Because We Care

TO SOMEONE LIKE Constance Debré, we’re still more trapped in tradition than we realize. Abolish families, the French writer suggests. Abolish childhood. Abolish names. Abolish anything that restrains. “If I were a terrorist, I would begin with the books,” writes Debré in Name, originally published in 2022 in France and now translated to English for Semiotext(e) by Lauren Elkin. “I would destroy them, I would tear them all up, I would burn them,” she imagines, launching into one of her many list-like excursions, calling books flabby, bourgeois, sluttish, cowardly.