10

Albert Cossery’s novels are often interpretated as a celebration of the subersive tricks of the common people in the face of misery and repression. His characters indeed decide, faced with the “great universal dupery” to oppose a radical form of disobedience, an “ethics of defection” consisting in no longer collaborating with power and turning their back on it. If the experience of refusal likes to present itself as the moral expression of a practical wisdom, it nevertheless conceals ambiguities which seem to us to lead the spirit of revolt towards the dead ends of a dilettante anarchism.