The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French 9780748668229

Citation preview

THE BECOMING OF THE BODY

Crosscurrents Exploring the development of European thought through engagements with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences Series Editor Christopher Watkin, Monash University Editorial Advisory Board Andrew Benjamin Martin Crowley Simon Critchley Frederiek Depoortere Oliver Feltham Patrick ffrench Christopher Fynsk Kevin Hart Emma Wilson Titles available in the series: Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux by Christopher Watkin Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism by Gerald Moore The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology by Mathew Abbott Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer by Nicholas Davey The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé Philosophy, Animality and the Life Sciences by Wahida Khandker Forthcoming: Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future by Stephen Zepke Visit the Crosscurrents website at www.euppublishing.com/series/cross

THE BECOMING OF THE BODY Contemporary Women’s Writing in French Amaleena Damlé

© Amaleena Damlé, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6821 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6822 9 (webready PDF) The right of Amaleena Damlé to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Series Editor’s Preface ix Introduction: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French 1. The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text: Encountering Bodily Becoming through Deleuze and Feminism 2. Making a Body without Organs: Amélie Nothomb’s An-Organic Flux of Immanence 3. Becoming Otherwise: The Transformative Encounter in Ananda Devi’s Writing 4. The Flux and Folds of Consciousness: Marie Darrieussecq’s Literature of Simulation and Dispersal 5. Nomadic Vitalities: Becoming Beyond Boundaries in Nina Bouraoui’s Writing Concluding Thoughts

1

30 62 92 123 154 183

Works Cited 187 Index208

Acknowledgements

The writing of this book, from its beginnings in my doctoral research to the printed page, has unfolded within a number of stimulating and supportive academic environments. I am grateful to King’s College, Cambridge, for the doctoral studentship that funded this research, and for providing a home for my PhD work, as well as to the French Department at Columbia University for a year’s visiting scholarship. In subsequent years, posts at Exeter College, Oxford, Churchill College, Cambridge and Girton College, Cambridge, as a College Lecturer and a Research Fellow, have allowed me the space to transform this research into its existing form. Sections of the book have appeared in publications elsewhere and I am grateful to editors, publishing houses and journals for allowing me to develop the material here. Parts of the introduction emerged in an early form in ‘Nomadic trajectories: postfeminism and contemporary women’s writing in French’, in Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French, edited by Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). Sections of Chapter 3 were first published in ‘Devenir-autre: female corporeality and nomadic transformation in Ananda Devi’s writing’, in Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, edited by Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011) and in ‘Towards a poetics of reconciliation: humans and animals in Ananda Devi’s writing’, in The Postcolonial Human, a special issue of International Journal for Francophone Studies (2013), edited by Jane Hiddleston. Parts of Chapter 4 appear in ‘Truismes: the simulation of a pig’, in Marie Darrieussecq, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies (2012), edited by Helena Chadderton and Gill Rye. I owe a great deal of gratitude to colleagues, friends and family for their wisdom, encouragement and support. This book has profited at every stage from the incredible insight, intellectual sensitivity and generosity of Emma Wilson, who continues to be a tremendous source of inspiration and who cannot be thanked enough for her warmth and vii

viii

The Becoming of the Body

commitment. Gill Rye has been a hugely supportive and stimulating interlocutor over the past several years and I am extremely grateful for her encouragement and critical engagement with my work. For their invaluable interventions on aspects of my research at different stages, for comments on different parts of the book, and for many inspiring conversations, huge thanks also go to Bill Burgwinkle, Martin Crowley, Jane Hiddleston, Ian James, Shirley Jordan, Anna Kemp, Julia Waters and Helen Vassallo. I am grateful also to my series editor Christopher Watkin and to Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press for their gentle encouragement and guidance. Heartfelt thanks for their loving support to my family: Jaya Damlé, Anupa and Stuart Grant, Jim, Sue and Aidan O’Leary, and especially to Christopher. This book is for my father.

