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Abstract

In her 2021 book La Familia grande, Camille Kouchner testifies to the event of sexual violence more precisely that of incestuous hebephiliac rape within her family. In extensive discussions that followed the publication of the book, the media has focused on the allegations of incestuous rape against Olivier Duhamel upon his stepson, twin-brother of Kouchner, nicknamed ‘Victor’ in La Familia grande. Kouchner's nuclear and extended family is part of a French politico-cultural elite that has been shaken by Kouchner's unveiling of violence. Acknowledging this context, this article looks closely at the text itself, and also situates it in relation to works by other woman members of Kouchner's family, with a sharp focus on the work of Évelyne Pisier, Kouchner's mother. This article teases out questions of love, grief and violence as related to Kouchner's testimony, presenting a case for close attention to the literary work alongside its paratexts. I argue that shifting away from the violence of Duhamel's acts, the book turns towards the ways in which the heteropatriarchal structures of the family allow for the perpetration of such an act and the perpetuation of its violence through silencing. This reading argues for the necessary unveiling of a filiation of women, to form a possible resistance to normative narratives of the family. This article further connects Judith Butler's thoughts about incest prohibition and Évelyne Pisier's queer-inclusive feminism.

Keywords

Camille Kouchner Affaire Duhamel Evelyne Pisier rape testimony queer theory

L’écriture m’a fait beaucoup de bien, parce que ça m’a permis de désigner des choses avec des mots d’adultes, alors que d’une certaine manière j’étais restée avec mes mots d’enfant. – Camille Kouchner¹

^‘La Familia grande a déclenché une véritable révolution culturelle’: Camille Kouchner is thus welcomed onto the set of French TV show Quotidien by Yann Barthes (Kouchner, 2021a). In her book La Familia grande (2021), Kouchner testifies to sexual violence, more precisely incestuous hebephiliac rape within her family, catalysing what the presenter, Yann Barthes, calls an ‘onde de choc […] inédite’ that has moved France from 2021 onwards (Kouchner, 2021a). The media has focused on the allegations against Olivier Duhamel, accused of incestuous rape upon his stepson, Kouchner's twin-brother, nicknamed ‘Victor’ in La Familia grande. Duhamel has admitted to ‘baisers’ and ‘caresses’, but not to rape ( Purepeople, 2021 ). Social media had already unfurled a line of testimonial voices since the 2017 #balancetonporc, and the (very belated) strengthening of the MeToo movement in France upon the publication of Vanessa Springora's Le Consentement in January 2020.² Following the publication of La Familia grande, further testimonies have surfaced, notably under #metooinceste, testifying to Kouchner's opening up of speech. The legal age of consent was raised to 15 years in April 2021, and to 18 years in the case of incest (Légifrance, 2021; Le Figaro, 2021).

Whilst calling it the catalyst of a ‘cultural revolution’ might be a sensationalist turn of phrase, La Familia grande is an artwork that questions social structures and social movements, and which in its aim or consequences allows for a fresh perspective on strands of French feminism. As philosopher Marc Crépon notes, literature opens the possibility for the transmission of ‘des voix singulières, […] des voix de victimes ou des voix qui permettent que les choses soient appelées par leur nom’ (Kouchner, 2021a). Kouchner (2021a) herself mentions, in interviews, the contribution of books to the enabling of her self-expression, amongst them Springora's Le Consentement, and Sophie Chauveau's La Fabrique des pervers (2016).³ Through an analysis of La Familia grande, this article strives to open up a view onto aspects less touched upon in social and mainstream media-based discussions.

Kouchner's book bears witness to incestuous rape but significantly supplements this with a narration of the family environment. Notable is this family's position in the French politico-cultural elite which Kouchner touches on: as such the book is broader than a retelling of familial violence. Indeed, Olivier Duhamel has fulfilled an array of prestigious positions; the scandal around him has shaken the French elite, spurring numerous resignations, such as that of Frédéric Mion, from his position as head of Sciences Po (Pech, 2021). Whilst this context is key to an understanding of La Familia grande, this article focusses also on references made to female family members in La Familia grande. Important to my analysis is the recognition that a eulogy to Kouchner's mother, Évelyne Pisier frames the book, which is also dedicated to Kouchner's aunt, Marie-France Pisier. I argue that La Familia grande turns away from patriarchal structures and their silencing and forbidding of grief through its alternative focus on Évelyne Pisier. Through its own feminist and queer political act of decentring,⁴ this article, without disregarding the events of incestuous rape retold in La Familia grande, goes beyond the foregrounding of violence that has dominated readings of the text.

Grief will be brought to the forefront to think of possibilities of speaking and writing the past. The grief of Évelyne Pisier, and her mourning of her own mother, as depicted in La Familia grande, will be the starting point of the article. The first section will thus introduce Évelyne and will offer an analysis of the depiction of the mourning of her death in La Familia grande. The question of whom, or what parts of a person are mourned will be drawn out, highlighting the importance of remembrance in relation to grief as well as traumatic memory. Judith Butler's work around Antigone, which combines the topics of family violence, the right to mourn, and silence will be brought in. The remembrance of Évelyne will be posited as necessary for the testimony of incestuous rape. Silenced grief will be shown to mirror the silencing of rape. The second section will rely on the feminist thoughts of sociologist and literary author Évelyne Pisier. If the first section draws out the centrality of Évelyne to Kouchner's bearing witness to violence, the second section gestures towards Pisier's theoretical and artistic work as itself fitting with, and supplementing, an understanding of Kouchner's strategies of writing. Butler's thought also accompanies this second part as I argue that Évelyne Pisier's feminist and pro-PaCS (pacte civil de solidarité) stances are themselves compatible with Butler's thought. I thus tie together Butler as a theoretical interlocutor in the first section with their pertinence as a queer-feminist thinker who in some ways aligns themselves with Pisier.

