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Christine Angot: "When it falls on you, incest is there all the time"

2021-01-21T21:55:28.034Z


The author was one of the first to have written on incest, the theme of Camille Kouchner's shocking book released earlier this month. Christine A


Long before Camille Kouchner and her shocking book "La Familia grande" or Vanessa Springora, there was Christine Angot.

The author wrote in the 1990s about sexual abuse, the incest that her father subjected her to in her early teens.

In a novelist's work, which has to face trauma, she evokes it in several of her books, then more directly in "Incest" (Stock) in 1999 before coming back to it very frontally in 2012 in "Une semaine holidays ”(Flammarion), in 2012, which meets a large audience.

She relates there this “week” spent with her father who abuses her daily between two dinners in good restaurants.

She evokes this period before the #MeToo movement.

When you write "Incest", published in 1999, are you dealing with a theme that at the time of little interest to society?

CHRISTINE ANGOT.

For me, incest is not a hot topic.

It is the foundation of my life.

No one wants to be a theme or a statistic.

When it falls on you, incest is there all the time.

The incest is there, but your survival, at 13, is also to pretend.

I go to school.

I like school.

I see my girlfriends.

When a friend tells me her dad is awesome, I tell her mine is awesome.

I believe it.

I need it.

I must live.

I wait for better days.

Did you feel alone, isolated, while writing this book?

Literally, it is anything but a noble subject.

And I'm say… sorry for me to have to write this.

In 1999, you were invited to television to talk about the book, and it rather laughs, like at Ardisson ...

Ah, laughter and power ... When I was doing

We are not lying

(Editor's note: the France 2 program in which she was a columnist from 2017 to 2019)

, I was struck to see, when there was sexist, even vulgar jokes, it happened, that the women in the audience seemed to make a point of honor to be the first to laugh out loud.

But, if you dared not laugh, even criticize the joke in question, the faces of women changed, calmed down and seemed freed from the social obligation to laugh with the strongest.

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Is it MeToo that caused an obligation to listen, the end of sneers?

The laughers turned their jackets over.

Their violence is now expressed in a bias.

They put on masks.

Only the naive get caught.

Faced with Léa Salamé on France Inter, this Thursday, you mentioned Eric Dupond-Moretti, declaring that as a lawyer, he had pleaded a "consented incest", but above all, having become Keeper of the Seals, he had invoked the " individual liberty ".

As if from a certain age, it was no longer incest?

There is confusion between incest and pedophilia.

In matters of pedophilia, the age of consent is central.

When it comes to incest, you remain your father's child regardless of your age.

The notion of consent is meaningless.

The legislator should not introduce the idea of ​​"individual freedom" into what is a crime.

READ ALSO>

"Finally, the word incest is heard": "the Kouchner effect", a liberation of speech


The law has nevertheless extended in time the possibility of filing a complaint for a victim.

There is an awareness ...

Society has always been aware of the taboo against incest.

It is the fundamental and universal prohibition in all societies at all times.

If the legislator feels the need to include it in national law, it is perhaps because the force of the taboo has receded in people's minds.

We can ask ourselves the question, and fear it.

But justice, yes, that's for sure, has made things easier.

Has incest become a social issue?

Since there are societies, incest has been a social issue.

The transgression of the taboo of incest disrupts, at the same time, the private life of the victim and the life of the community, from which he who abuses his power precisely derives the legitimacy.

A whole social chain can thus find itself accused of complicity, by blindness, or perversion.

The pleasure, for the one who commits the act, is not purely sexual.

Much of it resides in the game it plays, under the gaze of others, without being seen.

READ ALSO>

Victims of incest, a mother and her daughter break the mechanism of silence


What you went through at 13, do you feel that in 2021, if you were the victim of the same assault, it would be a little less difficult for you to talk about it?

It would be just as difficult.

To speak, you have to know.

Now, did I want to "know" what I was going through?

No.

It is too hard.

Source: leparis

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