2026

Election Night on the Brink: Power, Drugs, and Authorship in the Works of John Jefferson Selve

John Jefferson Selves's "La matière humaine" (Gallimard, 2026) takes place over a single weekend in near-future France, immediately before a presidential election whose outcome seems a foregone conclusion. The anticipated victory of the far right hangs over Paris like a dark doom: the capital appears as an exhausted "parody of a parody," marked by social division, cultural navel-gazing, and political resignation. Against this backdrop, the novel tells the story of three uprooted characters whose fates are intertwined by the death of a child drug courier. From their perspective, a picture emerges of a country in which repressed conflicts surrounding class, racism, colonial history, and state violence are surfacing with renewed force. This review interprets "La matière humaine" as a political diagnosis of a France that meets the triumph of the far right not with resistance, but with numbness. Central to this is the thesis that the drug in the novel is far more than a motif: it appears as a narrative and ruling force, controlling a society whose political impotence has transformed into chemical anesthesia. Election night forms the vanishing point of this diagnosis. Remarkably, the novel refuses to mention the actual election result, instead staging it as noise, jubilation, and collective intoxication—as a symptom of a deeper societal condition. The review shows how Selve develops from this constellation a reflection that is both political and poetological: the death of the child and the birth of writing appear as two sides of the same movement, in which the possibility of attention asserts itself against the logic of numbness. Thus, "La matière humaine" combines a political apocalyptic vision, social critique, and a narrative of authorship into a novel that ultimately opposes the cataclysmic event of election night with only one fragile but persistent counter-figure: "L'espoir" (Hope).

➙ To the article

Tel Quel's trip to China: Ideology, vanity, and projection in the work of Jean Berthier

Jean Berthier's novel "Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs" (Cherche Midi, 2026) reconstructs the historical trip to China undertaken by the Tel Quel group, including Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and François Wahl, in the spring of 1974. Against the backdrop of the late Cultural Revolution, the author shows how these prominent French intellectuals follow a meticulously planned itinerary, perceiving their own theoretical, political, and aesthetic obsessions more than Maoist China itself. The comical opening episode, featuring Jacques Lacan, who believes he understands China through the categories of his psychoanalysis without ever actually traveling there, introduces the central motif of projection. At the same time, the novel's narrative of the affair surrounding Michelangelo Antonioni's documentary film, which was banned in China, serves as a foil: while the director attempted to see behind the official staging, the travelers readily conformed to it. The essay argues that Berthier develops from this a satire on the blindness of the intelligentsia that is as comical as it is sobering: semiotics, psychoanalysis, avant-garde aesthetics, and revolutionary hope appear not as means of knowledge, but as filters that obscure the view of violence, persecution, and political reality. At its core is the thesis that the travelers turn the foreign land into a projection screen for their own desires and, precisely for this reason, miss reality. Berthier's novel is thus read as a case study in the history of ideas, which, beyond historical Maoism, raises the question of how intellectual certainties can distort perception and transform the foreign into a mirror of the familiar.

➙ To the article

Trilogy of Masculinity: Franck Mignot

This essay reads Franck Mignot's three novels, "Mollesse" (2023), "Les Viandards" (2025), and "Faire avec" (2026), as a cohesive narrative project that traces a genealogy of exhausted masculinity. Starting with the programmatic titles, which signify lethargy, predatory behavior, and resigned accommodation, the analysis reveals how Mignot portrays the crisis of male role models not as a spectacular collapse, but as a slow process of enervation. The central thesis is that the three novels trace a movement from an eruptive act of violence to an exhausted, sustained existence: from the murderous Samuel in "Mollesse" to the childlike observer in "Les Viandards" to the weary, lingering Bertrand in "Faire avec." This essay does not trace this development chronologically, but rather along recurring structural themes—speechlessness, desire, fatherhood, gender asymmetry, spatial poetics, and writing practice—and demonstrates how the books mutually comment on and illuminate one another, ultimately leading to a narrative study of manhood. Particular emphasis is placed on the analysis of Mignot's laconic style: the sober, paratactic prose appears not merely as a stylistic device, but as the ethical stance of a world in which the characters have lost any stable value system. The essay argues that Mignot's novels systematically reject the classical Bildungsroman and instead create a "chronicle of the unchanging," in which development is replaced by repetition. This is precisely where the trilogy's radicalism lies: not catharsis or healing, but the exhausted "continuation of life with what remains" forms the horizon of these texts. By reading Mignot's work simultaneously as a chronicle of milieu, a poetics of silence, and a reflection on modern masculinity, the study reveals how closely form, language, and theme are intertwined in this trilogy.

