Créature sans créateur: pour une anthropologie baroque dans les ‘Pensées’ de Pascal (review)

Hall Bjørnstad accurately, if belatedly, describes his study of the Pensées as ‘[une] méditation sur une partie [de l’œuvre] — son espace anthropologique —, à travers une constellation de lectures ponctuelles’ (p. 181). His remarks are thus limited not only to the pre-Christian elements of Pascal’s projected apology, but more narrowly again to a small number of fragments drawn from these sections. He gives particular attention to the so-called ‘Lettre pour porter à rechercher Dieu’ (fragments 681–82 in Philippe Sellier’s edition), together with a cluster of supporting fragments, some better known than others; and his method, reassuringly enough, is informed by the need carefully and open-mindedly to explore the precise features of Pascal’s strategy and terminology. Bjørnstad’s guiding hypothesis, advanced in a long introductory chapter, is that, in his portrayal of the ‘Misère de l’homme sans Dieu’, one of whose defining features is inconstancy, Pascal is describing a condition that correlates with a central component of what Jean Rousset has identified as the baroque (even if Bjørnstad’s own definition of the term is considerably broader, including as it does those features of the text that show ‘son opacité, sa matérialité, sa textualité, sa littérarité [et] sa poéticité’ (p. 5)). This is then refined by the introduction of two types of trajectory towards belief, that of the seeker, exemplifying ‘l’inconstance noire’, and that of the non-seeker, ‘l’inconstance blanche’. The apology must therefore take as its starting point an immanent depiction of the human condition, in order to jolt the reader into the desire to transcend it; and the ‘homme sans Dieu’ is thus the ‘créature sans créateur’ of the title. Despite an occasionally polemical tone, many of Bjørnstad’s conclusions fall into the mainstream of Pascalian interpretation; nonetheless, the reader will frequently be struck by new insights and striking formulations, and the analysis as a whole affords powerful evidence of the proto-Christian vision that is already present in Pascal’s evocation of godless humankind. The detailed examination of particular fragments is meticulous, above all in its valuable exegesis of the origins and resonances of a nexus of key terms (although there is an overdose of recapitulation and internal cross-referencing); Bjørnstad’s command (and application) of rhetorical figures is impressive; and the cultural context in which the specific analysis is situated is exceptionally broad, notably with respect to elements of German philosophy and literary history and theory. Yet it is this very dimension of selective exhaustiveness that is the most questionable facet of the book as a whole, since such close attention to detail, when combined with such an expansive breadth of reference, runs the risk of overlooking certain more salient features and key ideas that lie much nearer to hand in the body of the text itself. But this is a compelling and highly perceptive reading of selected fragments of the Pensées, and one that places those texts in an impressively wide framework of interpretation. It is perhaps in the nature of the exercise that some of the more immediate context is sacrificed to this end.