The Aesthetics of Hate Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France Sandrine Sanos |
2012 384 pp. 9 illustrations. ISBN: 9780804774574
Cloth $65.00 ISBN: 9780804782838
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"Sanos has provided a vital resource for the intellectual history of interwar France . . . Highly recommended."—D. A. Harvey, CHOICE "This book is an impressive piece of intellectual and cultural history. In an important intervention, the author illuminates how a range of extreme-right figures in 1930s France shared a racialized conception of the French nation. By historicizing these authors' thought, placing their writings in their wider political and journalistic context, Sanos moves beyond the narrow frame adopted by many literary scholars. The book's demonstration of the mutual constitution of antisemitism and colonial racism is one of its chief assets and achievements."—Judith Surkis, Institute for Advanced Study "This ambitious and conceptually sophisticated book moves beyond debates about whether the French far-right during the 1930s was 'really' fascist. In contrast to most historians, Sanos argues that the French far-right, while not 'worse' than other fascisms, was just different: it sought to provide the basis for a 'reasonable' racist anti-Semitism that would justify excluding Jews legally and symbolically from France rather than appealing, as they felt Hitler did, to myths."—Carolyn Dean, Brown University The Aesthetics of Hate 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. Sanos 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 antisemitism 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. |
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