Samenvatting

This essay focuses on the parallels between the recently coined phrase ‘meaningless violence’ and the literary theme of the ‘acte gratuit’, developed by the French modernist author André Gide, but also represented in the novels of Dostojewski, Camus and Arnon Grunberg. From a philosophical perspective the acte gratuit can be connected with Nietzsche’s ‘Wille zur Macht’, but also with Bataille’s interpretation of violence as an expression of the will to break taboos and exceed the borders between the profane and the sacred.