French Literature Reviews - 2026
W. Marx, Un savoir gai
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
William Marx
Un savoir gai
Minuit, Jan 2018
176 p. — ISBN: 9782707344137
Sex is a mental construct. It colours our worldview, shapes our understanding of it, and in part even underpins it. Sexuality implies a specific relationship to truth, beauty, and goodness—in other words, a knowledge, an aesthetic, an ethic, a politics.
Yet when desire shifts, the worldview shifts with it. What does a gay person know of the world? What is their experience of it? What do they remain unaware of? Three thousand years of Western literature have explored the heterosexual intellect and its accompanying worldview. It is time to explore the other side: the perspective of gay knowledge, the perspective of estrangement.
This book is not only about love, cruising, fantasies, pornography, and penis size, but also about Plato, Velázquez, Proust, Oshima, and Cat Stevens, taxi drivers, summer camps, same-sex marriage, the lifespan of cats and blue whales, the author's erotic life, and Jesus's as well. In short, about life itself.
Reader, you will learn a great deal here about homosexuality and heterosexuality, but first and foremost about yourself. You are the subject of this book—you and your desire.
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An article on this work can be read on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
"In a Foreign Land", by U. Baratin.
And on nonfiction.fr:
The volume engages with a long tradition of reflection on the relationship between sexuality, perception, and worldview within Western culture. By contrasting the established heterosexual perspective with what the author terms gay knowledge, the study examines how desire informs intellectual and aesthetic categories over centuries of artistic and literary history. Readers interested in queer studies, contemporary French essays, and cultural approaches to literature may find this work relevant.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Gay Man", by V. Giroud.
See also on Diacritik.com, an interview with W. Marx by J. Faeber.