What's in a Name

I have a political agenda. I am in favor of the elimination of inheritance, the requirement that ancestors sustain their descendants, I am for the elimination of parental authority, I am for the abolition of marriage, I am in favor of children getting some distance from their parents at as young an age as possible, I am for the abolition of filiation, and for the abolition of the family name, I am against guardianship, minority, I am against patrimony, I am against having a domicile, a nationality ... I am for eliminating the family, I am in favor of eliminating childhood as well, if we can.

What's in a Name, the third novel in Constance Debré's acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of name and given identity, the narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing.

Debré's first two novels, Playboy and Love Me Tender, narrate an escape from bourgeois life and convention. The narrator leaves her husband, her nice apartment, and her job as an attorney when she comes out as a lesbian and begins writing. Denied custody of her young son for an extended period, she pursues a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing.

In What's in a Name, perhaps the most intimate of these three works, Debré recounts moments of the narrator's childhood living alongside the extreme addiction of both of her parents. She seeks to get rid of everything: "You can't go backward ... We have to get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I'm not holding onto the corpses ... Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void ..."

As Debré recently stated, "I'm only using my life as material, there is no identity." Brilliant and searing, What's in a Name affirms and extends her radical project.