Russian Revolution

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches the Russian Revolution through the figure of Lenin rather than through an account of events. He says he belongs to a sequence that runs from Rousseau to Lenin. From Lenin he takes the testament, in which Lenin wanted to sideline Stalin and Trotsky, and the Philosophical Notebooks, which show a reader transformed by Hegel's Logic1. He returns several times to the judgment Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, passed on the absolute idea: for Lenin it is at once the most idealist and the most materialist passage in Hegel23. He also comments on "What Is to Be Done?": the project of the newspaper Iskra, the spark meant to fan the blaze, its educational role for activists across Russia, and the ironic praise of dreaming that Lenin borrows from Pisarev2. From this he draws a reflection on the place of the subject and of purpose in history. Against the neo-positivism dominant since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he holds that dreaming does no harm if the dreamer works to make the dream real2.

1. 1Au bistrot avec Pagani : partie 219 Jun 2016
2. 2#2 Lénine ou les ailes du rêve18 Apr 2021
3. 3"La parole est la meilleure et la pire des choses" (Esope)19 Oct 2022

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