Out of This World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought - (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures) by Bruno Chaouat

About the Book

How to escape this world, this body? How can one invent a world parallel to this one? How do language and literature strive for a heterotopia that empties out the world and replaces it with words? From the mass graves of the First World War to transhumanist utopias, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq, Out of This World focuses on the modern and postmodern vexed relation to the world, body, and Creation, a major theme in gnostic metaphysical rebellion.

Book Synopsis

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

The 20th century is one of "great derangement." The idea that History has any meaning or direction has been challenged by two world wars, totalitarianism, and genocides, and now by pandemics, artificial intelligence, and the environmental crisis. The experience of the absurd is tangible and widespread. Times of cultural and material transitions further anxiety and disorientation. In the 1950s philosopher Hans Jonas suggested that cultural and geopolitical disorientation had fostered the re-emergence of cosmologies known as "gnostic" at the dawn of the Christian era. Out of This World revisits French modernity through the prism of this ancient cosmology. How to escape this world, this body? How can one invent a world parallel to this one? How do language and literature strive for a heterotopia that empties out the world and replaces it with words? From the mass graves of the First World War to transhumanist utopias, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq, this book focuses on the modern and postmodern vexed relation to the world, body, and Creation, a major theme in gnostic metaphysical rebellion.

Review Quotes

'the author has identified and substantially filled a gap in contemporary studies of modern French writing.'

Kevin Hart

'In addressing whether our time is shaped by a new "gnostic ethos," the force of Out of this World's argument stems from its sustained engagement with Gnostic traditions across a range of well-known French writers rarely discussed in the same context.'

Philip Armstrong

'Chaouat's new book shows how strains of Gnosticism's repudiation of "this world" have once again emerged to manage cultural and political disorientation--climate change, epidemics, the rapidity of technological change and the increasing obsolescence of human labor. As he shows brilliantly, these repudiations echo quests for authenticity in mid-twentieth-century French literature and thought. The encounters between Gnosticism and the work of thinkers like Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michel Houllebecque (among others) address what Primo Levi called the "useless suffering" of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and continue to haunt our present. Chaouat's work has always pushed us to think about literary and philosophical encounters with established traditions in innovative fashion. This book is but one more exemplar of the fruitfulness of his approach.' - Carolyn Dean

About the Author

Bruno Chaouat is Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.