Africa
69 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani first approaches Africa through his own path: the son of a colonist, then a teacher south of the Sahara and the director of a music training centre in Niger1. From this he draws a constant thesis: class relations count for more than relations of race or ethnicity, and so-called ethnic differences cover economic functions or conflicts over the resources of the soil. With Stanislas Adotevi and Paulin Hountondji, he criticises the essentialism of negritude, which was necessary at first and then became a hindrance, and he holds that identity is a relation, not a substance2. He also links Africa to music: the griot, Pygmy polyphony, and jazz born of the blues of African slaves3. He defends the French language as a means of opening up isolated communities. From 2021 onwards, he deals mainly with current events in the Sahel. He sees them as the work of an Atlanticist imperialism rather than simply of colonialism4, and he explains the coups that have popular support by the insecurity that has been growing since foreign troops arrived5.
- 1N comme Niger28 Dec 2014
- 2Négritude et négrologues / Adotevi par Pagani (2017)8 Jun 2017
- 3Discussion entre Aliocha Allard et Dominique Pagani, 29 Mars 201726 Feb 2019
- 4AFRIQUE SAHÉLIENNE ET IMPÉRIALISME : Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger - avec Dominique PAGANI23 Mar 2024
- 5SPÉCIAL NIGER : Faut-il "noircir les cadavres" ?7 Aug 2023
Introduction produced automatically from the 69 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 69 videos
Jeunesse du MondeMALI: Dominique PAGANI REACTS to Emmanuel MACRON's remarks at the Africa Forward summit
16 May 2026What does Emmanuel Macron's discourse on French failure in Mali conceal, and where do the rebellion and the crisis in the Sahel come from?
Season 13STATE AND STATE APPARATUS - The conflict between public and private
29 Aug 2025Why must the State, understood as general will, be distinguished from the State apparatus that oppresses?
Season 13Imaginary identity
15 May 2025Is identity a substance, or must it be converted into relation and function?
Season 13The essence of evil - Innocence of nature, horror of naturalism!
17 Dec 2024What is evil, if one starts from Rousseau's distinction between the state of nature and the civil state?
Season 13Clouscard: The metamorphoses of class struggle
2 Sept 2024How does Clouscard's thought, read from Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes and its relation to Rousseau, account for the present situation?
Season 12TOO LATE?
14 Aug 2024Is it already too late to prevent the war waged by Atlanticist imperialism from becoming a world conflict?
Café marxisteSAHELIAN AFRICA AND IMPERIALISM: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger - with Dominique PAGANI
23 Mar 2024What is today the dominant element exploiting the Sahelian Africa, and why must it be called imperialism rather than colonialism?
Season 12Secularism, the truth of religion?
18 Feb 2024In what sense can secularism be called the "truth" of religion, that is, what accomplishes it by abolishing it?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard: Desiring what? Through whom??
3 Sept 2023What is the object of human desire in our modernity, and who is its subject?
Season 11NIGER SPECIAL: Should we "blacken the corpses"?
7 Aug 2023What does the coup in Niger reveal about the situation in the Sahel and about the way Western powers wage their wars while managing public opinion?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard - The world as "cunning of reason"
22 Jul 2023How can reason, which has essence but not existence, produce a world, and why must it resort to cunning for this?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard - The clash of worlds?
9 Jul 2023How can we think the ambivalence of the world, between enjoyment and negativity, when two worlds collide, as in the colonial encounter between Africa and the school of the white men?
Communistes FrançaisInterview with Dominique Pagani, praxis and psyche
27 Mar 2023How did Rousseau, first of all, unite praxis and psyche, and how does this synthesis continue in revolutionary thought, from Hegel and Marx to Clouscard?
Upsd 52From Plato to world revolution, by Dominique Pagani
14 Jul 2022In what way is the Socratic initiative the origin of a revolution whose effects are not yet exhausted?
Pagani Parle MusiqueFROM BACH TO THE PYGMIES • Pagani Parle Musique
22 Jun 2022Do the common divisions between tonal and modal music, learned and popular, classical and jazz hold up to scrutiny?
Season 10#10 UKRAINE: From the problem of "Edges" to the unleashing of war
24 Feb 2022What does the notion of edge, border and march teach us about the war that breaks out in Ukraine?
Season 10#8 Philosophising under threat
27 Jan 2022What does the geopolitical situation in eastern Europe and the Sahel reveal about the crisis of capitalism and the danger of war?
