r.’s Reviews > White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics > Status Update

Writing is an extraordinary violence, of which I am very conscious. I don’t write novels, I write what I call fictions, I transpose, I transfigure from the living, I nourish myself on the flesh and blood of those around me. I always say: I’m a “carnivore of souls”, which is, for me, an ineluctable tragedy.

Being an author for the theatre is a fascinating experience,
but pretty painful. I’m not even ashamed to say it — I think at the beginning of these
experiences I was a bit embarrassed because I didn’t recognize myself. Personally
I find that it un-structures me, my self, my very being; it splits me apart in a very
violent manner.

To write poetically is to come close to others precisely where they are the most alive, most mortal, closest to death. For me, a text has no urgency unless it is agonizing. Unless it rips open the heart. Unless it pushes us beyond ourselves. These days pain is elsewhere. We should feel it as our own, even if it’s not French.

To write poetically is to come close to others precisely where they are the most
alive, most mortal, closest to death.
For me, a text has no urgency unless it is agonizing. Unless it rips open the
heart. Unless it pushes us beyond ourselves. These days pain is elsewhere. We should feel it as our own, even if it’s not French.

For me, writing is the breath, the respiration, it is a necessity as imperious as the need to wake up, to touch, to eat, to kiss, to progress. When I do not write, it is as if I had died.

I do not seek to “know” myself full-on. Who am I, she whom I think I am because I would like to be this one that one? I am dressed in qualifiers that you will rightly connect to me. Or she whom I would like you to think I am? I “am” also the sum of the ghosts that bear my name in the fantasies of people near or far. We are imagined imaginers.

The process of literature doesn’t make one happy, it suspends death — as long as it manifests itself. This is what Blanchot calls the “arrêt de mort”. It stops death with life. Similarly, when you’re dreaming, all pain is suspended. It’s waiting for you. Similarly, when you wake up from literature, the pain is waiting for you.

The process of literature doesn’t make one
happy, it suspends death — as long as it manifests itself. This is what Blanchot
calls the “arrêt de mort”. It stops death with life. Similarly, when you’re dreaming, all pain is suspended. It’s waiting for you. Similarly, when you wake up from literature, the pain is waiting for you.