Silence and Grief from Antigone to La Familia grande

Sanary-sur-mer (named Sanary by Kouchner) is the primary setting of La Familia grande. The familia grande, whose members spend their holidays in Sanary, is constituted of Kouchner's extended family, as well as family friends and members of the French politico-cultural elite. Sanary is the scene of the rapes recounted by Kouchner.⁵ Paula, Évelyne's mother, who had been the ‘grand-mère centrale, pilier de Sanary’ (2021c: 86) dies in 1988 as recalled by Kouchner. Kouchner writes about the response of her mother, Évelyne, ‘Ma mère est effacée’ (p. 110). Kouchner continues, showing the complexity of her mother's mourning further, ‘c’est moi [Camille] que ma mère a voulu tuer’ (p. 99). Indeed, Évelyne attempts to sever the anchor to life that her children, notably her daughter, represent, as they are a reminder of Évelyne's responsibility, of the necessity for care beyond herself; upon Paula's death, a filiation of women threatens to disappear. Questions of the right to mourn are brought to the fore upon Paula's death, as the children, including Camille/Kouchner, are excluded from collective grief: ‘Les Sanaryens pouvaient, eux, se rassembler, se soutenir, mais nous, les petits-enfants, […] nous devions nous éloigner’ (p. 95). Upon the death of the grandfather, Georges, and husband of Paula, Kouchner further writes about her incomprehension at the seemingly emotionless response of her mother and aunt:

Si l’on se parle tant, si on refuse de s’enfermer dans des simagrées, c’est bien pour pouvoir dire la peur, […] et même, parfois, la tristesse non? Vous ne souffrez pas? Pourtant si, je le vois. Et moi, est-ce que j’en ai le droit? (84, my emphasis).

Kouchner thus unveils the difficulty of verbalising loss and the difficulty of, if not escaping, eluding the ‘simagrées’, the deceiving narratives surrounding the loss. Open speech appears to be deceiving, as the patriarchal word silences possibilities of remembrance in the case of rape, as well as in the moment of grief.

In the context of the effacement of women, ‘Plus encore qu’avant, mon beau-père règne’ in the family milieu (p. 110). Whilst the beau-père, Olivier Duhamel,⁶ increasingly takes up the position of the patriarch in the environment of Sanary(-sur-mer), the position of the mother is displaced.⁷ As if in response to this, (maternal) connections frame and form Kouchner's testimonies to violence, and her book, La Familia grande, as a whole. The book, dedicated to Kouchner's children and her aunt, is framed by a remembrance of her mother, Évelyne. The re-centring of the mother, who had been put in parentheses, thus accompanies the denouncing of the violence perpetuated by the beau-père; the testimony to incestuous rape is intertwined with a testimony to Évelyne – this is not previously recognised in accounts of the novel, indeed, even when the centrality of Évelyne is mentioned in journalistic publications, this is not dwelled upon.⁸ The mourning of Évelyne by Camille/Kouchner and others is restricted, and the deaths of other family members anticipate and retrospectively supplement, in Kouchner's non-linear narrative, the retelling of this mourning.

The way in which Kouchner remembers her mother in spite of deceptive and restricted narratives, I argue, mirrors, in its structure, and supplements her testimony to the incestuous rape committed upon her brother. The silencing that occurs around the mourning of Évelyne is not dissimilar to that which surrounds (incestuous) sexual violence. As such, the unveiling of violence in La Familia grande is multilayered. Sanary, in Kouchner's testimony, is the scene of multiple unspoken rapes. Kouchner writes of a Sanary guest: ‘La jeune femme, à peine 20 ans, était endormie lorsqu’un garçon s’était glissé dans son lit’ (p. 106). Having complained to her parents, the woman is ‘répudiée, vilipendée’ by the Sanary hosts: ‘on m’a expliqué ce qu’il fallait en comprendre: la fille avait exagéré’ (p. 106). Camille/Kouchner, as a family member, is conscripted into a compulsory narrative that stems from an ambiguous collective ‘on’. As exemplified in this case, and in that of Victor's rape, the familia grande repeatedly ‘opted to protect one of its own’ (Cohen, 2021). With this secretive reasoning whereby the members of the familia grande veil one-another's acts, the events of the mansion remain private. The explicatory process of the ambiguous, normative, and responsibility-deprived passive ‘on’ serves to conceal the violence of Sanary; it is this discourse that Kouchner is attempting to escape through its retelling in La Familia grande.

Silence, the right to mourn, and incest are central to La Familia grande. These topics are brought together in queer-feminist theorist Judith Butler's book-length analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone. I bring in (Butler's reading of) Antigone to analyse the relationship of these three topics in conversation with La Familia grande. An analysis of the patriarchal edict of Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone allows us to highlight the violence of silencing indicated by Kouchner – around the mourning of Évelyne, and around incestuous sexual violence. Antigone itself threads through questions of silence, mourning and incest; for Butler, it is the incest narrative par excellence, as its eponymous character is born from an incestuous relationship and arguably desires an incestuous relationship with her brother, Polynices (2000: 5−6).⁹ Butler thinks of incest in relation to cis-heteropatriarchy; as they note, Antigone ‘exposes the socially contingent character of kinship,’ questioning the role of the patriarch, Creon, whom, as Butler highlights, ‘assumes his sovereignty only by virtue of the kinship line that enables that succession’ (2000: 6). As such, Butler's analysis of the incest taboo inscribes itself into a queer-feminist line of thought that sees the incest taboo itself as a construct of, and that aims to uphold, white cis-heteropatriarchy. The adoption of these theoretical lines to think through La Familia grande must be nuanced, however. Kouchner, a woman married to a man with children does not visibly struggle with issues faced by queer and trans* communities. Further, if La Familia grande and Antigone converge around certain topics, it must be noted that Antigone does not deal with rape, an aspect that must not be forgotten. Nonetheless, through Antigone and Butler, the normative context of the creation of the incest taboo, and the place of silence and mourning can be retraced.

