L’insolite dans les guides touristiques

This paper deals with travel guides and, more specifically, with French-written guides that invite their readers to discover a kind of so-called “new” destinations made of “insolite” cultural products and situations. The French adjective “insolite” has no English translation. It refers, though, to the realm of the unusual that seems to be, from a tourist point of view and according to travel guides, somehow different from the realm of curiosity. Analysing thus a series of travel guides to “insolite” destinations through a communicational perspective, this paper aims to understand how these books have turned the “insolite” into a tourist value and to identify its specificities. It firstly studies the differences “insolite” travel guides have established between “insolite” and curiosity focusing on the way they produce cultural hapax. It then shows that these guides construct a specific tourist practice – at least a program of practices – that resembles more the experiment of a series of cultural hapax than the experience of an other. Finally, it raises the question of the possibility for the “insolite”, since it is defined as a rhetoric of singularization and a program of experimentations, to be something else than a territory made of bursts or, if one considers speeches as acts, something else than a process of dismantlement of cultures