Aesthetics

23 videos, newest first.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches aesthetics through the question of beauty, which he refuses to leave to either the dogmatist or the sceptic: to say "it is beautiful" is to say "it pleases me", and so that a desire is satisfied, and it is this desire that must be sought1. He draws on Kant's reflective judgement in the Critique of the Power of Judgement: aesthetic pleasure reveals an unconscious desire, and the beautiful object informs the subject about itself2. He separates the beautiful from the good but brings it close to the true, which it expresses in a displaced form, and he criticises relativism about taste, which he links to standardisation by the market3. With Hegel, he defines aesthetics as the domain of the surface and comments on the girl offering fruit in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in whom he reads our museum-like relationship to art4. In his view, Hegel's Aesthetics does not announce the end of art: it describes the passage of the sacred from presence to representation, linked to politics through Antigone and the triad of symbolic, classical and romantic art5. He also connects this theme to music, Racine, Hölderlin, Rilke and Proust.

Introduction produced automatically from the 23 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.

The 23 videos

Readings on the spot

Kleist "On the Marionette Theatre" - Pagani - Readings on the Spot

29 Sept 2023

Why, according to Kleist, does grace appear only in the marionette or in god, and never in the man who reflects?

Upsd 52

From Plato to world revolution, by Dominique Pagani

14 Jul 2022

In what way is the Socratic initiative the origin of a revolution whose effects are not yet exhausted?

Season 10

#9 PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION: Art, seen from here or from the other side?

10 Feb 2022

How does art pass, in Hegel's aesthetics, from the presence of the sacred to representation, and what relation does this movement of interiorization bear to the political?

Season 10

10#4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics

3 Nov 2021

Why does aesthetics remain tied to a political stake in Hegel, and why does the tragedy of Antigone still hold for the modern world?

Analytical Reveries

#1 Mignon, or the song of silence

7 Apr 2021

What silent element links texts that are never brought together: the sound coming from the castle in Kafka, Mignon's song in Goethe, and the eternal feminine as commented on by Wagner?

Season 8

#16 • Return to the logics of the subject

30 Jul 2020

What becomes of art once aesthetic religion has disappeared, and what do we, moderns, gain from this loss?

Season 8

#13 • Return to the logics of the subject

9 Jul 2020

What does Kant's reflective judgment teach us about the relation between the beautiful object and the subject's desire, and how far can art lead?

Season 8

#12 • Return to the logics of the subject

2 Jul 2020

Why has aesthetics become a necessary part of the corpus of philosophy?

Season 8

#11 • Return to the logics of the subject

21 Jun 2020

How does Hegel's aesthetics, centered on the figure of Antigone and on classical art, allow us to think tragedy, finitude, and the avant-gardes of modernity?

Season 5.2

#5.6 Nature or Landscape?

2 May 2019

How is the exterior, the landscape, interiorized by speech and music, and how does landscape differ from nature?

Saint-Dizier Popular University

Education: can the Beautiful be learned?

20 Jul 2018

Is beauty a matter of individual taste, or can it be learned through an education that brings us into contact with works of art?

Season 4

#4.8 Angélique (by Nerval)

16 May 2018

In what sense is Nerval's quest for the mother, far from being a personal matter, connected to the universal, and what does modernity repress in its relation to art?

The philosopher's two enemies: The dogmatist and the sceptic.

16 Nov 2017

Why are the dogmatist and the skeptic the philosopher's two enemies?

Season 2

#2.5 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?

1 Aug 2017

How does the modern subject divide itself, and how does literature express the unconscious before Freud theorizes it?

Season 2

#2.6 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?

1 Aug 2017

How does the reading of Phèdre, which joins the highest poetic beauty to the most profound content, lead from the psychological unconscious to class unconscious, and is there a universal criterion of beauty?

Hegel & Marx on the Beach

Hegel on the Beach 3/5

2 Feb 2016

How does the phenomenology of spirit, by refusing to treat knowledge as a preliminary instrument, shift truth from the sensible object to the subject?

Hegel & Marx on the Beach

Hegel on the Beach 5/5

2 Feb 2016

How does aesthetic appearance, down to the gleam of a look, express the material and historical richness of a world, and why does recognition between subjects pass through the thing?

Hegel & Marx on the Beach

Hegel on the Beach 4/5

2 Feb 2016

How 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?

What Is to Be Done?

What is to be done? 1/3

29 Jan 2016

What is to be done, and why does the answer require a theoretical detour through Rousseau and his conception of happiness?

Season 1

#1.7 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?

11 Dec 2015

Why does the philosophy of knowledge lead to the question "what must I do?", and what content should be given to freedom?

Season 1

#1.4 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?

10 Dec 2015

Why did modern thought banish the notion of end, and how can it be rehabilitated without returning to naive finalism?

Saint-Dizier Popular University

The Music of History

26 Apr 2015

What does music teach us about the history of peoples, once we have defined what is properly musical in music?

A Philosophical Alphabet

Q for Quality

31 Dec 2014

What does a quality say, and what are we talking about when we qualify a thing?