Titre : Scars
Auteur : David Le Breton
Editions : Métailié
Release date: September 13, 2024
Genre : Essay
David Le Breton, a sociologist by profession, is interested in scars, as the title of the book clearly indicates. What are they exactly? What traces do these bits of skin and flesh reveal about ourselves? What can we say about them? By evoking all sorts of scratches, cuts and blisters, the author returns to various ways of understanding these marks that form our body, which sometimes also deform it.
The book is divided into short chapters, themselves divided into sub-sections, where Le Breton will give pride of place to many examples and literary and cinematographic extracts where scars are exposed, analyzing the different bodily marks that make us up. To begin, it begins with a somewhat disconcerting theoretical prologue, because it is very conceptual, almost disconnected from the body.
David Le Breton is therefore a mixture of concepts and excerpts/interviews. The theoretical references are often self-directed towards his own bibliography, since he has written more than ten books. Nevertheless, his name often appears in parentheses, he likes to self-mention. On the other hand, the world-famous scar on Harry Potter’s forehead is only cited in a footnote, perhaps not “noble” enough, too “popular” to be in the body of the text. The excerpts are diverse and varied, very often masculine however, at first glance and sometimes causing confusion by their eclecticism.
Generally speaking, if the reflection is interesting, Scars. Existence in the skin would have benefited from being tightened up (250 pages all the same), synthesized. There are many repetitions. In the part of the book on Gina Pane, we can read the same sentences, a few pages apart, word for word: “a sensitivity redoubled by the fact that she is a woman, that her skin is cut and that blood flows”. The Breton is nevertheless an expert in synonyms, and it is not so much the words that purr as the ideas. He likes to repeat the same thing but differently, and this, over several paragraphs, which is perhaps seen as admirable, from a certain point of view.
This is not a pleasant book to read, you have to read it several times. Perhaps images would make it easier to digest? However, what Le Breton says about our ways of managing our skin, of projecting our imaginations onto it, of doing violence to ourselves, accidentally or voluntarily, by creating new identities, is worth a look. But the excess of information makes everything flow, and nothing really sticks in your head. Some passages may also be a bit hair-raising, even if he always tries to complicate the analysis, when he talks about “the” woman, or breasts as an object of seduction “since always” that “the” woman uses, in one way or another, opposing “the” woman to other women, those who wear the burqa for example.
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