Identity

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani refuses to treat identity as an essence given in advance. For him, it is the result of a historical process. In nature he finds no identities, only otherness: identity presupposes unity, which is a human conquest, like the standard metre. It is always built within a praxis1. With Spinoza, he holds that all determination is negation: identity contains difference and the need for the other. It forms over time, in the manner of a river, which draws its identity from its whole course and not from its source alone2. In the cycle on amnesia, he links it to memory, starting from the statement "I have changed", from Fichte, from Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker and from Nietzsche3. In 2025 he makes it the core of a session. There he argues that "the stock" cannot be found, that man is a migrant by essence, and that evil consists in seeing substance where there is relation4. He ties the theme to apartheid, Rwanda, Ukraine and racism linked to unemployment. He also connects it to the debates on negritude, understood as open to the universal5.

1. 1Dominique Pagani sur Michel Clouscard - Les chemins de la praxis 2/28 Dec 2015
2. 2L'île du Peuple : le débat23 Jun 2015
3. 3#1 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...8 Oct 2020
4. 4L'identité imaginaire15 May 2025
5. 5Adotevi : Négritude et négrologues (2)17 Jun 2017

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