I say: “That bitch”. About putting terror on trial in literature

The article focuses on the materialistic narrative of writing as production of terror and terror of production. In 1893, Camille Lemonnier is brought before the court for “L’Homme qui tue les femmes”, a bloody short story published some years earlier in Le Gil Blas, in which he tells of “the acts of a maniac, relentlessly pushed by his mania to kill the public women who give themselves to him”. The autopsy of the text shows in fact that he proposes the detailed narrative of the aesthetic gesture which literary writing constitutes, analogous with Jack the Ripper’s woman-killing gesture. Writing always pertains to dismembering.