In Sophocles’ play, Creon's laws are multifaceted. He forbids the burial, effectively forbidding the mourning, of Polynices. Creon also forbids anyone from speaking against him, that is, from speaking against the state. The public space created around Creon, not unlike that of Sanary as seen through the quote above, is supposedly one of open communication as analysed by Timothy Gould (1995: 38); ‘the illocutionary force of advice must remain open, for that openness is part of how he [Creon] has defined and occupied the role of ruler’. Nonetheless, Creon proclaims, ‘him who rates a dear one higher than his native land, him I put nowhere’ (Lloyd-Jones and Sophocles, 1994: 21), that is, as Gould (1995: 38) sums up, Creon's ‘view of loyalty and language insures that sensible citizens will keep quiet’. Creon's edict is thus not limited to his forbidding of mourning where a non-grievable life rhymes, in a Butlerian sense, with a non-valuable life; it forbids any vocalisation of objections to his edict, building up an incontestable set of silencing structures. Creon's son nonetheless notes that one can ‘hear under cover’ the objections to Creon's edict that spread in whispers, revealing resistance to a silencing that is thus never complete (Lloyd-Jones and Sophocles, 1994: 67; Gould, 1995: 40−41).

As Creon's edict is multifaceted, Butler asks what deeds transgress it. A guard exclaims in relation to the burial of Polynices’ body, I did not do the deed, nor did I see who did,” as if to have seen it would have meant to have done it’: Butler shows that reporting about having seen the deed would stain the guard himself (2000: 7). Butler further analyses Antigone's own utterance, ‘I say that I did it and I do not deny it’ and argues that ‘her contestation takes the verbal form of a reassertion of sovereignty, refusing to dissociate the deed from her person’ (Lloyd-Jones and Sophocles, 1994: 43; Butler, 2000: 8). Thus, the elements of Antigone's utterance are each transgressive acts to be confessed: the deed and the refusal to be silent, that is, the refusal to deny the deed, are each transgressive. Further, Antigone is, not negligibly, born from an incestuous, that is, taboo, relationship and their gender, as noted by Butler (2000: 10) is ambiguous – ‘the disturbance of kinship appears to destabilize gender throughout the play’ – As such, Antigone's person itself becomes transgressive as Antigone refuses dissociation from these deeds.

Taboo is thus from Sophocles onwards, what cannot be enacted, seen, or voiced and what taints a person. As such, Victor says to Camille/Kouchner about the incestuous sexual violence he suffered at the hands of Duhamel and the secrecy to which he was sworn by him: ‘Respecte ce secret. Je lui ai promis, alors tu promets. Si tu parles, je meurs. J’ai trop honte’ (p. 105, my emphasis). Here, as in Antigone, the making explicit of the transgression of taboo is itself transgressive. Voicing taboo violence, such as incestuous rape risks the attraction of societal shame. What Kouchner might be read to highlight is that the societal-shame-inflected silencing adds to the violence of the incestuous rape itself. Kouchner (2021a) formulates this multifaceted silencing: she explicitly notes in interviews the ‘double violence’ that is caused by the ‘indifférence’ of the members of the familia grande, even when faced with the events of violence. To think of the violence perpetrated, instead of denouncing Antigone's transgressive acts, Tiresias remarks to Creon: ‘it is your will that has put this plague upon the city’ (Lloyd-Jones and Sophocles, 1994: 97). As such, rather than denouncing Antigone's or Camille/Kouchner's transgressive acts (‘Si tu parles, je meurs’), it is possible to, alongside Tiresias, denounce the cis-heteropatriarchal structures that bring such violence on – a violence that is multifaceted: it enmeshes forbidding and silencing.

The violence of the silencing of taboo acts might be drawn into parallel with the non-recognition of life. In an analysis of silencing and grief, Butler (2004a: 34) notes that the non-grievable life (where the recognition of a life is itself questioned) is marked by its omission from the conversation, as ‘the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed’, and ‘if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life […] It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable’. To return to the question of grief in La Familia grande, the book opens with the recollection of Évelyne's death and funeral. In La Familia grande, Évelyne, seemingly far from a conception of the ungrievable, is shown to be publicly grieved. Indeed, Kouchner describes that her funeral gathers an entire crowd, ‘une masse’ (p. 21). In Butler's conception of the primacy of relationality, loss and the grief that follows it offers the possibility of revealing collective ties. Butler (2004a: 23) writes, ‘it furnishes a sense of political community […] by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’. Butler's analysis of relationality brought to the fore in grief might be linked to their analysis of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Describing this non-conceptualisable relationality that is always-already present, Butler (2015: 58; 54, my emphasis) writes that the collective body of connections always-already formed is neither collapsible into a unitary whole, nor separable into discrete elements, as ‘we are not speaking of masses, but of passages, divisions, and proximities’. Thus, as Butler (2004a: 23) further elaborates, the moment of grief highlights the workings of relationality and of the inherent vulnerability linked to such connections, pointing towards the responsibility owed to others.

