“An excessive desire for friendship”, by Hélène Giannecchini, Seuil, “The bookstore of the XXImy century”, 288 p., €21, digital €15.
In December 2019, while Hélène Giannecchini was about to finish her second book, See with your own eyes (Seuil, 2020), a fascinating personal investigation into death and mourning, is already thinking about the next text. She wants to write a book about friendship. Friendship as a refuge, as a possibility beyond blood family to invent new forms of collective life. “When I embarked on this adventure I was 34 years oldentrusts to “World of Books”. I know very well that I will not start a family, despite the precautionary measures to which I am subject. I am a queer woman in search of her story and her peers. »
When she talks about her project with those around her, she first looks for ideas for reading. But the books recommended to her on this subject (Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Montaigne, etc.) do not capture her attention. The real trigger came from herself, when she discovered a text by Saint-Just written in 1794, in which the revolutionary proposed conferring legal status on friendship. “I was fascinated by the idea of going to declare to your friends at the Temple of Reasonsays the author. I found myself presenting mine at the town hall in Noisy-le-Sec. [Seine-Saint-Denis]where I live, and I suddenly imagined an ideal society where our friends would be as important as our loves. »
It also discusses American anthropologist Kath Weston and her work on “chosen families” by LGBTQ+ people who confirm an intuition: “There is something special that happens in queer environments between family and friendship. »
In the approach of Hélène Giannecchini, also a historian of photography, everything begins in books and continues in images. At this stage, she knows that her text will speak of the fragile and incomplete memory of queer lives that preceded her. In her first book, dedicated to the photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud (An image may be trueSeuil, 2014), the writer, to tell her story, relied on photographs, as fine certificates of presence and truth.
For this new project, he decided to use the same process. “Photographs structure my mind, they launch me. These are the triggers of my research. They first form the secret architecture of the project.”points out.
The first photograph that sparked the book, she says, was found by chance, inside a shoe box, at a Parisian flea market. It depicts a couple of men lying against each other on the grass, undoubtedly photographed in pre-war France. Hélène Giannecchini bought the photo and posted it immediately. “work wall”Who are these lovers? What was their story? First he tries to identify the historical context of the image based on the clothes the couple was wearing, but to unravel a persistent mystery, he knows he will have to invent. Without appropriating these lives. “Faced with the silence of the image, I understood that it was up to me alone to decide. I told myself that I could imagine probable lives.”
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