2022

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.

➙ To the article

The Monster and its Double: Pierre Rivière in Michel Foucault and Ismaël Jude

The review focuses on two radically different but inextricably intertwined books: the documentary volume “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère”, edited by Michel Foucault, which makes the historical triple murderer Pierre Rivière visible as a focal point of competing discourses, and Ismaël Jude’s “grief” (éditions verticales, 2022), which performatively attacks precisely this discursive containment. While Foucault's book embeds Rivière's prison-written memoir within a polyphonic archive—legal files, medical reports, historical commentaries—thus demonstrating how a life becomes a "case" through institutional language, Jude propels this constellation into the present and dismantles it from within: His narrator reads Foucault, rewrites his terms (parricide becomes matricide, sororicide, fratricide), and transforms herself into the repressed female doppelgänger of the murderer. The review does not merely highlight this contrast as a difference between two methods—here the analytical distance of genealogy, there the furious, corporeal, language-destroying counter-speech—but as a kind of dialectical movement: Foucault shows how discourses appropriate a text; Jude shows that this critique itself remains a form of appropriation. The focus shifts decisively: Where Foucault reads the text as a battleground between justice and psychiatry and emphasizes its “strange beauty,” Jude insists on what disappears in the process—gender-specific violence, the bodies of the victims, the possibility of another, non-male voice. The review's argument derives its strength precisely from the fact that it does not pit these two perspectives against each other, but rather understands them as a necessary tension: It shows how Foucault's project creates the conditions under which Jude can write at all, and simultaneously how Jude shatters these conditions by radicalizing writing itself into an act. This creates a picture of a literary-theoretical constellation in which a central question becomes increasingly acute: If—as with Rivière—text and action merge, who then controls their meaning? And who is heard—or silenced?

➙ To the article
From the film "Leurs enfants après eux"

The dignity of perseverance: literary rehabilitation of the France périphérique in the work of Nicolas Mathieu

In “Leurs enfants après eux” (Actes Sud, 2018), Nicolas Mathieu tells the story of a generation growing up over four summers in the dying industrial region of Lorraine: In the fictional town of Heillange, Anthony, Hacine, and Stéphanie drift between gravel pits, disused blast furnaces, and familial fault lines through a youth whose promises – advancement, freedom, self-definition – prove to be structurally blocked, so that even their most intense experiences of love, violence, or friendship remain constantly bound to the gravity of a space that no longer produces a future; the novel condenses this experience into a choral panorama in which individual biographies appear less as autonomous life stories than as variations on a collective fate of invisibility. In contrast, “Connemara” (Actes Sud, 2022) shifts the perspective to the present and to a different phase of life: Using Hélène, the seemingly successful social climber, and Christophe, who remained in his original social milieu, Mathieu tells the story of the illusion of social mobility itself – Hélène’s return from the Parisian elite to the provinces reveals her upward mobility as a story of alienation, while Christophe embodies the flip side, a life of continuity without departure, so that their fleeting reunion makes visible the impossibility of a coherent identity between origin and self-conception; the titular place of longing remains pure projection, a name for a life not lived. The essay reads both novels as a diptych that elevates the geographical space of périphérique France from mere backdrop to epistemic center: space appears here as an instrument of knowledge in which the contradictions of French meritocracy materialize, and the characters act as bearers of social positions whose scope for action is predetermined by origin, class, and symbolic orders. Mathieu's poetics are described as a tension between social-realist precision and literary economy—as a writing of ellipsis that, through choral structure, free indirect style, and the imbuing of landscape, body, and everyday details, generates a universal resonance without ever tipping into abstraction; at the same time, this writing insists that the implicit social critique lies not in explicit theses, but in the narrative form itself, in convergence without catharsis, in the "malgré tout" of precarious happiness, or in the "cœur en miettes" of an unfulfilled existence. This creates the image of a work that neither morally privileges ascent nor stagnation, but understands both as variants of the same double bind – and herein lies the political power of its literature.

