Skip to Main Content

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

Online ISBN:
9780804782838
Print ISBN:
9780804774574
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France

Published:
24 October 2012
Online ISBN:
9780804782838
Print ISBN:
9780804774574
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy. In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. The author argues that these intellectuals offered an “aesthetics of hate,” reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions. By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of anti-Semitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close