Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Anne F. Garréta

Defiling what is sacred to us so as not to be taken hostage… Or else indecency stretches so far into the intimate because everything is profane, because there is no secret, no interiority, because everything can be put to use for schemes, control, subjection…? Thus we have that paradoxical and concomitant overestimation and depreciation of desire, intimated in the language we use to speak of our erotic lives… In terms manifesting its vulgarization, and in the tone and accent we use to pronounce them, pretending we will not be imposed upon by the power of the thing. Hygienic, necessary, metronomic: the driving score, with no syncopation or breath, of a municipal fanfare or a spin dryer. That banality blown out of proportion; that showcased insignificance… You suspect that the sort of lexical volunteerism used by your interlocutors is the fruit of an effort, of a concerted resistance to an intimate sentiment that it would be too ridiculous or childish to expose. And it seems to you that, through an additional act of ruse or resistance, the shameless assertion which would seem to be merely paradoxical prudishness—or better, just as much prudishness as shamelessness—is beyond our control and runs without stopping, the prudishness dictating the shamelessness that unveils the prudishness, the one signifying the other and canceling it out in the same utterance; familiar strangeness, through which the shameless assertion preserves or calls to renounce the possibility of its double, of its other—defends itself from rendering its secret to

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