Political Rhetoric in Ruins: Mathieu Larnaudie and Nicolas Idier

Discourse as a central object – and as a symptom

Mathieu Larnaudie, Relentlessness (Actes Sud, 2012) [quote. as ACH]
Nicolas Idier, Matignon la nuit (Editions Plon, 2024). [quote as MLN]

A wooden platform is a raised platform or pedestal made of wood—a small stage that the protagonist had built in his study so he could rehearse his speeches while standing on it. In Larnaudie's novel, it is described precisely: a few square meters, constructed of wood, about two steps high, with a narrow lectern in the middle. It imitates what politicians encounter at campaign rallies—the podium that elevates the speaker above the audience—except that in Müller's case, there is no audience. The platform thus becomes the tangible symbol of the rest of the novel: the form of political rhetoric without its content, the elevation without an audience, the staging in emptiness.

On that self-built wooden platform in a country house in the middle of the provinces, Müller rehearses his speeches daily in front of an empty room—his hands symmetrically on the narrow lectern, his shoulders open, his chest free to breathe, his voice stretched into the room, but the room gives nothing back; in the end, he crumples up the written sheets and throws them in the wastepaper basket. On the other side of the novel, in Paris, an unnamed consultant stands in office 169 of the Hôtel de Matignon on his last day of contract work and listens to a colleague who is reciting every syllable of the word RHÉ-TO-RIQUE cutting with his teeth and demanding: no syntax, no grammar, only bullet pointsJust bones – while on the television screen above him, migrants balance on wind turbines and the news channels stage a state of emergency in real time, for which the speech should have been finished long before the event. Müller's minister, Gonthier, once delivers a campaign speech in a gymnasium before devoted party members, adhering word for word and punctuation to his speechwriter's manuscript – but this is the sign of his failure: the more completely he adopts the foreign language, the clearer it becomes that he means nothing by it, the applause is off-beat, conviction is lacking, and the perfection of his imitation is simultaneously proof of his emptiness. Müller registers this from a folding chair at the edge of the hall, notebook on his knee, recording the room's reactions like a seismograph – while Gonthier later looks for someone to blame and finds him. Idier's counterpart is a scene in the Salon du Conseil, beneath La Fontaine medallions and a tapestry depicting Don Quixote, where consultants with headphones and open laptops sit at a long table covered in red felt, assembling elements of language like parts of a disassemblable machine: "éléments de langage," "narratif," "récit performatif"—a terminology that treats discourse as a strategic product even before a sentence is written. Two writers, two machines, the same diagnosis: political language has lost its addressee and retained itself as its sole horizon.

Literature possesses an arsenal of techniques for questioning political rhetoric: it can detach speech from its institutional framework and place it in absurd or revealing contexts—the gymnasium without conviction, the empty room as the sole listener—it can expose the technical mechanics of discourse and thus destroy the illusion of spontaneity, it can make the speechwriter visible and thus dismantle the fiction of the authentic political voice, it can put the language of power into the mouths of characters who distrust it, thus creating a double voice that speaks and comments simultaneously, it can, through deceleration—the endless analysis of a single sentence, a single gesture—show what remains invisible in the performative acceleration of everyday politics, or, through acceleration and fragmentation, expose the chaos behind the staged order, it can employ parody, incongruity, the comic of seriousness, the seriousness of the comic, the comparison with Bernhardian tirades or with the silence of Taoism; And she can ultimately use the form of the novel itself as an argument, in that the writing style reflects or contradicts the pathology of its subject. Larnaudie chooses the path of mimetic critique: his hypotactic, self-commenting, rhythmically calculated prose imitates the structure of political discourse and leads it into emptiness; it is the speech that no one hears, and therein lies its indictment—a method of distance without irony, cold, anatomical, reminiscent of Bernhard. Idier, on the other hand, relies on dispersion and contamination: he interrupts and enriches the speech to be written with Marabutz quotations, Taoist maxims, Tarot cards, Sollers on the phone, the mother's words, as if the best thing about political discourse were precisely what falls out of it – a process of productive sabotage that does not destroy rhetoric but opens it up from within so that something more human can emerge, and which in the end, when the Prime Minister wordlessly climbs the wind turbine, completely replaces language with gesture, without forgetting that gesture, too, has long since become television.

Both novels share the same thematic focus: they unfold entirely in that liminal space separating the writing of a speech from its delivery—precisely where political language reveals its constructed nature. In ACH, the former speechwriter Müller, who voluntarily left the political arena, drafts speeches into the void of a French province for a fictional orator, from a makeshift home. In MLN, an unnamed "conseiller technique discours"—the first-person narrator—spends a white-night in Matignon, hastily writing a speech that the Prime Minister will never read in its entirety. In both cases, the speech is not simply the subject of the novel: it is its inner form, the secret model that structures the narrative.

