Mother-of-pearl and Bataille: Yannick Haenel

An anarchist banker

Philippe Sollers is the editor of the series “L’Infini”, in which the book under discussion appears; he once pointed out that Yannick Haenel refers to Blanchot’s famous statement: “A writer who does not think, while writing: I am the revolution, does not actually write.” ² Our preview of Le Trésorier-payeur Yannick Haenel laid the foundation in 2022, five years after Hold your crown tightHe presents a new novel, the idea for which, according to him, came when he was invited to a branch of the Banque de France, now an art center, for an exhibition relating to Georges Bataille; he decides to make a banker of the same name the protagonist, who, in the spirit of Pessoa, wants to understand the economic system from within in order to critique it. Here, one need only recall the motto in Haenel's Renards pâles recalls, in which a revolt of the undocumented migrants is recounted:

Overcoming capitalism through migration

Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion ³

What has changed since Yannick Haenel's novel Circle (2007) – in which the bank vault was still demonized as a slaughterhouse – changed in Yannick Haenel's worldview and understanding of art?

The safe was built for Haenel's latest novel Le Trésorier-payeur (Gallimard, 2022) Apparently steam-cleaned: The gold standard shines flawlessly and impresses the American president during his visit to the Banque de France in a grotesquely proto-religious scene. Ronald Reagan celebrates the "barbaric relic" in the "sanctuary," as in an Egyptian tomb, as Haenel quotes the economist Keynes here.

One can say, with Sollers, that Haenel sees himself as a writer of radical contemporary criticism, as he wrote in his chronicle of the Charlie Hebdo attack trials, referring to the philosopher Levinas. Notre solitudeIt could take years for the radical, present event (in this case, terrorist violence) to penetrate our souls:

Between Haenel's reflection on justice (or crime) and economics, there is a differentiation of the symbolic capital of vulgar and noble crime:

In a similarly legitimizing way, the 'other' Georges Bataille in Haenel's latest book lives a noble, a soberly holy (to use Hölderlin's adjective) economy, in the sense of the theory that also ascribes a role to art here:

Much has been written in recent decades about Georges Bataille's economics of waste, in La part maudite He designs a counter-model to a narrow economy of utility considerations and scarcity between supply and demand. In the era of post-structuralism, the excessive, transgressive aspect of this counter-model was emphasized. Peter Sloterdijk calls Bataille's design an 'economy of pride,' thus pointing to anthropological dimensions of the good life and recognition, as we see them in connection with crime. Notre solitude They have problematized: “Bataille deciphers in Nietzsche’s writings the outlines of an economy of pride, through which the concept of investment is radically modified. If ordinary investors use their resources to get back more than they put in (their time is eo ipso Time of waiting for the return on investment), while others use their resources to satisfy their pride and demonstrate their happiness. Both impulses prevent the givers from expecting returns in the same currency – whereas gains in reputation and elation are perfectly legitimate and desirable (hence their time is the time for passing on a wealth that creates significance). ⁶

According to his own account, Yannick Haenel took the time during his stay in Italy to re-examine Georges Bataille. In light of the country's migration crisis, he writes in Je cherche l'Italie (2015):

Lipovetsky and Roux argue in accordance with the idea of ​​expenditure Le Luxe éternelIn considering the ceremonial distribution of goods and gifts, the nobility was practically obligated to gain social recognition through gifts: “The chiefs must tirelessly give gifts, sponsor feasts, and hold great banquets to maintain their status or increase their prestige. In tribes with potlatches, chiefs earn titles and honor by competing with their splendor and sometimes challenging other chiefs through the wasteful destruction of considerable value. To prove oneself great and outdo rivals, one must be insanely extravagant, burning or throwing into the sea what is most valuable. On this point, Georges Bataille was not mistaken, who recognized in the potlatch ‘the specific manifestation, the significant form of luxury.’ In primitive society, it is not the possession of valuables that is important, but the social and spiritual element of exchange and gift-giving, the acquisition of prestige through the circulation or burning of wealth.” ⁷ In a constricted economy of scarcity, this commitment and the luxury of the potlatch by elites has disappeared.

One sentence among all the sentences – pearl and tear

Des fins splendideS: magnificent and sumptuous goals, wondrous luxury, radiant beauty, dazzling and captivating expenditure, instead of an economy based on thrift, calculation, and exploitation. Georges Batailles The cursed part formulated this counter-concept, a splendid economy of waste, and is the protagonist of Yannick Haenel's latest novel. Le Trésorier-payeur (2022) bears Bataille's name.

