Hugo

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani very often quotes the line "When I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of you." For him it sums up the Romantic self raised to the universal, the opposite of Pascal's hateful self1. He uses the failure of Les Burgraves as a conventional marker for dating the end of Romanticism in the strict sense. Yet he sets Hugo apart, as a poet who spans the century: Romantic, realist and almost Symbolist23. He gives a close reading of "Stella", from Les Châtiments: its opening, made of sensations, seems to him more Baudelairean than Baudelaire, and then the ending lapses into bombast4. He sees Hugo as the poet of the collective and of action, capable of the best and the worst, and often the author of thought put into verse. Still, he takes up Rimbaud's judgement that Les Misérables is "a true poem"5. He also discusses Gavroche, "L'onde et l'ombre" as a metaphor for social misery, the "red cap on the old dictionary", Aragon's rehabilitation of Hugo and his conversion to the Napoleonic cult.

1. 1Griaule (Marcel)18 Oct 2017 · 55:15
2. 2Leibniz1 Aug 2017 · 1:36:37
3. 3NOTRE ANCIENNE SAUVAGERIE ? - Lecture à vif d'une illumination d'Arthur Rimbaud13 Jun 2025 · 17:57
4. 4#10 • Retour aux logiques du sujet11 Jun 2020 · 31:31
5. 5Dominique Pagani - Qui se cache sous les surfaces ? Esthétique et politique20 May 2022 · 47:46

Summary produced automatically from 109 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.