The differing positions of the two characters are crucial. Müller has seen everything, learned everything, and withdrawn; Idier's narrator is still stuck inside the machine, it's his last day on the contract. One writes from the detached rage of the dismissed employee, the other from the vertigo of a debutant being thrown one last task. This structural opposition—withdrawal versus immersion, distance versus intimacy, provincialism versus grandeur—generates two fundamentally different poetics, even though the subject matter, politics as rhetoric, remains the same.

Müller and the anatomy of the empty word

Larnaudie stages political rhetoric as a clinical diagnosis. The opening pages of the novel describe with entomological precision how Müller rehearses a speech in his makeshift home studio:

What is described here is not content, but a mechanism. Larnaudie dissects speech like clockwork: acceleration and deceleration, orchestrated pauses, staged emphasis. Political discourse appears as a system of rhythmic effects that can be completely detached from its content—and in Müller's case, has been completely detached. He writes and rehearses speeches for no one, for an empty room, for a fictitious audience. The addressee has vanished; only the form remains.

This amputation of the recipient is the novel's fundamental compositional principle. Larnaudie thus radicalizes an observation he contrasts with the Mitterrand quote he cites: "Je crois aux forces de l'esprit, et je ne vous quitterai pas"—one of the most famous closing formulas of a political orator—hangs as a motto over the novel and sounds hollow in Müller's home studio. The spirit is gone, the formula remains.

Larnaudie's prose itself adopts this structure. His sentence structure is expansive, hypotactic, yet rigorously controlled—it mimics the expansion and rhythm of the political discourse it describes while simultaneously dissecting it. The long parentheses, the cumulative strings of synonyms, the inserted corrections and self-commentaries of Müller make the style a commentary on its subject: The language of the novel is itself a speech spoken into the void, with the utmost technical proficiency and without a living counterpart.

The narrator and the economy of the punchline

In Idier's work, the staging of discourse functions quite differently. Here, speech is not an anatomical object, but a situation of pressure. Van Gogh, Müller's distorted counterpart, provides the novel's poetics right at the beginning:

In this scene, rhetoric has become a chore: it is no longer meant to persuade, but to perform. Van Gohg's demand—no syntax, no grammar, only slogans—articulates the self-abolition of discourse as discourse. The goal is not argumentation, but a short, viral, media-effective nudge to grab attention. This demand reflects a political communication culture that operates between morning announcements, breaking news, and social media loops.

The novel's narrative structure corresponds directly to this: MLN is divided into chapters named exclusively after times of day—17:00 PM, 18:00 PM, 19:00 PM, and 07:00 AM—thus traversing the time of a single night. This is a radically anti-discursive form. Where Müller's prose expands and intricately structures like a long speech, Idier's novel chops time into short units that correspond to the staccato of crisis intervention: brief appearances, abrupt dialogues, scene changes without transition. The punchline as a demand becomes the punchline as a narrative form.

Action structure as a reflection of rhetoric

The plot logic of both novels follows their respective rhetorical philosophies with remarkable consistency.

In ACH, there is no plot in the conventional sense. What drives the narrative are not events in the sense of turning points, but the persistent repetition of a futile activity: Müller writes a speech, rehearses it, crumples the pages, throws them in the wastebasket—and starts again. This loop repeats itself, interrupted by the suicides of those who plunge from the viaduct into his garden. The structural peculiarity lies in the fact that the suicides are not presented as a contrast to the rhetoric, but as its extreme inversion: While Müller remains fixated on cultivating empty form, the jumpers embody absolute silence, the shattering of all form. The word and the self-destructing body are the two poles between which the plot oscillates without ever mediating between them.

The title "Acharnement"—referring to doggedness, but also to the medical concept of therapeutic acharnement, the pointless continuation of treatment until the very last moment—precisely names this logic: Müller's writing is a kind of treatment he performs on himself and on language, even though it no longer has any effect. The narrative structure is circular, repetitive, and self-referential.

In MLN, the structure is linear and chrono-dramatic, but with a specific paradox: the plot strives toward the writing of the speech, yet the narrator becomes increasingly detached from it. He plants bamboo in the garden, calls Monsieur Bobo, strolls with Lena through nighttime Paris, visits Conrad in a neighboring palazzo, drinks sake and Red Star, consults a psychiatrist, and listens to Philippe Sollers on the phone. This is not a distraction from the plot, but rather its very form: the path to the speech leads through everything that has nothing to do with rhetoric. The speech does not arise through argumentation, but through wandering, through the "bain de forêt," through the mother's word ("nuage"), through a remark by the delivery surgeon. The plot structure thus encodes a different epistemology of political discourse: its best qualities do not come from rhetoric itself, but from the life that resists it.

