Pascal Bruckner

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Pascal Bruckner (born December 15, 1948 in Paris) is a French writer.

After studies at the university Paris I and Paris VII, and then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he became maître de conférence at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, and collaborator at the Nouvel Observateur.

A prolific writer, Pascal Bruckner began writing in the vein of the so-called "nouveaux philosophes". He published Parias, ou la tentation de l'Inde (Parias, or the temptation of India), Lunes de Fiel (adapted to film by Roman Polanski) and Les voleurs de beauté (The beauty stealers) (Prix Renaudot in 1997). Among essays, La tentation de l'innocence (Temptation of innocence) (Prix Médicis in 1995) and, famously, Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Cry of the White Man), an attack against narcissic and destructive derives in the interest for the Third World.

He became an active militant of the US cause and for the so-called "preventive war", signing letters and petitions in favour of Donald Rumsfeld, along with Romain Goupil and André Glucksmann (Le Monde, 4 March 2003).

[edit] Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc

Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Cry of the White Man), published by the Éditions le Seuil in May 1983, subtitled "Third World, culpability and self-hatred", was a controversial opus. The author describes what he sees as a pro-Third-World sentamentalism of a part of the Western Left-wing, and its cheap self-culpabilisation; the essay had an influence on a whole trend of thought (Maurice Dantec, Michel Houellebecq).