Class struggle
10 videos, newest first.
Summary
Dominique Pagani approaches class struggle through Clouscard, for whom class cannot be reduced to income: the class that produces more than it consumes stands against the one that consumes more than it produces1. Drawing on Marx's 1859 preface, he treats class relations as an "unconscious of the unconscious". These relations are never experienced as such but are expressed in displaced form, in myth, opera or tragedy: Wotan facing the giants, the slander Racine gives to a servant2. He traces them in writers, from the shared beauty of Proust's girls at Balbec to Mallarmé's "class struggle on the lawn"3, and even in the myth of Daedalus, the slave engineer facing Minos4. From 2020 onwards, he stresses how class struggle is concealed: political ecology and left-washing replace the social question with the societal question and divide the collective worker5. Finally, he reads Clouscard's Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes as a logic of French society since the Liberation6.
- 1Avec Clouscard2 Aug 2016
- 2Marx Plage 1/21 Feb 2016
- 3Mallarmé ou la lutte des classes sur le gazon - Lectures sur le vif31 Jan 2023
- 4Freud1 Aug 2017
- 5Left-washing : Les wokes sont-ils les plus endormis ?17 Nov 2021
- 6Clouscard : Les métamorphoses de la lutte des classes2 Sept 2024
Introduction produced automatically from the 10 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 10 videos
Season 13Clouscard: The metamorphoses of class struggle
2 Sept 2024How does Clouscard's thought, read from Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes and its relation to Rousseau, account for the present situation?
Readings on the spotMallarmé, or class struggle on the lawn - Readings on the Spot
31 Jan 2023How does Mallarmé, a poet reputed to be aristocratic and hermetic, stage the class struggle and the condition of the working class in "Conflit"?
Questions and answersPanzer-philosophy against the cogito: neo-fascism or the ideology of nature. Heidegger/Descartes
5 Mar 2022What does Heidegger have in mind when he traces the atomic bomb back to Descartes's cogito, and what does the ideological use of the word "nature" conceal?
Questions and answersLeft-washing: Are the woke the most asleep?
17 Nov 2021Why does the societal left that calls itself "woke" play into the hands of the right, and how can a language common to the human tribe be recovered?
At the Tropiques bookshopCalves and Things (3): The dictatorship of the bobotariat
6 Oct 2020Is political ecology anything other than the aesthetic surface of dominant liberal ideology?
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?
Season 3#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017Can man free himself from the fatality of the return of carnage, figured by Ulysses, through the labor that transforms reality, figured by Daedalus?
On Michel ClouscardWith Clouscard
2 Aug 2016What does Michel Clouscard's life tell us about his thought, and why does this long-ignored thought impose itself today?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachMarx on the Beach 1/2
1 Feb 2016What does Marx mean when he affirms that men enter into relations of production independent of their will, and in what sense do these relations form "the unconscious of the unconscious"?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 3/3
29 Jan 2016How can one respond to the question "what is to be done?" through a theoretical detour, and how does Rousseau, between the praise of labor and the praise of idleness, found property, happiness, and the beauty of landscape on praxis?