2021

Genealogy of Hate: Autobiography, Antisemitism and the Poetics of History in Édouard Drumont and Christophe Donner

As this essay demonstrates, Christophe Donner's novel "La France goy" unfolds a genealogical narrative project in which individual family history and collective ideological history intertwine: The starting point is the first-person narrator's archival search for his great-grandfather Henri Gosset, which quickly expands into a far-reaching reconstruction of French antisemitism since the late 19th century. Through Gosset's social mobility and his entanglement in the circles of Léon Daudet and Edgar Bérillon, the family is directly integrated into the ideological network of the time, while in parallel, Édouard Drumont's biography unfolds as an "anatomy of hatred," revealing how personal failure, social humiliation, and media strategies condense into a powerful antisemitic narrative. This network is complemented by counter-figures such as the anarchist Marcelle Bernard, as well as by the genealogical perspective on the grandfather Jean Gosset, whose death in a concentration camp brings the historical threads to a brutal culmination. The interpretation argues that Donner's method is neither purely autobiographical nor classically historical, but rather, as a kind of "genealogical archaeology," develops a reflexive poetics of the archive in which documents, fiction, and self-observation intertwine, systematically subverting the boundaries between self-biography and biography. Central to this is the thesis of a structural continuity of antisemitism, which is not asserted discursively but demonstrated narratively by making visible ideological, linguistic, and affective sediments across generations. Donner's literary achievement is seen in not only morally condemning antisemitism, but also revealing its aesthetic and narrative appeal: Drumont's success is understood as the result of a narrative logic that transforms diffuse resentments into a coherent story. This leads to a sophisticated critical approach that understands writing itself as an ambivalent power—as a medium of both ideological seduction and enlightened counter-work—and reads the novel as a whole as an attempt to gain a form of historical knowledge that transcends mere factuality through the literary exploration of genealogical entanglements.

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Three intermedial Orpheus variations: Palermo, Berlin and Trump's USA in the work of Sébastien Berlendis

This review reads Sébastien Berlendis's new novel, "24 fois l'Amérique" (Actes Sud, 2026, cited in FA), in conjunction with two earlier books ("Revenir à Palerme," 2018, and "Seize lacs et une seule mer," 2021), as part of a cohesive poetic constellation. All three texts explore a common narrative motif: a first-person narrator follows the trail of a missing woman, traversing landscapes steeped in history, memory, and melancholy. While the first novel unfolds an almost claustrophobic search for the lost lover, Délia, in a decaying Palermo, staging photography as a medium of remembrance, the second relocates this search to the summer lakes of Berlin, where Super 8 films of a mysterious woman become the starting point for a leisurely reconstruction of the past. FA now expands this movement into a road movie through the American Rust Belt: The narrator travels from New York to Lake Michigan to find Marianne, who has been present for years only through drawn postcards. The novel unfolds a visually structured journey through motels, industrial wastelands, and lake landscapes, in which photographic equipment, overexposed images, and cinematic shots become central metaphors for the unreliability of memory. Marianne appears less as a real figure than as a "presence through absence," whose trace the narrator follows in a landscape of fragmented memories. – The article argues that these three novels can be read as an intermedial variation on the Orpheus myth. Berlendis's narrator constantly moves in a paradoxical motion between memory and the present: Like Orpheus, he tries to retrieve a lost Eurydice, but the search does not lead to the recovery of his beloved, but rather to an aesthetic transformation of the loss. The analysis reveals that this poetics is strongly influenced by visual media. Photography, film, and Polaroid images not only structure the characters' perceptions but also the formal organization of the texts—particularly in the most recent novel, whose twenty-four episodes resemble cinematic shots from a melancholic road movie. Simultaneously, the article interprets this latest novel as an indirect political novel about contemporary America: The journey through the Rust Belt leads through deindustrialized cities, religiously charged landscapes, and migrant-dominated urban spaces, resulting in a multifaceted portrait of a socially fractured country. The interpretation argues that Berlendis does not formulate this political dimension programmatically but rather allows it to emerge from a poetics of observation in which personal memory, media perception, and historical landscapes are intertwined.

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Between Act and Body: Literature as a Counter-Space to Justice in the Work of Laure Heinich

Laure Heinich, a Parisian criminal defense lawyer and essayist, portrays the justice system not as a place of decision, but as a space of experience in her two novels. "Corps défendus" follows a lawyer who, in the case of Ève, who was raped and murdered, finds herself caught between legal technicality, familial pain, and the materiality of traces and bodies; here, the law appears as a process that must reconstruct violence in order to judge it, thereby creating new wounds itself. "Avant la peine" (2026), on the other hand, follows a young judge during her first months on the job, where she learns that there is no absolute truth, only a "vérité judiciaire," a precarious weighing of statements, probabilities, and roles—exemplified in the case of an alleged rape, where one person's word is against another's. Both books depict the criminal justice system as an overburdened apparatus that must function despite a lack of certainty, transforming people into cases, files, and functions. The review argues that literary form makes visible what legal textbooks cannot capture: emotions, doubts, physical shocks, and the structural silence of the courtroom. By contrasting the different poetics—here the introspective gaze of the judge, there the scenic, physical perspective of the lawyer—it reads the novels as complementary investigations of the same system: once from within, as a process of habit formation, and once from without, as a confrontation with violence and trauma. This creates a picture of a legal system that is neither objective nor curative, but remains a permanent moral struggle. The review thus understands Heinich's literature as a counterpoint to the justice system: a space in which the unspeakable becomes narratable and the boundaries of truth, punishment, and justice become tangible.

