“I have never been interested in psychoanalysis, as you know,” Annie Ernaux said in an interview with Laure Adler for the program “L’heure bleue” on Radio France Inter. Ernaux has made the same remarks several times, expressing the distance she maintains from psychoanalysis. These words were qualified by the addition of “but perhaps because I don’t need psychoanalysis and so far I don’t feel I need it.”¹

In another interview with Raphaëlle Rérolle, Ernaux talks about her writing: “I write about things that have been affecting me for a long time, themes, questions, pains that psychoanalysis would call unsurpassable (indépassables), whether it be the death of a father, a mother, an abortion, a feeling of shame…These things are buried and I try to bring them to light, but in a way that is not only personal. It’s about getting out of myself, looking at these things and objectifying them.”² Ernaux writes about things that are unsurpassable, about what Lacan called the real, the impossible to reach.

An author surely precedes an analyst as one might say, the search for the real that Ernaux applies so well in her writing is typical of the cut on a signifier in an analysis. This is what appears in what she describes as “a writing where there is neither commiseration nor lyricism, but simply the will to keep as close as possible to things, to the real. In terms of emotion, the more concise one is, the more the words become like things, like stones placed next to each other. At that point, one is no longer just reading a book, but it becomes something real that touches you in your own life” ³

It’s clearly the precedence of literature over psychoanalysis that is at issue here, which evokes a sentence by Lacan: “the only advantage that a psychoanalyst has the right to take from his position […] is to remind himself with Freud that in his field, the artist always precedes him, and that he does not therefore have to act as a psychologist where the artist paves the way for him.”⁴ This indication is given to analysts so as to orient themselves based on the way artists apprehend the real. Ernaux’s writing teaches us of the practice of the letter, a practice of what she so rightly calls a “writing with a knife” (une écriture au couteau) in search of bits of the real.

“I’m definitely in a position of a transfuge with regard to language. I lived in a world where we spoke a lot of French patois, and then there was the French at school, the literature in which I immersed myself with ease I must say and also with pleasure. And so to write for me is obviously to use the literary language and not the French patois of my parents but at the same time it’s to know that this language is basically arbitrary […] and there is this real of my childhood which was said with other words or with no words at all. It’s certainly in this interstice that I place myself when I write.”⁵  This is how, in her writing, Ernaux situates herself in the interstice between the French patois and the literary language searching for the real of her childhood, just like in analysis when one stands in the gap between lalangue and the common language.

“To write is to search for the real because the real is not immediately given. It’s a political act,”⁶ she states firmly, but is this not, surprisingly, what Jacques Lacan hoped the analytical act would be?

As a transfuge, Annie Ernaux draws us into her quest for the real which makes her, like all artists, a heraldess of the discontent in civilisation. As one reads her writings, one can’t help but be reminded that, as speaking beings, we are exiled from language and therefore, in a way, transfuges.

[1] Special series of “L’Heure bleue” devoted to Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, “les tempos d’Annie Ernaux” on December 2022.

[2] Rérolle, R. Raphaëlle 2011. Annie Ernaux. Entretien avec Raphaëlle Rérolle. In Écrire, écrire, pourquoi ? Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Lacan J., Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 192-193 (author translation).

[5] Special series of “L’Heure bleue” devoted to Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, “les tempos d’Annie Ernaux” on December 2022.

[6] Rérolle, R. Raphaëlle 2011. Annie Ernaux. Entretien avec Raphaëlle Rérolle. In Écrire, écrire, pourquoi ? Éditions de la Bibliothèque publique d’information.