Compte rendu publié dans Acta fabula, dossier critique "La mort de l'auteur" (juin 2019, vol. 20, n° 6) : Étienne Bergeron, L’inversion de la question du VIH & la nécessité de la « contamination »

David Caron, The Nearness of Others. Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Chicago : University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

336 p.

Prix 24,95USD

EAN 9780816691791.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

An intimate look at the experience, meanings, and politics of HIV disclosure

In this radical, genre-bending narrative, David Caron tells the story of his 2006 HIV diagnosis and its aftermath. The Nearness of Others examines popular culture, politics, literary memoirs, and film to ask deeper philosophical questions about our relationships with others, demonstrating a form of disclosure, sharing, and contact that stand against the forces that work to separate us.

In this extraordinary work of personal and social exploration, David Caron devises a new literary form that enables him to touch the reader with his HIV-positivity as well as a new ethics that explains why that touch is both necessary and desirable. Learned, witty, provocative, moving, edifying, and brilliantly written in a simple, conversational style, The Nearness of Others demonstrates the intellectual advantages of being HIV-positive, which emerges from these pages less as a medical condition than as an epistemic one, a position from which it is possible to know the world and to make us see it differently. This is no longer cultural analysis of HIV, but cultural analysis by HIV. A significant breakthrough.