Before succumbing to the danger of literary reviews of too quickly narrowing fiction down to a core problem (in this case, economics): Haenel's novel Le Trésorier-payeur is to A text about the garden and the sky, about light and the fairytale ("féerie"), about joy and time, about desire (as need, as love and eroticism), about the absolute and silence. A novel that thus seeks to transcend utilitarian thinking in desire and expenditure. Several critical reviews of the novel have already been published. ⁸ But as far as I can see, Haenel's book remains unnoticed on the shortlists for literary prizes. The publisher summarizes the book: “It is the story of a banker who wants to spend everything. In the early 90s, the young Bataille abandons his philosophy studies to enroll in a business school and gets his first job in Béthune, at the branch of the Banque de France. In this city, where the closure of the mines and the devastation of neoliberalism have created a landscape of crisis, the treasurer's life becomes a passionate adventure: Under the protection of the bank director, Charles Dereine, he defends people burdened with debt, discovers a sexual deception with Annabelle, a Rimbaud-esque bookseller, becomes involved in the Brotherhood of Charitables, works with Emmaus, and meets the love of his life, the dentist Lilya Mizaki. How can one be an anarchist and work in a bank at the same time? Is it possible to give everything? Yannick Haenel tells how it is possible to resist the world of calculation from within through compassion and eroticism.” ⁹ Claude Arnaud offered a somewhat pointed commentary on the story: “There’s a very French mixture of Catholic aversion to money, a love-hate relationship with the state, and a belief in literature and eroticism. […] The evocation of the Faculty of Philosophy and the Business School in Rennes, as well as the Reagans’ visit to the labyrinthine warehouses of the Banque de France, are anthology-like elements. The basement becomes the heart of this heartless world Marx spoke of, with its impeccably tidy ingots, while homeless people languish on the neighboring sidewalks. A reality rarely addressed in the novel, and one that could prove to be a treasure.” ¹⁰ The author attempts a more comprehensive synthesis of his novel in five minutes:

Yannick Haenel's works are all rich in discovered, text-founding sentences such as the one quoted above from Bataille's The cursed part. also the founding of the magazine Ligne de risque, together with François Meyronnis and Frédéric Badré, Haenel led to a sentence from the Poems back from Ducasse; the novel Evoluer parmi les avalanches It is based on the opposing theorem of Ducasse and Pascal, each concerning the relationship to nothing; numerous other examples of the role of the theorem in Haenel's books could be mentioned.

In Haenel's essay on Caravaggio's painting, he chooses a sentence that represents for him a certain aesthetic of the pearl:

The pearl on Judith's ear in the later text originates from the drastic moment when she personally beheads Holofernes, and yet Haenel focuses on the splendid detail that rises above the world in this contemplation:

Let us not forget that Judith's cruelty led to the liberation of the Israelites. Her beauty gained her access to Holofernes' chambers, and his desire gave her the opportunity to get him drunk and kill him while he slept.

Pearlescent colors like this detail are like a tear in another painting, which, like the multiple reflections, color nuances and plays of light in Yannick Haenel's novels, illustrates an ambiguous narrative poetics of the splendid:

It would be fundamentally wrong to separate Haenel's theoretical and aesthetic considerations – in this case, *Tear*, *Reflection*, and *Pearl* – from his critical novels about his time. This is especially true in his most recent novel. Le Trésorier-payeur Is the philosophical banker one who translates Bataille's economy of the splendid into his perception and physical desire? Here we encounter again the contemplation of the pearly tear, as Haenel's books should generally be read in their interrelationships with one another:

Mater perlarum

Haenel is A storyteller of pleasure and light: The inner radiance of mollusk shells, mater perlarum, gives one of the most magnificent color impressions in literature, Proust's "The Shards of Pearl at Dawn" ("des débris de nacre de l'aurore") ¹¹ for example, those in Sodom and Gomorrah to color a maritime light scene in a poetic and dreamlike way. The ethnologist Lévi-Strauss, in his travelogues, went so far as to glorify the colors of the desert, calling it a "desert of flesh: peach skin, mother-of-pearl, raw fish". ¹²

