Romanticism
27 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani treats Romanticism as the "anthropological revolution" that accompanies the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution. He distinguishes Romanticism in the strict sense, that of gentle melancholy, from Romanticism in the broad sense, the first expression of modernity. In Baudelaire and in Senancour's Obermann, he reads in it a need for infinitude that runs counter to Greek measure1. Comparing Poussin and Friedrich, Chateaubriand and Rousseau, he sets classicism, which escapes from nature into the city, against Romanticism, which escapes from the city into a wild, nocturnal nature2. In his view, the Romantic alienates in nature a freedom of which the relations of production deprive him, and this belongs to the unhappy consciousness. Drawing on Lukács, he stresses the ambivalence of Romanticism, at once progressive and reactionary3, and argues that the "mal du siècle" (the malady of the century) leads to the "century of Evil"4. In music, he traces the alternation between the death drive of Tristan and the popular demand for happiness5. Rousseau, whom he calls the "only Romantic of the Enlightenment", remains his constant reference.
- 1#3 • Les Attelé(e)s de la confinitude4 Apr 2020
- 2Racine4 Feb 2019
- 3#4 • Les Attelé(e)s de la confinitude11 Apr 2020
- 4Ibn Battûta19 Feb 2020
- 5Musicosophie 5. Bonheur contre pulsion de mort en musique11 Dec 2020
Introduction produced automatically from the 27 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 27 videos
dominique bintou"Napoleon, or the reasons of cunning", with Dominique Pagani
2 Dec 2024Why is Napoleon of interest to philosophy, and what does Hegel's concept of the cunning of reason show about him?
Season 13Sickness, misfortune, evil
20 Sept 2024How is evil, under the figures of misfortune, illness and suffering, linked to autumn and finitude, and how can it be overcome?
Season 12Secularism, the truth of religion?
18 Feb 2024In what sense can secularism be called the "truth" of religion, that is, what accomplishes it by abolishing it?
Season 10#15 Nietzsche: Philosophical or musical relevance? Answers to questions
23 Jun 2022What 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?
Pagani Parle MusiqueTCHAIKOVSKY - FROM THE STEPPES TO THE MIDWEST • Pagani Parle Musique
15 Jun 2022What is a concerto, and what does the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. 1 reveal about Russian music?
Pagani Parle MusiquePOLYMORPHOUSLY PERVERSE MOZART • Pagani Parle Musique
1 Jun 2022How does Mozart's music unite libertinism and generosity, comedy and true emotion, gaiety and melancholy?
Season 9.29 #23 "Ruled like music paper!" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss
9 Jun 2021How can it be shown that the historical sciences have an object as rigorously determinable as that of the natural sciences?
Analytical Reveries#1 Mignon, or the song of silence
7 Apr 2021What 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?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 18. What is musical in music
25 Mar 2021What is musical in music?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 16. Programme music / Pure music
10 Mar 2021Does the distinction between pure music and program music hold, and what does it reveal about modernity?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 15. Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and music
9 Feb 2021What founds, since Plato, the complicity between music and philosophy?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 8. Happiness and unhappiness in music
11 Jan 2021Why does the history of music make happy and morbid musics alternate, and what is the happiness that they express?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 6. The Jazz Variation... by Beethoven
15 Dec 2020What distinguishes genre from form in music, and why is the so-called "jazz variation" of Beethoven's opus 111 not jazz?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 5. Happiness versus the death drive in music
11 Dec 2020How does modern music, since Beethoven, oscillate between the popular demand for happiness and the romantic fascination with the death drive?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 1. Schubert and the master singers
3 Dec 2020Why begin a history of music with its middle, with Schubert and the second act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 3. What is called modern music?
3 Dec 2020What do we call modern music?
Season 8#16 • Return to the logics of the subject
30 Jul 2020What becomes of art once aesthetic religion has disappeared, and what do we, moderns, gain from this loss?
Season 8#11 • Return to the logics of the subject
21 Jun 2020How does Hegel's aesthetics, centered on the figure of Antigone and on classical art, allow us to think tragedy, finitude, and the avant-gardes of modernity?
Season 7#4 • Harnessed to confinitude
11 Apr 2020When is romanticism, the first expression of modernity, progressive, and when does it become reactionary in the face of access to absolute knowledge?
Season 7#3 • Harnessed to confinitude
4 Apr 2020How 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#6.5 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
19 Feb 2020How 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 5.2#5.8 Nature or Landscape?
30 Jun 2019What distinguishes nature from landscape, and how does the beauty of landscape relate to freedom and property?
Season 5.2#5.7 Nature or Landscape?
26 May 2019How do revolutionary thought and the question "nature or landscape" fit together, and what distinguishes nature from landscape?
Season 5.2#5.4 Nature or Landscape?
4 Feb 2019Are nature and landscape the same thing, or is landscape merely a surface onto which the subject projects its fantasies?
Other videosAt the bistro with Pagani: part 2
19 Jun 2016How does Rousseau open the sequence that runs to Lenin, and what becomes of this legacy in Nerval, the romantics, Clouscard and Nietzsche?
A Philosophical AlphabetY for Yonville
8 Jan 2015How can one distinguish the imaginary from illusion, and what is the place of the imaginary in creation and in politics?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#1 Presentation; the EU; Clouscard; Rousseau.
20 Sept 2014Who is Dominique Pagani, and how does he judge the railway workers' strike and the European Union?