➙ To the article

Between times and countries: Resistance as a time-travel novel by Martin Winckler

Based on Martin Winckler's own biography as a Jewish doctor born in Algeria, caught between colonial history, French memory culture and later emigration, the review reads his novel "L'Amour à temps" (POL, 2026) as a literary condensation of precisely that experience of uprooting and historical overlay. The text intertwines the popular time-travel narrative with the historical depths of the German occupation, the resistance of marginalized groups, and the emancipatory impulses of 1968: The prologue begins with the striking image of the library of Tours in flames, and the young doctor Maurice D'Alget pulling a wounded soldier from the fire amidst smoke and collapsing shelves – a scene that paradigmatically combines the destruction of knowledge with the impulse to rescue. The story then centers on the 83-year-old narrator Rachel, who in 2026 reconstructs her own past, intervening in 1942 via a time portal; this is particularly condensed in the scene of her visit to her grandparents in occupied Paris, where, trembling all over, she tries in vain to warn them of the impending wave of arrests – a moment in which historical knowledge becomes an existential, but limited, agency. This dual movement – ​​retrospective narration and physically experienced past – transforms time travel from a speculative motive into an ethical procedure of bringing history to life, which ultimately culminates in the drastic act of Rachel killing a collaborator, thereby changing an individual fate but not negating the logic of persecution. The essay highlights that Winckler hybridizes the genre – as a “roman choral”, which organizes collective memory against silencing through a multitude of unattributed voices, and as an autopoetological project in which the narrator herself appears as an instance of archiving, commenting and legitimizing. The temporal structure becomes an ethical aporia: knowledge of historical catastrophes creates responsibility without necessarily guaranteeing agency; time travel only allows "interventions on the surface" that shift individual fates but do not revise history as a whole. From this perspective, the novel appears as a decidedly contemporary narrative of remembrance, which – as the review pointedly highlights – transfers the language of the resistance of 1942 into the political present, thus making visible the continuity of violence, ideology and resistance. Overall, the interpretation reads the text as a combination of bodily memory, multilingualism, and polyphonic witnessing, whose common vanishing point is a poetics of storytelling as resistance: writing here becomes a practice not of preserving the past, but of constantly updating it anew in the act of passing it on.

➙ To the article

Marc Bloch in the Pantheon: Historian, resistance fighter, martyr of the Republic

On June 23, 2026, Marc Bloch will be interred in the Panthéon—82 years after the Gestapo shot him near Lyon and left his body in a ditch. This text attempts to understand the significance of this gesture: for France, which honors in Bloch a citizen whose civil and academic rights were once curtailed by the French state; for Germany, which must recognize in him a victim of its own state power; and for the discipline of history, which, for the first time, sees one of its own entering the nation's temple. He was a medievalist and an officer, founder of the Annales and a resistance fighter, a man who treated the self-evident as requiring explanation and who never abandoned the truth, even when it cost him his life. What holds his works together, from the Thaumaturge Kings to the unfinished Apology, is less a method than an attitude: the refusal to tell history from within a single community. He chose "dilexit veritatem" – he loved the truth – as his epitaph. The Republic is now giving him the answer he didn't receive in 1940.

➙ To the article

Between Glue and Life: A Phenomenology of the Book

Michel Jullien's "Le Format d'un livre" (Verdier, 2026) unfolds a phenomenology of the book that is as precise as it is sensually rich, starting not with the text but with the object: the weight of the pages, the smell of the paper, the posture of the reading hands. In loosely connected, narratively grounded chapters, Jullien combines miniatures of book history—from the dépôt légal of the Renaissance to the typography of the Pléiade—with autobiographical scenes and ethnographically precise observations of reading as a physical practice. The book thus appears as a unique kind of time receptacle: it stores not only texts but also traces of lived experience—fingerprints, found objects, wear and tear—and derives its meaning from the interplay of material, form, use, and memory. Jullien's essay therefore moves beyond classical genres, between object description, cultural history, and self-narration, vividly demonstrating that the book speaks even before it is read.