Series Editor’s Preface

Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought creates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as mathematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of performing a pre-determined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-­disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition. Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this re-making is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross-disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones. Each book in the series explores the different ways in which European thought develops through its engagement with disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences, recognising that the community of scholars working with this thought is itself spread across diverse faculties. The object of the series is therefore nothing less than to examine and carry forward the unique legacy of ix

x

The Becoming of the Body

European thought as an inherently and irreducibly cross-disciplinary enterprise. Christopher Watkin

Introduction: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French

The subject of feminism is not Woman as the complementary and specular other of man but rather a complex and multi-layered embodied subject who has taken her distance from the institution of femininity. ‘She’ no longer coincides with the disempowered reflection of a dominant subject who casts his masculinity in a universalistic posture. She, in fact, may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis. (Braidotti 2002: 11–12) PRELUDE The Becoming of the Body is a book about female corporeality in contemporary women’s writing in French. It is a study of four particular authors – Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui – who all came to writing by the early 1990s, and who, despite differences in approach, aim, content and style, share important conceptual and literary concerns about the status and signification of the female body as they traverse their way into the new millennium. A very great number of factors have sparked my desire to write a book about the female body in the contemporary realm, and these will gradually emerge over the course of this introduction. However, they might all be said to stem from a fascination with one particular question, which has resounded in my mind over the past several years: what are the limits of the body? This deceptively slight question enfolds multiple critical concerns. How is the body constituted? What do we understand to be its borders? 1

2

The Becoming of the Body

Where does the mind end and the body begin? What is our experience of the body? How do we understand our selves through it? Who owns the body? How is the body recognised? What factors – biological, social, political, cultural, technological – encode or script its identity? How do bodies interact? What, finally, can a body do? In focusing specifically on the female body, such questions are framed in this study by critical reflections on gender and sexuality, and on femininity and feminism. As a response to a long social, political and cultural history of literal and symbolic violence, twentieth-century feminism has sought to liberate the female body from the patriarchal constraints and physical realities of its subjugation and subjection to cultural enslavement by the male gaze and phallogocentric discourse. French feminists in particular have urgently addressed the need to inscribe and celebrate the rhythms and plenitude of the female body in writing. This book is concerned with how the close relationship between women’s writing and the body, as well as the debates around specificity and difference that were foregrounded by the second wave of feminism in France, have evolved in the increasingly globalised and putatively postfeminist years that precede and succeed the turn of the millennium. Specifically, it is interested in female bodies that are perceived or articulated as existing on borderlines, or at margins, bodies that in some way pose a challenge to normative systems and structures by stretching the boundaries, codes and limits that would conventionally decide what a (female) body is. It explores the questions that contemporary writers raise about the body as a lived experience, culturally inscribed, and interwoven with complex crosscurrents of meaning, and delineates a contemporary emphasis on the body’s liminality, difference and flux. This book suggests that, in contemporary women’s writing in French, the body is articulated in ways that remain in some way tethered to female specificity, but that it is also opened out to radically new modes of resignification, rearticulation, and to the possibilities of its perpetual transformation. It proposes that the becoming of the body, as understood in and through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, is a key element of contemporary experiences and expressions of corporeality. The aim of this book is to illuminate the implications of such a theory – the becoming of the body – for a feminist politics, for women’s writing and for the cultural signification of the female body. T H E P L AC E O F WO M E N ’ S W R I T I N G Before we can begin to think through the possible relations and, indeed, the enduring tensions that can be discerned between Deleuzian



Introduction 3

philosophy, feminism and the ways in which female corporeality is currently being expressed in the literary arena, it will be important to consider carefully the place of women’s writing within contemporary literature in French. The very use of my subtitle ‘contemporary women’s writing in French’ deserves some critical attention, and perhaps as much in the way of problematisation as justification. The French literary scene has been witness over the last twenty years to a rich seam of cultural production, with vibrant new voices and texts emerging from the métropole and the wider French-speaking world. A great many of the authors writing in French today whose works have apparently garnered popular and critical attention are female. It might appear to be quite obvious by this stage not only that the imperative for women’s voices and identities to be articulated in writing that was outlined by earlier waves of feminism has been handsomely met, but that the status of ‘women’s writing’ as a minority classification ought well to be eschewed, as female authors have become increasingly integrated into mainstream literary culture (and perhaps precisely in order for them to continue to do so). By positioning ‘contemporary women’s writing in French’ as the subtitle to this book, however, I am consciously drawing attention to a belief that there are still a great many contemporary questions to be explored, minds, bodies and experiences to be traced, that benefit from a critical lens that narrows its focus specifically to literary production by authors who identify as female. If female voices and female authors make up a great part of the mainstream today, it seems vital to remember the relatively recent nature of this achievement and the struggles it has taken for women writers to obtain such recognition. Until the 1970s, women remained largely excluded from the academic literary canon in France. Yet it was during this decade that a sudden outpouring of new voices rushed forth, eager to speak women’s lives and experiences, particularly in writing. As Elizabeth Fallaize explains in her important study that has inspired so much work in this area, this was to a great extent sparked by the emergence of new forms of political consciousness with regard to women and gender after May 1968, but also by the ‘economic optimism’ of the 1960s and early 1970s which created new publishing opportunities for many young writers (Fallaize 1993: 1; see also Atack and Powrie 1990). Figures such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Annie Leclerc raised challenging and often controversial questions surrounding the possibility of an écriture féminine, a writing of the semiotic or a ‘parler-femme’, the recuperation or creation of a language that would speak the feminine or the female body, pushing

