Neither lieux de mémoire , nor non-lieux : Towards a Concept of Precarious Spaces in Philippe Vasset’s Un livre blanc

This article starts from the identification in French literature of a recent turn to the peripheries, at a time when the centre of Paris has become both museified and gentrified. Taking Philippe Vasset’s ‘récit’ Un livre blanc (2007) as a case study of this turn, this article identifies urban peripheries as the space where the postcolonial and the post-industrial intersect, intensifying the precarity of those who live there. The analysis proceeds dialectically to unfold the ways in which Vasset both resorts to the neutralizing spatialism operated by cartography and distances himself from these postmodern co-ordinates, deploying a ‘poetics of precarity’ that encodes the unstable qualities of the peripheries. Arguing that neither of the two concepts currently used to define contemporary space — the lieux de mémoire and the non-lieux — is fully apt to describe the current socio-temporal configurations of urban peripheries, this article elaborates the concept of ‘precarious spaces’, redirecting the analysis towards the political pressures exerted by the globalized, fragile dimensions of our contemporary moment. Vasset’s text is thus analysed in its capacity to insist on the relevance of the notion of precarity in the study of contemporary French literature.