The figure of the speechwriter: sovereignty and the dread of dissolution

Both novels develop a complex reflection on the status of someone who writes for others – what is called “plume” in French.

Müller has moved beyond this dissolution. He describes with cold, analytical precision what it meant to write for Gonthier:

The dissolution of oneself into the voice of the other is treated here as a fait accompli, with the tone of the survivor. Müller has gone through this experience and gained the conviction that political discourse is structurally empty—not by chance or due to bad politicians, but constitutively. He pursued the ideal of the "discours idéal," that speech which the speaker delivers without deviation, and experienced how precisely this perfection brought about the catastrophe: Gonthier delivered his speech word for word and symbolically, and the audience was cold. The complete adoption of the text was the sign that he meant nothing by it.

In contrast, Idier's narrator is still in the midst of this process of self-abandonment—he is, as he himself puts it, a "sous-plume," a fragment of the pen, barely more than a tool. His reflection is less analytical than existential: he doesn't ask whether rhetoric is empty, but whether he himself still exists. Writing the speech is, for him, an act of self-assertion—and he ultimately chooses this act differently than expected. The speech is not delivered; instead, the Prime Minister climbs the wind turbine himself, without any speech manuscript. The gesture replaces the word.

Political rhetoric and the problem of the addressee

A fundamental difference between the two novels lies in their conception of the audience.

Larnaudie works with the absence of the audience as a structural condition. Müller's spectator is always fictitious – the empty room, the "phantom ground floor." However, when he follows the real political discourses of his time via television, he formulates a devastating diagnosis that simultaneously includes his own complicity:

The audience of political rhetoric appears here not as an addressee, but as a target – a mass that can be molded and deceived. This diagnosis exposes the normative core of Müller's "acharnement": He continues to write because he cannot abandon the ideal of discourse that truly convinces, even though he knows that practice destroys this ideal.

In Idier's work, the audience is not absent, but rather hyper-present in the media. The migrants on the wind turbines are filmed by drones, broadcast live on all channels, and debated as a trending topic on Twitter. The audience is everywhere—and it is itself part of the problem, because it reacts to images, not arguments. Van Gohg's demand for the punchline is nothing other than a response to this hyper-mediated audience: In a world where attention has become the scarcest resource, discourse must shrink to minimal units.

The solution hinted at in the novel's conclusion is a circumvention of rhetoric itself: the prime minister climbs a wind turbine. The body replaces the word. This is not a critique of rhetoric, but rather its surpassing through gesture—a media-effective "tableau vivant" that is immediately fed into the media stream. Here, too, the logic of staging remains effective, only it has abandoned the verbal form in favor of the physical.

Intertextual references: Bernhard and Segalen

Both novels ground their poetological reflection in literary pre-texts that are symptomatically different.

Larnaudie prefaces the novel with two mottos: the Bernhard quote from Old Masters – “We need audiences and a mouthpiece […] the ideal mouthpiece doesn’t exist” – and Mitterrand’s “I believe in the forces of the mind, and I will not leave you.” The combination is programmatic: Bernhard, the master of obsessive, empty speech and self-destruction through language, provides the literary model; Mitterrand, the master of political rhetoric, the historical context. Müller’s character is situated between these two poles – simultaneously a Bernhardian monomaniac and a failed speechwriter, and the combination of these two legacies renders him incurable. The Bernhard quote functions as a poisoned manifesto: it names the fundamental predicament of the speechwriter – there is a message that needs to be heard, it needs someone to carry it, and this someone is never the right one, because the ideal of complete congruence between voice, conviction, and effect is unattainable. Larnaudie uses it not as a lament, but as a diagnosis, which he radically intensifies through Müller's story: Müller is the man who has borne another's voice and in doing so lost his own, who now writes for no one and has no one to listen—not even an empty room. For Bernhard, speeches are fundamentally monologues without resonance, obsessions that reproduce themselves without ever reaching their destination, and it is precisely this structure that Larnaudie applies to political rhetoric: The "ideal speechwriter" does not exist because the conditions of its existence—a speaker who truly means what they say and an audience that truly listens—have been systematically destroyed in modern political communication. Müller's "acharnement," his dogged continuation of writing into the void, is the only honest response to this impossibility: He does not cease to pursue the ideal precisely because he knows it does not exist, and in this paradoxical fidelity to an unattainable ideal lies the melancholic dignity of his character—and the silent indictment of the novel.

