L’ennui pascalien versus la nausée sartrienne
Pascal’s boredom versus Sartre’s nausea

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the premise that boredom is a multiform historical constant, this article tries to grasp, using a comparative endeavor, the essence of boredom, in Pascal’s sense and in Sartre’s sense of the word. At an epistemic level, Sartre replaces Divinity with contingency, which determines the concept of “boredom” to gain more acute valences, designated by the word “nausée”. Starting from some key concepts like “divertissement” or “mauvaise foi” and insisting on the way in which notions like freedom and loneliness are conceived, we shall demonstrate why the novel “Nausea” is considered to be the “Profane Bible” of boredom in the 20th century and to what extent Sartre borrows certain concepts from Pascal, concepts that aid him in defining the paradigms “être en-soi” and “être pour-soi”.

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