Worldliness

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches worldliness as Michel Clouscard's own concept, which he regards as the keystone of his work, and he follows its two poles across a series of sessions in 2023. On one side, the world, made of the relations between people and distinct from the earth, is the condition of happiness, which requires duration and a positive relation to the world. He shows this with Voltaire's Le Mondain, Rousseau and Saint-Just1. On the other side, "the prince of this world" has lying as his essence. The "weight of the worldly" explains why the dominated remain imbued with the dominant ideology, and he refuses to give this a puritanical reading1. With Hegel, he argues that history extends to all the privileges of a few, and he defends the people's right to luxury2. He traces code and artifice from the précieuses to Les Liaisons dangereuses and on to Baudelaire's praise of make-up3. Finally, with Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë, he considers the clash of worlds, neither putting the world on trial nor offering an apology for it4.

1. 1La mondanité chez Clouscard ou "L'idéologie dominante"26 Apr 2023
2. 2La mondanité chez Clouscard ou les privilèges pour tous18 May 2023
3. 3Dominique Pagani : De la débauche du sens à l'orgie du sentiment29 May 2023
4. 4La mondanité chez Clouscard - Le choc des mondes ?9 Jul 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.