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First published online July 30, 2019

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Autisme, j’accuse! Life-writing, autism and politics in the work of Hugo Horiot

Vivienne Orchard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2795-1901 [email protected]View all authors and affiliations

Volume 30, Issue 3

https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155819861033

Abstract

Autism has generated a great deal of controversy, culturally, intellectually and politically. The context for this in recent years in France is unusual and has been the site of strong antagonism. These debates are political in terms of policy implications and disagreements along political lines but also entail the politics of knowledge, and the question of who has the right to speak for whom. Competing groups – parents, ‘experts’ and autistic adults have different claims to validity as knowledge-bearers. This epistemological validity is vital in creating wider public understanding and determining policy directions. Autism life-writing is a new phenomenon in French and contributes to this set of debates. In order to illuminate this further, this article will offer an account of the first best-selling memoir by an autistic individual in France. The book, L’Empereur, c’est moi, is by Hugo Horiot, and was published in 2013, at the height of the ‘autism battle’ in the French public sphere.

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Biographies

Vivienne Orchard is a lecturer in French Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She has written on theories and histories of knowledge-construction in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida, in Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy (2011), and in relation to constructions of autism and Disability Studies in Francophone and Anglophone contexts. She has also written on literary cosmopolitanism and the theorisation of cultural identity. She is currently engaged in a wider project exploring autism in relation to understandings of disability in philosophy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

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