In very good condition. - Introduction -- In November 2005, with some fanfare, the Presses Universitaires de France published their Dictionnaire de la pornographic, edited by Philippe di Folco with an august advisory committee, and over a hundred contributors, including many notable intellectual names. Unwitting visitors to the publisher�s website were greeted by a gaudy animation advertising this publication, featuring the warning phrase �X Attention� in flashing pink letters, miming the style of a pornographic website; when the title of the Dictionnaire subsequently appeared on screen, the pulsing pink �X� remained. More spectacular evidence of the advance of pornography as a theme and as an aesthetic into the western cultural mainstream could hardly be imagined. This advance � whether it be a matter of websites, magazines, cable and satellite television, or art-house cinema - is unmistakable, and well documented. It does not in itself form the object of this study, however. Rather, it forms the cultural horizon against which this object has constituted itself. -- The aim of this study is to examine that body of recent French literary and cinematic productions which have been characterised by their reference to, use of, or complicity with the aesthetics, the codes, the tropes or the world of pornography, and which have made a significant cultural impact on the basis of this dimension.1 That it has become possible to identify such a body of work, and that an alignment with pornography should work to facilitate such cultural prominence, should already make clear the massive presence of pornography within the broader contemporary cultural field; but it is not as a symptom of this cultural dominance that these works will here be explored. Rather, our aim is to consider what issues might be at stake - socially, culturally, politically and aesthetically - in the decision by a range of writers and filmmakers to use the pornographic as a key point of reference within their work. That is to say, their use of pornographic imagery and figures will be explored as symptomatic of contemporary debates, anxieties, and possibilities in such diverse areas as the status of the novel, the apparent hegemony of liberal democratic capitalism, sexual relations, the contact between films and their spectators, or the sexualisation of children. Our interest is to evaluate some of the principal ways in which it has been used, in order to gain an understanding of the roles it plays for those writers and directors who have chosen its characteristic features as the vehicle for their concerns. -- We will mostly be considering works produced in France over the last decade, since approximately the mid-1990s. This is of course the period in which pornography has acquired its dominant status; a handful of typical developments during this period (chosen more or less at random from a much longer list) might include, for example: the anti-feminist backlash, and the �raunch culture� diagnosed by Ariel Levy (Levy 2005); the blurring of boundaries between pornography and other cultural forms observable in such phenomena as �lads� mags� in the UK, and some music videos in the US; and the increasingly easy availability in mainstream press outlets of hard-core material. With specific reference to the French context, it would also be necessary to cite the establishment of the first French adult cable and satellite television station, XXL (which by 2005 was claiming a million subscribers); the rise of the publishers Editions Blanche and La Musardine; and the prominent publication of the autobiographies of those the French call hardeurs and hardeuses, and that English has taken to calling �porn stars� (indeed, the popularisation of the words hardeur/-se and �porn star� is itself such a symptom).2 Since 1991, French television station Canal Plus has been broadcasting Le Journal du hard, its monthly round-up of adult cinema, followed by an adult film; in 2005, it was estimated that 1,200 hardcore films were being broadcast per month on French television, counting pay-per-view and repeats.3 This extension of pornographic material from its once restricted forms of diffusion to the heart of the western cultural field is, then, the backdrop against which the works we will be discussing are situated.4 The aims of a number of those writers and filmmakers we will discuss - including, for example, Erik Remes, Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq or Bertrand Bonello - include a critique of the reductive, empty consumerism of this world, for which the pornographic, defined for these purposes by a soulless, commercially motivated materialism, can become a kind of shorthand. At times, however, this thematisation is marked by a very contemporary ambivalence, which leaves any critique of the ways of this world, and of this pornography, awkwardly entangled with the very structures it might like to denounce. ISBN 9780719073984
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