L'Irrespect: entre idéalisme et nihilisme ed. by Julien Roumette (review)

This issue of Littératures takes up the theme of irrespect in modern and contemporary literature, philosophy, and cinema. Tracing a lineage of revolt that passes via Dada, surrealism, situationism, and the writings of Alfred Jarry and Henri Michaux, the editor Julien Roumette argues in his introduction for the particular value of considering such works in relation to this theme: far from a gesture of pure nihilism, disrespect is a form of 'provocation désacralisante' (p. 6) that rejects certain values in order to affirm others. Pursuing this thought, the collection addresses a rich and wide-ranging set of material (drawn from mostly French and francophone contexts yet also beyond), including writings by Rachid Boudjedra, Romain Gary, Julien Gracq, Félix Guattari, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nathalie Sarraute, cinematic works by Jafar Panahi and a range of Cuban directors, and Anti-Formalist Rayok, a cantata by Dmitri Shostakovich (published here in French for the first time). Although this collection of material seems rather eclectic, it allows for productive connections to be made across diverse cultural, political, and disciplinary contexts. The volume also works well to explore less familiar material. Flore Garcin-Marrou's study offers intriguing insights into the interdisciplinary dimensions of Guattari's corpus: alongside film scripts, poetry, and an autobiographical novel, Guattari wrote six plays between 1979 and 1990. Rather than pièces à thèse, Guattari's plays are seen here to subvert philosophical thought, puncturing its seriousness, in an absurdist mode that draws on Dada and Jarry. Frédéric Sounac's insightful essay charts further underex-plored territory, examining Jean-Pierre Martinet's Jérôme (1978), a novel that articulates an attack on bourgeois conceptions of the family through a set of violent, transgressive impulses that reveal a mode of abjection beyond recuperation. Martinet's text is framed here as part of a transnational lineage of literary revolt—Sounac cites Céline, Dostoevsky, Genet, Gogol, Lautréamont, Melville — that further emphasizes the border-crossing dimensions of aesthetic practice signalled by the collection more broadly. At the same time, Philippe Ragel's essay on the contemporary Iranian film-maker Panahi is a timely reminder of the national and cultural specificity of artistic revolt: charged with propaganda in 2010, Panahi was sentenced to six years' imprisonment and a twenty-year ban on making films. Ragel's essay on Panahi is a vital contribution to the volume, as it implicitly poses a set of important questions about the differing stakes of artistic transgression in diverse cultural contexts. By focusing on Panahi's Offside (2006), a film about the ban on women attending football matches in Iran, Ragel's analysis also foregrounds issues of gender that seem underexplored by the collection as a whole. Despite the relatively brief consideration of Sarraute, the model of aesthetic revolt that emerges from this volume is one largely shaped by men. A particular (gendered) idea of revolutionary art thus remains, implicitly, very much respected here. The collection is illuminating in many ways, and its space is, of course, limited, but one wonders about other subjectivities, works, and histories that might have been included.