Out of this World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 96)

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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.

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