Collective memory

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches collective memory from two successive angles. In 2020, he starts from Marx's text on Greek art and asks why a bygone past still moves us. In Phaedra's speech, memory leads back to the high point of a collective past: the killing of the Minotaur, a political act that he takes to be the true primal scene. He contrasts Nerval, who discovers the historical depth of the Valois, with Proust, who stays within personal drama. For him, this return to the past signals unresolved problems1. In 2025, the theme takes a political turn. Drawing on Halbwachs's The Social Frameworks of Memory, he sets out to correct the amnesia kept up by the media: the deadly record of the democracies since 1945, Western support for the Khmer Rouge2, the recruitment of former Nazis by the American services3. He faults structuralism for having disqualified history. With Hegel and Freud's "date your memories", he argues that the historical sequence must be restored so that legend does not replace history, in the individual as in collective propaganda3.

1. 1Musicosophie 7. Les Grecs, le mythe et la musique17 Dec 2020
2. 2De l'anti-soviétisme des khmers rouges-vert6 Feb 2025
3. 3Les silences du vacarme médiatique - nouveau cycle : la renazification atlantiste.21 Oct 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.