Pascal Bruckner

We've been living baffling times. Human Right activists and Humanists of all sides surely are right in agreeing upon one point: from slavery to colonialism, the Western world has been guilty of awful deeds across the globe and for the past centuries. No one denies that, yet... Isn't it bizarre that such criticisms are more often than not turned only against the West, and is not applied to others -political regimes, foreign governments, religions, cultures... The 'others' have often been show more perceived as 'victims' only, never as executioners themselves. Isn't it telling indeed that whose daring to ignore such intellectual conformism (read: apply the same critical thinking in order to denounce non-Westerners for their own questionable deeds) get themselves quickly put back to order, being labelled, among other insults quickly thrown around, 'racist' or 'islamophobe' (a very interesting term, of which Pascal Bruckner retells the historical background so as to enlighten whose using it lightly...). Such denial and refusal to point fingers at others for their crimes can actually play right into our enemies' hands...

This was written by a Frenchman more than a decade ago; but the writing was on the wall:

'... if tomorrow, God forbids, terrorists were to blow themselves up in the Parisian tube, destroy the Eiffel Tower or destroy Notre-Dame... do-gooders from Right and Left would intimate us to make amend: we've been targeted, so we must be guilty; our aggressors can be nothing but poor destitute at war against our insulting wealth, our lifestyle, our predatory economical system'.

Here's was a baffling state of affair, and the philosophe, in this superb essay reading in one go, offers welcome insights so as to get rid of such moral decaying. He in fact tries to understand why, in Europe especially, instead of being proud and defending Western civilisation and its values, faced by enemies more and more threatening, many are actually turning against themselves to denounce its whole heritage. He reminds, in fact, why the West shouldn't be ashamed of what it is. He also challenges the tenets of whose supporting multiculturalism with a sagacity which will delight anyone standing against racism (read: the real anti-racists, not those defeatists purporting cultural relativism and political correctness).

Going against the grain whereas everything wrong in the world is the sole fault of the Western historical legacy, and a punch in the face of whose who, shamelessly, ally themselves with fanatics of all sorts (be it political regimes or terrorists lauded as 'freedom fighters') under the guise of humanism, Pascal Bruckner delivers here a welcome read!

Of course, there are flaws in his views. For instance, I found him very naïve in his defence of American foreign policies (this was written during the tumultuous Blair-Bush leadership), which he sees as a way to defend Western values against its enemies. Bruckner indeed believed the USA to be the last Western bastion standing proud, as opposed to a Europe on its way out from history. Personally, I don't adhere to this idea of 'a clash of civilisations', nor do I believe American interventionism to have been mainly motivated by ethical reasons.

Nevertheless, here's a welcome read. At least, someone had the guts to stand up and point at many naked Emperors! Political correctness, excessive guilt only applying to some and not others, cultural relativism, the dangerous mindset whereas 'the enemies of my enemies are my allies' and else are nothing but defeatism; and the West deserves better than that. show less

I got the feeling that Pascal Bruckner is one angry French intellectual who knows his way around irony and I think when it comes to existential unhappiness nobody can compete with French intellectuals. After all if "hell is other people", then the only life we live is hell of an opportunity to investigate what it really means to be happy. And investigation of a fundamental concept is what Bruckner does with a sharp wit and ruthless criticism.

Take for example this part: "The majority show more conception of happiness has long since moved beyond the soppy, rose-colored realm of popular literature; it has become hard, demanding, and inflexible as well. This is mortification that comes to us in the guise of affability and indulgence and commands us never to be satisfied with our condition. The severe visage of the old preachers has been replaced by the omnipresent smile of the new ones. Therapy with a smile: that is the incontestable market advantage Buddhists have over Christians. That is why Buddhism is making inroads among the rich in temperate countries, whereas Protestants and Catholics are converting poor people in the tropics." And then he hits Dalai Lama and he hits him hard, so hard that I could feel the pain (which at the same brought tears to my eyes because I laughed so hard).

Should we be happy? Did it become a duty? What is the punishment of failing this duty? Unhappiness? But then what is the punishment of never-ending pursuit of happiness? Maybe the real punishment of trying to be happy is the process itself in which you are continuously tormented by marketing, PR, gurus, innovators, gym instructors, bosses, friends and everything else. Bruckner does not pretend to give any easy answers and nowhere in the book does he refrain from asking difficult, disturbing questions.

I wouldn't hesitate to give the book 5 stars if only I could feel more at home with this translation, in some sentences it really sounded weird but nevertheless I'm thankful to everybody who spent effort to convert the original into a form I can more or less grasp. This made me happy, indeed... On a second thought, maybe not that much! show less

Pascal Bruckner has been identified with a new group of philosophers who broke away from Marxist thinking in the early 1970's. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's writing, particularly [The Gulag Archipelago] had an effect on what they described as the worship of the master thinkers of the left. They came to believe that these comprehensive systems of thought led to oppression, be it of the left or the right. It is no surprise then that Bruckner's novel published in 2013 is to some extent a critique of show more western society grounded in the streets of Paris France.

