Destruction as a possibility: Manhood and violence in the work of Bernard Bourrit

Destroy everything (Éditions Inculte, 2025) by Bernard Bourrit reconstructs a real Femicide In 1960s Switzerland: Alain kills his fiancée Carmen. But instead of presenting the murder as an isolated crime, Bourrit rejects a linear, explanatory narrative. Drawing on archives, newspaper articles, and observations, the narrator approaches the perpetrator without psychologically excusing or condemning him. Alain appears less as an individual figure than as a symptom: a product of an era, a milieu, and a social structure that breeds violence without explicitly naming it.

Central to the film is the portrayal of the rural, patriarchal environment in which Alain grows up. Rural Switzerland appears as a space of confinement, control, and unspoken hierarchies: family, village, and state intertwine to form a system that enforces conformity and punishes deviation. Alcoholism, authoritarian upbringing, and administrative violence (such as involuntary commitment) are not presented as direct causes, but rather as persistent underlying tensions that increasingly restrict the characters' scope for action.

In parallel, the text analyzes the gender relations of the time. Carmen becomes a projection screen for male expectations, female idealization, and societal norms. Bourrit makes it clear that the murder cannot be explained by "jealousy" or individual grievance, but rather by a destructive relationship to female freedom and one's own powerlessness. The lack of a language for female self-determination and male vulnerability exacerbates the imbalance between desire, possessiveness, and violence.

Formally, the text reflects this approach: it is fragmentary, associative, and essayistic. The language rejects simple causal relationships and forces readers not to place responsibility solely on the perpetrator; responsibility lies in the interplay of history, mentalities, and power structures. Destroy everything It thus becomes a literary investigation into how societies enable violence – and how literature can make this visible without trivializing it.

In Destroy everything Masculinity is not portrayed as a stable identity; manhood is depicted as a fragile, overburdened construct inscribed in the male body. Bourrit creates an image of masculinity that teeters between a claim to strength and inner powerlessness, and it is precisely this tension that makes it destructive.

The male body initially appears as a working, functional body. Alain's hands are simultaneously "musical" and violent: they could create, produce, and touch, but in the agrarian-industrial reality, they become tools for felling and destroying. The body is trained for toughness, endurance, and obedience, not for tenderness or self-reflection. This reduction to utility empties the body of its expressive possibilities and stifles emotions that are not allowed to be articulated.

At the same time, masculinity is exposed as hysterical and insecure. Alain does not embody sovereign virility; rather, it is a wounded, crisis-ridden masculinity that reacts to female autonomy with fear. The male body here is not a site of control, but of loss of control: desire turns into possessiveness, intimacy into threat. The violence against Carmen does not stem from strength, but from the inability to tolerate one's own desire and dependence.

Ultimately, Bourrit portrays masculinity as a socially constructed role, stabilized by paternal power, village public life, and male community. The male body is under constant scrutiny: it must function, perform, "be a man." Deviation—sensitivity, failure, passivity—is sanctioned or ridiculed. Murder thus appears as a monstrous overaffirmation of these norms: a desperate attempt to salvage a fragile masculinity through violence.

Completely dismantled Destroy everything The ideal of the strong, controlled man. The male body becomes the arena for social indignities, historical violence, and emotional speechlessness – and thus the stage for a masculinity that destroys itself because it knows no other form of being.

The conclusion of Destroy everything It offers neither a psychological explanation of the murder nor a moral catharsis. Instead, it marks a point of exhaustion of understanding: everything that could be reconstructed, contextualized, and analyzed has been said without yielding any meaning, justification, or solace.

Crucially, the text pauses at the moment of greatest intimacy between Alain and Carmen – in that scene of their first physical approach. This gesture is not romanticized, but shown as a fragile threshold: a moment in which everything is still open and precisely for that reason "everything could be destroyed." The title Destroy everything Here, destruction takes on its full meaning: it is not the sudden event of murder, but a possibility inherent from the beginning in the web of desire, power, fear, and societal expectations.

Furthermore, the ending avoids focusing on the perpetrator. By not delving into the act itself, the narrator deprives the violent act of its spectacular finality. Attention remains with the circumstances, not the act itself. Thus, the murder does not become the narrative climax; it becomes a void—something that defies representation because any attempt at representation would risk normalizing or explaining it.

Finally, the conclusion addresses the readers themselves. The open, fluid nature of the text compels them to question their need for explanation, blame, or meaning. Destroy everything It doesn't end with an answer, but rather with an ethical challenge: to acknowledge that violence cannot be "understood" without that understanding itself becoming part of the problem. The conclusion is thus also an indictment of a society that makes such stories possible, and of any narrative that seeks to reassure and close them off.