Gisèle Sapiro is research director at the CNRS and director of studies at the EHESS, specialist in the commitment of intellectuals and the relationship between literature and politics. She is the author of “The Responsibility of the Writer. Literature, law and morality in France” (19th-21st centuries), Seuil, 2011 and “Des mots qui tuent. The responsibility of the intellectual in times of crisis” (1944-1945), Points Seuil, 2020. (Replay)
” In recent years, the question has come up with force : can we separate the work from its author ? From the Nobel awarded to Peter Handke to the Césars to Roman Polanski, not to mention the Renaudot prize to Gabriel Matzneff, the debate is raging. Similarly, the Nazi past of great thinkers of the XXand century, starting with Heidegger, disturbs our appreciation of their legacy, while the inclusion of a Céline or a Maurras in the book of national commemorations has sparked a bitter quarrel.
Should we consider that the morality of works is inextricably linked to that of their authors? ? And ban the works when their author has faulted ? Far from invective, this short essay intends to put this question into historical, philosophical and sociological perspective, by analyzing the positions taken in these “business“. But far from the “everything is worth“, he decides, offering everyone the means to progress intellectually on a terrain strewn with pitfalls. » (Presentation of editions of the Threshold)
Testimony of Vanessa Springora, writer and editor author of the book The consent published by Grasset, awarded the trophy “ Author of the year » awarded by Books-Weekly.
” In the mid-1980s, raised by a divorced mother, V. filled the void left by an absent subscriber father through reading. At thirteen, at a dinner party, she meets G., a writer whose sulphurous reputation she does not know. From the first glance, she is caught by the charisma of this fifty-year-old man with the false air of a bonze, by his enamored glances and the attention he pays her. Later, she receives a letter in which he declares his “imperious” need to see her again. Omnipresent, passionate, G. manages to reassure her : he loves her and will do her no harm. When she has just turned fourteen, V. offers herself to him body and soul. Threats from the miners’ brigade reinforce this dangerously romantic idyll. But the disillusion is terrible when V. realizes that G. has always collected love affairs with adolescent girls, and practices sex tourism in countries where minors are vulnerable. Behind the flattering appearances of the man of letters, hides a predator, covered by part of the literary milieu. V. tries to tear herself away from the hold he has on her, as he prepares to tell their story in a novel. After their breakup, the ordeal continues, because the writer continues to reactivate V.’s suffering with publications and harassment. »
” For so many years, my dreams have been peopled with murder and revenge. Until the day when the solution finally presents itself, there, before my eyes, as evidence: to catch the hunter in his own trap, to lock him in a book “, she writes in the preamble of this liberating story.