Christine Angot writes the act of taking back her mother's name
In her latest text, discussed on France Culture's Le Book Club, the writer recounts giving up her father's surname to reclaim her mother's, Schwartz, and with it a Jewish origin.
Christine Angot's newest text turns on a single administrative gesture: her decision to drop the surname of her father, who abused her, and to adopt instead her mother's name, Schwartz, according to France Culture's Le Book Club, which devoted an episode to the work on 27 October.
As described by the program, the récit follows Angot through a change that is at once legal, symbolic and literary — the paperwork of renaming becoming the occasion to narrate why the father's name could no longer be carried, and what it means to take up the mother's instead. The summary notes that the name Schwartz also restores a Jewish origin that the father's name had obscured.
Angot has returned repeatedly, across her body of work, to the incest she suffered and to the question of naming and inheritance; this text, as presented by France Culture, treats the renaming itself as the subject rather than a detail within a larger story.
No publisher, title or publication date for the text is given in the material available; the France Culture episode is the only source for this account.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.