#4.9 Angélique (by Nerval)

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?

Dominique Pagani devotes this last session on Angélique to questions from the audience. The first concerns an apparent contradiction: he claims to read a text with the rigor of a science, while also separating the exact sciences from the practical field. He begins by describing the contemporary divide between neopositivism and irrationalism, recalls Auguste Comte's law of three stages and Plato's divided line, then situates the philosopher between the mathematician, who rejects the words of the tribe, and the poet, who seizes upon them. With the forgetting of "aliquis" analyzed by Freud and the comparison between the Senlis scene in Angélique and a dream from Aurélia, he shows that the symbolic order has its own logic, rigorous enough to allow predictions. He then answers the question about death: modernity represses death, but what is despairing when one is alone becomes happiness when shared. From Hölderlin to Goethe to Rimbaud, all modern poetry, he argues, reaches a collective, and therefore political, conclusion.

Conceptsscientificitypositivismontologicaldianoiaabsolutenatural languagemetaphorsymbolic orderunconsciousnegativegenremodernitypost-moderndivisionpolitics