Catherine Millot's 'Abîmes ordinaires' Blends Psychoanalysis and Narrative

Catherine Millot's new book 'Abîmes ordinaires' has been published by Éditions L'Infini, Gallimard. Though classified as a psychoanalytic essay, it reads like a novel, gripping the reader with a promise of revelation. The book opens with an epigraph from Meister Eckhart and a childhood memory of sudden solitude. Millot explores intimate vertigos where the self seems to annihilate, drawing on Georges Bataille's 'Inner Experience' and 'Guilty', and Jacques Lacan's concept of loss and void as originary. She argues that subjectivity is apprehended through a negative path, subverting contemporary egotism. The book discusses love, particularly conjugal love, using the stories of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy and Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini as examples. Millot links ecstasy to the fantasy of rebirth, prompted by her father's death. The work examines the economy of salvation, where the subject finds support in the absence of support, aiming for freedom. The reviewer praises it as a rare, intelligent, and necessary novelistic work.