4

The Becoming of the Body

at the boundaries between literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics in their attempts to do so. By the 1980s, the more poetic and psychoanalytically inspired avant-garde texts of writers such as Cixous, Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf and Jeanne Hyvrard were joined by realist (though often still intimate or autobiographical) accounts of the social and political aspects of women’s lives, such as in the writing of Paule Constant, Annie Ernaux, Sylvie Germain and Danièle Sallenave. Women writers began to enjoy greater ‘official’ recognition, with Marguerite Yourcenar becoming the first-ever female member of the Académie Française in 1980 and Marguerite Duras claiming the Prix Goncourt in 1984. However, to some extent, this public recognition still remained starkly limited in comparison with the incremental turnout of novels published by women. As Fallaize (1993: 21) explains, this can be attributed to the particularities of the rigid and elitist traditions of French culture: A specific cause of women’s lack of progress in terms of literary recognition is undoubtedly the great prestige of literature and of the novel in particular in France, which means that the whole terrain is fiercely guarded. Another is the French tendency to create elites through institutional structures which make it extremely difficult for marginal groups to force an entry – the fixed membership of the prize juries being a case in point.

Such attitudes are strikingly resilient and would appear to dominate even at the very end of the twentieth century, as Diana Holmes’s (1996: 214) comprehensive study of French women’s writing over the period 1848–1994 reveals, resolute in its claim that in the mid-1990s French culture remained ‘a predominantly masculine sphere’. Indeed, since Duras’s award of the Goncourt almost thirty years ago, it seems surprising that, in spite of so many female authors making the shortlist, only three further women have won the prize: Pascale Roze in 1996, Paule Constant in 1998 and Marie NDiaye in 2009. Though one may have genuine and pertinent reservations about compartmentalising female-authored literary production under the label ‘women’s writing’, institutional and cultural realities in France demonstrate the validity in continuing to draw attention to voices and groups that still seem to lack the recognition and attention that they may deserve. As Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (2002b: 8) argue, at the beginning of the new millennium, the presence of women in literature in France still has not progressed to the extent that is often assumed, ‘que ce soit au niveau des ouvrages publiés, des prix littéraires obtenus ou de la reconnaissance critique’.1 Their conclusions would seem to suggest that, on some, perhaps insidious, level, female-authored literature might still be deemed to lack the intellectual seriousness to qualify it as worthy



Introduction 5

of sustained levels of dissemination, absolutely equal consideration for academic prizes or critical recognition. Despite the validity of these concerns, it seems relevant to resituate the importance and critical weight of institutions such as the Académie Française and prizes such as the Goncourt in the vastly changing ­landscape of literary publishing, in France, and across the world. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, readership no longer depends so crucially on such critical validation from potentially elitist institutions, journals or reviews in highbrow broadsheet newspapers. The transformation of the media as well as technological advances during these years have had an enormous ­ impact upon the publishing industry, and upon what the reading public chooses to buy and to read (indeed, how to read it). Consequently, and not always unproblematically, it has also had a huge effect on how authors and publishers have chosen to market their works. If the academy remains elitist, the 1990s have seen writers, and often specifically female writers, capture the public imagination through deft manipulation of the media. Publishers and the media hailed a ‘new generation’ of writers, and, as Gill Rye and Michael Worton (2002b: 1) observe, this was a decade in which writing by women ‘assumed its place at the forefront of what is new – and sometimes controversial – on the French literary scene’.2 The media controversy that surrounds many female-authored works during these years largely derives from their explosive thematic content. The 1990s saw women’s writing in France turn towards the absolute extremes of experiences, and to the reappropriation of previously male-dominated subjects. Particularly polemical has been the proliferation of female-authored texts concerned with depicting brutally violent or sexually explicit acts, and, more often than not, with evoking a seamless slippage between the two. Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, Virginie Despentes, Alina Reyes, Catherine Millet and Marie Nimier are just some of the writers whose work has been the subject of sustained shock and ethical debate in the media in this regard.3 However, it is not merely the themes such authors grapple with that contribute to their increased and increasing media profiles. Shirley Jordan (2004: 16–17) highlights a pre-millennial upsurge of the author’s presence in the French media, noting that women writers in particular have been ‘prolific, noisy, controversial and entertaining’ in their animation of the publishing scene. Just as the cult of celebrity has seeped into so many other aspects of contemporary life, there has been an increasing sense of preoccupation with the author’s persona, no doubt fuelled by French publishing houses and media as a means of generating further sales. In many ways this has been intensified by

