A woman transports the body of her lover in the back of her car.
Here in this mountain chalet on the edge of a lake, they had had their secret meeting place, had invented a life as a couple, had made love, laughed, played, talked… But on this day, as she lovingly prepares breakfast, M. does not return from his morning swim. Stunned, she discovers the lifeless body of her lover floating in the lake.
Ricardo Seldes reminds us that "sexuality and death are the two Freudian impossibles whose resolution requires mastery of the drive."¹ The death of her lover plunged her into a "monstrous void left by the absence."² For four days, she refused to "abandon" the corpse: "I knew he was dead, I'm not crazy,"³ but she was surprised that she couldn't get him out of this irremediable state.
"Here, we could imagine […] that we would grow old […] together […], that we would be enough for each other. We loved this lie."⁴ And she sometimes believed in it. What does this lie, this ideal of love that she believes in, mask? The terror of exhausting their dialogue, the dialogue of words and bodies, the terror of blasé silence, of dry desire! This passage is reminiscent of what Deborah Gutermann-Jacquet says in Croire, where words and belief "keep […] the believer in ignorance of his own darkness."⁵ Belief "makes up for the absence of the sexual relation and thus masks death."⁶
Although Adeline Dieudonné's novel takes the form of an epistolary letter, it is first and foremost a monologue about an impossible mourning process and an act that indicates a radical refusal, pushing the main character to pose the question of her own madness, of the enigma, and of the secret that she is to herself: "I'm not sure I've fully grasped what happened to me, or what led me to act as I did. There is no moral to this story […] that has taken me into obscure places, into the swamp of my conscience."⁷
Fiction, as Dieudonné says, is "a place where you can moderate and touch things, knowing that they won't hurt you in real life."⁸ This insidious inclination to dreaming is what "determines a liveable life,"⁹ indicating the function of "the obscurantism in speech"¹⁰ that maintains the pleasure principle. For her – unlike Freud's famous dream, "He was dead and he didn't know it" – he was dead, she knew it, but she couldn't come to terms with it. Yet, she decides to address that which the most singular in herself had revealed, and to write down words in order "to grasp the flesh."¹¹ But the words escape her, slip away, fail to catch the real.
The contrast between the ideal of love and the reality it tries to cover is striking, and ultimately makes the reader feel uneasy: nothing is spared of the stains that appear on the corpse, the leaking fluids, the nauseating smell; she says nothing of the disgust. The same is true when the ideal does not veil the sexual relation that does not exist. Without this love, what appears is only the object that men have access to:¹² "He wanted a child, I had a womb […] His intelligence eroticized me, but it wasn't reciprocal. He liked my arse. No, […] not my arse. He was proud of the gleam of envy in his mates' eyes."¹³ The same with aime,¹⁴ the fantasy is the same, it's always the "M": on the "market of the good girl," she could only come out on the side of "the cattle fair," where she "nevertheless held an honourable place."¹⁵ If the "most obvious benefit" of the obscurantist speech is to experience the happiness of a "clear night," what returns in the glow is the "dark night,"¹⁶ a darkness masked by the belief in the lie of the ideal of love.

^[1] Seldes R., "From the Mystery to the Secret of the Sexual," argument for the WAP Congress 2026. Available online: congresamp.com.
^[2] Dieudonné A., Reste, Paris, L'Iconoclaste, 2023, p. 233.
^[3] Ibid, p. 15.
^[4] Ibid, p. 17.
^[5] Gutermann-Jacquet D., "Liminaire," Ornicar ?, no. 57, October 2023, p. 8.
^[6] Lacan J., "Improvisation. Désir de mort, rêve et réveil," La Cause du désir, no. 104, March 2020, p. 10.
^[7] Dieudonné A., Reste, op. cit., back cover.
^[8] Dieudonné A., "Reste," Interview with Éditions de L'Iconoclaste, available online: youtube.com.
^[9] Gutermann-Jacquet D., "Liminaire," op. cit.
^[10] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, Dissolution, in Aux confins du Séminaire, text compiled by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Navarin, 2021, p. 67.
^[11] Dieudonné A., Reste, op. cit. p. 13.
^[12] Cf. Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XV, L'Acte psychanalytique, text established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil & Champ freudien Éd., 2024, p. 266. Unpublished in English.
^[13] Dieudonné A., Reste, op. cit, p. 20.
^[14] TN: there is a homophone between the words aime ["love"], pronounced "em"; and même ["same"], pronounced "mem."
^[15] Ibid, p. 23.
^[16] Lacan J., Dissolution, op. cit.

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