➙ To the article

Beauty, corruption, and literary genealogy: Capote's guilt, Aragon's farewell, Simon Liberati, and Taïné's death

Simon Liberati's "New York City Inferno" (Stock, 2026) concludes a trilogy of novels that began with "Les Démons" (2020) in late 1960s Paris and leads via 1970s Rome ("La Hyène du Capitole", 2024) to 1974-75 Manhattan – a New York at the turning point between pop and punk, between the last glamour of post-war culture and the first dark premonition of an epidemic that has not yet been named. At the center are the Russian-born siblings Tcherepakine: Taïné, androgynous, drug-addicted, proto-punk avant la lettre, who dies on the schooner Elseneur in Palma de Mallorca, and Alexis, the vagabond would-be writer who ultimately takes Capote's money and begins writing the book that is already the first volume of the trilogy—a Möbius strip in which genesis and work are inextricably intertwined. The essay interprets the trilogy as a circular structure: The book that Alexis announces at the end of the third volume bears the same title as "Les Démons," and this circularity is a poetics statement—literature does not arise from emptiness, but from survival, from the material of the dead. Truman Capote, who appears in the novel as a living corpse and gives the student the apostolic mission, is the key figure: Liberati accomplishes what Capote could not with "Answered Prayers" because the social victory had made writing impossible – he writes the American Proust as a French one, with the same social chronicle, the same betrayal, the same conviction that gossip is a literary form, but with the affective charge that Capote's clinical irony lacks. In this constellation, Louis Aragon's brief, hallucinatorily beautiful appearance also gains its full weight: The old communist, who looks through a fogged windowpane at a Balthus tableau and hums Nerval verses, is not only an intertextual gesture, but the witness of the end – the last representative of a European literature of engagement, who bids farewell to Bérénice (the name of the main character in Aragon's "Aurélien"), who, unlike in Aragon's work, is not a historical martyr in Liberati's version, but a purely aesthetic vision of youth, which the old man sees through glass and cannot touch before he disappears down the sandy path, taking an era with him.

➙ To the article

Writing against the death of her lover: Céline Zufferey

Céline Zufferey's novel "Maxence" (Gallimard, 2026) is a fragmentarily composed writing project born from the anticipated grief for a lover, defying any conventional love narrative. In loosely connected chapters—lists, miniatures, observations, reflections—a portrait of a man emerges that is simultaneously a love story, a memory experiment, and a poetics-based self-examination, driven by the central tension between the desire to capture the ephemeral and the realization of the fundamental inadequacy of linguistic fixation. The narrator writes against the future loss by meticulously registering Maxence's body, voice, gestures, and everyday practices, while increasingly reflecting that every description remains reductive and transforms the living into a potential "tombeau." The interpretation reveals that this very insight into one's own failure becomes an aesthetic principle: the fragmentary form, the rhapsodic temporal structure, and the shifting address (between third person and intimate "you" to both the living and the anticipated dead Maxence) are not merely stylistic devices, but rather necessary responses to the text's ethical and epistemological dilemma. By systematically uncovering the four axes of reading—love narrative, critique of knowledge, autopoiesis, and reflection on time—and simultaneously uniting the semantic fields of body, archive, and prolepsis, the review reveals a poetics of pre-mourning in the novel, in which death does not appear as an event, but as a permanent inscription into the present, leading to an intensification of the everyday: the writing, intended to banish loss, thus itself becomes a medium of heightened presence, without ever resolving the fundamental contradiction between life and recording.

➙ To the article

Francesco Petrarch and his followers: Étienne Anheim

Étienne Anheim's "Pétrarque: portrait de famille" (Minuit, 2026) reconstructs Francesco Petrarch's literary project as the result of dense familial entanglements and understands his work as a discursive "family portrait" in which genealogical construction, social embeddedness, and poetic self-stylization are inextricably intertwined. Based on a combination of textual analysis and archival research, Anheim demonstrates how Petrarch mythologizes his origins along a patrilineal notary genealogy, while simultaneously systematically marginalizing or silencing key figures—especially his mother, daughter, and the mothers of his children. The constellations of father (as a professional model to be overcome), brother (as a spiritual alter ego), Laura (as a real void, imaginary lover, and symbolic cipher of poetry), as well as children and friends, unfold as structuring relationships within which Petrarch shapes his authorial identity. Writing thus always appears as an addressed, fragmentary practice within an extended "familia" composed of relatives, correspondents, and literary successors. Anheim does not resolve the tensions between archivally reconstructible social history and literary self-presentation, but rather understands them as a productive site where Petrarch invents his own genealogy and simultaneously establishes the model of modern authorship—a model based on selective memory, symbolic reshaping, and the transformation of familial bonds into literary transmission.

