Abstract

For recent readers, dialectic has provided a hermeneutic model for the interpretation of Pascal's authorship. His life itself, governed by disruptive moments of reversal from his scientific pursuits to piety, would suggest understanding his works as the incompatible products of reason and faith. The Pensees exemplify Pascalian dialectic. Most commonly readers organize this text into binary oppositions and patterns of reversal. These antitheses defy any effort at reconciliation by totalization or any other move that would bound them and thus make them comprehensible. The Pensees, the culmination of Pascal's thought and of dialectical development within his oeuvre, is directed to the expression of the tragic vision of man, to paradox, and to epistemological impasse. ;Almost all efforts to elicit patterns of dialectical opposition and reversal ignore another thematic strand that runs throughout Pascal's oeuvre: the elusive "middle," metaphorically a mediate and mediating space that functions as a point of articulation or conjunction between opposites and that would "resolve" dialectical tensions. For example, the binary opposition par excellence in the Pensees is nature and the supernatural. This tension is exemplified within Holy Writ by the carnality and worldliness of the Old Testament and the spirituality of the New Testament. This tension is "resolved" by figure, that is what the Old Testament says is a figure of the Christian truth, and nature a figure of the supernatural. Figure here functions as a "middle:" it makes compatible "dialectical opposites" by naming the discrepancy between saying and meaning in Biblical discourse. In this example, the question shifts from the reconciliation of antithetical categories by dialectical logic to the linguistic element: it is a question of rhetorical mediation rather than of dialectical totalization. This study proposes to examine the neglected theme of the middle and will argue that dialectic in five exemplary works by Pascal turns on or raises the question qualified above as the articulation of saying and meaning in discourse