Pascal Bruckner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Our selective hypermnesia recalls only the calamities, never the highpoints." --The Tyranny of Guilt (2006) by Pascal Bruckner "Figures such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pascal Bruckner criticize the liberal-left for its preoccupation with white guilt and its open-borders approach to immigration and refugees."--Whiteshift (2018) by Eric Kaufmann |
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Pascal Bruckner (°1948) is a French writer best known for writing the book Bitter Moon (1992) by Roman Polanski is based on.
He also wrote The Tears of the White Man (1983) and The Tyranny of Guilt (2006) which criticizes the West's relationship to the Third World.
He was an active supporter of the US cause and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
He is one of the so-called New Philosophers.
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. 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.
His fiery polemic stance against multiculturalism has kindled an international debate. 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 brings in defence of his wide attack on Enlightenment, the position of modern philosopher ranging from Heidegger to Gadamer, Derrida, Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, mentioning how 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", although later in the text settling for a preferable form of Enlightenment, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment, by admitting that "Denouncing the excesses of the Enlightenment in the concepts that it forged means being true to its spirit.
See also
- Criticism of multiculturalism
- Islamophobia
- Alain Finkielkraut
- Prix Médicis
- The Shooting Star
- Anticonformism
- Bitter Moon
- New Philosophers
- Luna Amară
- Prix Renaudot
- Criticism of Islam
- List of philosophers born in the 20th century
- Mustafa Balel
- Cercle de l'Oratoire
- Zoran Mušič
- Multiculturalism and Islam
- Criticism of the Israeli government
- Patrick Lapeyre
- Nora Zaïdi
- Tatiana Niculescu Bran
- Text Publishers
- Christophe Beauregard
- The Divine Child
- Les Voleurs de beauté
- Evil Angels (novel)
- Islamo-Leftism
- The Temptation of Innocence
- Nouvelles Mythologies
- The Tyranny of Guilt
- Western guilt (concept)
