Incizii ontologice
Ontological incisions

Summary/Abstract: Historical epochs live the truth of their imaginary. And so are the cultural paradigms that define them. Because history (in general, but especially that of culture) is made up of lasting signs of the experiencing of “true” events, those fixed in their testimonies, and not of true events or of the cultural veil called “objective truth”. (The ciron, for example, for Pascal’s time, was an insect – which is inaccurate for us today). The present text tries to establish certain connections between the imaginary underlying Pascal’s writing and, respectively, the philosophical labyrinth born through it. The starting point is precisely the famous ciron just mentioned, which constitutes the threshold of the abyss towards the infinitely small. Venturing to decipher certain textual passages that have already been discussed in many thousands of pages, the approach tries to open up the current reading of Pascal to some fundamental themes of philosophy. Among them are the ontological condition of philosophical discourse, the system’s stability, the subjugation of strangeness by taming it under the guise of “otherness”, and many others. One of the essential stakes of this approach consists in confirming the (older) idea that an author is all the more important, the more his signature leaves its idiomatizing effects on the signed text diminished, opening up to a universal active substratum in philosophy taken as a whole and across the culture, independent of any individual brand. Pascal is indispensable to the history of philosophy because he is only an occurrence of the discourse that constitutes the latter. Elements from the theory of rhetoric, literature, theater, poetry, etc., will support this idea.

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