Against the conception of the mourning ritual which highlights the primacy of relationality, the funeral procession following Évelyne in La Familia grande forms an indecipherable ‘mass’ erasing all individual differences and excludes Camille and the collective of her siblings formed around her. Kouchner thus writes: ‘cette masse comme s’il n’y avait personne’ (p. 22). Évelyne is (re)articulated in the speeches of the members of this crowd; a eulogy attempts to summarise her: ‘Celle qui nous fait la leçon “dans l’espoir, dit-elle, de mieux comprendre” qui était notre mère débite un laïus égocentré et mal écrit’ (p. 24, my emphasis). Certain aspects of Évelyne are thus remembered, ‘Ma mère et la science politique, ma mère et la direction du livre, ma mère et son féminisme, ma mère et la liberté sexuelle …’ (p. 24). Nonetheless, this remembrance appears partial if not a thin veil covering a dis-membering. The flesh-less mass formed by the procession voices a eulogy in which ‘Tout est faux, sans aucun intérêt. Affadi, décharné’ (p. 24, my emphasis), leaving open the question as to whether Évelyne is truly ‘re-membered’ (Butler, 1999: 161). Indeed – echoing Butler's analysis Butler (2004a: 34) of discourse as inflicting violence – through the image of the eulogy qui décharne, one might recall Polynices’ body lying there ‘for birds and dogs to devour’ (Lloyd-Jones and Sophocles, 1994: 23). Such prewritten discourse that silences, forbids from remembering some aspects of Évelyne, including her proximity to the events of incestuous rape suffered by her children, is what Kouchner attempts to un-, or rewrite.

If Évelyne is dismembered in the burial ritual, then the crowd at the funeral itself appears divided. Camille/Kouchner and her siblings appear detached, ‘esseulés’ (p. 22) from the procession. Lacking a connection to the crowd, further estranged by the fragmentary, as Kouchner writes, ‘false’ (p. 24), recollection of Évelyne – literally in the case of the brother, Pablo, who ‘quitte les rangs’ (p. 24) – Évelyne and her siblings do not appear to have the possibility, the time or the space, to grieve. Kouchner writes: ‘j’assiste à cette cérémonie sans y participer’ (p. 23). Where Butler emphasises that grief reveals the primacy of relationality, in the case of Kouchner, an alienation from this relationality is cause and consequence of the non-possibility to grieve, bringing back her concerns about the right to grieve: ‘Et moi, est-ce que j’en ai le droit?’ Camille/Kouchner is separated from the body of her mother.

It must be noted that all such disconnections, including Kouchner's from her stepfather Olivier Duhamel, are painful. Kouchner (2021b) thus says on Quotidien, ‘je le trouve impardonnable, mais le voir, ça me brise le cœur’, testifying once again to the multifaceted situation. In Sanary, the space of the familia grande, violence and love appear to work together towards the implementation of silence. Her stepfather – who Kouchner (2021b) compares to the ‘personnage solaire’ of Maïwenn's Mon roi (2015), perhaps further playing on Sanary as a regime with a Roi Soleil reference – reinforces the prison-like ‘emprise’ in silence.¹⁰ Kouchner, upon being probed by François Busnel in her interview for La Grande librairie simultaneously raises and brushes aside the connection between paternal love and ‘emprise’ (Kouchner, 2021a). Nonetheless, Kouchner (2021b) voices elsewhere: ‘je l’aime’, she adds, ‘c’est ça qui est dure’, ‘c’est le propre de l’inceste’. This radiance or love reinforces the difficulty of speech. In the case of incestuous rape, somewhat modulating the analysis of Judith Herman (1981) for whom incestuous rape is a form of exploitation,¹¹ Butler notes that it is the child's love that is exploited (Kilby, 2010) – for Kouchner, this increases the complexity of the situation and difficulty of its denunciation. Love becomes a silencing factor in the face of testimony; Kouchner writes: ‘par sa tendresse et notre intimité, […] en moi, enracinait le silence’ (107). Butler (2004b: 155), in their analysis of the child's love, highlights the danger of love and desire as distracting from the consideration of the ‘parent-child incest as a violation’. Indeed, in the case of Kouchner, her descriptions of the family idyll threaten to overwhelm her testimony of violence. Amidst these concerns about the factor of love, Kouchner highlights the particularity of incestuous rape, and as such notes the importance of the change in the legal age of consent to 18 years (Kouchner, 2021b).

Whilst Duhamel's name does not appear in La Familia grande, his nickname, ‘Viouli’ does. ‘Viouli’, the verlan term derived from of ‘I love you’, takes over the text (p. 107). Echoing Butler's elaboration Butler (2004b: 150), in a Hegelian strand, of the ‘ontological primacy of relationality’, and of the particular case of love in the context of incestuous rape, the epithet-like nickname ‘Viouli’ encompasses an always-already loving relationship towards the beau-père, whether from Évelyne, or from Camille/Kouchner, as the name takes root in her narrative. Similarly, even after the mother's death, the patronym complicates the connection with her mother's body as Évelyne is not registered at the morgue under her birth name; Camille/Kouchner is told ‘Je n’ai pas de Mme Pisier’ (p. 17). Kouchner continues: ‘Ma sœur tente autre chose, son nom de femme mariée. Trouvée, notre mère égarée!’ (p. 17). The patronym takes over the narrative, not unlike the ‘laïus’ of the eulogy at Évelyne's funeral – it might be noted that ‘laïus’ is a French word anecdotally linked to the patriarch's name, King Laius, who cast his child aside.¹² It is from this silencing patriarchal narrative – silencing incestuous rape and the person of Évelyne – and the disconnections in which it results, that Kouchner attempts to escape. To return to Butler's analysis in Antigone's Claim, Antigone opens the route to ‘a new field of the human’ through transgressive acts, or what Butler calls ‘political catachresis’ (p. 82). It is through such acts that Antigone displaces a framework of prohibitions. It must also be noted that whilst the sibling relationship of Camille/Kouchner and Victor might not appear to be at the centre of La Familia grande, the familial relationship of Antigone and Polynices remains the starting point of Antigone. Speaking for, or in the place of another, the brother is a further way in which Antigone is of relevance to La Familia grande, I touch on this question in the second part of the piece.

