Modernity

Readings on the spot

What does amorous desire seek through the body and the gaze: someone or something?

Season 13

What do perfumes, even the foul-smelling ones, teach us about sublimation, about modernity, and about man caught between the indeterminate and the determinate?

Season 12

Why does the fixation on the mother, which the second act of Parsifal stages, make the past be lived as a present, and how does this illusion concern modernity?

Season 12

In what sense can secularism be called the "truth" of religion, that is, what accomplishes it by abolishing it?

Season 11

What is the object of human desire in our modernity, and who is its subject?

Pagani Parle Musique

Why does Nietzsche, after condemning Parsifal as a Christian betrayal of the Greek ideal, recognize in its music the truth he had refused?

Season 10

What place does music occupy between the mathematician, the poet and the philosopher, and what good use can be made of Nietzsche, the philosopher who spoke most of music?

Season 10

What remains invariant, beneath their apparent discontinuity, in Dominique Pagani's talks?

Questions and answers

How does the passage from modal music to tonal music, starting with the legend of Paul the Deacon's "lost voice," mark the West's entry into modernity?

Season 9.2

How does the last act of Twilight of the Gods move from the cyclical repetition of myth to a woman's knowledge and the reign of man?

Musicosophie

What does it mean to interpret a musical work, between improvisation, execution and the restitution of the composer's thought?

Musicosophie

Does the distinction between pure music and program music hold, and what does it reveal about modernity?

Musicosophie

How can a literary text convey what is heard in music, and what do Walt's dream in Jean-Paul and Vinteuil's little phrase in Proust reveal?

Musicosophie

Is the divorce between scholarly music and popular music that Lévi-Strauss notes in contemporary music a new symptom, and how can one think the union of speech and music up to the music of the future?

Musicosophie

What do we call modern music?

Season 9.1

Why is human memory inseparable from forgetting, and how does the consciousness of death mean that 'the echo changes'?

Season 7

What does the polarity of white and red in the poetic imagination, from Chrétien de Troyes to Mallarmé and Nerval, say about our modernity?

Season 7

If access to truth is irreversible, why does modern consciousness seek to flee it?

Season 7

When is romanticism, the first expression of modernity, progressive, and when does it become reactionary in the face of access to absolute knowledge?

Season 7

How does romanticism, the first expression of modernity, express the unhappiness of absolute knowledge, and how can one escape it through a collective subject?

Season 7

Why does modern man's access to absolute knowledge come with a refusal to know, and how does this conflict between revolution and counter-revolution structure modernity?

Season 6

Why does the access to absolute knowledge in modernity symmetrically engender the temptation of an absolute non-knowledge, which leads as far as Nazism?

Season 6

How does the modern stage of the relation between substance and subject, where absolute knowledge becomes possible, shed light both on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?

Season 6

How do the death drive and the compulsion to repeat, as read in Freud and Lacan, shed light on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?

At the Tropiques bookshop

How can a book give linear form to Dominique Pagani's oral teaching, and what does this teaching say about the specificity of philosophy, of modernity, and of the question "what must I do"?

Season 5.2

Is philosophical communication possible, if the message, as in Kafka's "An Imperial Message," seems never to reach its destination?

Season 5.2

How is the exterior, the landscape, interiorized by speech and music, and how does landscape differ from nature?

Season 5.1

How does Rousseau open a sequence of revolutionary thought that leads to Lenin, and what dialectical thread runs through it?

Season 5.1

How can we think revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin without separating the study of praxis from the consideration of the psyche?

Season 4

How is a rigorous, quasi-scientific reading of a literary text possible if an abyss separates the exact sciences from the field of human actions?

Season 4

In what sense is Nerval's quest for the mother, far from being a personal matter, connected to the universal, and what does modernity repress in its relation to art?

Season 4

Why go through Nerval and the concept of modernity to think the historical present, dominated by capital?

Season 2

How does the modern subject divide itself, and how does literature express the unconscious before Freud theorizes it?

Season 3

How can we assume the contradiction between the Greek and Christian heritages without falling back into the old counter-revolutionary thought that presents itself as new?

Season 3

How does one pass from the theoretical order (what can I know?) to the practical order (what must I do?), and why is Rousseau, "Newton of morality," the decisive figure for this?

Season 2

What is missing from the Cartesian subject in order to think the modern subject, and why do both the abstract self and the exclusive community end in destruction?

Season 2

Why does philosophy, daughter of crisis, start from words of ordinary language, and what does modern poetry say about the historical moment named by the word "Occident"?

Season 2

How does a sonnet by Baudelaire, La Cloche fêlée, allow us to link the problem of language and communication to the thought of our historical present, modernity?

Season 1

What 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

What 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 Alphabet

What exactly does reverie mean, and what would an eleventh promenade of Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker look like?