L’Habitation de la ville: Écriture de la mémoire urbaine et recomposition identitaire dans deux textes de Régine Robin

Abstract

Abstract My article aims to analyse two essays by Régine Robin, Cybermigrances: traversées fugitives (2004) and Mégapolis: les derniers pas du flâneur (2009), in the light of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. I am interested in highlighting the concept of writing seen by the writer as a patchwork of spaces and as a protective site. I suggest theorizing it as a memorial writing or a form of urban memory creation as well as a space of identity reconstruction. According to Robin, in the experience of the nomad of surmodernity (Augé) memory is an ephemeral element, and yet memory is the most stable component in the existence of an individual in movement. The writer’s constant journeys, and the correspondences that she finds between the mega-cities that she walks through as part of her familiar routines and temporary placements, constitute for the narrator a home of memory and a space of identity (re)construction.