Marie Redonnet's L'Accord de paix: The question of resistance and the turn-of-the-millennium novel

This article discusses how Marie Redonnet's 2000 novel L'Accord de paix addresses the question of resisting the ideology of turn-of-the-millennium consumer society. It takes its bearings from Redonnet's explicit points de repère (Genet's travesty of the symbolic order, Debord's integrated spectacle and Sartrean engagement) and from the intersection of her critical works with Cixous's criture féminine and Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires. The discussion identifies how L'Accord de paix converges with and diverges from these writers' differing conceptions of agency, and how Redonnet self-reflexively seeks to counter appropriation by the order she seeks to oppose. Situating the questions of misogyny and difference within the question of resisting turn-of-the-millennium symbolic violence, it reveals a literary commitment that simultaneously harnesses the legacy of the past and makes a travesty of the market-driven symbolic order of the present. The article argues that by transmitting the responsibility for resistance from writer to readers, Redonnet inscribes in storytelling a hope for discovering new bearings for the future.