Motherhood, love, and the work of Évelyne Pisier

Évelyne and the mourning of Évelyne are central strands of La Familia grande's narrative. I argue that beyond the recalling of her person, her theoretical work might serve to think through Kouchner's strategies of remembrance. This line of thought will further help to highlight the tensions between Évelyne Pisier's feminism, her position as a mother, her own contribution to the propagation of violence by not speaking up at the time of the series of incestuous rapes, and her own place as a victim of Duhamel. Following on from the paradoxical position that love holds in the case of incestuous rape outlined above, I turn to a delineation of motherhood as related to Pisier and Kouchner, as well as the latter's reclamation of love towards her mother. Numerous are the instances in Pisier's work that narrate mother-daughter relationships, a topic that frames La Familia grande. Kouchner gives voice to the complex figure of her mother. Indeed, as studies of motherhood highlight, the idea of the mother as the epitome of perfect care and the denunciation of any failure to live up to such an ideal are themselves harmful normative constructs.¹³ Camille/Kouchner recounts Évelyne in La Familia grande, in interviews and to her children. She notes that her children had to understand the complex figure of Évelyne: ‘il fallait qu’ils [Kouchner's children] arrivent à comprendre Dr Jekyll et Mister Hyde’ (Kouchner, 2021b). The depiction of Évelyne's complexity includes the retelling of her lack of reaction in the face of the incestuous rape endured by her son. Thus, the resistance to a pre-written idea of Évelyne as voiced in her eulogy is intertwined with a testimony to violence.

Whilst staying away from an apology for Pisier's lack of action in the face of incestuous rape, I turn to Pisier's literary, filmic and academic works to supplement my reading of Kouchner's book. Kouchner's Spanish title ‘La Familia grande’ pre-empts a textual body on the line between linguistic boundaries, eluding the Francophone space. Kouchner thus queries the primacy of normative, nation-bound language. Such a relationship to a fixed space and language might echo her family's background, as retold notably in Évelyne Pisier's La dernière fois (1994), a semi-autobiographical book that talks about the family travels from Cuba to France. Pisier's La dernière fois indeed retells four young people's journey to Cuba. Kouchner, in La Familia grande, mentions reading the book at the age of seventeen, when it was published: ‘Enfin je lis le voyage fondateur’ (p. 41).¹⁴ La dernière fois retells the story of characters Marie, Charlotte, Pierre and Lucas, read alongside Kouchner's notes, it is the story of Évelyne and her sister Marie-France as well as a couple ‘amis niçois, Jean-Pierre, Una, etc.’ (p. 41). The book is also a recollection of Évelyne's meeting with Bernard, Kouchner's father; on the journey, they encounter French students, the Union des étudiants communistes: ‘Leur chef deviendra mon père’, writes Kouchner (p. 41).

The novel thus offers an insight into the lives of characters Marie and Charlotte as well as Pierre and Lucas. A coming-of-age of sorts, it outlines the shifts in the character's political views and personal relationships along a journey to Cuba. From the first page, and indeed the first line of the novel, homosexuality is a central topic: ‘Pierre était pédéraste’, and it continues: ‘Avant de rencontrer Pierre, Charlotte et Marie défendaient déjà les pédérastes. Elles défendaient aussi les fous et le femmes, le Juifs et le Noirs, tous ceux qu’il était convenu de défendre’ (Pisier, 1994: 11). Progressively, along the story, such ‘agreed upon’ defense of minorities, especially of gays, becomes a strong belief.¹⁵ Importantly, the novel also touches on the death of Marie's mother, which stands in complex relation to childhood: ‘Marie dirait qu’il reste de l’enfance jusqu’à la mort de sa mère. Ce n’est qu’après, juste après, que l’enfance finit’ (1994: 37). The relationship between childhood and the death of the mother is a topic which chimes with Camille/Kouchner's topics of interest – a detachment from the childhood place of trauma seems to be made possible in this moment, as I touch on below.¹⁶

Pisier's later explicitly autobiographical work, Et soudain, la liberté (2017), co-written with Caroline Laurent, is originally conceived as the story of Paula Caucanas, Pisier's mother. Évelyne Pisier voices in Et soudain, la liberté:

Il faudrait tout raconter.

Retracer le destin d’une épouse, d’une mère, d’une femme devenue libre’ (Pisier and Laurent, 2017: 19)

Évelyne Pisier's words highlight the centrality of Paula Caucanas. The narrator, Laurent, however, questions the accuracy of Évelyne Pisier's claims, she writes: ‘Ce prologue n’est plus d’actualité. Par la force des choses, Évelyne a pris la place de sa mère. Elle est devenue le sujet du livre, son point de départ et son horizon’ Pisier (2017: 19). Et soudain, la liberté bears criticism for parts of the work done by Laurent, whom, according to Pisier's son is responsible for idealising the Évelyne Pisier-Olivier Duhamel couple – the book incidentally ends on a note of gratitude dedicated to ‘Olivier’ Pisier (2017: 368). Published after the estrangement of Évelyne and her sister Marie-France, precisely because of the former's lack of action in the face of the revelation of the acts of incestuous rape, the book omits a discussion of Évelyne and her sister's previously close bond – conversely mirrored in the Marie-Charlotte relationship of La dernière fois. These aspects of Et soudain, la liberté were, for Évelyne Pisier's and Bernard Kouchner's oldest son Julien, ‘une nouvelle manière de nous piétiner …’ (Vincelot, 2021).

