Sylvain Tesson, the extreme as the ­conquest of nostalgia

Looking at Sylvain ­Tesson’s text and film about his stay next to Lake Baikal, this study shows how the extreme is inseparable from a nostalgia for a time when there were still geographical areas to discover. In this sense, Tesson reproduces a model of ­conquest that does not avoid repeating a neocolonial ideology that the ­traveler’s discourse claims to want to question.