Poetry

Readings on the spot

What does the question "Est-ce ancienne sauvagerie qu'on pardonne ?" mean in Rimbaud's "Mouvement," posed before a young couple in the midst of a hymn to industrial modernity?

Season 13

Why can the essence of evil be defined as lying, that is, as a privation of self-knowledge?

Season 13

If everything is determined and returns eternally, is philosophy, which asks the question "what must I do?", still possible, and can one still deliver a message against evil?

Season 13

How is evil, under the figures of misfortune, illness and suffering, linked to autumn and finitude, and how can it be overcome?

Season 12

What does the separation of the Grail and the spear mean in the second act of Parsifal, and how can their reunion be understood as the passage from substance to subject?

Season 12

What is dialectic, if it hinges on the internal contradiction of a subject between opposed and mutually necessary moments?

Season 12

How can we think the contradiction within the subject, the negativity immanent to the self, and why do we repress it?

Readings on the spot

What does Aragon's "Le Paysan de Paris chante" say about working-class Paris and demonstrations, and how does this poem from the Resistance connect with current events?

Season 11

How does the positivity of the negative, read in a poem by Aragon and in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, shed light on Clouscard's concept of worldliness and the critique of neopositivism?

Season 11

Why does mondanité, in Clouscard, not reduce to "bling-bling", and what does the world become when the privileges of a few are extended to all?

Readings on the spot

How does Mallarmé, a poet reputed to be aristocratic and hermetic, stage the class struggle and the condition of the working class in "Conflit"?

Season 11

Can we fix a threshold where one ceases to be animal and becomes man, or must man be thought as the very movement of this passage?

Season 11

How, starting from ordinary ideological language, do we arrive at the necessity of the concept?

Pagani Parle Musique

What does music say when it says nothing, and how does instrumental music express what words dare not say?

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?

Season 10

How does art pass, in Hegel's aesthetics, from the presence of the sacred to representation, and what relation does this movement of interiorization bear to the political?

Season 10

Why does aesthetics remain tied to a political stake in Hegel, and why does the tragedy of Antigone still hold for the modern world?

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 can one cross the abyss between the natural sciences and the historical sciences, and how is it that statements drawn from language alone apply to the world?

Analytical Reveries

What silent element links texts that are never brought together: the sound coming from the castle in Kafka, Mignon's song in Goethe, and the eternal feminine as commented on by Wagner?

Musicosophie

What is musical in music?

Musicosophie

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

Musicosophie

What founds, since Plato, the complicity between music and philosophy?

Season 9.2

How can sciences of history, that is, sciences of the human subject, attain a rigor really comparable to that of the sciences of nature?

Season 9.1

Should anamnesis be pushed as far as our oldest vulnerability, or should it be forgotten in order to open onto a genuine future?

Musicosophie

What distinguishes genre from form in music, and why is the so-called "jazz variation" of Beethoven's opus 111 not jazz?

Musicosophie

How does modern music, since Beethoven, oscillate between the popular demand for happiness and the romantic fascination with the death drive?

Season 9.1

Why does the nostalgia for a lost substance found every reactionary ideology, and what does the ambivalence of memory and language reveal?

Season 9.1

Why can memory, which Greek myth conflates with language in the figure of Mnemosyne, not go without forgetting?

Season 8

What relationship does the aesthetic field have with the political field, between the poet as bard of the collective and the poet of art for art's sake?

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 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

What is a logic proper to the subject, which exists only for, by and in a subject, and how does it differ from the logic of objects?

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 5.2

Are nature and landscape interchangeable terms?

Season 5.1

How can we think both the order of nature and the order of freedom at once, and what makes negativity the principle of revolutionary thought?

Saint-Dizier Popular University

Is beauty a matter of individual taste, or can it be learned through an education that brings us into contact with works of art?

Season 3

Why does Plato's allegory of the cave already contain the whole program of philosophy, from knowledge to the return to politics?

Season 2

What path did the workshop "Between Crisis and War: Philosophizing?" follow, from the definition of philosophy to the passage to the philosophy of action?

Season 2

How does the reading of Phèdre, which joins the highest poetic beauty to the most profound content, lead from the psychological unconscious to class unconscious, and is there a universal criterion of beauty?

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

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?

Hegel & Marx on the Beach

In what way does Hegel, and first of all the Phenomenology of Spirit, remain relevant against a contemporary thought that presents itself as anti-Hegelian?

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?

Season 1

What can I know, and why does empiricism, which puts us in contact with reality, fail to reach truth?

Saint-Dizier Popular University

What does music teach us about the history of peoples, once we have defined what is properly musical in music?

A Philosophical Alphabet

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

A Philosophical Alphabet

What does the figure of the island mean, from Robinson to the île des Peupliers, where Rousseau's tomb is located at Ermenonville?