Antonin Dampierre comes from a bourgeois family and two events in his early young life have left scars that cannot be healed. The first and most important of these was as a young man of twenty travelling across an alpine pass alone in his car in mid winter. The car breaks down and he must find shelter from the cold. He finds an inn; closed for the winter, but manages to persuade the ancient female proprietor to let him stay. He is shown a room upstairs and soon falls asleep. He is awakened by the old woman coming into his room; she gets into his bed and lays on top of him, he is pinned down and does not know what to do. He falls asleep again only to find that the old woman has died and he crawls out from underneath and makes his escape. The second incident occurs when he is working as an estate agent in Paris. He is awaiting the arrival of some very rich clients outside a luxurious apartment that he hopes to sell. Just as their chauffeur driven car pulls up at the kerb side, two very drunk homeless men come barrelling down the road. One of them stops outside of the street entrance to the apartment and vomits over the doorstep. His clients agree to look at the apartment but they no longer have an interest and soon leave. As a furious Antonin leaves the apartment the tramp is lying propped up in the doorway and he grabs Antonin's leg. Antonin kicks him and keeps on kicking him until he is dead. He hastily flees the scene waiting then for a call from the police. Nothing happens; he has got away with it. Two things are thus revealed about Antonin: he has a hatred of old or destitute people and has a violent temper. He hatches plans to rid Paris of the homeless destitute people littering the streets and finds himself volunteering to work in a refuge for the homeless, so that he can carry out his murderous schemes.

Antonin's close association with the destitute brings forth all sorts of emotions, on the one hand he bitterly despises them, but on the other hand he comes to grudgingly admire their ability to look after themselves. Pascal Bruckner's novel takes the readers down amongst the homeless and their bitter struggle to survive. We see them through Antonin's eyes and so the worst aspects of their existence are brought to life. It is no surprise that Antonin finds himself sinking down among them and for him it becomes a question of sinking to the bottom, before he can get some sort of redemption.
The novel literally takes the reader through the streets of Paris and the catacombs and sewers that run beneath it: to another world barely glimpsed by most people. Bruckner is careful not to make this seem a fantasy world and real personalities like Bono of the group U2 and Christopher Hitchings: the American critic, find themselves included in the general debate about homeless people. Another theme straddling this novel is the tribal nature of the destitute, the groupings into nationalities that were a feature of the last french novel I read, which was Olivier Noreks's Entre Deux Mondes.

The central story about the fate of Antonin Dampier is a good one and holds the book together. I found the descent into the world of the misery on the streets of Paris pretty good for my soul, but Bruckner's point that some can survive, albeit usually at the expense of others is a fairly hard dose of reality. Of course the question of homeless people in the big cities and what if anything can be done, is outside the scope of this novel, but Bruckner sets the background for such a debate. A four star read. show less

This was a powerfully argued, in many ways persuasive, intelligent book that I thought I would end up disliking because of Bruckner’s reputation as a political gadfly in Europe. The subject of the book would also put off a certain kind of American reader who might openly identify with the terms “liberal” or “progressive.” In a time when the French thinker can sometimes be more identified with the obscurantism of someone like Jean Baudrillard, Bruckner much more closely resembles show more someone like Raymond Aron – which would position him, politically at least, as a moderate in the United States, and on the far right (especially in academic circles) on the Continent.

At the heart of Bruckner’s book, he makes claim that is not meant to provoke so much as it is to get people thinking: Europe has spent too much of the twentieth century apologizing for its mistakes (fascism, the Holocaust, the horrors of Communist) instead of carving out a new path for itself by learning from these mistakes. This apologizing, he says, can become pathologically debilitating. In a time of bracing secularism, Brucker argues that the guilt of original sin never really left us, but that it has been transmogrified – into guilt at the former atrocities of colonialism, slavery, racism, genocide, and many others. Condemnation has become a kind of new civic religion.

Instead of doing the rational thing, which would consist of a dialectical consideration of both our past crimes and an ongoing effort to both correct for them and ensure that they do not occur again, the West (and he’s particularly talking about western Europe here) reverts to a kind of childish narcissism whereby the only way we can savage any shred of former international importance is to wallow in past atrocities.

Whether or not you agree with Bruckner’s thesis, and I had the feeling that I would learn and appreciate it a lot less than I actually did – his writing, even the translation, is extraordinarily well-crafted and his writing convincing. A few of his more minor assertions – like his claim that Baudrillard was positively giddy at the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9/11 – struck me as dubious. The general themes, however, brought me on board more than I expected them to. This is said too often, and of too many writers, but its true of Bruckner: whether you agree with him or not, you’ll certainly come away from this book having been challenged – and done so by a writer who, while far outside the European political mainstream of the intelligentsia, eschews extremism and intelligently questions even his own assumptions. show less