Créature sans créateur: pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal by Hall Bjørnstad (review)

BJØRNSTAD, HALL. Créature sans créateur: pour une anthropologie baroque dans les Pensées de Pascal. Québec: PU de Laval, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7637-9072-5. Pp. xii + 201. $30 Can. The book’s core methodological idea is tied to its key critical and historical insight. As we learn from the “Lettre pour porter à rechercher Dieu” (Sellier fr. 681), the foundation of Pascal’s Apologie pour la religion chrétienne is the anthropology or philosophy of the human being that was to have supplied its starting point. This is a distinctively baroque anthropology that must be read, not in the ‘classical ,’ rationally clarified perspective of its theological end in blissful surrender to God’s will, but in that of the human creature from whom that end is necessarily hidden. The perspective involved is thus that of the ‘creature without a creator’ to which emergent modernity confines us: that of mortal beings abandoned to their fallen state as inhabitants of a reductively natural world. The standpoint from which God is sought is the one defined by the new physical science of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the properly historical sense of human norms, conventions, and politics laid down by early-modern humanists, the infinite (and eternally silent) spaces of post-Copernican cosmology, and above all anthropology itself in the desacralizingly descriptive register endemic to the naturalistic discipline that now usurps that name. This yields a bracingly hard-edged reading of the Pensées, divided into two parts. The first is devoted to ‘the threshold’ constituted by Pascal’s anthropology: a picture of humankind that administers what Pascal calls the ‘shock’ attending the discovery of the inescapable wretchedness revealed by candid contemplation of our natural state. The second takes us to ‘the center,’ where we find the path to redemption in that paradoxical part of our nature without which wretchedness would be impossible, namely, our capacity to take thought of our condition: a second-order activity that helps us discover, within our natural frames, the upward promptings of a desire for more than our natural mortal selves can provide. For it is the unrequitedness of this desire that makes us the wretched beings we are. The book performs an invaluable service by shifting attention away from the redemptive theological teaching with which the Apologie would have ended. As the author demonstrates with enviable precision and patience, the trouble with traditional interpretations of Pascal is the way they blunt his sting. Like Descartes, whose Méditations were meant to be read ‘analytically,’ in the order defined by the state of ignorance in which we begin, rather than ‘synthetically,’ as a function of the a priori truths discovered only after the fact à force de rechercher, Pascal wants us to confront the undiluted reality of our mortal state. The point is thus to make us not only confess but feel our doleful fallenness as fully as possible; and we can only do so if our eyes are fixed on what is in any case the inescapable truth of our condition: the total absence of any opening on the transcendent object of our deepest desire. We are, then, already in Bjørnstad’s debt for reviving what is at once most baroque and most modern in Pascal, and the one because the other. But we owe Bjørnstad another debt. For, in restoring Pascal to his philosophical as well as historical moment, he relates him to the modern ‘discourse of the creature’ whose iconic exponent is the Walter Benjamin of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. The interpretation of Pascal thereby links up with some of the deepest issues in contemporary philosophy of history as well as in the, in every sense, critical anthropology associated with Benjamin’s work. Bjørnstad has thus given us a Pascal for Reviews 565 the twenty-first century, purged of the tincture of conventional Catholic piety that, in Sellier or Ferreyrolles, spoils so much of the most philologically responsible criticism devoted to his work. University of Colorado, Boulder Christopher Braider BRAMI, JOSEPH, éd. Marcel Proust 8: lecteurs de Proust au XXe siècle et au début du XXIe , vol. 1. Caen: Minard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-256-91155...