Literary queerness. “I must admit that at one point I got tired of theory […]. » By opening The great emotional conspiracyRomain Noël’s first novel, we say to ourselves that it starts well: the incipit promises with this admission the very failure of his project. But what is In search of lost time if not the long procrastination of little Marcel who waits for mother’s evening kiss and who becomes in the space of thousands of pages and over the years the mature writer having transmuted all his affects into art? The Proustian narrator will only begin to write the novel he aims to write at the end of the novel we have just read. Here, Romain Noël’s alter ego who says “I” will never stop, while challenging the theory, theorizing about the incapacity of the theory to succeed in totalizing life. Forgetting the intellectual heritage which by the weight of its history crushes, or the avant-gardes which by their radicalism dry up, letting go of all these identities which restrict our desires… this is the vast program to which Romain Noël has set himself. The absence of a romantic plot in no way prevents a reading pleasure that even resembles a form of suspense, as we are caught up in the maze of its construction. And to grope forward and discover with delight the singular form of this “theoretical thriller”. Mixing autofiction, critical thinking, a sort of quest for the Grail and “queer ecology”, with note references and tree structures to infinitythis unidentified literary object has its place near The house of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski in the Unclassifiable Library. Written in the first person, it invites us to share with the narrator his encounters with real characters, here a contemporary artist, there a Luciferian black block, encountered at an opening or at a café, and metacharacters, heroes of unfinished fictions, in simply become bookish…
At the beginning a young man finishes his dissertation on animal suffering. Concomitantly, he saw the “intimate catastrophe” of separation from “the love of [s]for life.” From one suffering to another? Or solidarity with the animal in our capacity, as humans, to feel and, therefore, to suffer? Welcome to the “pathocene”the era of the return of feelings, even sentimentality, of the mystique of love! Affect theory, “BDSM Apocalypse”, “transpassion”… Concepts and references to Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault or Donna Haraway abound but should not frighten. Ideas somatize into embodied adventures and concatenation of tears. “If thought is, as I believe, an adventure, you have to put your body into it. » Fiction will save us from nihilism. To touch the bottomless bottom is to understand that the nothingness into which we sink is no longer the dark night of despair, but the possibility of welcome where sublimation through suffering is revealed. There is no love, there are only trials, which are still love.
Roman Christmas
The great emotional conspiracy. A theoretical thriller
Threshold
Edition: 2,200 copies.
Price: €22; 336 pp.
ISBN: 9782021567427