Idier chooses Victor Segalen's as the most important pretext René Leÿswhich he carries and quotes throughout the entire novel. This is a less canonical, but revealing choice: Segalen's novel about a narrator who imagines a secret reality behind the locked Forbidden City and falls prey to a con man is a parable about the impossibility of reaching the "dedans"—the inside. The narrator in Idier adopts this constellation for Matignon: It is also a Forbidden City that one inhabits without ever fully penetrating it. The sentence "Je ne saurai donc rien de plus," which the narrator reads repeatedly, marks the fundamental epistemic situation: One writes speeches for a power one never fully knows, about an audience one never understands, in a night that brings no definitive knowledge.

Poetological consequence: Style as a political argument

The deepest parallel and at the same time the sharpest contrast between the two novels lies in the relationship between writing style and political diagnosis.

Larnaudie chooses a prose style for ACH that is itself a political statement. His long, highly constructed sentences, full of inserted corrections, conceptual clarifications, and rhetorical self-commentaries, transform the writing into a mimicry of political discourse—and into a critique of it. By writing like political speeches sound, Larnaudie reveals what is wrong with them: their self-referentiality, their obsession with form for form's sake, and the absence of a genuine addressee. The novel is a speech delivered into the void—and it knows it.

Idier, on the other hand, chooses a fragmented, discontinuous, often laconic tone that reflects the brevity and haste of the crisis rhetoric he describes, without succumbing to it entirely. His style is porous—he allows intertexts, childhood memories, quotations from Marabutz, Taoist maxims, and political analysis to stand side by side in equal measure. This is not disorder, however, but an alternative epistemology: the best arises not from logical construction, but rather from association, from drifting through a night, from the mother's word. Political discourse, according to Idier's implicit poetics, needs not less language, but a different one—one that listens instead of staging.

Two aporias, one diagnosis

Ultimately, both novels face an aporia, which they formulate differently, but share.

Larnaudie's argument goes like this: anyone who has fully grasped the mechanisms of rhetoric can no longer use it with conviction—nor can they stop using it. Müller's "acharnement" is a suffering without escape: he continues to write because stopping would be a capitulation, and he cannot stop knowing that writing is pointless. The suicides at the viaduct are the radically different answer to the same problem—silence as the only honest form.

Idier's dilemma is this: anyone who recognizes that political discourse in mediocracy is reduced to punchlines and gestures can either play along—and lose themselves—or write the discourse differently, with dignity, literature, and humanity, and thus risk not being heard. The narrator chooses the latter, and his choice is confirmed: the speech is not given. But the prime minister climbs the wind turbine—and that was perhaps the most discursive moment of the entire night.

Both novels, in different ways, diagnose the same thing: that political rhetoric today operates in a state of structural emptiness, in which form and content, voice and conviction, addressee and addressee have broken apart. The difference lies in affect: Larnaudie writes with the cold fury of a dissector, Idier with the warmth of a failed romantic who, in the end, travels to Calais, to the migrants, with his mother's word – "nuage" (cloud). This is, in all modesty, the only utopia the novel allows itself.

In Larnaudie's work, the novel doesn't end, it breaks off—or more precisely: it stops without stopping. Müller continues writing, the suicides from the viaduct will continue, the wastebasket will continue to fill. There is no closing speech, no final insight, no gesture of liberation. The novel ends in the continuation of the "acharnement" itself—this dogged persistence is simultaneously the only form of dignity the text grants its characters and the darkest diagnosis it offers of political rhetoric: it doesn't stop, even when it no longer means anything, even when no one is listening anymore, even when the speaker knows he is speaking into the void. Speech as compulsion, as addiction, as incurable suffering—that is Larnaudie's final word.

In Idier's work, however, the speech literally dissolves at the end—in two ways. First, the painstakingly written speech is never delivered: the Prime Minister wordlessly climbs the wind turbine, ascends to the migrants, and the journalist sums it up in three words: "Ce n'est pas du cinéma"—the only sentence that survives the entire night, and which the narrator alone truly understands because he had it written in his own notebook. Second, the narrator leaves Matignon with a single word in his possession—"nuage," his mother's favorite word—gets into a car, and drives not to the casino in Cabourg, as he had planned all night, but to Calais, to the migrants. The speech that was never delivered has transformed into a movement—not in language, but in direction. Where Larnaudie ends in circling, Idier ends in departure; Where Müller's rhetoric has itself as its only horizon, the narrator finds an addressee in Idier beyond rhetoric – and travels to him.