Reconfiguring the Public and the Private

This article analyses the public and the private in the work of Christine Angot with a particular focus on her 2006 text Rendez-vous and an emphasis on her articulation of intimacy, exposure and vulnerability. Angot is first contextualised through broad analysis of the trend in France for radically self-revelatory cultural production by women, which reconfigures the public/private divide and brings us to consider it in postfeminist perspective. Whereas the disruption of public/private categories remains clearly implicated in feminist narratives of empowerment in the case of writers such as Annie Ernaux and Catherine Millet, Angot appears to destabilise such narratives by repeatedly rehearsing, as well as engendering, vulnerability. The article argues that vulnerability stems from the central textual problematic of incest in Angot, and posits a double reading of incest: incest as testimony and incest as trope. In conclusion, it is suggested that Angot's potently insistent exposure of the incest taboo is not merely an example of, but an overarching metaphor for, the contemporary culture of exposure in `reality' genres.