➙ To the article

Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

➙ To the article

Brittany begins in the mind: A tribute to Jack Kerouac by Pierre Adrian

Pierre Adrian's "Le rêve inachevé de Jack Kerouac" (2026) reconstructs and reshapes Jack Kerouac's failed Brittany trip (1965) into a dual model of movement encompassing literary pilgrimage and self-discovery: Starting from Kerouac's genealogical obsession – the return to a Breton origin that proves unattainable – Adrian constructs an associatively structured, intertextually dense travel narrative that imagines Brest as a melancholic space of resonance between American Beat aesthetics and Breton culture; the "unfinished" Satori serves as a leitmotif of a poetics of failure, in which the missed enlightenment becomes productive. The essay demonstrates that Adrian's text is less a documentary reconstruction than a continuation of Kerouac's "Satori à Paris": While Kerouac's spontaneous prose records an immediate, disoriented experience, Adrian's writing appears as a reflective, centripetal approach that semantically charges the historical failure and transforms it into an elegiac narrative. Thus, the structural parallel between genealogical quest and existential uprooting is explored, and Brest is read as a topos of a "waiting possibility." The interpretation pursues the thesis that identity here is not genealogically but literarily constructed ("terre sans aïeux"). A certain tendency toward mythologizing, however, remains discernible: The interpretation affirms Adrian's reading, which, admittedly, accentuates the ruptures and ironies in Kerouac's work in favor of a coherent symbolic representation of failure. Overall, the interpretation of Adrian's transformation of a biographical failure into a literary myth shows and makes plausible that Adrian is less explaining Kerouac than productively continuing his unfinished nature.

➙ To the article

Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey ends in a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.

➙ To the article

All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

➙ To the article

Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

➙ To the article

Resurrection: Ecstasy, Delusion and Revelation in the Works of Cécile Delacoudre

Cécile Delacoudre's novel "La Baptiste" (2026) tells the story of a Parisian techno producer who experiences a radical, boundary-pushing encounter at the intersection of artistic self-empowerment, social downfall, and religious ecstasy: Anastasie Hirsch, bipolar and anti-medication, increasingly interprets her life as a messianic mission, in which music becomes liturgy, the techno scene a sacred space, and baptism the central—simultaneously saving and destructive—pattern of action. The narrative arc leads from an excessive birthday night in the shadow of the Notre-Dame fire in Paris, through a series of social losses (custody, relationships, artistic autonomy), to the final catastrophe in the mud of a techno festival, where vision, self-dissolution, and an ambivalent moment of possible "resurrection" merge. The essay reads this narrative not as a linear pathography, but as a deliberately open constellation of three equally valid interpretive frameworks: an ethnographic study of the techno-culture milieu, a phenomenologically precise inner view of a manic-psychotic episode, and a serious, i.e., unironic, religious narrative. The argument emphasizes that the text systematically suspends the distinction between madness and wisdom (in the Pauline sense): the unreliable first-person narrator provides no corrective external perspective, but rather compels the reader to consider clinical diagnosis, mystical experience, and poetic imagination simultaneously. It is precisely in this epistemic undecidability, according to the implicit thesis of the interpretation, that the novel possesses an aesthetic and ethical radicalism: it rejects both reduction to illness and transfiguration into prophecy, instead revealing the feedback loop in which every social defeat intensifies religious excess and every ecstasy generates new destruction. Thus, the final scene – rising from the mud holding another's hand – appears less as a redemption than as a minimal, fragile counter-figure to the failed grand narratives of art, religion, and therapy: a remnant of possibility that keeps the question of "resurrection" open without answering it.

