Out of This World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought

How to escape this world, this body? How can one invent a world parallel to this one? How do language and literature strive for a heterotopia that empties out the world and replaces it with words? From the mass graves of the First World War to transhumanist utopias, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq, Out of This World focuses on the modern and postmodern vexed relation to the world, body, and Creation, a major theme in gnostic metaphysical rebellion.