Mémoires de filles: Stratégies pronominales et enjeux du témoignage chez Annie Ernaux et Vanessa Springora

This article analyzes the pronominal strategies used in narratives that recount experiences of abuse in adolescence (Mémoire de fille by Annie Ernaux and Le consentement by Vanessa Springora), in order to show how the agency emerging in the autobiographical is inextricably linked to a retrospective attempt at subjective reparation and to an ethical and political “implication” of the authors. By forcefully placing his victim in the position of a “you” in a language she cannot understand, the abuser deprives her of the possibility of becoming “I” again. “Disincarcerating” this silenced “I” and restoring it to its position as a subject and its capacity as an agent require an address to a “you”, an inscription in a “we”. These autobiographies acknowledge that "I" cannot exist without the address to "you", and conceptualize subjectivity within the framework of a relational ethics. In this way, they give rise to a feminist agency that contributes to current movements for social change.