L'écriture «extime» de Gérard Wajcman: Blancs, notes et intertextes dans L'interdit

The present article offers an analysis of L’interdit, roman (Wajcman, 1985), a literary work almost exclusively composed of footnotes, the text itself being “absent.” Although the subtitle identifies L’interdit as a “novel,” the text also indicates a close affinity with autofiction and with Holocaust testimony. The literary analysis follows three stages. We will first concentrate on the aesthetic and phatic functions of the footnotes : a linear and circular interpretation of the latter will allow us to sketch the broad outlines of the protagonist’s history. The analysis of Wajcman’s intertextual quotations (principally those originating from Proust’s, Dante’s and Flaubert’s oeuvre) will subsequently enable us to further elucidate the footnotes’ isotopies, which confirms that the apparent semantic dissemination in L’interdit is only a superficial impression. Finally, we will point out how L’interdit realizes the testimonial project defined in Wajcman’s critical works on the Shoah and on art history (L’objet du siècle and Fenêtre, Chroniques du regard et de l’intime). Wajcman being a member of the second generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the “novel” more precisely elaborates a testimonial position relying on Lacanian notions as the decentered subject, the object (a) and the “extime.”