The topics of motherhood, as well as those of scandal and taboo, are central to Évelyne Pisier's later TV-film Vital Désir Pisier (2010) – one which appears to be strongly autobiographically inflected. The TV film depicts a difficult mother-daughter relationship, as the mother, Simone admits after years of secrecy to having taken a dangerous medication whilst pregnant – named Distilbène in France, although the name does not appear in the film −¹⁷ causing her daughter's quasi-infertility. Mother of twins, Florence (echoing the floral Camille?) and Hugo, the protagonist Simone is played by Bulle Ogier,¹⁸ whose physical traits, her above-shoulder blond hair, for instance, are not unlike those of Pisier. The first name Simone further echoes de Beauvoir, as Évelyne is named in La Familia grande. The mother's acts are shown as having a cross-generational impact. The 14-year-old grand-daughter voices, ‘moi aussi je peux être stérile […] la troisième génération aussi est touchée’; this might draw to mind the impact of in- family violence as voiced by Kouchner (2021b) in Quotidien, ‘ça va jusqu’aux petits enfants’. Vital désir also raises the ‘répercutions sur les proches’, not unlike Kouchner's revealing Kouchner (2021a) of the status of a ‘victime collatérale’.

Vital désir unveils aspects of the mother-daughter relationship that Kouchner and Évelyne Pisier have. This follows a conversation on La Grande librairie: Kouchner and Busnel highlight the possibility of reading Pisier's 2005 novel Une question d’âge as unveiling the incestuous rape committed on Kouchner's brother. Like Une question d’âge, in its arguably autobiographical moments of the mother-daughter relationship, Vital désir might be read as a fictional work marked by Évelyne Pisier's perspective on the incestuous sexual violence and abuse. The mother explains her silence: ‘Je voulais te protéger d’un souci. Je ne te souhaite pas, un jour, d’être dans ma situation’. Thus, she asks for the consideration of her own side: ‘Est-ce que tu te rends compte à quel point tu es injuste?’ In Vital désir, the medication referred to, whilst not only causing cross-generational infertility, but is also depicted to be the cause of disabilities in children, and cancer in mothers. Against this backdrop, the character of Simone is depicted with a degree of moral ambiguity, at once arguably at fault for her daughter's quasi-infertility, but also for medical negligence herself. Vital désir shows the harmfulness of blinkered views, and the necessity to recognise the complexity of mothering in which harm caused might be intertwined with a form of care.

Vital désir is closely connected to Pisier's political-philosophical thought. She highlights in an interview that her initially planned topic was surrogacy, with a view to gay rights. Unable to create a film about surrogacy, she turned to the scandal of the drug Distilbène.¹⁹ Surrogacy is touched upon in the film, a short scene criticises France's anti-surrogacy stance that drives those in search of alternative child-bearing methods to countries such as Belgium. Following a process of immersion, including her inscription to the Réseau DES – short for Distilbène – she makes the film with the aim of lifting the taboo around the drug:

Nous n’avons pas voulu faire un film manichéen, caricatural. Ce n’est pas un acte d’accusation, mais une volonté de lever un tabou sur le DES. On sait bien que comme pour la Thalidomide, comme pour l’hormone de croissance, tout le monde n’est pas coupable. Et les coupables ne le sont pas tous au même degré (Pisier, 2010).

Importantly, Pisier claims that she had no intention of reinforcing a normative stance around the desire for child bearing – a statement that could apply to both her original and developed film ideas; ‘Je ne voudrais pas non plus qu’il y ait un malentendu sur l’expression “vital désir”’ (Pisier, 2010).

Pisier (2000: 67) notably takes on an anti-Parité and pro-PaCS (pacte civil de solidarité) stance as she denounces a feminism that anchors women in their gender. As the PaCS entailed the danger of the opening up of parenthood to homosexual couples, it stood against the Parité debate's focus on the gender binary (Fassin, 2001a: 217−218). Since the 1999 approval of the PaCS and the 2013 legalisation of same-sex marriage, the stance on the heteronormative family structure still appears not to have budged. Évelyne Pisier's TV-film Vital désir raises the issue of reproductive technologies still only partially legal in France. The eventual acceptance of the ‘PMA pour toutes’ in September 2021, the ‘Procréation Médicalement Assistée’ is finally available in France for single women and lesbian couples. It does, however, remain exclusionary as trans women still do not have access to PMA in France. If Pisier's TV film was especially relevant leading up to September 2021, it still is as some women still travel abroad for the PMA. Pisier thus takes on an anti-Parité and pro-PaCS stance. She notably stands in disagreement with Sylviane Agacinski whose stance against same-sex parenthood Judith Butler also criticises (in Undoing Gender, 2004b: 118−120). Indeed, the PaCS entailed the danger of the opening up of parenthood to homosexual couples. Same-sex couples’ possibility for parenthood might have, however, destabilised the arguments on the basis of the Parité debate's focus on the gender binary. As such, pro-Parité stances were accompanied by arguments against the PaCS (Fassin, 2001a: 217−218).²⁰