6

The Becoming of the Body

the growing popularity of autofiction in contemporary French writing, a genre that itself collapses the boundaries between self and text and that many female authors have explored in their writing.4 Whether or not particular texts experiment with life-writing, however, portraits of female authors are commonly emblazoned across their covers, serving to accentuate further this sense of a cult of personality. Through interviews on television and radio, readers are drawn further in their fascination into the intimate details of authors’ lives, from the peculiarities of Nothomb’s distinctive taste for flamboyant hats and stark make-up and her predilection for eating rotten fruit, to the raw realities of rape and prostitution in the life of Despentes. Other writers, such as Chloé Delaume and Régine Robin, cultivate and play with the image of the author through new virtual possibilities of self-creation online. In addition, media engagement with the literary landscape in France over the last ten years has been significantly marked by various plagiarism debates and privacy scandals. In many ways these are bound up with questions about authorship and the ownership of experience that are raised by new trends in autofictional writing, but they point too to anxieties about our technological age’s rapid dissemination and exchange of information.5 Many of these disputes have related to women writers and that they have been highly publicised has no doubt contributed to these authors becoming well-known household names. This might seem somewhat paradoxical, given that accusations of plagiarism or the invasion of privacy would tend to suggest a protective attitude towards identity and writing. This is not to imply any deliberate marshalling of such scandals on the part of these authors, merely to bear witness to the fine lines that are being drawn between life and literature in the contemporary realm, and to the role that the mass media plays in establishing readership figures in its engagement with the literary persona. Female authors have thus gained notoriety in a variety of ways that circumvent the elitist institutions of the traditional French literary scene. As Jordan (2004: 17) notes, in the 1990s in France, ‘Women have made themselves heard in new ways, vigorously appropriating territory previously little associated with female writers such as crime fiction and pornography, pushing at the limits of what constitutes “literature” and testing the boundaries between text and life.’ The result of this has been that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, though the recipients of literary prizes and critical reviews in highbrow print media and academic publications may continue to be largely male, female authors have gained a tight grasp of the public imagination and, significantly, have reached an equal footing on bestseller lists.6 If it would appear that this greater sense of parity has been achieved



Introduction 7

at the level of the popular, rather than the ‘intellectually serious’, this clearly deserves further attention. For, surely, this would seem to reiterate all the same assumptions that have been historically levelled at female-authored literary works: that they are light, unchallenging, sentimental and generally unworthy of considered intellectual engagement. Further, the hyper-animation of the media and the publishing scene from the beginning of the 1990s might well give rise to some suspicion. Are these texts truly transgressive? Do they really appropriate previously male-dominated themes? Are they as adventurous and daring in style and genre as they would have us believe? Do the works ultimately signal a ‘new generation of women’s writing’? Or have they just been knowingly packaged and produced in a cultural arena that is dominated by the mass media and global market economics? Might they, then, pretend to subvert and exceed precisely what they in fact only serve to reinstate and to reify? All of these questions have resounding implications for the term ‘women’s writing’ itself, and how it might be mobilised in the contemporary context. To think through the possible responses requires some consideration of the relationship between women’s writing and the politics of feminism in France through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. WO M E N ’ S W R I T I N G A N D F E M I N I S M The early days of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) in the 1970s saw a close correlation between theory and practice, between intellectual research and active political change. Headed by Antoinette Fouque, the group Psychanalyse et politique (Psych et po) disseminated ideas and extended its influence by setting up a publishing house, bookshop and magazines (des femmes). For second-wave French feminists such as Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva (who were each part of the group at some point), writing itself is posited as a privileged space for the inscription of female specificity, identities and desires. In Cixous’s vision of écriture féminine, the mobilisation of the feminine is linked to the unconscious, the pre-oedipal and the pre-linguistic. Writing the rhythms of the body is a way of tearing into the dominant fabric of masculinist discourse and rupturing the phallogocentric economy (Cixous 1975; 1976). For Kristeva, literature takes on a specifically political function as a realm within which established norms and relationships might be undone, where new ways of thinking and a culture of revolt might effect change in a real sense (Kristeva 1996: 21; 2000: 7). In such a context, the theorisation of women’s issues is not restricted to abstract intellectual ponderings; writing itself impacts on

