Telling a Minor Subjectivity : the Case of Edouard Louis

Abstract

En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule is a sociological novel of formation, where the author, the young sociologist Edouard Louis, tells about his own experience as a marginalised homosexual in the context of French working class through a first-person narrative. On the one hand we have a pitiless description of endured violence and repression, on the other there is a distant critical judgement on his native environment.

Using the resources of narratology, we will be able to describe the relationship between the narrative discourse and the life form of a minor subjectivity, as a world of experience entirely marked by conflict and domination.   Once subsumed in the logics of storytelling and lived through experiences, the categories of social analysis aren’t just neutral anymore, and reveal the presence of irreconcilable divisions and wounds, while culture is no more the language of mediation, being completely assimilated by the identarian stiffening of different social groups. Unlike modernist and postmodern poetics of subjective emptiness or fragmentation, Louis uses narration as an instrument for achieving the process of subjectivation, tending towards de construction of solid and unilateral personality, feeling at ease in parceled society, where different classes and communities have no common code to communicate and know each other.