What Does Jacques Lacan See In Blaise Pascal?

Pascals Wager ... to which, from my Rome report on, I indicated that instead of a thousand other futile occupations, psychoanalysts should turn their gaze.[1] Putting the title in this way is meant to reflect two things. First, that Jacques Lacan is unequivocal in his assertion that the work of Blaise Pascal, and in particular his Wager, is of 'inestimable value'[2] for the psychoanalyst. And second, that it is not at all clear - not to me and not to anyone I have read - why he thinks that the seventeenth century genius should have so much to offer to a praxis that saw the light of day almost 250 years after his death.…