➙ To the article

The flower as text, body and danger: three novels by Colette Fellous, Célia Houdart and Constance Guisset

What connects three very different contemporary French novels—Colette Fellous's "Quelques fleurs" (Gallimard, 2024), Célia Houdart's "Les Fleurs sauvages" (POL, 2024), and Constance Guisset's "Fleur de peau" (Flammarion, 2026)? At first glance, only the botanical nature of their titles; but on closer reading, a shared and multifaceted literary project: the questioning, displacement, and in some cases, radical destruction of that symbolist tradition which, since Mallarmé, has encoded the flower as a sublime, incorporeal sign—as "l'absente de tous bouquets," absent from every real bouquet, ascending into pure idea. This comparative review shows how the three authors inherit and disrupt this legacy in their own unique ways, by reclaiming the plant-like and bringing it back into the corporeal, the ecological, and the pharmacological. Fellous, whose autofictional essay operates within the formal framework of the lyrical narrative, cultivates the flower as a mnemonic device and a poetics of self-portraiture: her flowers are silent witnesses to lived experience, condensations of childhood, mother, Tunis, and Paris, and the book she is writing is literally "en ces fleurs caché"—hidden within the flowers, awaiting the act of writing that will liberate them. Houdart, on the other hand, strips the flower of any subjective claim: in the laconic polyphonic narration of her Provençal characters, wildflowers are ecological symbols of a nature indifferent to humankind and—in the case of the hallucinogenic datura, which poisons two characters—even prepared to harm them, unintentionally and without message; botanical knowledge here becomes an ethical and epistemic necessity. Finally, Guisset turns the romantic floral aesthetic on its head with a gesture of critical commentary on the system: Her florist Ava has spent thirteen years arranging the beauty of flowers, accumulating an invisible poison through pesticides in her skin – the flower, chosen as a counter-world to the financial world, turns out to be its accomplice, and the woman's body a barometer of a global commodity economy that bases beauty on toxic substances. The essay reads these three very different text projects along a common dimension of analysis: the function of the flower as a temporal figure, as a bodily figure, and as a linguistic figure. It argues that contemporary French literature uses the flower motif to span a scale ranging from mnemonic cultivation to ecological sobriety and pharmacological paradox – culminating in Ismaël Jude's concurrently published novel "Une vie de jasmin," which is used as a fourth comparative text, in a linguistically skeptical ontology of pure emanation that consistently takes Mallarmé's idealization to its logical conclusion using the means of the body and biology.

➙ To the article

Proliferating bodies, silent flowers: the aesthetics of emanation in Ismaël Jude

The review of Ismaël Jude's "Une vie de jasmin" (éditions verticales, 2026) interprets the novel as a fundamental questioning of human identity, language, and civilization. At its heart is the character Jasmine, whose body, through a process of "dermaculture," produces plants, thus dissolving the boundary between humans and vegetation. Against the backdrop of a repressive, technocratic order—embodied by the allergic, authoritarian father and a world shaped by concrete and pesticides—the text develops a counter-aesthetic of proliferation, of "Émanation," and of a "sexuality without language," in which flowers appear not as symbols but as independent, untranslatable forms of life. The review demonstrates how this poetics intertwines with a traumatic family and colonial history: The name Jasmine proves to be an "acte manqué," a bloody trace of the Algerian War that does not create identity but rather undermines it. By combining ecological critique, queer physicality and language-skeptical poetics, the review ultimately interprets the novel as a plea for an unfixable life that spreads – like a pioneer plant – in the cracks of civilization and asserts itself beyond symbolic orders.

