Christine Angot: a hetero-homosexual and incestuous woman

Abstract

The aim of Christine Angot in her literary project L’inceste (1999) is not to reveal her incestuous savvy –she denies her book to be an autobiography– but to disclose a most repressed feature of our Culture, utterly hidden but an essential root of it: the incest with the mother. The daughter mother incest can be real or imaginary, and the literary work discloses it and shapes its multiple nuances, ranging from the desire of merging with the mother, most typical of a pre-Oedipus complex stage, to the homosexual relationship with her narcissist twin or the incestuous longing for her own daughter. It is a world without castration, where anything is possible in a game of “being” and “not being”, where the issue of incest is presented as a vertical, from the top to the bottom, generational, mother-daughter relation –Christine and Léonore– and a horizontal relation – Christine and Marie Christine.