For Pisier, self-expression becomes possible from a position of difference – a feminist conception of solidarity shared by Pisier's Belgian colleague Françoise Collin −²¹ offering a space of solidarity, a meeting place for the mother and daughter. For Pisier (2000: 66), the annihilation of differences between women, an anchoring of women in their gender identity, characteristic of pro-Parité feminists, ‘renforce le permanent chantage masculin à leur altérité’. Pisier denounces a unitary conception of women as an exemplification of an eternal irony, she gestures towards Irigaray's reclamation of the label given to Antigone by Hegel, that is the ‘eternal irony of the community’ (Irigaray, 1979: 266). She writes: ‘Éternelle ironie de la communauté et de l’Histoire, voici les femmes sous surveillance. Les voici à nouveau privées du droit à l’erreur et, pourquoi pas, du droit à la méchanceté?’ (Pisier, 2000: 67, my emphasis). In a similar vein, according to her friend Rosa Braidotti, Collin ‘aimed at the reconstruction of a common world based on respecting the irreducible plurality of every single individual’ (Braidotti, 2014: 618). Kouchner's testimony of Pisier, a testimony that accept contradictions and imperfections chimes with Pisier and Collin's work. As Braidotti (2014: 613) analyses Collin's novel Le rendez-vous, which retells the encounter of a mother and her daughter on the mother's deathbed, ‘Collin is relentless in accounting for the shortcomings’ of the mother figure.

Kouchner bears witness to a complex figure and thus, as Collin does according to Braidotti (2014: 613), she ‘expresses her respect and, ultimately, her compassion’. Indeed, on the ‘road’ that is writing, she says to have gained a renewed understanding of her mother's situation: ‘elle aussi, peut-être, elle était sous emprise’. This allows for a loving return, a way back to the mother; ‘ce livre, il m’a permis d’être en colère contre elle et de l’aimer immensément’ (Kouchner, 2021a). Kouchner faces her mother, Évelyne, with love in her letter addressed ‘Maman chérie, Ma mamouchka’ (p. 201) at the close of La Familia grande. It is a love that remains critical however and that retains an awareness of the pain that love can cause (as Kouchner voices in relation to her love for Duhamel). Pisier herself already voices this in La dernière fois; she notes about the naivety of young Marie and Charlotte: ‘Elles ne savaient pas encore que l’on peut aimer si mal’ Pisier (1994: 27) – her awareness remains in tension with her actions.

The process of naming and renaming is key in La Familia grande.²² Kouchner recalls voicing at her mother's funeral, ‘Ma maman m’appelait “mon Camillou.” Qui m’appellera “mon Camillou,” maintenant?’ (p. 23). Transposing the affectionate diminutive of Camillou, Kouchner renames her mother to step towards her: ‘Ma mamouchka’ (p. 201). This stands in contrast with Évelyne's dissociation from the label ‘mother’ as Kouchner recalls, ‘Quand j’étais petite, ma mère m’incitait à l’appeler par son prénom: Évelyne’ (p. 26). Such a process of renaming echoes Kouchner's stance previously clarified in La Familia grande: ‘Maman, je suis en désaccord avec ta vie de femme. Tu ne devrais pas rester avec cet homme. Mais tu es ma mère et ça, je veux le garder’ (p. 195). Importantly, in context, the name ‘mother’, ‘mère’ is displaced from its idealised position and reconfigured with its paradoxes and imperfections. This nickname, – itself a translinguistic Gallicised version of the Russian ‘Mamushka’ – with its affectionate diminutive bears a childlike ring to it. Kouchner, retells Évelyne's reconnection to her mother upon her mother's, Paula's, death. Évelyne, locked away in mourning reconnects momentarily with her daughter: ‘Je me suis approchée et elle s’est effondrée. […] Toujours je me souviendrai de sa petite voix qui répétait: “Ma maman, ma maman …”’ (p. 100). The mother, Évelyne, upon her mother's, Paula's death, appears in a child-like position of vulnerability. And Camille/Kouchner appears in a similar position in this latter instance too.

For Butler (2004a: 44), grief reveals the primacy of relationality, and so does the vulnerability of an infant. If Kouchner testifies in the moment of loss, then she also testifies as a mother, from a position of care owed to the vulnerable, the children. Indeed, she describes her meeting her first child, her stepson as an awakening, a ‘réveil’: ‘Mon beau-fils Orso, dont la présence m’a réveillée’ (p. 137). She sums up her line of thought in La Grande librairie: ‘il a besoin qu’on le protège, […] les adultes doivent protéger les enfants’ (Kouchner, 2021a). In La Familia grande, Kouchner highlights the danger that her stepson might be in and it is the vulnerability of Orso that leads Camille/Kouchner to the conclusion: ‘Il fallait parler’ (p. 137). The recognition of vulnerability unveils previously endured violence. ‘J’ai pris la mesure de ce qui était arrivé à mon frère, voilà, c’est plutôt ça, le réveil’: thus clarifies Kouchner (2021a) her use of the word ‘réveil’ in La Grande librairie. This ‘réveil’ thus carries the recognition of vulnerability in relationality, as ‘we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them’, in Butler's words (2004a: 24).

