"The Aesthetics of Hate" examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy.
In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Celine, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior--Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. Sanos argues that these intellectuals offered an "aesthetics of hate," reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions.
By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of antisemitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

Sandrine Sanos's biography of Simone de Beauvoir situates Beauvoir's life and works in historical context, charting how she was enmeshed in most 20h century events and developments from WW2, to Decolonization, the Cold War, Socialist Politics, Feminism-as well as topics and ideas of contemporary relevance (war crimes, human rights, the possibilities and limits of political activism in support of social justice). Building on recent scholarship, this biography focuses especially on the colonial, transnational, and postcolonial influences that shaped Beauvoir and emphasizes her paradoxical and complicated relationship to politics. Written in accessible and lively prose, the book is divided in 7 chapters and includes lesser-known photos of Beauvoir, as well as primary sources of both historical and contemporary interest (on the question of justice, complicity with oppressive regimes, torture, gender politics).