A dive into the work of Nancy Huston, biologist and radical writer

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Meeting On the occasion of the release of her new essay, "Les Indicibles", and of "Enragée, engagé", a selection of texts written for the press, we delved into the mass of bodies that make up the work of this primato-feminist writer.

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We call preterition the figure of speech which consists of saying that one will not speak of something which one nevertheless speaks of: "M. de La Rochefoucauld, not to name him..." In the same way, "The Unspeakable" (Actes Sud), Nancy Huston's new essay, is full of ideas so unspeakable that they can be found spoken and consulted, starting this week, in all good bookstores. This title recalls "Saying and Forbidding," her memoir on blasphemies and swearing directed by Roland Barthes, but, clumsily, it places this great and prolific 71-year-old writer, now more French than Canadian, on the side of the "We can no longer say anything" dear to the extreme right. A fallen icon of feminism since she preferred biology, does she find here confirmation of her reactionary turn? Not quite. Let's start again.

In the ^20th century, around 1973, newly arrived in Paris, Nancy Huston took refuge in feminist circles. They rebuilt her after a difficult first quarter of her life, anorexia, suicidal thoughts, what she called her "murderous marathon of femininity" , we will come back to this. She dec…