Ambivalence as agency in Camille Reynaud’s Et par endroits ça fait des nœuds (2021)

Abstract

This article examines ambivalence and agency in contemporary life writing through focusing on an autopathography which highlights these features of self-narrative in original ways while also holding them in unusual tension. Camille Reynaud’s first publication, Et par endroits ça fait des nœuds (2021), addresses the abrupt loss of selfhood resulting from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm she experienced four years prior to publication. It draws the reader not only into a clinical reconstruction of trauma and treatment but also into the warp and weft of Reynaud’s ongoing, uneven attempt to re-establish agency and a stable sense of self. This article examines how the text, and the emerging sense of selfhood that it helps to produce, are shaped by medical imperatives, by voracious intertextual interlacing, and by the ways in which the author thinks with photography. It also asks how the premise of her book inflects important questions in life writing such as the tension between self-knowledge and self-invention, and the ways in which the self is socially constructed, understood, and talked about. Finally, it argues that Et par endroits ça fait des nœuds offers a newly ambivalent approach to life-writing’s emphasis on the body, embodiment, and corporeal experience through its focus on the body’s secret life and on the brain as locus of the self. The argument is underpinned with reference to the phenomenology of illness as theorized by Havi Carel, and Catherine Malabou’s ideas of post-traumatic subjectivity.

Keywords

• self-narrative
• autofiction
• autopathology
• Camille Reynaud
• brain
• photography