Passion de l'énonciation ou fragmenter le fragment
A reconsideration of what Alain Cantillon has called Pensées-de-Pascal enables one to look again at the link between this collection of writings and mysticism. This is especially the case if one considers one of the text’s most notorious fragments, the “Mystère de Jésus”. I will start by elaborating...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | fra |
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Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l'Histoire du Littéraire
2022-05-01
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| Series: | Les Dossiers du GRIHL |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/dossiersgrihl/9430 |
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| Summary: | A reconsideration of what Alain Cantillon has called Pensées-de-Pascal enables one to look again at the link between this collection of writings and mysticism. This is especially the case if one considers one of the text’s most notorious fragments, the “Mystère de Jésus”. I will start by elaborating the history of this matter, the boundaries of which were demarcated by a conflict over the meaning of the term “mysticism” itself (meant both as an experience and as a body of texts) until Louis Marin, following the footsteps of Michel de Certeau, read Pascal’s fragment in light of the linguistics of enunciation. I will then look at a series of articles, in which Marin makes the following demonstration: mysticism in the Pensées is not a matter of Pascal’s own experience nor about a certain conceptual content, but rather the fragment’s own specific style of enunciation. Marin shows how the lost body of Jesus in Gethsemane (the Agony in the Garden) arises out of the collective prayer of the Christian community, a community that finds itself in communion with Christ through the exchange of blood and tears. In doing so, Marin examines how the deixis in this fragment produces a multiplicity of labile speakers that one cannot simply identify with Blaise Pascal the man praying to Jesus Christ. Marin applies this hermeneutic to the entire Pensées, and analyses each part of the text according to its own discursive scenography, rather than as a fragment participating within, and deriving its meaning from, a preconceived totality. I argue that, as convincing as his interpretation is, Marin forgets to consider the “Mystère de Jésus” as the product, indeed the invention, of its own successive publications. I demonstrate how a closer look at the way the paragraphs within Pensées are put together in the manuscripts and in selected different editions pushes us to “reopen” the Pensées even further and to “fragment the fragment”. |
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| ISSN: | 1958-9247 |