Enlightenment
28 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani approaches the Enlightenment through Goethe's formula: with Voltaire a world ends, with Rousseau a world begins1. He regards Rousseau as the most radical figure of the Enlightenment, because he calls property into question. He makes happiness, "a new idea in Europe" according to Saint-Just, the value that unifies the century, from Voltaire's Letter on Commerce through to Rousseau. He places Rousseau's happiness between the libertine's pleasure and Robespierre's virtue2. He hears this happiness in Mozart's music, which he places in the tipping point from the Ancien Régime to the new world3. He asks how, in less than a generation, one moves from this happiness to the mal du siècle, and he answers with the carnage of revolutions and wars4. He draws the Renaissance and the Enlightenment together: for him they are two parallel critical movements, for which the pedagogical is the antechamber of the political5. Finally, he sees the weak point of the Enlightenment in a "bad empiricism", that of d'Alembert, which confuses matter with the sensible. He sets against it the Kantian revolution of the active subject6.
- 1#2 Rousseau, un monde qui commence20 Sept 2014
- 2Que faire ? 1/329 Jan 2016
- 3Musicosophie 13. Mozart restitué2 Feb 2021
- 4L'interview de Dominique Pagani : Introduction aux futurs ateliers23 Mar 2020
- 5#5.1 bis FaceBook Live / Questions2 Nov 2018
- 6De Copernic à Lénine: Révolution !28 Aug 2026
Introduction produced automatically from the 28 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 28 videos
Season 14From Copernicus to Lenin: Revolution!
28 Aug 2026How did discourse on nature become scientific, and why must we break with empiricism to understand it?
Season 13Flagrante Delights
27 May 2025What do perfumes, even the foul-smelling ones, teach us about sublimation, about modernity, and about man caught between the indeterminate and the determinate?
PaduTeamPHILOSOPHY with PAGANI: E for ENFANCE (CHILDHOOD)
4 Jun 2023What do childhood, Émile and Ermenonville teach us about Rousseau, and why is the island the symbol without which he cannot be understood?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard, or "The dominant ideology"
26 Apr 2023What does the world mean, and worldliness in Clouscard's sense, between the happiness of being in the world and the lie of the world that keeps the dominated under the ideology of the dominant?
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?
Season 9.29 #17 The geopolitical metaphor • Planck • Descartes • Clouscard • Dominique Pagani
17 Mar 2021Under what conditions is a discourse scientific, and how does science turn into scientism when applied to the human world?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 14. Mozart once more
7 Feb 2021Why does Mozart's music, situated in the shift from the Ancien Régime to the new world, express that happiness which is, according to Saint-Just, a new idea in Europe?
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 3. What is called modern music?
3 Dec 2020What do we call modern music?
Introduction to the workshopsInterview with Dominique Pagani: Introduction to the upcoming workshops
23 Mar 2020What does Angélique de Nerval, reread in light of the Odyssey and the structure of the double carnage, teach us about the passage from Enlightenment happiness to the mal du siècle and about today's illusions?
Season 5.2#5.5 Nature or Landscape?
26 Mar 2019How does landscape reach its highest poetic value when the visible setting fades to become an interior landscape?
Season 5.1#5.1 bis FaceBook Live / Questions
2 Nov 2018What place does transmission hold in the pedagogical movement from the Renaissance to Rousseau, and what are the stakes of the dissolution of the separation of genres?
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?
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?
At the Tropiques bookshopTribute to Jacques D'Hondt (1)
2 Aug 2016Why and how could Jacques D'Hondt call himself a Hegelian without adopting the manifest content of Hegelianism?
At the Tropiques bookshopTribute to Jacques D'Hondt (2)
2 Aug 2016How did Jacques D'Hondt's work undo the image of a conservative Hegel, philosopher of the Restoration, to make him instead the philosopher of living history and of the French Revolution?
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?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 1/3
29 Jan 2016What is to be done, and why does the answer require a theoretical detour through Rousseau and his conception of happiness?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 2/3
29 Jan 2016What does the passage from the state of nature to the civil state mean in Rousseau, and why does the Social Contract begin by rejecting force as a foundation of right?
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#1.5 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
10 Dec 2015How can science work, that is, how can the sequence of phenomena follow that of concepts, and what does Kant change by making the subject of knowledge an active subject?
Season 1#1.6 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
10 Dec 2015What does Kant change by making the subject the legislator of knowledge, and why does this emancipation of the subject lead to the question of freedom?
A Philosophical AlphabetW for Wolmar
6 Jan 2015Who is Wolmar in Julie, or the New Heloise, and thereby who is Julie?
A Philosophical AlphabetL for Liberty
26 Dec 2014What is it to be free, and how does freedom differ from libertarian liberalism?
A Philosophical AlphabetE for Enfance (Childhood)
19 Dec 2014How do childhood, Émile and the island of Ermenonville help us understand Rousseau?
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?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#2 Rousseau, a world that begins
20 Sept 2014Why can one say, with Goethe, that with Rousseau a world begins?