Oyster, mother-of-pearl, and pearl form a complex allegory of the artistic creative process and of aesthetics. Petrarch only wanted to describe the pearl-like appearance of his Laura as 'beautiful' in conjunction with her chastity:

Flaubert's Orientalism in the historical Carthage novel Salammbô In contrast, it revels in the eroticized splendor of adorned female bodies, with a shimmering mother-of-pearl waist:

Francis Ponge's poem about the oyster can be read explicitly in terms of poetics; in three stanzas, the gaze moves from the outside in and then back out into the outside world: the protective layer against the external world is hard, the animal shell is difficult to penetrate; in a reading as a poem about poetry, this would be the factual world, the biographical protective mask of the artist and his subjects:

Having penetrated the inner world of the oyster, one encounters a sky-high landscape with two pearly heavens, a world of the senses, like Plato's cave. And with the pearl, which sometimes emerges here as an objectification of the spirit, lies the ambiguous word formula This also includes the artwork, the performance, the magic formula, the alchemical gold-making, the ornamentation of rhetoric:

Yannick Haenel lived in Florence from 2011 to 2014; the book was written there. Je cherche l'Italie (2015), here he not only reread Georges Bataille, here he also discovered a city of art, yet was shocked by the financial crisis that hit the Italians hard and devastated their culture:

The pearl, as a symbol of disinterested pleasure, of aesthetic vitality, is carelessly concealed. Haenel's mother-of-pearl is by no means merely a embellishment of the worlds criticized in his novels: the overwhelming luster of the mother-of-pearl is in La solitude Caravage (2019) brought into an image of the ideal, of utopia, in the case of literature as a declaration not to remain in the status quo:

The word envelops the inviolable ("la parole enveloppe l'indemne"), writes Haenel in his book on Caravaggio, comparing it to painting; like the formation of pearls, it is an initiation into that which eludes the visible. Prismatic like the art of painting, a dispersive representation of abundance also becomes possible in literature on a small scale.

The enjoyment of eating oysters is most clearly integrated into the novel's context in Hold your crown tight, linked to the aesthetics of mother-of-pearl and pearls. A political dimension may still be subtly hinted at through the luxury goods, but here the sheer pleasure of sensual living is paramount:

And so it is not surprising that mother-of-pearl in Le Trésorier-payeur encountered a dozen times, mother-of-pearl on the shoulders of his beloved Lilya, mother-of-pearl fragments from the sky above Béthune, the pearly shimmer he seeks out every morning in the living quarters, a wide and clear light extending to the mythical scene of the gods:

Economic critique as a Chagall fresco

The sporadic reception of Yannick Haenel's work in Germany could be remedied by his latest novel. Le Trésorier-payeur (2022), should it be translated into German, to better reflect his complete works. For it is precisely his work that is most discussed here in Germany. Jan Karsky The author had written in the magazine Fixxion ¹⁶ It was understood as a rather atypical interruption of his usual writing. The filmmaker Claude Lanzmann ¹⁷ Haenel had been accused of falsifying history; the polemic and scholarly discussion – e.g., by Marc Dambre and Maxime Decout, Catherine Coquio, or Aurélie Barjonet – also drew the attention of German Romance studies to problematizing questions about testimonial literature and the Shoah in relation to Haenel. ¹⁸ Cécile Guilbert, on the other hand, has irritatedly summarized scandals and legal proceedings like the controversy surrounding Haenel's book and excluded them from her work on factuality and fictionality: “As far as literature is concerned, the question is different. To be honest, the questions that have occupied me for some years now are not about the fear that the dissolution of reality into fiction, or vice versa, would provoke. Nor are they about whether it is troubling when authors are sued for violating the rights of private individuals. Or whether Claude Lanzmann was right to sue Yannick Haenel.” Jan Karsky to rage, Edouard Louis, to take part in a fact-checking-process to disrupt, or Camille Laurens, Marie Darrieussecq of the 'psychological plagiarism'to accuse. No, what concerns me most are the reasons why an ever-increasing portion of contemporary French literature prefers to play on this quicksand. Especially since, by the standards of bleating and triumphant political correctness, almost all the classic writers of the past would be accused today of writing purely imaginary novels, but let's leave that aside…' ¹⁹