➙ 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

Between origin and upward mobility: Novels of class change by Moraton, Robin and Sizun

This article focuses on three French novels that explore social mobility from different literary perspectives: Gilles Moraton's "Transfuge" (Nadeau, 2025), Patrice Robin's "Le Visage tout bleu" (POL, 2022), and Marie Sizun's "10, villa Gagliardini" (Arléa, 2024). Robin's novel, told from an autobiographical perspective, recounts the educational ascent of a boy from a rural, artisan background whose near-fatal birth and his parents' harsh working conditions shaped his social starting point; his path to the intellectual sphere remains fraught with guilt and the physical imprint of his origins. Moraton depicts the development of a protagonist from a lower-middle-class or proletarian background who gains access to the cultural elite through educational institutions, yet remains a "crossover" between classes, ruthlessly analyzing his own metamorphosis. Sizun, in turn, reconstructs the childhood of a girl in postwar Paris who, through education and self-discipline, gradually emerges from the confines of the "villa Gagliardini" into a different social sphere; here, the class shift appears as a subtle, intra-familial shift closely linked to female self-empowerment. – The essay argues that these three novels not only address class change thematically but also present it as a structural problem of narration. At the center is the figure of the "transfuge" as a doubly positioned subject who retrospectively recounts an origin left behind without ever being able to completely shed it. The analysis focuses particularly on the tension between the narrating and narrated self, the linguistic problem of the shift in social register, the staging of rupture or continuity in the temporal structure, and the ethical dimension of characterization. In its comparative reading of the novels' endings, the review highlights that Robin aims for a conciliatory integration of origins, Moraton emphasizes the enduring intermediate position, and Sizun designs a quiet form of inner continuity. Thus, the review demonstrates that class change as a literary motif presents an aesthetic and ethical challenge because it sets identity, language, and narrative perspective all in motion.

➙ To the article

Late works as a laboratory: Jean-Jacques Schuhl and Simon Liberati

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's "Les apparitions" and Simon Liberati's "Performance" (both 2022) revolve around aging writers whose physical decline becomes the starting point for a radically renewed literary experience. In "Les apparitions," Schuhl portrays a narrator who, after a severe internal hemorrhage and cerebral hypoxia, is haunted by so-called "apparitions": autonomous, highly present visual events that refuse to be either dreams or hallucinations. The text unfolds a poetics of montage, quotation, and desubjectification, in which the self increasingly recedes behind alien images, voices, and fragments. "Performance," on the other hand, tells the story of a 71-year-old author who, after suffering a stroke, finds renewed creative energy through a commission about the Rolling Stones. This energy, however, is largely fueled by a scandalous relationship with his young stepdaughter, who serves as a projection screen for an excessive desire. Liberati's novel combines illness, decadence, pop culture, and transgression into a provocative staging of aging as an aesthetic experience at the limits of human experience. – The review reads both novels as paradigmatic works of old age, which understand aging not as a phase of taking stock or moderation, but as an aesthetic extreme. It argues that Schuhl and Liberati develop two contrasting but complementary models of the "aging creative": a receptive, disempowering imagination in Schuhl's work, which almost dissolves the self in the act of writing, and an aggressive, transgressive imagination in Liberati's work, which asserts a final form of artistic sovereignty precisely in moral and physical decline. At the heart of the analysis is the thesis that pathology, illness, and proximity to death become "material for thought" in both texts, from which new forms of literary intensity emerge. The review thus shows how the late work functions not as a swan song, but as a laboratory in which literature radically re-examines its own limits in the face of mortality.

➙ To the article

The Goncourt brothers and the poetics of doubling: Alain Claude Sulzer

Alain Claude Sulzer's novel "Doppelleben" (2022) has now been published in French as "Les Vieux Garçons" (2025). With precise, artfully detached language, it traces the lives of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt—two writers inextricably linked in 19th-century Paris, living, thinking, and writing together. Sulzer weaves historical facts with poetic imagination: from everyday rituals and conversations about art and style to the quiet catastrophes of their private lives, a chamber drama unfolds, exploring dependency, illness, and creative obsession. The novel follows the brothers from their literary rise to Jules's physical and mental decline, which Edmond observes with desperate concern but also with aesthetic detachment.

