Aux limites du langage : écrire le réel des dominations sociales chez Édouard Louis
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- This dissertation offers an analysis of Édouard Louis’s work, focusing on the tension running through it between the desire to represent social domination and an awareness of the limitations inherent in any attempt at representation. Drawing on the Lacanian distinction between the real, reality and truth, this work examines the way in which Louis’s writing negotiates its relationship with a real that is structurally resistant to being put into words. The analysis unfolds across four complementary strands. The first strand focuses on the place of violence in the author’s literary project, considering it not merely as a theme, but as a writing concern in its own right. It examines in particular the writing of insults and abuse, in order to show that verbal violence also lies at the intersection of the sayable and the unsayable. The second strand examines the construction of a style, notably what is termed “popular” language, and the question of literary authenticity, demonstrating that the effect of spontaneity in the writing results from an elaborate process of construction. The third strand examines the use of quotation and interdiscursivity, drawing on Antoine Compagnon’s theoretical framework, as a tool for legitimisation but also for self-understanding. Finally, the fourth strand examines the role of photography in three novels from the family cycle, in the light of the work of Roland Barthes and Hal Foster’s Lacanian reinterpretation of it. Taken together, these analyses reveal a common logic running through Louis’s work, which this thesis proposes to term a ‘poetics of circumvention’: unable to represent directly a reality that is structurally beyond the reach of language, Louis’s writing employs a multitude of formal mediations to make its effects perceptible.