Why translate a 600-page book about ancient Christian rebels?

From Fifth Estate
#415, Summer 2024
by Bill Brown

Why did I translate Raoul Vaneigem’s La Résistance au christianisme: Les Héresies des origines au xviiie siècle, originally published in 1993 by Editions Fayard, into English? This is a fair question because, after all, the book is more than 600 pages long, not counting the bibliography and the index, and it’s about a fairly esoteric subject: the so-called heresies that were identified (sometimes even fabricated), publicly denounced and ruthlessly persecuted by the Christian Church over the course of nearly 2,000 years.

Sects, Cults, and Heretical Messiahs

Raoul Vaneigem’s "Resistance to Christianity"

With its stunning wraparound cover, featuring a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, this edition of Raoul Vaneigem’s landmark "Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century," translated by Bill Brown (ERIS, 2023), is beautifully produced and, indeed, encyclopedic, presenting the full panoply of heresies that defied the Catholic Church, with evenhanded clarity and thoroughness.

Michèle Bernstein Has Forgotten to Die

from partisanhotel.co.uk by Clodagh KINSELLA

& (in lieu of an interview) a film called On the Passage of Michèle Bernstein Through Time

Michèle Bernstein tells me over the viral winter of 2020, when we plan to meet in Normandy but never do. The problem is not with her memory: she quotes verbatim her book reviews for Libération, where she was a literary critic forty years ago. She can remember minor details about others who themselves forgot not to die and, at eighty-nine, has become the de facto guardian of the Situationists’ legacy.

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