➙ To the article

Autosociobiography as a French genre

Autosociobiography: Poetics and Politics, edited by Eva Blome, Philipp Lammers and Sarah Seidel, Treatises on Literary Studies, Metzler, 2022.

The edited volume “Autosociobiography: Poetics and Politics”, edited by Eva Blome, Philipp Lammers and Sarah Seidel, is dedicated to the study of a literary text form that has existed since Didier Eribon's Return to Reims (Return to ReimsThe genre of autosociobiographical writing (2009/2016) has experienced a remarkable resurgence. The editors aim to examine, systematize, and reflect upon this "still young genre" in order to establish it as a relevant object of literary studies and to investigate its literary form (poetics) within the context of its political and socio-analytical claims. The contributions discuss current autosociobiographical texts and their literary-historical contexts under the three main themes of "Literary Epistemology of the Social," "On the Political Nature of Form," and "Transition and Narration."

Read more

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

Boualem Sansal's work today: Rebecca Hohnhaus

Current Status: Exclusion from National Pardons. The situation of the Algerian-French writer Boualem Sansal remains critical. On July 1, 2025, an Algerian appeals court upheld the first-instance verdict and sentenced the 80-year-old, seriously ill author once again to five years in prison without parole. He is accused of violating Algeria's "national unity." This…

Read more

Completing the world: Alice Zeniter

Alice Zeniter's work "Toute une moitié du monde" (Flammarion, 2022, German: "Eine ganze Hälfte der Welt," translated from the French by Yvonne Eglinger, Berlin-Verlag, 2025) is a stimulating reflection on fiction, drawing on her personal experiences as both a reader and a writer, and prompting a comprehensive re-evaluation of how we read and tell stories. The present book explicitly does not present itself as a strictly academic essay, but rather as a mental excursion or a meditative reflection that freely interweaves personal reflections, literary-theoretical considerations, and social critique.

➙ To the article

François Truffaut and Literature

The collection Correspondance avec des écrivains (1948-1984) (Gallimard, 2022) offers a concentrated insight into the mind of François Truffaut and his deep-rooted relationship with literature, which permeated his entire cinematic oeuvre. Edited by Bernard Bastide, this work gathers a wealth of letters that Truffaut wrote from 1948 (when he was 16) to 1984 (when he was 18).

Read more

Non serviam. Political Literature Today: Alexandre Gefen

In his book "La littérature est une affaire politique" ("Literature is a Political Affair"), Alexandre Gefen aims to demonstrate that literature—contrary to the common assumption that it merely serves entertainment—is fundamentally a political matter. A central concern of Gefen's is to highlight that contemporary French writers, while rejecting the classical notion of "committed literature," are by no means aesthetically indifferent to their country's political problems. Rather, these authors frequently use their narratives as tools for analyzing inequalities. They employ elements of autobiography or reportage to question social discourses and sometimes even attempt to prolong or anticipate societal crises. In doing so, they reject the idea of ​​an "ivory tower" into which they are supposedly confined and which they can no longer tolerate. They fulfill social demands by participating in literary residencies, for example, in communities, hospitals, retirement homes, or with young people and migrants. The book thus reveals an impressive panorama of a "combative and modern literature that seeks to transform our society."

➙ To the article

France's Topology of Violence: Narrative Modeling in the Extreme Contemporary: Markus Alexander Lenz

The present study, *The Wounded Republic: Narrated Violence in 21st-Century France* (Mimesis 101, Berlin: De Gruyter Brill, 2022), addresses a highly topical and socially pressing issue: the representation and reflection of violence in contemporary French literature. The author, Markus Alexander Lenz, offers an in-depth analysis of current narrative texts, most of which were written in the second decade…

Read more

The supernatural as an expression of the times in the novel: Anne-Sophie Donnarieix

