On Work and Worklessness in Beau Travail

A matter of months after the film's theatrical release, Jean-Luc Nancy published a short commentary on Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) titled 'L'Areligion', which would become the first of three texts dedicated by Nancy to the films of Claire Denis. 1 Implicit in this title is the notion that Beau Travail succeeds in recasting 'l'allégorie christique' of Herman Melville's Billy Budd the Foretopman in a less conspicuously religious context, inviting us 'à relire Melville […] d'une manière paradoxalement plus insidieuse et plus voyante '. 2 Where in Melville's tale of jealousy and contempt the titular hero Billy Budd is portrayed as the embodiment of 'Christ d'un monde sans Dieu', the valour and psychological idiosyncrasies of Denis's 'sauveur perdu', Gilles Sentain, are largely eclipsed by the quotidian rituals of the French Légion étrangère to which Sentain belongs.In reference to the film's many memorable sequences of combat exercises and training drills, Nancy describes the Légion as 'Une areligion qui se désigne au plus près de la chrétienne'; that is, an 'ordre monastique' whose identity lies in the soldiers' teleological striving for an absolute unity of gesture and appearance, an 'ordre enfin de beauté accomplie, puissante et harmonieuse, dont les corps des hommes sont ici l'incarnation'.Here, Nancy notes that the work performed by these soldiers, as presented by Denis, conforms to the classical aesthetic principles of rhythm, balance, and harmony, such that the film's title, Beau Travail, acts as a superlative for the Légion, as well as a self-reflexive description of the film itself, which constitutes: 'un travail sur la beauté: corps, lumière, apparence, harmonie, majesté, rythme sévère du montage, qui tient la narrativité en respect, au second plan, en faveur d'une ostension des images'.Through attention to various registers of movement at work in Beau Travail, this article will argue that Denis's film mobilizes a palpable opposition between the Foreign Legion as an oeuvre and what Nancy might call, after Maurice Blanchot, the désoeuvrement of sense.Laura McMahon has shown that Nancy's interpretation of the Légion étrangère as a 'secularized community, [which] remains reliant upon a quasi-religious system of ritual, symbol and observance', is informed by the interventions of Nancy's earlier essay La Communauté désoeuvrée, in which Nancy argues that within all attempts to think community as defined by a common body, being, or identity there subsists a nostalgia for the monotheistic ideal of communion. 3The etymological root of both 'community' and 'communication', communion describes a now-lost state of originary togetherness which ensured that 'la communauté se tissait de liens étroits, harmonieux et infrangibles', reflected 'dans ses institutions, dans ses rites et dans ses symboles', which combine to accomplish the 'représentation […] de son intimité et de son autonomie immanentes'. 4 In the essay in question, making an undisguised allusion to Blanchot's notion of désoeu vrement as developed in L'Espace littéraire, Nancy uses the noun oeuvre to describe a state of integrity sought by communities which, in the name of civilization and togetherness, seek to subsume all that remains outside of, or foreign to, the common body, including death and decomposition, which, Nancy asserts, 'ne forment que des parodies ou des