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.