‘Ramasser ses mots parmi les détritus‘ : l‘écriture de l‘abjection dans Za de Raharimanana et La vie de Joséphin le fou d‘Ananda Devi

Abstract

Starting from the observation that abjection in literature produces a specific kind of vertigo in the reader, this article focuses on the way in which this type of writing possesses, in the Indo-Oceanic novels La Vie de Joséphin le fou by Ananda Devi (2003) and Za by Raharimanana (2008), the formidable capacity to question the norms and limits that found what can be called, alongside Julia Kristeva, “the social and symbolic order”. In other words, it is a matter of exploring the power of abjection that makes it possible for the story to go beyond mere socio-political satire and the jubilation of the obscene, to the benefit of more ambivalent, shifting and disturbing representations that reach into the very foundations of our humanity. We will thus seek to go beyond the stupefaction into which the violence of the writing dives, in order to consider the ways in which the abject, and the processes of rotting and swarming emerge as fertile ground for a counter-power, on both the ethical and the aesthetic levels. Because these abject shallows are also the site of a proliferating, multi-faceted anarchic life form, the speech that emerges from them, and claims to be their own, can indeed be understood as a pocket of resistance to the threat of the tyranny of the One, of the void and of the petrification that characterize postcolonial power.