What’s in a Name

A searing disavowal of identity and inheritance, which completes Constace Debré’s acclaimed trilogy.

I have a political agenda. I am in favor of the elimination of inheritance, the requirement that ancestors sustain their descendants, I am for the elimination of parental authority, I am for the abolition of marriage, I am in favor of children getting some distance from their parents at as young an age as possible, I am for the abolition of filiation, and for the abolition of the family name, I am against guardianship, minority, I am against patrimony, I am against having a domicile, a nationality ... I am for eliminating the family, I am in favor of eliminating childhood as well, if we can.

Name, the third novel in Constance Debré’s acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.

Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Debré’s first two novels embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. Using the facts of her own life as impersonal ＂material＂ for literature, Playboy and Love Me Tender epitomized what Debré (after Thomas Bernhard) has called ＂antiautobiography.＂ They introduced French and American readers to her fiercely spare prose, distilled from influences as disparate as Saint Augustine, Albert Camus, and Guillaume Dustan. ＂Minimalist and at times even desolate,＂ wrote the New York Review of Books, these works defied ＂the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.＂

Name is Debré’s most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator’s childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of ＂regaining＂ the past. Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: ＂We have to get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I’m not holding onto the corpses. ... Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.＂ To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this ＂void＂--that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project.

Constance Debré left her career as a lawyer to become a writer. She is the author of the trilogy of novels Playboy, Love Me Tender, and What’s in a Name, all published in English by Semiotext(e). Her other novels include Un peu là, beaucoup ailleurs (winner of the 2005 Prix Contrepoint), L’Offense, and Manuel pratique de l’idéal Abécédaire de survie.