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Light, sound, silence – Philippe Jaccottet on his 100th birthday

The type that has to be traced on the page appears in the same way as the brindilles don't have to be saved.
Tracer encore des lignes comme on jetterait des filins à la surface d'une étendue d'eau, mare infime ou mer à perte de vue,
afin qu'ils supportent a spèce de filet qui nous éviterait la noyade.
“Poèmes de sauvetage”… Paroles, n'importe lesquelles même peut-être, pour différer l'effondrement.
(La Clarté Notre-Dame, II)

Thus, every word placed on this page would be like one of those twigs from which Char once dreamed of building a defensive wall.
To draw lines once more, like stretching ropes across reflective water, whether a small pond or a boundless sea,
so that they carry a kind of net that could save us from drowning.
“Rescue poems”… words, any words perhaps, to delay further decay.

The echo of the song

Reading Philippe Jaccottets Le dernier livre de Madrigaux and La Clarté Notre-Dame Together, one crosses the outermost threshold of a poetic life that was always in search of "clarté," that glimmer of the worldly which the Swiss poet understood as the only legitimate place of transcendence without dogma. Both collections, although separated by decades in their creation, form a compositional unity in the 2021 edition (with the poet's 2020 notes), published in 2021 (the year of the artist's death, a century after his birth): The lyrical afterglow of one book opens into the meditative prose of the other, and together they constitute a final variation on Jaccottet's great theme—the uncertain brightness that language can only bear witness to, searchingly, almost reluctantly.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Rimbaud Fictions: Philippe Lemaire

Philippe Lemaire's novel "L'Arpenteur de rêves" (2021) cannot be read as a mere biography or historical account of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rather, the text presents a poetic construction that plays with the figure on several levels: Rimbaud is simultaneously narrated, evoked, and reinvented. The title itself hints at a dual movement: the "surveyor of dreams" is someone who maps the immeasurable, who captures the impossible in language while simultaneously leaving it in suspense. Lemaire narrates Rimbaud by fictionalizing him, in order to make his image newly visible to the reader.

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Overlooked interior: Particles, marks and scratches at Thomas Clerc

Thomas Clerc's books "Intérieur" and "Cave" are closely linked, forming a coherent yet evolving exploration of space, self, and the act of writing. While "Intérieur" is a meticulous inventory of his living space, "Cave" expands this topographical obsession into a journey into the hidden, the unspoken, and desire. The movement from visible, above-ground life to the invisible, subterranean realm of the cave symbolizes a twofold process: the continuation of an already established literary method and its radical deepening into the complexity of human interiority and desire.

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France as a Greek Polis: François Hartog

François Hartog's weighty yet slim volume of just 54 pages, *Ancient Greece Is the Most Beautiful Invention of the Modern Age* (2021), published as the third installment of the Gunnar Hering Lectures, invites a critical re-examination of Greece's conventional role in Western culture. The work, which explicitly draws on Paul Valéry's famous…

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Gardens of Transformation: Marivaux and Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

This article connects Pierre de Marivaux's "Le Triomphe de l'amour" (1732) with two contemporary works by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam: the theatrical adaptation "À l'abordage!" (2021) and the novel "Arcadie" (2018). A common core is a fundamental dramaturgical constellation: a young character infiltrates a secluded world—be it Hermocrate's philosophical enclave, Kinbote's cult-like community, or Arcady's utopian commune. In all cases, the established order is challenged by love, desire, and transformation. The mode varies, however: Marivaux's comedy stages a strategic masquerade to restore order; Bayamack-Tam transforms this model into a queer farce in "À l'abordage!" and into a melancholic quest for self-discovery in "Arcadie." The mask becomes identity, the theatrical performance an existential transformation. The article demonstrates how Bayamack-Tam not only updates Marivaux but also radically recodes her work: instead of a binary world of reason and emotion, she creates fluid identities whose desires are not normatively tamed but politically liberated. While Marivaux stages love as a means of restoration, in "À l'abordage!" it becomes pleasurable destabilization, and in "Arcadie" it becomes the touchstone of utopian promises of salvation. Farah is no longer merely the subject of disguise but of transformation itself. The essay reads Bayamack-Tam's works as a homage to Marivaux through subversive continuation—a queer humanism that does not drop masks to reveal truth but to assert identity as an open process of becoming.

