Introduction

Introduction Lawrence R. Schehr THE RECENT PUBLICATION OF VOLUMES and the production of films by individuals seemingly as diverse as Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes, Catherine Millet, and Guillaume Dustan among others give critics reason to think about ways in which contemporary literary and artistic praxis in France is reinscribing the sexual. Despite the differences among the authors, what these works have in common is a rewriting of previous borders: between the erotic and the pornographic, between hetero- and homosexual, between the literary and the non-literary. At the same time, one finds volumes of contemporary erotic/sexual theory of great intellectual interest that test lines between discourses: personal alia' impersonal, public and private, or academic and non-academic. And there is'great interest in all mediatized forms of pornographies. Though some taboos remain, they are few and far between in a world where "queer" is part of the title of a popular television show. Recasting the sexual in a new kind of discourse, one associated neither with shame nor with effrontery, nor with discourses of civility or incivility, these writers and film-makers singularly and collectively challenge readers to recast their own attitudes toward literature and the erotic. Is there pleasure to be gained? What effect does the mixture of aesthetic pleasure and prurient interest have? In what ways have the discourses of liberation been taken either as received knowledge or as products of a kind of leftism that has in turn to be overcome? How does this contemporary writing go beyond women's liberation and queer theory? In what ways do these authors set out to shock—Millet's water sports, Dustan's fluorescent dildos, Houellebecq's sexual tourism, Rémès's unprotected anal intercourse, everyone's scenes of masturbation and sodomy—and in what ways is that shock meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek? Certainly there are long traditions of pornographic and erotic writing in French, in fiction, in autobiography, and in theory. While sometimes combined , as in Sade's alternation of pornographic scenes with disquisitions and discussions of freedom, libertinage, and license, much of the time the discourses are separate. At the same time, the reader of these fictions can often infer a philosophical position espoused by an author from the text itself. Indeed the very fact of producing erotic or pornographic fiction indicates, despite any possible rhetoric or denial, interest in libertinage. Vol. XLIV, No. 3 3 L'Esprit Créateur Arguably, in recent cultural history, modernism seemed to have the last word to say on these matters: one need go no further than writers such as Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski, who in theory and in practice produced a body of work that seemed the fulfillment of the libertine promise of Sade, without what many might consider totally objectionable aspects of the earlier author's writing. And yet, in recent years, perhaps as a result of various liberation movements, of varying modes of representation, of the "postmodern condition" itself in which there is no longer a universal discourse, the modernist models of the erotic and the pornographic, determined by a generalized truth, seem no longer to obtain. Indeed, recent literary and cinematic production in France (and elsewhere) indicates that there is a profound cultural shift underway in which concepts of pleasure, eroticism, pornography, and sexuality are being revised and revisited. Are these new articulations of the sexual, the erotic, and the pornographic in literature, in going beyond those distinctions that are passé, themselves symptomatic of an advanced state of sybaritism? Or are they rather not a new way to rethink the social, the personal, and even the political in a post-Christian , post-modern world that has, at least in much of Western Europe, abandoned its reliance on grand narratives. It is these matters and those related to them that the authors investigate and analyze in this issue. Fall 2004 ...