The Céline case and the lessons from fanaticism
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Céline, writer and anti-Semite, has been the subject of numerous and repeated controversies. I will argue that he offers a case of self claimed fanatic and that he raises doubts about the possibility of educating or re-educating him. Reading the three “pamphlets”, the letters published in the press under the Occupation and the interviews given in the post-war period allows us to reconstruct his fanatic doctrine. It consists of a murderous conception animated by the “mongoose spirit”. It implies an understanding of history as a “race war” and a theorization of style as a “little music” expressing the biological root of being. Thus his fanaticism turns out to be not “insanity”, but a strictly rational elaboration, which is based on one and single principle that is itself exempt from all critical reflection, and therefore escapes the power of education. Céline, in this part of his work and in his last three novels, has thus produced a literary system of education for fanaticism where he, himself, is the paradigm.
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