- June 17, 2022
Victims, what next? - Essay - Arthur Dénouveaux and Antoine Garapon - Gallimard, 2019
The essay Victime et après? written by Arthur Dénouveaux, survivor of the Bataclan attack and President of the victims' association Life For Paris: November 13, 2015, and Antoine Garapon, magistrate and Secretary General of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Justice, analyzes the political instrumentalization of victims of terrorist acts in order to question the social and societal view of them.
These two courageous voices speak out and question the status of victims: what is to be made of them? What place is there for their words? Why is society so keen to hear them? Is it possible to stop being a victim?
These questions allow us to tackle notions such as transference onto the victim, secondary substitution and resumption of life. They evoke the confinement implicit in the status of victim, and the reasons why society makes them sacred, in order to suggest ways of rebuilding oneself after the unspeakable.
"Whereas the only relationship to the victim is one of indignation or compassion, here the victim gives us a lesson in life. The discipline of happiness is a universal lesson for everyone. It's a challenge, the demand of an art of living that the victim lives in an intensified way, but which is on the agenda of all existences."
- Book
