Constance Debré
Tuesday, March 25
Doors: 7pm
Event: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
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Semiotext(e) and the Poetic Research Bureau present a reading and conversation with Constance Debré, on the occcasion of the release of Name, the third novel in her acclaimed trilogy.
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Name is a searing disavowal of identity and inheritance:
I have a political agenda. I am in favor of the elimination of inheritance, the requirement that ancestors sustain their descendants, I am for the elimination of parental authority, I am for the abolition of marriage, I am in favor of children getting some distance from their parents at as young an age as possible, I am for the abolition of filiation, and for the abolition of the family name, I am against guardianship, minority, I am against patrimony, I am against having a domicile, a nationality … I am for eliminating the family, I am in favor of eliminating childhood as well, if we can.
The third novel in Constance Debré's trilogy, it is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.
Set partly in the narrator's childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past. Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I'm not holding onto the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré's radical project.
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This event is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.