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Far from the Tree. When families are dysfunctional Saturday October 20th 2012 / McNally Jackson Bookshop

The Author

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A novelist and a philosopher, Gwenaëlle Aubry studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Trinity College in Cambridge. She published her first novel, Le diable détacheur (Actes Sud), in 1999, followed in 2002 and 2003 by L’Isolée (Stock) et L’Isolement (Stock) and Notre vie s’use en transfigurations (Actes Sud, 2007), written while in residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome. She is also the author of several nonfiction works including a translation of a treatise by Plotinus. In 2009, she won the Prix Femina for No One.

No One, translated from French by Trista Selous (Tin House Books, 2012)

Bibliography No One, translated by Trista Selous (Tin House Books, 2012) Le Moi et l’intériorité [The Inner Nature of the Self] (Dir.), with Frédérique Ildefonse (Vrin, 2009) Le (Dé)goût de la laideur [The (Dis)Taste for Ugliness] (Mercure de France, 2007) Notre vie s’use en transfigurations [Our Lives Lost in Transfigurations] (Actes Sud, 2007) Dieu sans la puissance - Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin [A Powerless God – On the Concepts of Dunamis and Energeia in the Works of Aristotle and Plotinus] (Vrin, 2007) L’Isolement [Solitary Confinement] (Stock, 2003) L’Isolée [Secluded] (Stock, 2002) L’excellence de la vie - Sur L’Ethique à Nicomaque et L’Ethique à Eudème d’Aristote [Life’s Greatness – On Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics] (Ed.), with Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey (Vrin, 2002) Le Diable détacheur [The Untarnished Devil] (Actes Sud, 1999) © Stéphane Haskell/ Mercure de France

Gwenaëlle Aubry France

Cleaning up her father’s home after his death, Gwenaëlle Aubry discovered a handwritten, autobiographical manuscript with a note on the cover: “to novelize.” The title was The Melancholic Black Sheep, but the subtitle, An Inconvenient Specter, had been crossed out.

The specter? Her father’s disabling bipolar disorder. Aubry had long known that she wanted to write about her father; his death, and his words, gave her the opportunity to explain his many absences — even while he was physically present — and to sculpt her memory of him.

No One is a fictional memoir in dictionary form that investigates the many men behind the masks, and a unified portrait evolves. «A» describes her father’s adopted persona as Antonin Artaud, the poet/playwright; «B» is for James Bond; and, finally, «Z» is for Zelig, the Woody Allen character who could transform his appearance to that of the people around him. Letter by letter, Aubry gives shape and meaning to the father who had long disappeared from her view.

The whole is a beautifully written, vivid exploration of a particular experience of mental illness and what it can reveal more generally about human experience.

Reviews “The question of identity haunts Aubry’s slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder...virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure...the reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds.”

New York Times Book Review “Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Personne is a beautifully rendered and conceived work.

Structured like a duet, with writing by her dead father and herself, Personne is about the search for a wanderer father in the morass of his unstable identity.

It is an impassioned novel, a psychoanalytic double session, an examination of the limits of language, and an act of filial devotion.”

Lynne Tillman, author of Someday This Will Be Funny “A cubist and polyphonic portrait, ridden with elegance and restraint, [No One] is a two-fold autobiography of a father and daughter, its threads are delicately woven with impressions, memories and language that recreate the figure of complex and engaging man, stranger to the world- yet, also stranger to himself…”

Le Monde des Livres

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Le Moi et l’intériorité [The Inner Nature of the Self] (Dir.), with Frédérique Ildefonse (Vrin, 2009)

Le (Dé)goût de la laideur [The (Dis)Taste for Ugliness] (Mercure de France, 2007)

Notre vie s’use en transfigurations [Our Lives Lost in Transfigurations] (Actes Sud, 2007)

Dieu sans la puissance - Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin [A Powerless God – On the Concepts of Dunamis and Energeia in the Works of Aristotle and Plotinus] (Vrin, 2007)

This collection of articles aims to evaluate the legitimacy and the relevance of two frequently used concepts, the “self” and “inner nature”, focusing mainly on Greek Antiquity.

The “self”, a common notion in literature and philosophy, is generally considered to be absent from ancient thought. This curious absence is analyzed first, in order to eventually challenge it. Is it possible to find, in ancient philosophy, a different notion than the “self”, as impersonal in meaning, as drained of all biographical features, surpassing the idea of the “individual” but still containing all the traits of his identity? Which ancient concepts can reveal, played out in a different manner, the elements of the modern concept of the “self”? And which, on the contrary, are wrongly associated to it?

Instead of an unfilled philosophical space, can we not find, in ancient thought, an alternative to the concept of the “self”, disjoint of the ideas of uniqueness and inner nature? The second half of this volume goes back on Jean-Pierre Vernant’s theories on the “history of inner nature and the uniqueness of the self” in order to reformulate it as a history of the inwardness of the self, meaning a history of ways of questioning inner nature itself.

If the mental and physical functioning of the Greek system was based on an outward analysis, if introspection was not a practice at all, how come the notions of subjectivity and inner nature have become so closely related in our thought? It is important to show that the manner in which we analyze the notion of “inner nature” is not exclusive and to find the way in which the different ideas that legitimize it can be separated, thus sometimes mapping a completely different conceptual terrain.

Ugliness bears no analysis and withstands all testimony.