Season 1010#6 War and Peace: "The death drives advance in silence..." (Freud)
8 Dec 2021Why is the danger of war, from the Sahel to the Russian-Ukrainian border, wrapped in silence, and what does this silence reveal, in the sense that "the death drives progress in silence"?
Season 1010#2 Dialectics of identity and difference
6 Oct 2021What relation, and what hierarchy, does Hegel establish between aesthetics and politics, based on the opposition between the family and the city embodied by Antigone?
Season 9.29 #24 "Ruled like music paper!" • Nerval • Baudelaire • Part 2
30 Jun 2021What grounds the determinability that the symbolic order brings out in Nerval's texts, and how does Nerval get out of the repetition of his fantasy?
Questions and answers"Red-browns", "decolonial": Should we use the dominant language? • Philosophical Q&A • Pagani
31 Mar 2021Should we take up the notions of "red-brown" and "decolonial" produced by dominant ideology, and what is lost when the subject is eliminated in the human sciences?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 17. Interpretation
25 Mar 2021What does it mean to interpret a musical work, between improvisation, execution and the restitution of the composer's thought?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 13. Mozart restored
2 Feb 2021What does Mozart's music say about happiness, and how does this happiness express the historical turning point of the late eighteenth century?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 12. Nietzsche (right up) against Wagner
28 Jan 2021What does the conflict between Nietzsche and Wagner reveal, once we reread Nietzsche's texts while listening to the music?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe World Before, The World After - Part 2
16 Jan 2021How should the "world after" the Covid crisis be judged, and under what conditions can one still speak of progress?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 6. The Jazz Variation... by Beethoven
15 Dec 2020What distinguishes genre from form in music, and why is the so-called "jazz variation" of Beethoven's opus 111 not jazz?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 4. Sound ghettos
3 Dec 2020How does the "people" music born in the 1950s enclose young people worldwide in sound ghettos, and how can one escape it?
Season 9.1#6 Presentation of the dominiquepagani.fr website
26 Nov 2020How does the site dominiquepagani.fr organize access to the workshops, publications, texts, and musical resources?
Other videosBetween sea and mountain, the standing stones of Valinco (The Corsican Neolithic)
24 Nov 2020What do the statue-menhirs of the Valinco gulf, raised between sea and mountain, signify?
Season 9.1#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
19 Nov 2020Why is human memory inseparable from forgetting, and how does the consciousness of death mean that 'the echo changes'?
Season 9.1#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
13 Nov 2020How does memory, which retains and names, confront the indeterminacy of origins, and how can one memory overdetermine others?
Season 8#15 • Return to the logics of the subject
23 Jul 2020What does the confinement of the era reveal, and what form of solidarity, camaraderie or community, allows us to face it?
Season 8#14 • Return to the logics of the subject
17 Jul 2020How does the Norwegian collective Alt går bra articulate aesthetics and politics, from Diogenes' cynical cosmopolitanism to the recognition of popular art?
Season 8#10 • Return to the logics of the subject
11 Jun 2020What relationship does the aesthetic field have with the political field, between the poet as bard of the collective and the poet of art for art's sake?
Season 7#8 • Harnessed to confinitude
17 May 2020What is lying, and how is lying to oneself related to ideology, repression, and negativity?
Season 6#6.5 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
19 Feb 2020How does the modern stage of the relation between substance and subject, where absolute knowledge becomes possible, shed light both on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?
At the Tropiques bookshopThe brass band's journey - by Dominique Memmi
6 Dec 2019What does Le voyage de la fanfare show, a novel about a brass band from Ajaccio invited in 1978 by Bokassa to the Central African Republic, about ordinary Corsican people and their encounter with Africa?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe religion of Money
29 Sept 2019Why is money, the most vile thing there is, so close to the sacred, and how can we get out of this religion of money?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityMoney, work, freedom
3 Aug 2019Is money only the power that perverts all values, or a medium whose problem lies in its distribution?
Season 5.2#5.7 Nature or Landscape?
26 May 2019How do revolutionary thought and the question "nature or landscape" fit together, and what distinguishes nature from landscape?
Play ▷II PauseDominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault
2 May 2019What is the value of Michel Foucault's project, in his 1966 interview, of an ethnology of our own knowledge that announces the end of philosophy and the death of man?
Other videosLa Fausse Note (English Subtitles), a film by Aliocha
26 Feb 2019Why is globalized, repetitive and binary music, broadcast everywhere since the 1950s, a music of enslavement and amnesia?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityDominique Pagani "On Marx"
6 Oct 2018What does Marx's sentence "in the social production of their existence, men enter into determined relations" mean, and how does it illuminate the world today?
