Dominant ideology

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches the dominant ideology through two questions: what philosophy it imposes, and why the dominated adopt it. His thesis is constant: it is no longer idealism but a neo-positivism. This naturalist materialism reduces history to zero, confines rationality to the sciences of objects and rejects the "know thyself"1. He connects it to an empiricism of which Popper is the figurehead2 and, as early as 2015, to Spinoza's positivity, a thought without negativity3. He links this neo-positivism to an Anglo-Saxon culture of Protestant origin, to which, in his view, societal puritanism, punitive ecologism and bourgeois feminism belong. At the presentation of the book Les Veaux et les choses, its author defines ecologism as the dominant ideology of the middle strata. He identifies what lies beneath it: an anti-humanism running from Foucault to anti-speciesism4. To explain why the dominated adhere to it, he takes up Clouscard's concept of mondanité (worldliness). The "weight of the worldly", a lie to oneself and a privation of knowledge, means that one does not want to think the unthinkable alone5. He also counts Derrida's deconstruction among the moments of this ideology.

1. 1La mondanité chez Clouscard : Aragon et la positivité du négatif29 Jun 2023
2. 2De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026
3. 3Z comme Zéro9 Jan 2015
4. 4Les Veaux et les choses (2) : L'écologisme stade ultime du capitalisme ?5 Oct 2020
5. 5La mondanité chez Clouscard ou "L'idéologie dominante"26 Apr 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 7 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.