Abstract
In a passage from Alain Robbe-Grillet's Projet pour une révolution à New York, one of the characters enunciates a revolutionary program whose objective is “d'operer une catharsis générale des désirs inavoués de la société contemporaine”. A priori, the concept of “catharsis” supposes a foreign turn to Robbe-Grillet's modernist rhetoric, however, that mention reappears in several essays from the seventies when the author seeks to specify a particular type of aesthetic experience. The objective of this paper is therefore to analyze Robbe-Grillet's concept of catharsis in order not only to unravel the aesthetic-political project of the novel, but also to rethink the relationship between theory and praxis, liberation from energy and moral effect, aesthetic education and intensification of the pleasure derived from his texts.
Keywords:
Catharsis; Robbe-Grillet; Aesthetic experience; Erotism