It opposes appearances and reveals the contradictions of the body, pointing to the obscure side of reality. In this experience, fear and fascination join in. Great philosophical, legendary, literary figures, hideous men and women, corroborate to the existence of this strange inversion: the power of seduction of Barbey’s Vellini, of Aragon’s Bérénice, of Stendhal’s ugly women, all these characters bring into play, in and through themselves, a new life force, a different reaction, remembrances and passions more gracious than those provoked by the rigid perfection of the flesh.

This game may just be the reason why ugliness manages to challenge the laws of art. Offering a new perspective, imperfection shapes a new type of beauty... An aesthetic promenade in the company of Roger Caillois, Yves Bonnefoy, Francis Bacon, Pascal Quignard, Henri Michaux, Georges Bataille, Socrate, Rilke, and many others.

As in the case of the rich and the poor, of spoiled children and the underprivileged, the world is divided between the beautiful and the ugly; there is no remedy to this original injustice. Still, we train ourselves to ignore it. Art itself claims to be indifferent to both ugliness and beauty. But all around us, on TV screens, on the covers of magazines, the requirement is issued, in a tyrannical and buoyant manner, of being good-looking.

From behind the looking glass, a woman’s voice tells the story of how ugliness is taught. Alternating accounts, tales, collages and portraits make up a composition that is a song of metamorphosis.

Considered by Aristotle as two of the fundamental principles of being, the concepts of “potentiality” and “actuality”, theorized in Metaphysics, open up a neglected philosophical path, one that may allow us to surpass all aporic interpretations and all ontotheological simplifications.

It is this path that will be followed through an analysis of Aristotle’s text, examining the way in which his metaphysical project formulates itself, and focusing on the correlations between the two complementary concepts of dunamis and energeia. The potentiality and the actuality, two notions much more complex than the ideas of power and action, or of matter and form, seem to found a unified ontology, which is also an axiological ontology, associating actuality to the manner in which good exists and potentiality to the way in which it comes into action.

This ontology offers a unique perspective on the Divine: it becomes synonymous to action, surpassing the idea of “pure form’; it lacks power without being powerless; Aristotle’s vision avoids making the choice between the almighty God of traditional metaphysics and the weak God that our contemporary anxieties contour. What has become, then, of this ontology? We try to measure the importance of Plotin’s initiative of designating its first principle not as act, but as the seminal power of all things, dunamis panton.

This gesture opens the way towards the corruption and the neglect of a system of thought that does not confound the being, and the Divine, with the idea of force or with that of presence.

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L’Isolement [Solitary Confinement] (Stock, 2003)

L’Isolée [Secluded] (Stock, 2002)

L’excellence de la vie - Sur L’Ethique à Nicomaque et L’Ethique à Eudème d’Aristote [Life’s Greatness – On Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics] (Ed.), with Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey (Vrin, 2002)

Le Diable détacheur [The Untarnished Devil] (Actes Sud, 1999)

In L’Isolement Margot is truly alone. She tells the story of her life without Pierre, of life without anything: life in prison. The initiation rites that, as do the rapes and the dispossessions, allow you to relinquish the outside while depriving you of the inside, the shrinks and the infirmary, the rules and the straitjackets, and the bodies that bend in pain, and the deviant minds. But also Aminata, the friend, and the magician that, for a while, protected her from all this, released her from her demons and brought her back into the world of the living.

L’Isolement is not a naturalist account of life in prison: it is a song, both lucid and delusional, hummed from the house of the dead and of the half-alive. In this text which sheds a light on Aubry’s previous novel, L’Isolée [Secluded], a text weaved of silences that breed recollections, of dreams and nightmares born of reality, there is no place for the outside: only for the elsewhere.

In L’isolée Margot told the story of her life with Pierre; the story of Pierre and Margot was that of two beings, very young, too fragile maybe, going through the acknowledgement of truth: the kind of truth we are aware of only in our childhood and that we later force ourselves to forget. The kind of truth that, if we accept it, will stray us from reality, leaving us no other choice that to rebel and to fight.

If Greek ethics continue to influence the modern ways of being and of thinking only in a muffled manner, Aristotelian ethics meets a very particular fate: it has become, for the past few years, not only a reference, but a model for contemporary moral philosophy.

The aim of this work, reuniting articles from French and foreign specialists, is to try to find the meaning of this return to Aristotelianism; historical and critical adjustments are made, as some of the main actors of this philosophical revival bring their contributions to this volume. But what is also important is to go back to Aristotle’s texts on ethics, to try to read and analyze them in order to reevaluate the main concepts, the guiding issues, and the fundamental ideas; to try to shed a light on the reasons why Aristotelian thought has been resuscitated, but also to understand the relevance of Aristotle, which might not be reduced to the requirements of the present.

When Ariadne, the heroine and narrator of this novel, meets Luc, a friend of her parents, she is eighteen and he is forty-three. She is “a savage, still full of the life-force and pride of childhood”. Their relationship will go through moments of tenderness, rebellion, lies, up to a predictable breakup.

This would be a story like so many others had it not found its philosophical underlay. Ariadne’s voice, lost in this labyrinth, is not only the voice of a young woman confronted with the disillusions of love and with society’s treachery, it is also that of a person who reveals with an avid clairvoyance, and by analyzing societal language and her partner’s behavior, the contours of illusion, mystical detours and erotic trickery, in the manner in which a sophist’s quibble could be dismantled.

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