Von Haenels novel are except Jan Karsky (2009) still Les Renards pâles (2013) and Hold your crown tight (2017) translated into German: The pale foxes (German edition 2014) were primarily recognized for their social realist aspect, but the shift to theory in the second part met with incomprehension in Germany, as Frenkel criticized in the Stuttgarter Zeitung The rhetorical nature of the revolt: “Karl Marx, Max Stirner, Georges Bataille – it is the critics of the reification of man who reappear in Yannick Haenel’s text, which increasingly becomes a paper-thin tract. Unfortunately, their thoughts appear so unreflective, as if there had been no changes or discussions between 1968 and the present day. As if one only needed to invoke the dreams of the Paris Commune, celebrate orgies on the graves of its martyrs, and organize mass demonstrations with masked people to bring the marginalized back to the center and thus shake a system in which the concept of freedom is merely a cipher for the boundless possibility of exploitation.” ²⁰ Holstein was particularly bothered by the gesture of politically engaged literature: “The figures of current debates appear, Hollande as well as Houellebecq, and in the end there is a radical vision: the marginalized conquer the city, Paris burns. What is irritating for the reader, however, is that Haenel follows the furious beginning with a weak ending. The last third of the otherwise stylistically magnificent book is written like a pamphlet; here Haenel is no longer an artist, but an agitator. The utopian experiment ends in the bombast of agitprop.” ²¹ Tilman Krause delved deeper into the literary-historical roots of Haenel's project, arguing that anyone who focused on ideological criticism of Haenel's political naiveté did not understand the literary spirit of utopia in France:However, those who focus on this overlook the suggestive linguistic power of the author, who draws on registers that have long been banished from modern literary discourse, even though they stand in a particularly fruitful tradition for France, from Rousseau to Victor Hugo and the Surrealists. And the emphasis here is on tradition. Haenel's highly poetic language, which is more elegiacally dark than aggressively blazing, strives to evoke the past. Quite consciously and very subtly, he reconstructs, purely topographically, that "rebellious Paris" hidden beneath the glittering world. It is no coincidence that the action is set in the vicinity of Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the "Wall of the Federated" still commemorates the mass shootings of the insurgents of 1871.

the novel Hold on to your crown (German edition 2019) subsequently received little attention in Germany. Hillgruber interpreted the homage to cinema and Herman Melville as an evasion: “Yannick Haenel has created a unique adventure and Künstlerroman, centered around a solipsistic hero who uncompromisingly pursues his dream, thereby gaining self-respect and clinging to his crown. […] However, the crisis-ridden French reality with its moments of upheaval barely penetrates this narrative cosmos. […] The current Jean lives far too much in his cinematic dream world for reality to still seriously interest him.” ²²

The protagonists of both novels bear the name Jan Deichel, a recurring alter ego of the author, but the intrinsic connection between an image-intoxicated aesthetic and political radicalism was overlooked. French critics, however, took a different view, as when Tiphaine Samoyault, for Le Monde She opened her review of the latest book with: “One can Le Trésorier-payeur"Entering Yannick Haenel's new novel is like stepping into a Chagall fresco, a universe full of skies, colors, and ethereal women—a somewhat delusional, delicate, and mystical universe. Even religious, let's put it that way." ²³ Philippe Chevilley even calls the novel a “Féerie bancaire,” a banking fairy tale or a financial enchantment, even if his conclusion remains ambivalent: “The learned, unrestrained, at times absurd novel ‘Le Trésorier-payeur’ seduces as much as it confuses. It is alternately brilliant and redundant, exploring its financial-anarchist agenda without truly transcending it, and it lacks a genuine apotheosis. Yannick Haenel nevertheless “exerts himself” without calculation. But we would have wished that his novelistic fever had opened the vault wider and consumed us completely.” ²⁴

Desire and abundance

The turn towards abundance naturally appears at first to be a hedonistic turn, a reinterpretation, a reclaiming of luxury, compared to militant, rebellious poses in Les Renards pâles:

Bataille threw in La part maudite The Reformers were accused of having desecrated the world with capitalism: “By giving the ultimate consequence to a demand for religious purity, the great Reformers destroyed the sacred world, the world of unproductive consumption, and handed the earth over to the people of production, to the citizens.” ²⁵ And the sociologist Georg Simmel once remarked, "I consider it a mistake to think of every miser as preoccupied with describing all the pleasures available to him, all the attractive uses of money." ²⁶ Avarice is not concerned with the splendor of life, but with abstraction; money is no longer a means to the abundance of the world, but an end in itself. Unlike perhaps the caviar-loving left in France, for Haenel's books the question of luxury is not an unreflective elitist stance, but a celebration of pleasure. This contrasts with the quantification of bodies, as Haenel already discussed in Circle wrote:

For Haenel, investing in art is by no means a form of Bataille's wastefulness, but rather an ultimate submission to the economy:

Even the world of digitalization harbors new dangers here, as is discussed in the essay collection co-authored with the editors of Ligne de risque The digital counter-world is interpreted through the lens of Bataille. Literature here loses its special position, which, as a genuine counter-world, had enabled a revealing critique of the false one.

