Bodies and alienation in the novels of Barbey d’Aurevilly

This article deals with the relationship between the presence of bodies in the work of Barbey d’Aurevilly and the different rhetorics of alienation that it inherits—theories of hysteria, animal magnetism, and so on. Four directions can be identified: the romanesque construction of a body-symptom, the lethal horizon latent in bodies, the diachronic evolution of the discourse on hysteria, and finally the physical relationship that this marginality can maintain with clairvoyance.