« En mettant des mots sur vos maux, vous p(e)ansez les nôtres ». Lectures mémorielles et thérapeutiques de la littérature de témoignage

In line with works on the social uses of reading (Mauger & Poliak 1998), particularly on the reading of “salvation,” but also with the analytical philosophy hypothesis of an ethical function of literature, this article proposes to study the social uses of testimonial literature through the case of the critical reception by ordinary readers of the book of Philippe Lançon Le Lambeau (Gallimard, 2018—translated into English as Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo), in which the author, a survivor, recounts the January 7, 2015 terrorist attack on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and his slow reconstruction. The analysis of the two hundred seventy-four reviews left on the Babelio social network shows that testimonial literature can be used for memorial, moral, and therapeutic functions: it allows readers to imagine the experience of the victims and to develop empathy towards them, to take a leaf from them, as in a hagiographical reading, and to appropriate a collective memory, but also to relive the experience of the attack, to remember it in order to construct the memory of it, to experience it emotionally by engaging one’s own body to overcome it through the mediation of art and to transform the painful experience into a spiritual exercise

Art · Empathy · Humanities · Linguistics · Media studies · Mediation · Newspaper · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Testimonial · Computer Science · Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology