Owen Heathcote

Gays and Lesbians in Contemporary France: Politics, Media, Sexualities1

The last few years have seen an unprecedented rise in the visibility of gay and lesbian issues in France. On the political front, a number of questions are receiving sustained attention: the potent...

Penser la violence en France au XXIe siècle

The extensive body of work on violence that precedes this special issue is daunting. In a French context alone, several major thinkers have contributed to shape this intrinsically multidisciplinary area of research, including: Georges Sorel, whose views on collective and revolutionary violence were immensely influential in the first half of the twentieth century; René Girard, whose theory of mimetic violence emerged from his literary analyses; JeanPaul Sartre, and his reflections on terror, oppression and group violence; Frantz Fanon, and his perspectives on racism and colonial violence; Pierre Bourdieu, whose work helped to think and define symbolic violence; and Michel Foucault, of course, whose influential work on power has inspired numerous studies across the world. In addition, from Simone de Beauvoir to Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, many French thinkers have significantly and durably informed and contributed to debates on feminism and the multifaceted aspects of violence in the oppression of women worldwide. Sociologist Michel Wieviorka, one of the major thinkers on violence of our time, is certainly not far off the mark when he writes that ‘il n’est pas de penseur important, dans les sciences sociales comme en philosophie politique, qui n’ait pas, d’une façon ou d’une autre, exprimé un point de vue sur la violence ou élaboré une perspective pour l’aborder’ (2004, 143). Wieviorka’s omission of scholars in the Arts and Humanities in this quotation may be explained by his own background. Nonetheless, it is true that, even though this topic has been central to many fields or subfields of the Arts and Humanities—including postcolonial, gender, memory, war and conflict studies—, few volumes written or directed by scholars in such fields have focused on violence, and even fewer have attempted to reflect on violence in France in the twenty-first century from a multidisciplinary perspective.1

Balzac and Theory, Balzac as Theory

This article considers the changing relationship between Balzac and theory from the 1970s onwards when Balzac was a favoured, if disparaged, object of theorization, as in Barthess S/Z. More recent critics, however, see the multi-layered enonciations of/in his texts as evidence of their ability to theorize their own relationship to history, society, sexuality — and literature. In the same way, moreover, as texts such as Sarrasine and Une passion dans le desert critique their own relation to literature, ostensibly theoretical Balzac texts such as Une theorie de la demarche turn theory into a form of fiction. Whether moving from literature to theory or from theory to literature, Balzac — or ‘Balzac’/Balzac — is thus shown to be (at) a nexus of literature, theory and literary theory.