Pascal Bruckner

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Pascal Bruckner (born December 15, 1948 in Paris) is a French writer. He is part of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.

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[edit] Biography

After studies at the university Paris I and Paris VII, and then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, he became maître de conférences 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" and counts among their best known French proponents. 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 narcissistic and destructive policies in the interest for the Third World, and more recently 'La tyrannie de la pénitence' (2006), an essay on the West's endless self-criticism.

He is an active supporter of the US cause and the invasion of Iraq, signing letters and petitions in favor of Donald Rumsfeld, along with Romain Goupil and André Glucksmann [1]. Bruckner supported the leader of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, Nicolas Sarkozy, during the campaign of the 2007 presidential election, claiming that the French Left now incarnated "conservatism" and that Sarkozy was the true heir of May '68 [2].

His fiery polemic stance against multiculturalism has kindled an international debate.[3] In this tribune titled "Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?", which defended in particular Ayaan Hirsi Ali by criticizing other tribunes by Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, Bruckner criticized philosophers ranging from Heidegger to Gadamer, Derrida, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, claiming that they had all joined together to say that "all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode [the Enlightenment ]: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. [3]," although then stating that "Denouncing the excesses of the Enlightenment in the concepts that it forged means being true to its spirit. [3]

[edit] Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc

Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc (The Tears 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 sentimentalism of 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).

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ "Paradoxal pacifisme, Le Monde, 4 February 2003. See response by Acrimed Le Monde aboie contre Le Monde Diplomatique (suite)) (French)
  2. ^ Pascal Bruckner, "Sarkozy, le soixante-huitard", op-ed in Libération, 14 May 2007 (on-line) (French)
  3. ^ a b c Pascal Bruckner - Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists? [1], appeared originally in German in the online magazine Perlentaucher on January 24, 2007. (English)

[edit] External links

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