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Childhood and Self-Transformation: Edouard Louis and Didier Eribon

In "Changer: méthode" (Seuil, 2021), Edouard Louis presents childhood as the fundamental origin of pain, exclusion, and the unstoppable urge to escape. Experiences of poverty, the harshness of the social environment, and especially the constant humiliation and slander due to perceived femininity and homosexuality inflict a deep wound on the narrator and an awareness of a predetermined fate to be avoided. This existential compulsion to flee becomes the driving force behind a lifelong and radical self-transformation, understood not as natural development but as conscious, disciplined, and methodical "work" on one's own body and being, often learned through role-playing and imitation. Childhood not only provides the motivation for change but also—through early survival strategies—the initial steps toward this "method," while later childhood and adolescent encounters (e.g., with librarians and Elena) serve as catalysts and precursors for the break with the world of origin. Even in adulthood, childhood remains a constant, often painful reference point, driving the ongoing need for change and shaping the struggle for identity and belonging.

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Poetics of Childhood: Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Le Fils de l'homme (2021)

Jean-Baptiste Del Amos's novel "Le Fils de l'homme" (Gallimard, 2021, translated into German by Karin Uttendörfer as "Der Menschensohn," Matthes und Seitz, 2025) depicts a childhood experience at the boundary between trauma, the forces of nature, and archaic initiation. In a language of minimalist poetic concision and biblical force, the novel portrays shaping, deformation, and fracture: childhood appears here not as a place of innocence, but as a transitional stage of becoming, characterized by silence, physicality, and an irresolvable ambivalence between closeness and alienation. At the heart of the novel lies the relationship between a father and his son—a relationship defined not by dialogue or mutual understanding, but by physical presence, speechlessness, and archaic rituals. In prose of dense beauty and relentless precision, Del Amo explores the dynamic between a man who seems to have fallen out of history and a child who grows up in that history without being able to understand or name it.

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Only someone who gets reality in their face is crazy.

Ce matin, Franck proposes to me to watch the face of the loup-garou, a simulacre of metamorphosis, for which I compare, which I grasp the experience of the peur, for me to prove that there is no sais quoi, sa Folie ou le contraire. I'm in the room, I have a chair, I have a face with my air focus and a change in expression, my eyes are fixed exorbitantly, I have a trembler, crisp machine, retrousse ses babies, sort les crocs, serre les dents à s'en faire péter l'émail, souffle et crache, cela dure, je soutiens faiblement son regard, il insiste, sa veine temporale qui palpite, le rouge qui monte au front. Puis Franck s'arrête net, rigole, satisfait de sa performance – alors, t'as flippé?

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

The fragility of bodies in the face of unfathomable dangers

Certain soirées, or avant de m'endormir, je m'étais mis à revivre notre voyage passé à Florence, avec la sensation que jamais nous ne connaîtrions à new pareils moments of inspiration and harmony. Ils appartenaient à here, without espoir de return. Ce sentiment de perte m'oppressait. Nous avions vécu comme une experience normal ce qui ne l'était pas. One of the moments of our lives d'avant, without the person being alerted. Personne à moins que Marina A, with these performances énigmatiques aux apparences gratuites or absurdes, nous eût montré une voie aux contours énigmatiques. The fragility of the corps face à des dangers insaisissables, notre mortalité de feuilles légères accrochées au fil de la vie quand on nous promettait l'éternité bionique.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

It never stops being born.

 

Pendant that je roulais avec the corps de mon frère, en train de se décomposer légèrement, two deux trimbalés sur l'autoroute, j'écoutais l'Incarnatus est de la plus belle des messes de Haydn. This little bout de musique chantée pretendait operar en quelques minutes un miracle: And homo factus is. Un homme? A woman? Un être humain prend corps devant nous. Et par paliers, ça s'incarne, c'est fait. Ça n'arrête pas de naître, des fleurs s'ouvrent en accéléré, the peau is constructed et les yeux s'ouvrent. This is a factory that is exactly what you want.

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Music Fictions: Kerangal with Pinget, Garcia and Reza

Maylis de Kerangal's "Canoës" brings together several dimensions of musical references in the work of Pinget, Garcia, and Reza: firstly, the semiotic-formal structuring and intertextual work, and secondly, the profound connection between musicality and physicality, between one's own identity and dimensions of musical experience. Resonance refers to the phenomenon where one body vibrates or sounds in sync with another, as in the case of the drone strings of lutes.

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Africa, Europe and the third continent

With his fifth book, Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr presents another building block of his political literature; in addition to topics of previous books such as migration to Sicily (Silence du chœur), homosexuality in Senegal (De purs hommes), jihadism in the Sahel (Terre ceinte), literature itself now comes into focus with "La plus secrète mémoire des hommes".

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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