Abstract EN:

Céline repeated time and time again that he was not a "message" man and that "style" was the only thing that matters in his work. There is in fact a kind of agreement among the Célinian French critic that completely dissociates the great writer from the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi polemist, divorcing, so to speak, a pure creative agent from the author as a civil person. Following the hypothesis that Céline, the "writer" is "more a philosopher than he wants to admit it", as Marie-Christine Bellosta already put it, this reading of Céline's work presents the influence that mysticism of all kinds, fashionable at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe, had on the author's vision of the world. This thought from an other age actually contributed to the edification, not only in Céline's novels but also in his polemic writings, of a real "spirituality", based in the search of the "true self", the hatred of "Law" and the cult of a strong and repaired body. In fact Céline, like his friend Henri-Robert Petit and after Alfred Rosenberg, believed he had found in the gnosis' invalid revolt the mythical source of anti-Semitism. Analysing his poetic art as the edification of a new mysticism thus shows the deep coherence existing in his body of work between æsthetic and political discourses. It also recuperates Céline's writings within the framework of Nazism emergence in Europe. Because Céline's anti-Semitism is nothing like a delirium and his adherence to national-socialism is not ambivalent, accidental nor opportunistic, it just takes place in what Emmanuel Levinas called, in "Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l'hitlérisme", "a new conception of humanity".