There is a secular French tradition, running from Voltaire to Valery, which regrets that such a genius as Pascal, in the end, wasted his time and strength in wishing to salvage the Christian mumbo-jumbo. If only he had solely devoted himself to mathematics and to his brilliant considerations concerning the miseries of the imagination- he excelled at such!
Though I am rarely suspected of harboring Christian zeal, I have never appreciated this motivated nostalgia for Pascal the scholar and moralist. It is too clear to me that, beyond Christianity, what is at stake here is the militant apparatus of truth; the assurance that it is in the interpretive intervention that it finds its support, that its origin is found in the event; and the will to draw out its dialectic and to propose to humyns that they consecrate the best of themselves to the essential.
What I admire more than anything in Pascal is the effort, amidst difficult circumstances to go against the flow; not in the reactive sense of the term, but in order to invent the modern forms of an ancient conviction, rather than follow the way of the world, and adopt the portable skepticism that every transitional epoch resuscitates for the usage of those souls too weak to hold that there is no historical speed which is incompatible with the calm willingness to change the world and to universalize it's form.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event
