Three generations of women committed suicide on their mother’s side, a father’s family destroyed by war. By weaving the story of her lineage, Nicole Lapierre offers a lesson in knowledge, but also in life: how to escape the “ heredity of misfortune » ?
On the cover of the book, the family photo, a snapshot taken from an album, is given in the intimacy of a memory to be shared and the proximity of a thrilling moment which, stolen from time, survives in its immediacy. Hands in her pockets, upright in her children’s shoes, her frank gaze smiling at us, the little girl stands there, facing us, at our height, available ; ready to take our hand to take us on an adventure and tell us her story.
This threshold image sets the tone, already contains the text to come, its freshness and vitality, its gentle sincerity. Both a gateway and an in-between, neither completely inside nor completely outside, she is an agent of transmission: the intermediary who gives access to the personal life of this little girl who has become a socio-anthropologist, to its past which interweaves common history and family heritage. The humble cover photograph opens this Save whoever’s life cantender and hospitable text ; text-residence where we like to stay.
Alongside this little girl who became a mother and then a grandmother, research director at CNRS engaged in a reflection on difference, memory and identities, we walk along the lines of flight that his life has traced. This family heritage allows us to better make common cause and confront contemporary ills.
Trace your line of flight
If I consider Nicole Lapierre’s story as a haven in which it is pleasant to take refuge, it is also the starting point of multiple treacherous paths favoring “ sometimes beautiful escape » (p. 9). He is the “ unmarked adventure terrain » at the heart of which the author traces his lines of flight.
“ We must invent our lines of flight if we are capable of doing so, and we can only invent them by actually tracing them, in life. », affirm Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It is in fact in the flesh of lived experience that Nicole Lapierre inscribes her future as a researcher, delimiting her fields of study at the crossroads of private quest and scholarly investigation – the change of her father’s name ( Lipsztejn, which became Lipstein, then Lapierre, Lipotin from the time of the Occupation having been abandoned) resonates with his work on changes in foreign-sounding names. The family experience of exile and immigration takes place alongside the testimonies collected for The Silence of Memory and questions about Jewishness continue in Common causes.
For Deleuze and Guattari, unfolding one’s line of flight means experimenting, taking the free path of emancipation to feel alive and set ideas in motion. Thus, at the crossroads of the sometimes tragic family novel, the modest autobiographical confession and the essay with scientific accents, Nicole Lapierre also stands at the threshold of genres and disciplines, assuming a salutary and strengthening hybridity which testifies to ‘an approach combining way of being and way of thinking.
The intimate story of knowledge
At the beginning, there is family dissemination: three generations of women committed suicide on the maternal side (Sarah the grandmother, Gilberte the mother and Francine the sister) and the loss of a Polish Jewish paternal family destroyed (assassinated or exiled) in the turmoil of the Second World War.
Two structuring motifs, two lines which are outlined in the first parts of the work, take shape and branch out over the pages. Two terrible matrices which find their positive counterparts in the heat of the “ new family home » (p. 33) where the author presides over large convivial tables, then in praise of resourcefulness, solidarity and a saving family dynamism.
The reflection on family tropisms broadens: the paternal heritage inaugurates a reflection on the figure of the immigrant, the victim and Jewish memory. Questions about suicide give rise to serious pages which, in the footsteps of Jean Améry, consider this fatal act as the expression of a free choice, the sign of freedom.
As if it were nothing, Nicole Lapierre leads us from one question to another, developing a subtle system of correspondences which interweaves opposites. Little by little, the subject becomes denser: weaving together the collective and the private, the personal and the professional, its trajectory becomes embodied, the coherence of its existence is finally exposed.
Skilled in the combination of the perception of the senses and intelligence, the author searches here and there, nourishing her subject with multiple references, a whole intimate heritage nourished by literature, poetry or cinema, testimonies and memoirs, philosophy or sociology. An example: the dramatic story of the paternal uncle “ unknown », Mendel, spinning mill boss who remained in Poland, whom she only knows through rare photos sent to her brother Élie. In 1940, he was deported to the Warsaw ghetto where, just before the 1943 uprising, he joined theArmia Krajowa. A stubborn resistance fighter, he died in the Warsaw uprising (August-October 1944), leaving only meager traces. And Nicole Lapierre brings the destiny of this tragic ghost into dialogue with the novel by Władysław Reymont, The Promised Land (1899), and its adaptation by Andrzej Wajda, The Land of Great Promise (1974).
Through her original approach, the sociologist established herself as the heir of Edgar Morin. His account of knowledge is based on a knowledge that is both sensitive and comprehensive, deeply inclusive, which favors intertwining. Elevating comparativism into a true humanism, it joins the theses of the theorist of Method who was his thesis director, for whom complexity is “ a fabric (complexus : what is woven together) of heterogeneous constituents inseparably associated “. Questioning the “ logic of places which guarantees hierarchies and reinforces prejudices » (p. 189), his text takes on an ethical and political depth, thereby asserting itself as a story for our time.
Refuse the “ identity of misfortune »
When reading the red title on the black and white childhood photo, we hesitate for a moment: Save whoever’s life canwhat to understand ? An antithesis which combines disarray with the élan vital, suggesting that we must flee life ? Let us instead retain the exclamatory side of an expression full of emotion, its positive injunction to save that very thing which constitutes the experience of life. Because Nicole Lapierre invites us, from the introduction, to “ resist the present bad weather » (p. 11). She writes in fact for “ rock the memory » of his dearly departed, emphasizing their vitality, their courage or their heroism, thus escaping the “ heredity of misfortune » (p. 169).
Faced with a painful and incomplete family memory, she says “ saving bet of openness, commitment and knowledge ”, in order to cultivate a “ memory on alert » (p. 241), guarantor of knowledge and transmission. If Nicole Lapierre lingers with tenderness on the figures of the suicide, the emigrant or the victim, symbols of otherness and strangeness, it is because she refuses the “ identity of misfortune » (p. 238) which is attached to them.
In these times of withdrawal and rejection, Nicole Lapierre counters the ambient gloom. It promotes the image of the foreigner, his valor and his obstinacy, his pressing desire to reinvent himself. The foreigner is the one who crosses borders, offering, from his distinct position, a “ disorientated vision » of the world.