Other videosMarxist Café - Work and the right to work
20 May 2018What should be understood by work, and by the right to work, from La Bruyère to Marx, by way of Rousseau and Hegel?
Other videosThe clash of cultures /K. Souleymane (Niger - Pagani)
19 May 2018How can Niger's traditional music be preserved and transmitted while opening its musicians to other repertoires?
Season 4#4.3 Angélique (by Nerval)
11 Dec 2017How can a literary text, that of a madman, achieve such rigor that it grounds a rationality in the human order, where Kant had separated nature and freedom by an unbridgeable abyss?
Season 4#4.1 Angélique (by Nerval)
18 Oct 2017Why read Nerval's Angélique, and how does this disjointed narrative, written in the middle of the century, lead from the mother's tomb to Rousseau's tomb?
Season 2#2.8 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
1 Aug 2017How can philosophy, after having answered with the sciences the question "what can I know?", move on to the knowledge of man and his historical present?
Season 3#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017Can man free himself from the fatality of the return of carnage, figured by Ulysses, through the labor that transforms reality, figured by Daedalus?
At the Tropiques bookshopAdotevi: Negritude and negrologists (1)
17 Jun 2017Why does Stanislas Spero Adotevi criticize négritude, and why must the Black question be thought in terms of class and universality rather than race?
At the Tropiques bookshopAdotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2)
17 Jun 2017What was the target of the critique of négritude in "Négritude et négrologues"? How did Césaire and Senghor receive the book?
At the Tropiques bookshopNegritude and negrologists / Adotevi by Pagani (2017)
8 Jun 2017What does Stanislas Adotevi show in Négritude et négrologues, and why does his critique of the essentialism of negritude disturb even more today?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityIs History a subject?
9 Mar 2017Is history a subject matter, and whose history, of what, do we make?
Other videosAt the bistro with Pagani: part 1
18 Jun 2016What do African Francophonie, the misreadings of Clouscard, and the fusion of genres reveal about the modernity born of the French Revolution?
Season 2#2.1 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
15 Feb 2016Is it philosophical critique that provokes the crisis of the city, or is it because the city is in crisis that philosophizing is needed more than ever?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachHegel on the Beach 4/5
2 Feb 2016How does the negation of the negation make it possible to understand individuality, labor, the struggle for recognition between master and slave, and the meaning of history as freedom?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachHegel on the Beach 1/5
1 Feb 2016How should we read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in light of the historical upheaval and the Romantic crisis from which it emerged?
Season 1#1.8 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
28 Jan 2016What becomes of philosophy when, in place of the good, modernity posits freedom as foundation, with the negativity and possibilities of evil that this opens up?
Season 1#1.4 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
10 Dec 2015Why did modern thought banish the notion of end, and how can it be rehabilitated without returning to naive finalism?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityMythology and Truth
8 Aug 2015Why does myth, which philosophy sought to set aside in favor of rational discourse, always come back, and what truth does it express?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe Music of History
26 Apr 2015What does music teach us about the history of peoples, once we have defined what is properly musical in music?
A Philosophical AlphabetP for People
30 Dec 2014What is a people, and how does one distinguish the popular from the populist, from pop music, and from « people » culture?
A Philosophical AlphabetO for Opposition
29 Dec 2014Should one be against, with, or "against with": how can opposition be thought without falling into one-sidedness?
A Philosophical AlphabetN for Niger
28 Dec 2014What has the experience of Africa taught Dominique Pagani?
A Philosophical AlphabetG for Gauche (the Left)
21 Dec 2014In what sense can a philosopher call himself a man of the left?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#5 Libertarian liberalism, libidinal consumption and music...
27 Sept 2014What does the notion of "consumer society" cover, and how does Clouscard's concept of libertarian liberalism allow us to analyze contemporary capitalism, down to musical consumption?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#3 The myth of the noble savage in Rousseau!
23 Sept 2014What does the "noble savage" mean in Rousseau, and what do his draft constitution for Corsica and the theme of the island reveal about his relation to nature and society?
On Michel ClouscardRadio Galère - Michel Clouscard - 2
7 Jul 2012How does Michel Clouscard analyze the passage, since May 68, to a capitalism that exploits in production and liberates in consumption?
On Michel ClouscardEverything is allowed but nothing is possible - Michel Clouscard - 2
29 Jan 2012Why does Clouscard criticize "libertarian liberalism," and what becomes of this critique when applied to the state, the societal, and music?