Love of the Soldier: citizenship, belonging and exclusion in 'Beau Travail'

This article arose out of an interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues from the University of Kent, the University of London and the BFI. We initially came together around Claire Denis' work at a symposium hosted by the Film department of the University of Kent. Some of these papers and other contributions formed part of a special issue of the JES edited by Caroline Rooney (Kent ) and Rob White (BFI). In addition to my article, I contributed translations of two interviews with Claire Denis and of an article by Jean-Luc Nancy. Since then I have been developing research on cultural and psychoanalytic representations of leadership, which will form part of a forthcoming monograph with Polity Press.
This paper examines belonging and non-belonging as set out in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, in the context of the Enlightenment ideal of citizenship and the historical development of the Foreign Legion. Inclusion and exclusion are also treated in terms of the Oedipal family formation of psychoanalysis, in order to further question just who it is that belongs and why. The characters of Galoup, Sentain and Forestier are used to illustrate the ambiguities that arise from such questioning.