The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France
Sandrine Sanos
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 ... More
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.
Keywords:
far-right intellectuals,
France,
anti-Semitism,
gender,
racism,
hate,
nationalism,
Maulnier,
Brasillach,
Blanchot
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780804774574 |
| Published to Stanford Scholarship Online: June 2013 |
DOI:10.11126/stanford/9780804774574.001.0001 |
