PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 232 Laurent Thirouin : Pascal, ou, le défaut de la méthode. Lecture des “Pensées” selon leur ordre. Paris : Honoré Champion, « Lumière classique 109 », 2015. 260 p. With the publication of his early article “Raison des effets, essai d’explication d’un concept pascalien” in 1982, Laurent Thirouin established himself as one of the most brilliant readers of Pascal of his generation. Readers of the Pensées will recognize “Raison des effets” as the recurrent title of individual fragments and even of an important cluster of fragments, but the exact meaning and function of the concept itself had remained unclear. Thirouin’s article convincingly demonstrated that, as used by Pascal, the concept in question is much more than a convoluted synonym for explanation: “la raison des effets” always refers to the deeper reason or regularity hidden behind the seemingly contradictory effects of an apparently incoherent and paradoxical reality. In Pascal’s most famous example, he considers the apparently mindless diversions with which we fill our lives and identifies the cause to be the fact that we are unable to remain in peace in a room. But cause and reason are not the same, as Pascal goes on explaining: “Mais quand j’ai pensé de plus près et qu’après avoir trouvé la cause de tous nos malheurs j’ai voulu en découvrir la raison, j’ai trouvé qu’il y en a une bien effective et qui consiste dans le malheur naturel de notre condition faible et mortelle” (fr. 168, ed. Sellier, my emphasis). As Thirouin points out (p. 113, quoted here from the expanded version of the article in the book reviewed), only the “effective” reason - the reasons perfectly proportioned to the effects under scrutiny - allows us to situate the perplexing cause within a higher order of meaning. As such, the “raison des effets” becomes key to our understanding not only of fragments carrying that title, or to the bundle of fragments (the so-called liasse) so named, but also to the movement of Pascal’s overall project. In fact, it is not only important for the analytical approach it pinpoints, but above all as a key to a better understanding of Pascal’s own project in the collection of fragments we read under the name Pensées. What Pascal is doing in the Pensées, or better: what he invites us to join him in doing is rendre raison, in this very precise sense. As a matter of fact, “Rendre raison est la mission ultime, sinon la tâche unique, de l’apologiste.” (p. 117) In this way, Thirouin’s early article constituted at once a method, a program and an example of a way forward. In his later work on Pascal, Thirouin has remained faithful to this framework, producing a body of work that stands a part in the scholarship for the penetration, clarity and rigor Comptes rendus 233 with which it teases out the internal dynamic of Pascal’s writing. This was the case in his important Le hasard et les règles. Le modèle du jeu dans la pensée de Pascal (Vrin, 1991). However, more than “la pensée de Pascal” in its abstract generality evoked in this book title, it is “les pensées” in their concrete textual specificity that have been at the center of Thirouin’s work on Pascal, unlike other leading French scholars in his own and the preceding generation, whose major contribution to Pascal studies has been to advance our understanding of the Augustinian (Sellier), Thomist (Ferreyrolles) or Cartesian (Carraud) backdrop of - and dynamic within - Pascal’s writing. Many of Thirouin’s most widely cited articles do something more specific than just rendre raison of this or that Pascalian fragment or theme in a loose sense. They perform an important philological groundwork by asking a key question about the internal dynamic not of Pascal’s writing in the abstract, but more concretely of the notes Pascal left behind when he died: How should our knowledge of the bundle (liasse) in which Pascal had classified a fragment inform our interpretation of that fragment? Pascal’s own classification of his notes obviously provides a context to what is too often read as contextless aphorisms, but what exactly does it tell us? As Thirouin points out in the introduction of the book under review: “Les liasses elles-mêmes ne sont que des apparences de chapitres : leur teneur est vague ; la cohérence du dispositif n’est pas très perceptible. Des sujets similaires sont dispersés ; des réflexions hétéroclites, en revanche, se trouvent rassemblées sous un même intitulé, parfois sibyllin.” (8) Through a resolutely inductive approach, attentive to the disparity and incongruities of the material (which any reader of the Pensées in the so-called objective editions by Lafuma, Sellier or Le Guern will recognize) yet forceful in his synthesizing vision of rendre raison, Thirouin often reaches unexpected clarity and surprisingly sweeping conclusions. For example, in his 1992 article “Les Premières liasses des Pensées. Architecture et signification” (republished in the present volume), the approach leads to the following striking conclusion about the relation between the Pascalian concepts of “vanité” and “raison des effets,” based on the analysis of both the use of the terms and of the liasses that carry these names: “les deux liasses sont dans un rapport de stricte symétrie” (89); in fact, while vanité “équivaut toujours à une absence de cause” (84), the Pascalian “raison des effets” turns out to be its exact antonym, signifying “le caractère de ce qui n’est pas sans cause,” in other words: “non-vanité” (89). And the relation between “vanité” and “misère” is equally striking: “la misère, c’est l’impossibilité structurelle d’échapper à la vanité” (86). Forceful readings and illuminating conclusions like these in articles focusing on different liasses published over a span PFSCL XLV, 88 (2018) 234 of 25 years have made Pascal scholars look forward to the synthesis bringing together all the different strands while completing this immense project. When the reader picks up the book reviewed here, s/ he can get the impression that this is indeed that book, for example from the very last phrase of the presentation of the book on its back cover: “Le commentaire d’une pensée ne devrait plus s’envisager en dehors de sa situation dans le singulier dispositif que forment les liasses.” The same phrase occurs in the opening of the book but with an even stronger emphasis on the temporality, since it is introduced by an “Il nous semble désormais que…” (9, my italics). But - alas! - the decisiveness is due to the urgency of the task, not the joy over its completion. The book under review is not exactly the long awaited synthetic volume, but rather two half books, pertaining to two closely related yet distinct projects. The central half of the book brings together the seminal articles mentioned above and does what the subtitle of the book promises, patiently, carefully, brilliantly teasing out the possible meaning of the liasse structure, providing everybody with the tool we would need to return in a more qualified way to the text of the Pensées, although only for less than a third of all the liasses, in the end. The rest of the volume contains, on the one hand, the mapping out, in an unprecedented and largely convincing way, of Pascal’s own thoughts on his method or the necessary lack of one in any traditional sense (the first three articles and the conclusion) and, on the other, four other articles dealing with key aspects of the Pensées, from the infamous Wager to superstition via a subtle reflection on Pascal’s mobilization of Montaigne. All these articles are excellent pieces of scholarship. The fact that they form a somewhat less cohesive totality than the framework at first might suggest, ultimately contributes to the project’s strength rather than present a weakness. Unlike the many readers who know all too well in advance what Pascal means to say, thereby failing to see the complexity and opacity (even tensions and contradictions) of the text in front of them, Thirouin always resists the temptation to explain too much too well in order to domesticate the text and make it all make sense. This book, in its generous openness, is an indispensable tool for any serious reader of the Pensées. Hall Bj Ø rnstad