Le Luxe de l’écriture: Writing Luxury in Annie Ernaux’s Passion simple and Les Années

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the concept and experience of luxury in Annie Ernaux’s work, starting from an observation made towards the end of Passion simple (1991) that luxury no longer represents for the author ‘manteaux de fourrure, [des] robes longues et [des] villas au bord de la mer’, but ‘aussi de pouvoir vivre une passion’. Though the temptation, given Ernaux’s stated admiration for Pierre Bourdieu’s œuvre, is to approach luxury through a lens of sociological distinction, the article argues that a more intricate unfolding of the concept can be traced within her texts. Through readings of Passion simple and Les Années, I suggest that Ernaux’s search for a writing outside the self that stringently rejects bourgeois literary values echoes visions of writing — such as those found at various points in the work of Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, and Georges Bataille, for example — as a form of total expenditure that cannot be harnessed to late capitalism’s exchange economy. Additionally borrowing from the thought of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, I argue that the thrilling loss of sovereignty Ernaux finds in the experience of absolute eroticism and écriture in Passion simple is extended in Les Années into a sociology of writerly vacation, where the luxurious dispersal of the first person makes way for a situated, politically operative being-in-common.