➙ To the article

Delicate Destruction: Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's novel "Anéantir" (2022) unfolds the panorama of an exhausted present: at its center is Paul Raison, a high-ranking official in the circle of a French minister, whose everyday life is permeated by mysterious cyberattacks, political nervousness and creeping personal alienation. At the same time, his family environment falls apart – his father after a stroke, his siblings in their own dead ends – until the focus increasingly shifts to Paul's own illness. The diagnosis of an incurable cancer radically shifts the perspective: What initially begins as a political novel condenses into a narrative of dying, in which a fragile form of closeness surprisingly returns – especially in the cautious reconciliation with his wife Prudence. The novel traces this process in a slow, almost protocol-like temporality, keeping the destruction in narrative suspense: as something that is happening, but still seems to be held back by relationships, routines, and minimal glimmers of hope. – In contrast, the poetry collection “Combat toujours perdant” (2026) appears as a radical contraction of the same material. There is no plot, no character development, no mediation through social contexts: The texts consist of short, sharply cut observations that directly display physical and existential decay. Illness appears not as a process, but as a condition; the body not as a narrated fate, but as a defective system. The novel's themes – loneliness, sexuality, aging, proximity to death – also recur, but in a language that denies any illusion of continuity or meaning. Where the novel reconstructs relationships, the poetry collection knows only their absence or their echo; where the novel unfolds time, the poetry reduces it to abrupt points in the present. The review reads both books as complementary forms of a single project to depict the gradual destruction of the individual and society. The novel acts as a kind of "safe space": it distributes the unbearable across plot, characters, and time, thereby making it perceptible in the first place. The poetry collection, however, systematically removes these protective mechanisms and confronts the reader with a language that no longer tells the ending, but presupposes it. In contrast to the calculated provocations of earlier texts, which relied on scandal, exaggeration and polemical exaggeration, this late work operates with a demonstrative emptying: no longer does the breaking of taboos create friction, but rather the almost protocol-like sobriety of a writing that refuses any punchline. Whether this represents a step backward or a maturation depends on how one interprets this gesture: as a loss of aggression – or as a form of self-criticism that has recognized that provocation is futile in the face of the depicted exhaustion and must therefore be replaced by radical reduction. In this movement, both the individual and the social are erased: The subject shrinks to a functioning or failing body, while society appears only as a diffuse background structure, so that both levels become indistinguishable in the same process of annihilation. Thus, in the end, a peculiar beauty remains: in the subdued light of the hospital room, when Paul and Prudence lie wordlessly side by side, in the slow gesture with which she hands him the food, in the quiet continuation of everyday things – coffee steam in the morning, the rustling of bed linen – while the body inexorably disintegrates and these very inconspicuous scenes shine like last, fragile islands in the stream of annihilation.

➙ To the article

Alain Finkielkraut between cultural criticism and political reflection

Alain Finkielkraut's "Le cœur lourd" (Gallimard, 2026) is a personal and diagnostic portrait of the intellectual, born in 1949, who experiences himself as an "orphan" in a world in upheaval. The review highlights that the book, based on conversations with Vincent Trémolet de Villers, not only reflects Finkielkraut's postwar biography and his belonging to the "post-Shoah" generation, but also critically analyzes the threats to language, culture, and identity in the present. Central themes include responsibility towards one's own historical and Jewish identity, concern for France and Israel, the loss of high culture and education, and nostalgia for a past, harmonious world. Finkielkraut presents himself as a melancholic chronicler who simultaneously makes concrete political, ethical and ecological proposals – from saving language to integral ecology to a model of conservative-liberal-socialist values ​​– thus showing how personal experience, philosophical reflection and concern for the future are inextricably linked.

➙ To the article

Writing against the border: Utopia Babel by Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani's essay "Assaut contre la frontière" (Gallimard, 2026) is a dense self-positioning situated between languages, cultures, and political discourses. Starting with a nightmarish courtroom scenario in which the wrong language becomes an existential guilt, the text unfolds an autobiographically grounded reflection on multilingualism as a space of identity and its loss as a genealogical wound—from her multilingual childhood and her father's colonial-influenced education to her own alienation from Arabic, which lives on as a "phantom language" in her writing. Slimani connects this personal linguistic history with a sharp analysis of global power relations: the hierarchization of languages ​​in the postcolonial space, the exoticization of "Maghrebi" literature, the political instrumentalization of Arabic after 9/11, and the illusion of a "pure" language, which she exposes as an ideological construct. She counters this with a poetics of the novel that understands literature as a radical practice of empathy and a diversity of perspectives—as a movement across borders that finds its continuation precisely in the act of translation. Slimani's argument is not linear, but rather essayistically condensed: she interweaves autobiographical scenes with intertextual references (from Canetti to Barthes to Camus) and cultural-political diagnoses to show that writing itself is an act of transgression. By reinterpreting Babel from a biblical place of punishment to a utopian cipher for a pluralistic world, literature appears here as a counterforce to linguistic and political isolation—as an "attack on the border" that does not consist of a return to a lost unity, but rather in the productive recognition of difference.

➙ To the article