Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Name

Name

Elkin, Lauren
Debré, Constance

Paperback

Series: Semiotext(e) / Native Agents

GLBTQIA EroticaGeneral FictionGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 163590238X
ISBN13: 9781635902389
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.40
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.30 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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.

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