Chloé Delaume

La règle du Je

The I Rule

March 1, 2010
Essay
96 pages
120 × 190 mm
14 €
9782130574255
978-2-1305-7425-5
																Chloé Delaume, La règle du Je
																Chloé Delaume, La règle du Je

Chloé Delaume, one of the most important novelists of the young generation, decides to take the bull by the horns. Debates about autofiction have continued to reduce the practice to that of a literary form of narcissism. It is true that many established practitioners of autofiction indulge in it. However, it is enough to consider again the history of literature to note that it is confused with autofiction: from Madeleine de Scudéry to Boris Vian, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jean-Jacques Schuhl, from Arthur Rimbaud to Pierre Guyotat, literature has always been an invention of the self. That this Self has nothing to do with the author’s own person is what makes autofiction so paradoxical, and so ironic. Far from being only the mirror of tiny egos, autofiction—or rather, as Chloé Delaume prefers to say, “self-realism”, or “psychofiction”—is a way of refusing the compartmentalizations that critics, the University or a certain good taste like to introduce between author, narrator, character and reader. In this sense, autofiction represents first of all the political dimension of all literature: in it is played a new way of organizing these partitions—a subversive way, from which no “I” comes out unscathed. In the course of her investigation in the direction of the new “I” invented by autofiction, Chloé Delaume dialogues with the greatest authors, the greatest critics and the greatest philosophers of the moment: where one will discover that no one can say he is absolved of the self-realist sin.

The author

Chloé Delaume was born in 1973. She has been writing in many forms and media since the late 1990s. She has written nearly thirty books as if they were experiments: novels, poetic fragments, plays, essays, self-fiction. She is fond of hybrid objects and the mixing of genres: a novel illustrated by a video game (Corpus Simsi), the hijacking of a board game (Certainement pas), fan fiction in which you are the hero (La nuit je suis Buffy Summers). But also diary of a home performance (J’habite dans la télévision), dystopia (Les sorcières de la République). If her first novel, Les mouflettes d’Atropos, was tinged with radical feminism, she later focused on the issue of sisterhood by publishing Mes bien chères sœurs and the collective work Sororité.
Winner of the Prix Décembre 2001 for Le cri du sablier, she was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2010-2011 and won the Prix Médicis 2020 with Le cœur synthétique.

March 1, 2010
Essay
96 pages
120 × 190 mm
14 €
9782130574255
978-2-1305-7425-5