However, the question of testimonial dispossession and mediation remains controversial. If Kouchner might be criticised for giving a second-hand account in the place of her brother – especially if one remains critical of Kouchner's veneration by the French press – it must be noted that Kouchner seems to aim to express her own story; she does not, in contrast notably with Caroline Laurent, claim to write the biography of Victor. She explicitly stands against the advice of a therapist, as she recounts: ‘On a déjà violé la parole de votre frère une fois. Vous ne pouvez pas, en parlant à sa place, le faire une deuxième foi. […]” Je restais muette, terrée’ (p. 234). In La Familia grande, against interchangeability, a sameness, a boundless blurring of positions, whether between twins or between mother and daughter, Kouchner distances herself and voices herself. As Kouchner (2021a) says in La Grande librairie, ‘ce livre m’a permis de dire “je,” et pas “on”’. Kouchner draws out the specificity of twinhood in her interview for La Grande librairie: ‘cette gémellité a fait que pendant très longtemps on était qu’une seul personne’. Writing necessitates and produces a dismembering of this unity: ‘quand moi j’ai exprimé le besoin […] d’écrire, je me suis un peu séparée de lui, puisque lui c’était pas son souhait’ (Kouchner, 2021a). If silence is anchored in a child-position, as Kouchner writes, ‘Mon silence est le fruit des croyances de l’enfant que j’étais’, this disconnection also appears as a disconnection from childhood (p. 202). This stands in contrast with Camille/Kouchner's initial immobility, as she recounts: ‘1995. J’ai 20 ans. Colin part vivre au Texas, Victor à Madrid. Je reste à Paris. Paralysée’ (p. 119). The burial of Évelyne brings a physical departure from this space, Kouchner writes: ‘Cette fois, pour toujours, quitter la propriété’ (p. 20). For Kouchner's testimony, a distancing from Évelyne's non-action in the face of violence is necessary. The burial of the mother thus also makes possible a final disconnection from the childhood space, Sanary. Further, Camille/Kouchner seems to claim that this moment also allowed her to distance herself from her brother: ‘jusqu’à ta mort, maman, Victor et moi ne formions qu’un. Je ne ressentais aucune altérité. […] Son désir et le mien entremêlés, indissociables inextricables, et pourtant au fond, déjà, différents’ (p. 202). It is from this position that Camille/Kouchner voices a solidarity in her own position as ‘victime’; ‘moi aussi j’ai été agressée. […] Mon beau-père a fait de moi sa prisonnière. Je suis aussi l’une de ses victimes’ (pp. 202–203). This solidarity does not come from a sameness, rather, it ‘relève d’un choix politique’ (Pisier, 2000: 65).²³

‘L’écriture pour moi c’est un chemin’ (Kouchner, 2021a). A road of return to the mother, to the other, to oneself, including, in Kouchner's words to ‘la petite fille gaie que j’étais’, offering a reconsideration of the search for ‘mots d’adultes’ as one that does not disavow the childhood past (Kouchner, 2021a) – ‘j’arrive aujourd’hui à accepter de rencontrer de nouveau la petite fille gai que j’étais’, says Kouchner in an interview (2021a). The reading of related texts and the study of particular instances of La Familia grande clarifies the book as a complex testimony, to violence but also to love and relationality. If ‘l’écriture est un chemin’, for Kouchner, it is a road that connects, beyond extra- and intra-diegetic boundaries. In Kouchner's words (2021a), ‘il y a un espoir […] c’est un chemin où il y a aussi de très belles choses’. The ‘path of writing’ bridges the intra- and extra-diegetic divide for the unveiling of an original relationality and the opening up of speech to see the unfurling of a multitude of testimonies. In a feminist and queer act of resistance to the perpetuation of violence, Kouchner exemplifies such possibility for reconnection and solidarity through her return to her mother – this does not mean an uncritical return, but rather a careful return to her, with an awareness of one's shortcomings, and posing resistance to the blinding aspects of love.

‘Les gens qui m’écrivent, ils sont seuls’, says Kouchner, about letters she receives, and thus a caring, if imperfectly so, relationality and solidarity are necessary, ‘la parole ne suffit pas, ensuite il faut accompagner tout le monde’ (Kouchner, 2021b). And indeed, with regards to the need for the recognition of vulnerability, highlighted by Butler – and similarly by others in conversation with Kouchner – one might wonder whether a theorisation of the sort might be enough.²⁴ Thinking of the notion of ‘réveil’ in the context of a societal ‘waking up’ to the pervasiveness of incestuous rape, sexual violence in broader terms, and intra-familial violence, we might wonder about testimony's societal impact. Since the upheaval around the publication of La Familia grande in January 2022, the presence of Camille Kouchner in the press has decreased considerably. For instance, in 2022, her name was only brought up twice in the context of incestuous rape in Le Monde.²⁵ Nonetheless, discussions continue, Hélène Merlin-Kajman's study of Springora's reclamation of literature²⁶ (Merlin-Kajman, 2020) and Lisi Cori's outline of Le Consentement's and its impact on Gabriel Matzneff (Cori, 2021) allow for a sharp focus on literature offering testimony of sexual violence. If quantitatively speaking, the media-based conversation around the book might have declined, close (re)readings of La Familia grande and its surrounding texts might still allow us to continue to engage with the complexity of the topics of love, grief and violence at its heart.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Orsolya Katalin Petocz

Notes

Author biography

Orsolya Katalin Petocz is a PhD student in the Italian Department of the University of Cambridge. Petocz explores possibilities of queer testimony between the invisibility and the (hyper)visibility of marginalised (queer) experiences in literature, visual art and film. Petocz pushes towards an analysis of contemporary resurfacing of memory between Italian and Francophone works. She focuses primarily on the testimonies of ‘queer’ survivors of World War II and ties this research in with a study of the contexts in which these testimonies emerge, including early texts of queer and trans theories.

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Love,grief and violence – A study of Camille Kouchner's La Familia grande (2021)

Abstract

Keywords

Silence and Grief from Antigone to La Familia grande

Motherhood, love, and the work of Évelyne Pisier

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References