Anne-Sophie Donnarieix's monograph *Puissances de l'ombre: le surnaturel du roman contemporain* (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2022) offers a nuanced analysis of the presence of the supernatural in contemporary French literature. The book pursues the ambitious goal of situating the diverse manifestations and functions of the supernatural within a literary context marked, on the one hand, by a crisis of rationalism…

Read more

The New Athens: Laurent Gaudé

In "Chien 51" (2022), Gaudé stages a dark parable about the degradation of humanity to a mere resource, the forgetting of collective history, the transfer of state power into private hands – and the last flicker of humanity in a soulless system. The novel not only addresses social inequality but goes far beyond it: it raises questions about moral integrity, individual agency, memory, revenge, and redemption – with an impressive language that is both analytically cool and liturgically dense.

➙ To the article

In memory of Pierre Nora (1931–2025)

On June 2, 2025, the eminent French historian Pierre Nora died in Paris at the age of 93. As editor of the monumental seven-volume series "Les Lieux de mémoire" (1984–1993), he decisively shaped the understanding of national memory culture and made a significant contribution to the reflection on French identity. Born in Paris in 1931, Pierre Nora escaped Gestapo persecution as a child. This early experience profoundly influenced his thinking about history, memory, and nation. In two books published in recent years, Nora presented his memoirs, "Jeunesse" (2022) and "Une étrange obstination" (2023), in which he freely recounted his life as a publisher and historian, and in particular traced his career.

➙ To the article

Transgression in Guillaume Lebrun: Joan of Arc and Héliogabalus

Guillaume Lebrun's novels "Fantaisies guérillères" (2022) and "Ravagés de splendeur" (2025) present history as a product of fiction, power, and staging. This article analyzes how Lebrun recodes Joan of Arc into a feminist media figure and stylizes the Roman emperor Héliogabale as a transgender mystic of decadence. The Middle Ages and Roman antiquity serve as an aesthetic and ideological space for exploring questions of identity and fiction: In "Fantaisies guérillères," Joan is invented by a clique of women and strategically staged as a symbol of female counter-power. In "Ravagés de splendeur," the transgression, alluding to Antonin Artaud's "Héliogabale," leads to a brutal death, a death that marks the incompatibility of Héliogabale's existence with an order that must eradicate the Other. Lebrun understands literature as an affect machine and disruptive force – his language does not aim to depict, but to destabilize and liberate, in these queer, mythopoetic transgressions.

➙ To the article

In the forest, man is transformed

The loin, the forest, the great forest, forms an infinity, a continent that has an ancient inquietude. It's more intimate, more impressive too. Passer outre craintes et tremblements and participants à la cérémonie qui s'y ordonne. The approach to the new ombres s'élève la beauté, celle des cathédrales d'avant les hommes, celle des bêtes antiques. Au bout du chemin du regard, se perdent la confusion des lisières, le treillis des épaisseurs de feuillages et des new pousses de printemps. Il n'est plus question de revenir sur ses pas ; l'attrait grandit, je me hate. Sauter un fossé, remonter la courte pente d'un talus, traverser les fouillis des ramures, s'égratigner: je me déracine, je me grise, je m'abstrais des souvenirs. Une fois passées les mailles couturées des taillis de ronciers à mûres qui enfoncent dans la terre leurs rameaux pour se reproduire, l'on parle bas, comme par crainte d'être surpris lors d'un échange secret. It is the place of confidence without voices. J'entre en résonance, je reçois la forest comme une grâce. À ce moment tout bascule, a frisson froid parcourt l'échine, the heart bat plus vite, the gorge is noue. L'agitation vous porte et ce que vous ressentez devient inexprimable. Sous les feuillées, the promeneur part pour un voyage sans return.

Read more

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

No need to talk about their existence

Toujours sur le qui-vive, nous échangions par gestes référencés pour évaluer la menace et prévenir l'agression. Dans l'intimité, c'était un langage de mains, de toucher, de caresses ou de coups, parfois ponctué de grognements ou de cris outragés.

Read more

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to give you the best possible user experience. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our site, and helps our team understand which sections of the site are most interesting and useful to you.