“Successive Slidings of Pleasure”: Eroticism, Kitsch and Witchcraft in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Work

Authors

  • Till R. Kuhnle Université de Limoges, France

Keywords:

fetishish, commodity fetishism, cinema, witchcraft, kitsch, eroticism, pornography, sterility, anti-nature

Abstract

According to Alain Robbe-Grillet, his movie Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) has been directly influenced by the essay Satanism and Witchcraft (French original: 1862) of the romantic historian Jules Michelet and also by the reading of this book by Roland Barthes in the sense of a new criticism. In the same sense, we propose here a comparative study of our corpus, based on the idea of a particular archaic universe of magical practice, shamanism and witchcraft as it is described by Hans Peter Duerr : “The ‘dream place’ is everywhere and nowhere, just like the ‘dreamtime’ is always and never. You might say that the term ‘dream place’ does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.” (Dreamtime, 1987; German original: 1978). Despite its rationality, modern civilization is mainly based on an irrational principle: the commodity fetishism (Marx). Thus in modern societies you can find a sliding eroticism of fetishism, now in the Freudian sense of the term (cf. Jean Baudrillard), that may transform every object into an object of desire, with the consequence that even the human body enters as a “fetish” into sexual relationship. In his works, Robbe-Grillet reproduces this universe by restituting to this fetishism its magic appearance throughout kitsch (representing anti-nature) and pornography in the “dream place” called cinema. The “generator” in Successive Slidings of Pleasure is the perfect female beauty of the seventies, associated to that of a witch. A similar effect produced by the woman’s body can be found, according to the “new critic” Roland Barthes and the “new novelist” Robbe-Grillet, in the work of Jules Michelet.

Author Biography

Till R. Kuhnle, Université de Limoges, France

Till Kuhnle is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Limoges (France). He is also the director of the research team Espaces Humains et Interaction Culturelle / Human Spaces and Cultural Interaction (EHIC – Limoges). Education: Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in Romance Philology (French), University of Augsburg (Germany) in 1992; Habilitation (Dr. phil. habil., Privatdozent) in Romance Philology,  University of Augsburg in 2000. Further teaching experience in many European Universities: in German (Augsburg, Erfurt, Eichstätt, Münster), in French (Lille, Boulogne-sur-Mer) and in English (Leeds). Major research fields in the last years: existential thinking and literature, existential and political adventure novels, Nietzsche and the avant-garde, theory of kitsch, theory of literature (daseinsanalysis). Monographs forthcoming in 2020: Nous sommes emabarqués. Études sur les arts et la littérature du  20e siècle (Aachen: Shaker); Abenteuer, Kitsch und Katastrophe (Vienna: Passagen Verlag).

Published

2021-02-02

How to Cite

Kuhnle, T. R. (2021). “Successive Slidings of Pleasure”: Eroticism, Kitsch and Witchcraft in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Work. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai - Dramatica, 65(1), 261–276. Retrieved from https://dramatica.ro/index.php/j/article/view/43