Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc īruckner's polemic stance against the ethnocentric nature of some discourses of multiculturalism has kindled an international debate. In 2009, he signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

military and the use of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In 2003, he supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but later criticized the mistakes of the U.S. Among his essays are La tentation de l'innocence ('The Temptation of Innocence,' Prix Médicis in 1995) and, famously, Le Sanglot de l'Homme blanc ( The Tears of the White Man), an attack on narcissistic and destructive policies intended to benefit the Third World, and more recently La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), a book on the West's endless self-criticism, translated as 'The Tyranny of Guilt' (2010).įrom 1992 to 1999, Bruckner was a supporter of the Croatian, Bosnian and Kosovar causes in the Yugoslav Wars, and endorsed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. He published Parias ( Parias), Lunes de fiel ( Evil Angels) (adapted as a film by Roman Polanski) and Les voleurs de beauté (The Beauty Stealers) ( Prix Renaudot in 1997). Īfter studies at the universities of Paris I and Paris VII Diderot, and then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Bruckner became maître de conférences at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and a contributor to the Nouvel Observateur.īruckner began writing in the vein of the nouveaux philosophes or New Philosophers.

Biography īruckner attended Jesuit schools in his youth. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture. Pascal Bruckner ( French: born 15 December 1948, in Paris) is a French writer, one of the ' New Philosophers' who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Criticism of the ' White Man's Burden' concept

The Tyranny of Guilt by Pascal Bruckner