His prose combines an artist's appreciation of language with an aphorist's gift for concision. It is a work of bracing lucidity and exhilarating perception.īruckner is not the first writer to bring attention to the penitential condition of the west – Paul Berman, Nick Cohen and your humble reviewer are among those who've dealt with the subject – but never has the diagnosis been more eloquently or persuasively made. Bruckner, more an heir of Raymond Aron than, say, Jean Baudrillard, is not that kind of philosopher and Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism is not that kind of book. The cliche of a French philosophe is the complacent obscurantist, wallowing in a swamp of postmodern jargon, who subjects textual meaning to cultural interrogation and finds that it's all the dastardly product of a white, male conspiracy. But he is also a thinker of some standing in France. P ascal Bruckner is best known in Britain for the novel Bitter Moon, which Roman Polanski made into a film (incidentally, a much better adaptation than his overrated version of Robert Harris's The Ghost).
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