History

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches history through Rousseau, who makes freedom the foundation of man: those who are slaves by nature were first slaves against nature, and what men have done, they can undo12. He sees Marx as the one who opens the "continent of history", which cannot be reduced to the physico-chemical. He takes up Hegel's formula "the result is nothing without its becoming" and applies it to the commodity, whose real history is concealed2. For him, restoring obliterated historical sequences is a revolutionary act. He includes in this the silent history of praxis: the horse collar, the progress of the productive forces1. Against Nietzsche, who praises forgetting, he defends historical reconstruction in the face of the reign of media-driven emotion3. With Hegel, he reads history as the progress of freedom (one, some, all) and as the cunning of reason, whose unconscious instrument is Napoleon4. He describes the period from 1789 to 1989 as a permanent conflict between revolution and counter-revolution5.

1. 1#2 Rousseau, un monde qui commence20 Sept 2014
2. 2Dominique Pagani "Sur Marx"6 Oct 2018
3. 3#1 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...8 Oct 2020
4. 4La mondanité chez Clouscard - Le monde comme "ruse de la raison"22 Jul 2023
5. 5Ce soir, on repolitise. 2ème partie31 Mar 2018

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.