Therefore, critics who, for example, find the visual opulence of... are not to be agreed with. Hold your crown tight Haenel did not see this as a departure from political social commentary; rather, he understands this abundance as criticism. through the power of Sensual pleasure, as a subversion of disembodiment. In Les Renards pâles Haenel also portrayed the political uprising as the plundering of a luxury society. Here, luxury is a hallmark of affluent capitalism and not yet as in Le Trésorier-payeur understood as a sensual counter-economy:

the novel Circle The 2007 film told the story of a man's self-liberation: he stopped going to work, severed all his ties, and wandered freely through Paris. Loneliness is a state of being frequently explored in Haenel's work. The protagonist of Circle He discovers an absolute existence, freedom. From this perspective, the people who continue his previous life appear to him only as victims of capitalism.

In Les Renards pâles (2013) then the collective uprising is rehearsed. In Everything is accomplished (2019) by Haenel with the companions of Ligne de risque Houellebecq's thesis of the economic conditioning of man is critically discussed again; in this respect, Haenel's Le Trésorier-payeur (2022) as an anti-Houellebecq who in Elementary particles had shown "that human desire has been completely integrated into the realm of political economy. It has become a commodity like any other, and as a result, people are now put on display in a gigantic cattle market." ²⁷ Le Trésorier-payeur Haenel's novels could thus be understood as an anti-dystopia; they have a fundamental connection regarding the possibilities of art and criticism, and ultimately of freedom and hope in today's crisis-ridden world.

Didier Jacob was not entirely convinced by the shift in wastefulness from the economic sphere to the expenditure of love in Le Trésorier-payeur“However, a reversal occurs, whereby Haenel’s writing style, which initially impressed with its philosophical skill, does not fulfill all its novelistic promises. For in the practice of love, Bataille (the banker) ultimately realizes his ideal of extravagance and carries his Mélenchonist strategy to its conclusion. Paradoxically, Haenel’s style descends into a tiresome profligacy, especially in the simultaneously childlike and old-fashioned descriptions of his heroines and the ardent love the banker feels for them. By delving deep into the adjective toolbox, Haenel wants to be the mad treasurer of literature. He is, which isn’t so bad, the cheeky cashier.” ²⁸ Alice Ferney discusses in Figaro Above all, the book's distinctive style, which aims to be as lavish as Bataille's exuberantly narrated theory of economics, with its excess of images and similes, is criticized. However, the critic finds the proliferation and orgy unsuccessful: "His overflowing style is repeated very often. One eventually becomes amused by the fact that under his pen, every woman is inevitably stunning, dazzling, damned sexy, and burning. The same words reappear again and again. Concepts, lovers, and landscapes are merely 'splinters,' 'shimmers,' 'glitter,' 'mother-of-pearl,' 'stars': whether a writing tic or inventiveness, the luminous metaphor colonizes the novel; the treasurer becomes a portrait of an enlightened man by an enlightened man. Haenel and Bataille trample in their phantasmagoria. The novelist, who reckons with intelligence, constantly intervenes; his commentaries interrupt the narrative, from which the reader is repeatedly thrown by the presented general truths." The author decrees epiphanies without making them tangible. His sentences are irritating, his exaggerations tiresome. His poetic raptures border on sentimentality or nonsense. ²⁹

Haenel was interested in the artist Caravaggio for the unconditional nature of a radical self-sacrifice:

