S’inspirer, respirer L’intime est politique
Tales of return on oneself, Comme nous existons, by Kaoutar Harchi, and Pour te ressembler by Christine Détrez are part of a fundamental movement in the field of social sciences, where recourse to literature, to the sensitive and intimate register, is grafted onto a broader knowledge. If Kaoutar Harchi and Christine Détrez are sociologists (of the arts, of culture, of reading practices, of gender…), the two authors are nonetheless writers in equal measure.
In Comme nous existons, Kaoutar Harchi, born at the end of the 1980s, traces her life’s journey from her grandparents’ arrival in France from Morocco to her own blossoming at the age of seventeen, the day she discovered sociology, which offered her a tool for understanding everything she had experienced. She remembers her experiences as a child, identifying what had been the constitutive event of her thought. It is a gesture of self-recognition, clarifying the way in which the intertwining of power, class, gender and race relations mark an existence. Both retrospective and reflexive, Comme nous existons gives shape to the experiences of millions of other immigrant families in France, who are plagued by the feeling that one may not be quite at home when one is at home. « People often ask me if this is not narcissistic. I don’t think so at all. I don’t feel at all in a form of contemplation. If it starts from me, it doesn’t stop at me. And I like that in this surpassing, it reaches the others. I dreamed of a book that would also be a meeting point for minority subjectivities, » explains the author.
In Pour te ressembler, Christine Détrez investigates her mother, a schoolteacher who died in a car accident in Tunisia when she was two years old, proving in a poignant text how much writing has to do with the memory of the dead, but also with what Pierre Michon called the « tiny lives », forgotten, erased by the sieve of history. A mother doubly invisibilized by the modesty of her social origins and by a family memory that quickly turned the page. At the crossroads of archival methods, proper to historians, and family investigation, proper to novelists, Christine Détrez’s poignant text, with its emotional and sensitive charge, also goes beyond the intimate framework to restore a moment in French history. While acknowledging that she has « crossed the river of oblivion, » the narrator questions her belated attention, having waited until she was in her fifties to take a real interest in her mother when, precisely, she had been writing books on « gender » and on invisibilized women for years. She also assumes a tenacious mystery: « I didn’t find what I was looking for, I probably don’t know who she was any more than before. Her piercing gaze on the photos has remained an enigma » she says.
In the light of these two sensitive texts, we will ask ourselves what literature and biographical research say about society, beyond ourselves. In the same way that we observe today elective affinities between literature and contemporary art, which feed each other in a gesture of reciprocal contamination (cf. exhibition literature, literature out of the book, plastic literature…), we are witnessing a sensitive attraction for the genre of the intimate and biographical narrative among many researchers in social sciences. If art acts on literature and vice versa, sociology, too, aspires to literature, and vice versa.
We will try to shed light on this complicity between historical or sociological knowledge and literary writings « which participates in the richness of contemporary creation and the mixing of discourses », as the critic Alexandre Gefen, author of L’Idée de la littérature, writes. From Art for Art to Intervention Writing.
Kaoutar Harchi is a sociologist; she published Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne (Pauvert, 2016) and is releasing Comme nous existons (Actes Sud) this month.
Christine Détrez is a sociologist, professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon; she published with Karine Bastide, Nos mères. Huguette, Christiane, et tant d’autres, une histoire de l’émancipation féminine (La Découverte); she is releasing this month Pour te ressembler (Denoël).
