L’anomalie de soi chez Édouard Louis

The Anomaly of Self in Édouard Louis

Édouard Louis has published five novels since 2014, somewhere between autofiction and autosociobiography. In this work, the writer recounts his process of construction as a young gay intellectual. To achieve this, he has to confront the systems of norms he encounters as he traverses different social milieus: the poverty of his family in the countryside, the bourgeoisie of his friends in the provinces, the power of his lovers in Paris. Against this backdrop, this article aims to explore the forms of the sense of abnormality felt by É. Louis during these experiences. We'll see how renewed confrontation with a norm foreign to himself (a cleaved habitus) led the author to develop an original approach to literature: through an aesthetic of confrontation, the author pursues a political objective, namely to invite the reader to join a new form of class struggle.