In Desire as adventure In 2021, Yannick Haenel recounted how, as a 19-year-old punk, he had stumbled upon Delacroix's "Death of Sardanapalus" in the Louvre, and how this violent, naked orgy fundamentally shook the young rebel within him. Some of this ecstasy of life is contained in Haenel's avowal of an economy of expenditure. The absolute erotic expenditure that manifests itself in Le Trésorier-payeur Lilya's connection, as well as the program of the radical artist Caravaggio and Bataille's economics, are existential aspects of a vitalism that must push itself to the point of exhaustion. Consequently, the text leaves the vaults behind, and the treasurer expends himself in union with his beloved Lilya.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. Fernando Pessoa, An anarchist banker, t: Reinhold Werner (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1986).>>>
2. “Yannick Haenel a raison de citer souvent la belle formule de Blanchot: « An écrivain qui ne pense pas, en écrivant: Je suis la révolution, en réalité n'écrit pas. »“ Philippe Sollers, Runaways, “Destin du français” (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).>>>
3. The quote in the original French text: “Vaincre le capitalisme par la marche à pied.” Yannick Haenel, Les Renards pâles.>>>
4. Georges Bataille, La part maudite, Ch. “La conscience de la fin ultime des richesses et la 'conscience de soi'”.>>>
5. Georges Bataille, The abolition of economics (Matthes & Seitz, 2001).>>>
6. Peter Sloterdijk, Anger and Time: A Political-Psychological Essay, Chapter “Completed Capitalism: An Economy of Generosity” (Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2012).>>>
7. "[…] les chefs doivent sans relâche faire des cadeaux, patronner des fêtes, donner de grands festins pour conserver leur statut ou rehausser leur prestige. Dans les tribus à potlatch, les chefs gagnent titres et honors en rivalisant de magnificence, parfois en défiant d'autres chefs par la Destruction somptuaire de valeurs considérables Afin de se montrer grand, de l'emporter sur les rivaux, il s'agit d'être follement dépensier, brûler ou jeter à la mer ce qu'il ya de plus sur ce point, Georges Bataille ne s'était pas trompé qui reconnaissance in the potlatch «the specific manifestation, the significant form of luxury4». Dans la société primitive ce n'est pas la possession des choses de valeur qui a de l'importance, mais l'élément social et spirituel que comporte l'échange-don, l'acquisition du prestige conférée par la circulation ou la consumption des richesses.” Gilles Lipovetsky and Elyette Roux, Le Luxe éternel, “Archéologie du luxe”.>>>
8. For example: Arnaud Jamin, “Yannick Haenel: écrire, jouir et vider les coffres (Le Trésorier-payeur)" Diacriticism, August 22, 2022; Eric Loret, “Le “Trésorier-payeur” de Yannick Haenel, argent double”, Libération, August 26, 2022; Didier Jacob, “« Le Trésorier-payeur » de Yannick Haenel: portrait du bankquier en kamikaze magnifique”, Nouvel Observateur, September 14, 2022; Alice Ferney, “Le Trésorier-Payeur, de Yannick Haenel: mort à crédit”, Figaro, September 14, 2022; Tiphaine Samoyault, “«Le Trésorier-payeur», de Yannick Haenel), Le Monde, 15. September 2022.>>>
9. "C'est l'histoire d'un bankquier qui veut tout dépenser. Au début des années 90, the young battle arrête la philosophie pour s'inscrire dans une école de commerce et décroche son premier poste à Béthune, dans la succursale de la Banque de France. Dans this ville où la Fermeture des mines et les ravages du néolibéralisme ont installé a paysage de crisis, the vie du Trésorier-payeur devient une aventure passionnée: protégé par le director de la bank, Charles Dereine, il défend les surendettés, découvre le vertige sexualuel with Annabelle, une libraire rimbaldienne, s'engage in the Confrérie des Charitables, collaboration with Emmaüs and rencontre l'amour de sa vie, the dentiste Lilya Mizaki. Comment what anarchist and work in a bank? Peut-on tout thunder? Yannick Haenel raconte commented that it is possible, for the charity and the eroticism, to resist the interior of the world of calculation.” Gallimard, 2022.>>>
10. "Il ya là un mélange très français de rejet catholique de l'argent, d'amour-haine pour l'État et de foi dans la littérature et l'érotisme. [...] L'évocation de la fac de philo et de la Business School de Rennes, comme la visite des réserves labyrinthiques de la Banque de France par les Reagan, sont of the anthology safe." Claude Arnaud, “Le banker philosopher de Yannick Haenel”, The Point, 22. September 2022.>>>
