Survivre : l’avant et l’après 13 novembre 2015

Abstract

The Paris Terror Attacks of November 13, 2015, marked the advent of a time of survival. How to survive to what happened? How to live with it in the waiting—the dread—of a repeat? How to perpetuate the remembrance in the collective memory of the unforgettable? How to, and what to, answer to such “out-of-the-ordinary” questions? Writing, testifying, and drawing are some of the forms of expressions of this “post-13-November” that swept brutally everything that came before. As depicted in the work of Fred Dewilde, Pierre Terzian, Frederika Finkelstein, Aristide Barraud, Arnaud Fradin, Virginie Despentes or Yannick Haenel, surviving means still being alive after, given that, facing, in spite of. However, writing or drawing, imagining or testifying also means to expose oneself to the ‘unshareable.’ The current interest for care literature bumps here into the incurable aspects of the contemporaneous. The incurable is the inoperable; despite the curative surgery, it remains present in every part of the body, of the language and the soul. Whatever the cure, the care, the therapy, the attention.