Je me rends incapable d’être bonne employée bonne épouse bonne adulte, ponctuelle, polie, fidèle. Fiable pour un système. Je suis défectueuse. Je suis difficile à exploiter. Je suis un mauvais soldat. Les bons soldats prennent la drogue qu’on leur prescrit. C’est comme la violence, la drogue. Légitime entre les mains de l’État. Délinquante aux mains de l’individu. Si je consomme la drogue que le médecin me prescrit, je deviens une toxico légitime. J’ai remarqué que les camés sont toujours ceux qui sont les plus difficiles à convaincre de prendre un traitement antidépresseur. Si l’on est dépendant aux drogues légales de la psychiatrie, si l’on ingère la drogue préconisée par le médecin, on est un bon travailleur. Un bon sujet économique. C’est ça, l’idée de fond de la défonce. Refuser ton pays. Refuser la langue que tu parles. Refuser d’être une femme honnête. Refuser l’usine où bossait ta mère. Refuser la tranchée dans laquelle ton arrière-grand-père est mort inconnu. //
I make myself incapable of being a good employee, a good wife, a good adult, punctual, polite, faithful. Reliable to a system. I am defective. I am difficult to exploit. I’m a bad soldier. Good soldiers take the drugs they’re prescribed. Like violence, drugs. Legitimate in the hands of the state. Delinquent in the hands of the individual. If I take the drug the doctor prescribes, I become a legitimate addict. I’ve noticed that drug addicts are always the hardest to convince to take an antidepressant. If you’re addicted to the legal drugs of psychiatry, if you ingest the drug recommended by the doctor, you’re a good worker. A good economic subject. That’s the whole idea behind getting high. Refuse your country. Refuse the language you speak. Refuse to be an honest woman. Refuse the factory where your mother worked. Refuse the trench in which your great-grandfather died an unknown man.1
As kids, we learn that messing around and taking drugs is a way to ruin your life. Sure, but it’s first a refusal. It’s a dumb refusal, sometimes, life is about learning to refuse without cheating, without numbing, without drugs or alcohol. When we succeed, we get sublimation, the result is aestheticism, quietism, relinquishment, surrender, art; it can also be activism.
Une psy m’a parlé de la dissociation, comme si c’était un truc physique, qui serait observé. Une femme violée ça se dissocie. Je l’ai écoutée déballer son bazar. Et j’ai dit « je suis une meuf. Comment veux-tu que je sois autre chose que dissociée ? Depuis que je suis enfant, on me répète que mon corps appartient aux regards des autres, qu’il appartient à ma beauté, à ma séduction. La séduction, ça te dissocie. Comment veux-tu faire autrement ? Je ne connais aucune fille qui mange sans se demander si ça la fera grossir. Comment veux-tu te dissocier de ton appétit et ne pas te dissocier de tout ce que tu es ? Bien sûr que je me dissocie. Je suis actrice. La psy m’a écoutée, c’était un grand dîner. Mais je voyais qu’elle savait mieux que moi ce qu’être violée voulait dire. Qu’elle exigeait de moi la confirmation de ses superstitions. Et que ma parole n’avait aucune importance. Je n’avais pas l’expertise de mon expérience ; elle l’avait confisquée, d’avance.//
A shrink talked to me about dissociation, as if it were a physical thing that could be observed. A raped woman dissociates. I listened to her unpack her mess. And I said “I’m a chick. How can I be anything but dissociated? Ever since I was a child, I’ve been told that my body belongs to the eyes of others, that it belongs to my beauty, to my seduction. Seduction dissociates you. How can you do otherwise? I don’t know any girl who eats without wondering if it’ll make her fat. How can you dissociate yourself from your appetite and not dissociate yourself from everything you are? Of course I dissociate myself. I’m an actress. The shrink listened to me, it was like a big fancy dinner. But I could see that she knew better than me what it meant to be raped. That she was asking me to confirm her superstitions. And that my word didn’t matter. I didn’t have the expertise of my experience; she’d confiscated it, in advance.
The concept of beauty, how it’s ingrained, such a shame. The French (not only them, I guess) fantasize of anorexic women. It’s so stupid.
On drugs and alcohol, it’s in shades of grey. Styron in Darkness Visible is quoted directly in the novel:
The storm which swept me into a hospital in December began as a cloud no bigger than a wine goblet the previous June. And the cloud—the manifest crisis—involved alcohol, a substance I had been abusing for forty years. Like a great many American writers, whose sometimes lethal addiction to alcohol has become so legendary as to provide in itself a stream of studies and books, I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent, which had contributed greatly to my writing; although I never set down a line while under its influence, I did use it—often in conjunction with music—as a means to let my mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit. The trouble was, at the beginning of this particular summer, that I was betrayed. It struck me quite suddenly, almost overnight: I could no longer drink. It was as if my body had risen up in protest, along with my mind, and had conspired to reject this daily mood bath which it had so long welcomed and, who knows? perhaps even come to need.
In therapeutic or philosophical contexts, we might learn to confront and cope with the ugliness of the world without resorting to drugs, alcohol; “la défonce.” In many ways, it’s healthier, better. Yet, Styron says it well, we lose something in the process.
Despentes is amazing. Definitely up there as one of my favorite.
Footnotes
All translations are mine, I read it in French.↩︎