11. "In the confusion of the night mists, still hovering in pink and blue shreds over the waters strewn with pearly shards of dawn, boats drifted by, smiling into the slanting light that colored their sails and the tips of their bowsprits as yellow as on their return in the evening: an imaginary, deserted, chilling scene, a mere reflection of the sunset, which, unlike the evening, was not based on the succession of daylight hours that I was accustomed to seeing precede it, noncommittal, merely inserted, even more elusive than the terrifying image of Montjouvain, which it could not destroy, cover, or hide—a poetic and vain image of memory and dream." – “Dans the désordre des brouillards de la nuit qui trainaient encore en loques roses et bleues sur les eaux encombrées des débris de nacre de l'aurore, des bateaux passaient en souriant à la lumière oblique qui jaunissait leur voile et la pointe de leur beaupré comme when the evening is rented: imaginary scene, grelottante et desert, pure évocation du couchant, qui ne reposait pas, comme le soir, sur la suite des heures du jour que j'avais l'habitude de voir le precéder, déliée, interpolée, plus inconsistante encore que l'image horrible de Montjouvain qu'elle ne parvenait pas à annuler, à couvrir, à cacher — poetry and vaine image du souvenir et du songe.” Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, chap. IV.>>>
12. “How delicate the colors of this sand are! It is like a desert of flesh: peach skin, mother-of-pearl, raw fish. In Aqaba, the water, though soothing, reflects a mercilessly harsh blue, while the inhospitable rocky massifs melt into pigeon-throat hues.” – “How delicate are the colors of this sand! It is like a desert of flesh: peach skin, mother-of-pearl, raw fish. In Aqaba, the water, though soothing, reflects a mercilessly harsh blue, while the inhospitable rocky massifs melt into pigeon-throat hues.” Claude Lévi-Strauss sad tropics.>>>
13. “In the first tercet, it is stated that Laura does not place much value on the things that are precious ‘with us’ ('tra noi'), such as pearls, precious stones, and gold ('perle et robini et oro'). In the second quatrain, however, a certain qualification is made. While it is initially stated that the surpassing beauty that distinguishes Laura from all others is merely a nuisance to her, this is not the case, as this finding is immediately relativized at the conclusion of the poem, insofar as this singular ‘beltà’ adorns the beautiful treasure of her chastity.” Andreas Kablitz, “The Double Ontologization of Allegory in Western Culture,” in Scriptural meaning and epochality: on the historical significance of allegorical and symbolic meaning-making, edited by Bernhard Huss and David Nelting (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017), 27.>>>
14. Francis Ponge, In the Name of Things, translated by Gerd Henninger, French Library (Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2017), 19.>>>
15. Francis Ponge, In the Name of Things, translated by Gerd Henninger, French Library (Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2017), 19.>>>
16. “Alexandre Gefen and Émilie Brière rencontrent Yannick Haenel”, Fixxion 6 (2013), “Fiction and democracy”.>>>
17. See Claude Lanzmann, ““Jan Karski” de Haenel, un faux roman”, Les Temps modern 657 (Jan.–Mar. 2010): 1–10. See also in German-language newspapers, for example: Marc Zitzmann, “Facts and Fiction: Claude Lanzmann on «Jan Karski»”. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 2, 2010, 15; Tilman Krause, “I am not interested in the executioners”, The World, April 26, 2010, 25.>>>
18. For example, recently: Thomas Klinkert and Christian Rivoletti, “Representation of reality in contemporary Italian and French narratives through hybridization of factual and fictional writing using the example of Antonio Franchini and Yannick Haenel”, in Julia Brühne et al., Reconstruction of the Real: The Rediscovery of Realism in Romania (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 19–40.>>>
