Lettres à Pascal

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19 €, 240 p.
ISBN : 978-2-36280-301-7
Format : 140/205 mm
Parution : 11 mai 2023
Disponible en Ebook (13,99 €)

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Du même auteur

Blaise Pascal
Édition Alain Cantillon
Pensées

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H-France Review Chad Córdova, Vol. 25, n°3, février 2025

Among the many colloquia, panels, seminars, new editions, and publications related to Blaise Pascal in 2023—the four hundredth anniversary of his birth—I suspect that few were as admirably quixotic as Lettres à Pascal.
[...]
Writing wavers undecidably between reference and fiction. It is a spectral medium. It always involves an invention of selves. In epistolary texts, this holds for the addressee (especially, yet not only, for one who is dead) but also for the sender. Thus emerges the auto-bio-graphical question, an important thread running through several letters: who am I, who will I have become, in reading and working on your texts, Pascal? Or, as the provocative opening letter by Hall Bjørnstad asks, how has your text, your voice, been writing me? Such questions are all the more crucial when addressing a theorist who deconstructed le moi and who troubled the line between imagination and reality, a writer who excelled in epistolary dissimulation and who shuffled through many masks in the vertiginous proliferation of a centrifugal style of thinking governed by no single principle (on this, see Bras’s letter).
[...]
Who, or what, is “Pascal?” Beginning with Cantillon’s preface, there arises an understandably unavoidable overlapping of “Pascal,” the name of an author or a shorthand for a group of notoriously opaque and often fragmented text(s) that still survive, and Pascal, the long-deceased human being, a phantom haunting his writings and his readers.
[...]
While some letters to Pascal are thus essays on Pascal in disguise, one must read the volume to appreciate that there are others where something would be lost were one to impose the third person. Paradoxically, it is these more confessional or intimate letters—if one could ever be intimate with Pascal!—that, more than the others, could best be repurposed as good introductions to the Pensées (I could imagine assigning them to students who have never read Pascal). Such letters convey something of the desire—for reading and rereading, for thinking and rethinking—that is tantamount to the experience of that mysterious, fragmentary text.
[...]
Beyond their scholarly insights, these letters achieve an effect that is arguably more crucial in our moment: they make contagious the desire, even the love, for reading Pascal. Not love as adoration or admiration, but as an attunement to truth as endless mystery, to what never wholly arrives, to what is not negatively but positively absent. Pascal here becomes the name for texts that are endlessly provocative, ever open, always ready to incite the desire that drives that mode of incomprehension called thinking.

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