La gloire de ­l’infamille

Although the family is a place of anxiety-inducing strangeness which alienates and derealises the experience of the individual, contemporary writers cannot adopt Gide’s expression: “Families, I hate you”. In the contemporary novel, the individual is thus condemned to the ambivalence of a contradictory injunction; between restitution and destitution, hommage and distancing, the contemporary writer is more likely to cry: “Families, I love/hate you”.