19. "Quant à la littérature, the question is posed autrement. À vrai dire, les interrogations qui m'agitent depuis plusieurs années ne tiennent pas à l'angoisse que susciterait la résorption du réel dans la fiction ou l'inverse. Ni avec le fait de savoir s'il est inquiétant que des authors soient attaqués en justice pour atteinte aux droits de personalnes ou encore si Claude Lanzmann a eu raison de se déchaîner contre le Jan Karsky de Yannick Haenel, Edouard Louis de s'offusquer d'un procès en fact-checking or Camille Laurens d'accuser Marie Darrieussecq de « psychic plagiarism ». Non, ce qui me soucie le plus sont les raisons pour lesquelles une part chaque année plus importante de la littérature française contemporaine préfère jouer sur ces sables mouvants. D'autant qu'à l'aune du politiquement correct bêlant et triomphant, la quasi-totalité des écrivains classiques du passé seraient aujourd'hui inculpés pour des romans purement imaginaires, mais passons…” Cécile Guilbert, “Faits et fictions”, in this., Freewheel (Paris: Flammarion, 2020).>>>
20. Ulrike Frenkel, “The pale phrases of the revolution”, Stuttgarter Zeitung, November 14, 2014, p. 35.>>>
21. Philipp Holstein, “Poetic novel about the barricade struggle in present-day Paris”, Rheinische Post, February 16, 2015.>>>
22. Katrin Hillgruber, “Boat trip with Cimino. Homage to the liaison of film and literature: Yannick Haenel’s novel Hold Your Crown Tight”, Der Tagesspiegel, December 29, 2019, 30.>>>
23. “On peut entrer d'abord dans Le Trésorier-payeur, The new novel by Yannick Haenel, in a fresco by Chagall, in a universe of fairytales, colors, women from the air, a universe of delirium, trend and mystique. Religieux même, disons-le.” Tiphaine Samoyault, “«Le Trésorier-payeur», de Yannick Haenel), Le Monde, 15. September 2022.>>>
24. "Erudit, débridé, volontiers abscons par moments, « Le Trésorier-payeur » séduit autant qu'il déconcerte. Tour à tour fulgurant et redondant, déclinant son propos anarcho financier sans vraiment le transcender, il lui manque une véritable apothéose. Yannick Haenel se « dépense » pourtant sans computer.” Philippe Chevilley, “La féerie bancaire de Yannick Haenel”, Les Echos, 4. September 2022.>>>
25. “Si l'on revient sur le sentiment des grands réformateurs, on peut même dire qu'en donnant ses conséquences extrememes à une exigence de pureté religieuse, il détruisit le monde sacré, le monde de la consumption improductive, et livra la terre aux hommes de la production, aux bourgeois.” Georges Bataille, The abolition of economics/La part maudite, Ch. L'effet lointain de la Réforme.>>>
26. Georg Simmel: “On Greed, Waste and Poverty”, Ethical Culture: Weekly Journal for Socio-Ethical Reforms, 42 (21.10.1899): 332–35; 43 (28.10.1899): 340–41.>>>
27. "Par là, the author has already chosen one soul, to know that the human desire is completely integrated in the domain of the political economy. It is a product that has come into its own, and the cause of the other human beings désormais exposes dans a gigantesque foire aux bestiaux.” Valentin Retz, Yannick Haenel and François Meyronnis, “Le sacrifice d'Israël”, in Tout est accompli.>>>
28. "Mais un renversement s'opère, par lequel l'écriture de Haenel, qui séduisait au début par son adress philosophique, ne tient pas toutes ses promesses romanesques. Car c'est dans la pratique amoureuse que Bataille (le bankquier) réalise finalement son idéal de dépense et mène The style of Haenel verses alors, paradoxalement, in a prodigalité fatigante, notamment in the description, à la fois candide et désuète, de ses héroïnes, et de l'amour flamboyant que le banquier leur porte largement dans la caisse des adjectifs. Haenel se voudrait the trésorier-payeur fou de la littérature. Il en est, ce qui n'est pas si mal, le caissier impertinent.” Didier Jacob, “« Le Trésorier-payeur » de Yannick Haenel: portrait du bankquier en kamikaze magnifique”, Nouvel Observateur, 14. September 2022.>>>
29. "Son ébullition se répète beaucoup. On finit par s'amuser que sous sa plume chaque femme soit immanquablement renversante, éblouissante, sexy à se damner et brûlante. Les mêmes mots reviennent sans cesse. Concepts, amantes et paysages ne sont qu'« éclats", "miroitements", "scintillements", "nacre", "étoiles": tic d'écriture ou d'imagination, the métaphore lumineuse colonise le roman, Le Trésorier-Payeur devient le portrait d'un illuminé par un illuminé. Comptant avec l'intelligence, le romancier intervient sans cesse ; These commentaries brisent the narration dont the reader est à chaque fois éjecté par ces vérités générales assénées. L'auteur décrète des épiphanies sans les faire ressentir. These sentences agacent, these exagérations leave. À bride avalée, ses élans poétiques frôlent la mièvrerie ou le non-sens.” Alice Ferney, “Mort à credit: Yannick Haenel”, Le Figaro, 15. September 2022.>>>