Modernity, from its beginnings, attributes a key role to passions: whether they are hostile to reason or on the contrary its allies, dangerous or fascinating, they mark the role of the body, desire, language and imagination. in the nature of man. The same period saw the development of different variants of materialism. Almost all of them reassess what classical reason tended to suppress or to regard as indicative of human weakness: the body and everything that, in the soul or in society, bears the traces of the activity and positivity of the human being. body.We can therefore expect that the materialists will do a particular fate to passions, that they recognise in them laws and not just lacks or vices, that they try to identify their effectiveness. in all human activities. We still have to ask ourselves how each materialism proceeds, by what specific configuration it accounts for these phenomena or how it deviates the discourse of classical theory to force them to pass through the objects that are its own.Rather than assuming the existence of a single materialist theory, an investigation is therefore necessary which takes into account the diversity of these authors, situates them in their context and identifies the points of inflection encountered in each of them. this general problematic of passions |