Historicising the Monstrous: Georges Bataille’s ‘Les écarts de la nature’ (1930), Pronatalism and French Eugenics in the Interwar Period

Abstract

Abstract In 1930, six teratological illustrations of children, victims of infant mortality or stillborn, appeared in the avant-garde magazine Documents. Nuancing the deconstructionist reception of the journal, this essay historicises Documents’ ‘monstrous’ children, returning them to the visual culture of interwar France to reinterpret their criticality. Once resituated within such an image economy, the avant-garde strategy that emerges hinges not on an ability to displace signification but on the legibility of an anxiety-laden motif, radically repurposed. Indeed, permeated by fears of impending depopulation, the image of the infant occupied charged territory in Third Republican France. Consequently, French eugenicists too anchored their rhetoric in this anguished terrain. When Documents intervened in France’s longstanding obsession with the child, its ideological currency was agitated. The political programme that it upheld was subverted. As Georges Bataille joyously announced alongside the teratological illustrations, all eugenics proved was that each ‘individual’, unable to meet its ultra-utopian ideals, is ‘a monster’.