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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2014
Sandrine Sanos has taken on a thorny topic in The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France. Sanos opens this compelling study of 1930s far-right French intellectuals by briefly discussing a scene in Jonathan's Littell's The Kindly Ones (Les bienveillantes). Greeted with praise and controversy on publication, Littell's highly charged 2006 novel was steeped in sinister perversions and vicious physical perpetrations straight out of Klaus Theweleit's encyclopedic two-volume Male Fantasies, dedicated to analyzing German anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist, and misogynist belligerence. In Sanos's description, the fictional protagonist of The Kindly Ones, an SS officer named Maximilien Aue, visits occupied Paris in 1943, where he enjoys the company of two now-infamous and very real French fascists—Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rabatet. Aue muses with the two anti-Semites on the possibilities of a uniquely fascist literature, enacts homosocial bonds over mutual hatred for Jews and communists, and exploits the abject sexual availability of men at a “faggot bar.” The pathology-filled narrative illuminates the mind of the protagonist even as it speaks to contemporary conceptions of the era's fanatical concern with self-regulation and masculinity.
1 Littell, Jonathan, Les bienveillantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2008)Google Scholar, in English as The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York, 2009).
2 Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character (New York, 1906)Google Scholar, 409.
3 Maurice Blanchot Biography, the European Graduate School website, at www.egs.edu/library/maurice-blanchot/biography.
4 Sontag, Susan, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, 73–108; Cavani, Liliana, dir., Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (Ital-Noleggio Cinematografico, 1974)Google Scholar; Frost, Laura, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca, NY, 2001)Google Scholar; Pasolini, Pier Paolo, dir., Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Produzioni Europee Associati, 1976)Google Scholar; Hewitt, Andrea, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Standford, CA, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 Lansing Warren, “Gertrude Stein's View on Life and Politics,” New York Times, 6 May 1934 available at www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/03/specials/stein-views.html.
6 Stein, Gertrude, The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. Burns, Edward and Dydo, Ulla E. (New Haven, 1996), 414Google Scholar.
7 Saint-Pierre, Dominique, Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre: D’août 1924 à Décembre 1944 (Bourg-en-Bresse, 2009)Google Scholar—a scrupulously researched account of Stein's life in Bugey, including an impressive array of local documents, detailed timelines, and inventories of Stein's visitors during their life in the area.
8 New studies of the Vichy government and its aspiration to purify culture and reinstate a national, soil-bound tradition still appear on a regular basis. France's role in promoting Pétain as the “Savior of France” and the legacy of his regime remain of enduring interest. See, for example, the recently published Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, L’héritage de Vichy: Ces 100 mesures toujours en vigueur (The Heritage of Vichy: One Hundred Measures That Are Still in Force) (Paris, 2013)Google Scholar.