Abstract

Because the writings of Blaise Pascal are so frequently in dialogue with those of his predecessors and contemporaries, including Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, and Descartes, Pascal's corpus provides an ideal source for a study of citationality. The first half of my dissertation treats Pascal's writings and various sources influential to them; the second half considers appropriations of his work by modern writers. My dissertation presents the work of Pascal as a group of writings representative of the French seventeenth century, and not as the culmination of an independent philosopher's thought. ;In the first chapter of my dissertation, an examination of Pascal in his philosophico-historical context, I try to show that his arguments are very often determined by his citations. Through close readings of his work on miracles, law, mathematics, and rhetoric, the second chapter explores the differences between quoting Scripture and quoting an author. In the third chapter, Pascalian configurations of the body are related to language through an investigation of Pascal's interpretations of the body as a medium for message transmission. The fourth and fifth chapters present rewritings of Pascal by Lautreamont, Baudelaire, Valery, and Blanchot--authors who promote a literary tradition that is essentially based on rewriting, citation, and plagiarism. By offering a reading of De l'art de persuader, I argue that Pascal's concept of linguistic force not only provides a model for the transmission of moral discourse, but it challenges the very possibility of plagiaristic writing. In the final chapter, I address the work of some contemporary thinkers on the issue of citationality: Deleuze on the fold, Irigaray on the between, and Cavell on rhetoric