MAURICE CIANTAR : DES AFFECTS ENGAGEANT LE TREFONDS
MAURICE CIANTAR: AFFECTS FROM THE DEPTHS

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I intend to show how affects that come to the surface in Ciantar’s writings mark the relations between the sexes and account for the characters’ controversial bent on how they spend their energy. Finally, the text reveals a clash between the urge to join the crowd and the call of the Bohemian way of life. Ciantar’s novels reveal the age gap between a man and a woman forming a couple and stress acute differences in their social status. In the Jacques Vorageolles trilogy, on two occasions, the protagonist ends up with an older female partner and earns the reputation of being a gigolo. Vorageolles’ brief experience of fatherhood is cut short due to the passing away of his prematurely born child. In order to recover, , the male protagonist in Ciantar’s texts remains a bachelor, takes part in orgies and, childless, faces courageously the onset of old age. Gambling is practiced as a profession by the author and comes to the fore in the later texts. While still an adolescent, Vorageolles joins first the SFIO, then a Trotskyite group, before heading for Barcelona at the outbreak of the civil war where, soon, reality dampens his revolutionary enthusiasm. As from now on, Ciantar turns his back to the crowd, preferring definitely to stroll endlessly along the Paris boulevards: an activity which is equivalent to Foucault’s technique of the self.

• Details
• Contents