Appréhender sa mort par l’écriture de l’autre: “L’Aztèque” de Bertrand Duquénelle et “Perfecto” de Thierry Fourreau

While one of the roles of literature is learning to die (Guibert), it is only possible to fathom one’s own death through that of another person. Death lies at the limits of the expressible and means that testimony via another figure or imagination is fated to waver between indecency and ellipsis; and all the more so given the specificities of AIDS. In order to hint at the imminent and immanent death, AIDS thanatography combines writing about the self and writing about the other, both a diary of grief and a deposition, a tomb. This article questions the stakes and aporia of deciphering the self by grieving for another, which are emblematic of various tensions within the corpus – specular and spectral tensions between recognition and dispossession, between contagion and sharing, between survival and returning. The article juxtaposes two texts which, due to their distance in time, approach the same period (1986-1994) from different perspectives – that of the condemned man and that of the survivor: L’Aztèque by B. Duquénelle (1993) and Perfecto by Th. Fourreau (2004). Between autopathography and a narrative of supporting a dying man, and by looking at the shift from one to the other, we can measure the distance between words written in the urgency of the pandemic and words written once the dust has settled, in the silence of grief. A dialectics also emerges between the testimonial impasse that comes with the unspeakable nature of death and epigraphy as the inscription of loss.