8

The Becoming of the Body

an active politics grounded in challenging received ideas and transforming perspectives. To some extent, however, the possibilities of écriture féminine and 1970s French feminism were to gain more popularity and enduring appeal in Anglo-American contexts than in France itself. Indeed, it has been frequently argued that the very grouping of the diverse thinkers Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva (and the exclusion of others) has been in part a ‘construct’ of Anglo-American academies during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Célestin et al. 2003; Fraser and Lee Bartky 1992). This has been read as the product of a fascination with French theory more broadly, that on the one hand borders uncomfortably on exoticism (Moi 1985: xiv), and on the other is politically designed to appropriate a particular view of French feminism so as to champion neo-conservative modes of essentialism abroad (Delphy 2001). Within France itself, this purportedly close relationship between women’s writing and feminism in fact began to decline during the 1980s. Divisions had started to fragment the French feminist movement more generally from the late 1970s onwards, as different factions with opposing views emerged, their disagreements centring on the very use-value and the fixity of terms such as ‘feminism’, ‘femininity’ and ‘woman’. Combined with the political decline of the Left at the end of the 1970s, the view that feminism had become anachronistic and above all overly institutionalised, with little relationship between the academy and real life experience, became widespread. In 1978, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, an Italian politician and writer living in France, published Les Femmes et leurs maîtres, pronouncing the death of feminism, a view that would resound in the popular French media in the early 1980s, with the weekly news magazine, L’Évenement du jeudi, boldly claiming that the war between the sexes was over (Allwood 1998: 30–1, 39). Anti-feminist perspectives of this time have been attributed to a conventionally French resistance to notions of political correctness, in part related to the French state desire to uphold the Republican logic of universalism that assumes all citizens to be the same and equal (and thus potentially minimises the possibility of the recognition of difference). In tandem with the desire to promote a particular image of the French national character was the notion that the feminist movement in the 1970s had been somewhat of an aberration from conventional French attitudes towards seduction and the relationship between the sexes, setting it apart from the radical nature of, for example, American feminism, with its supposedly dangerous, man-hating image (Allwood 1998: 39). Despite the tendency to promote the French exception here, these attitudes were far from limited to France, and during the 1980s



Introduction 9

backlash became a prevalent response to feminism across the Western world, in the politically conservative environments of the United States under Reagan and the United Kingdom under Thatcher (see Faludi 1992). In France, this resistance to feminism nonetheless takes on a different trajectory. While the Socialist Mitterrand government of the 1980s played an important legislative role in securing women’s rights, this era seemed not to reinvigorate gender debates but to contribute to a slowing down of feminist activism. This is undoubtedly in part due to the partisan nature of politics of the time, but can also be explained through an increasing sense of complacency about the role of feminism. As a result, as Célestin et al. (2003: 2) have observed, the French media during this period ‘were quick to relegate feminism to a sort of “historical epiphenomenon”’. At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, the status and purpose of feminism in France remains ambiguous and often obscured. Feminism has by no means disappeared. During the late 1980s and 1990s, French politics became caught up in the parité (equality) debates, which refocused women’s position in society in relation to the questions of universalism and difference that structure the Republic. New legislation aimed at increasing equality of representation was passed in June 2000 and, along with the introduction of the PACS law (Pacte civil de solidarité), gender and sexual politics appeared at the very forefront of political concerns at the turn of the millennium. The past decade has seen active engagement in a range of gender issues from employment, reproductive health, sexism, economic and legal discrimination, sexual harassment and violence, and the impact of cultural and religious difference on femininity, to gay, lesbian and trans rights and homosexual marriage. Feminist activism has also been revivified through groups such as Mix-cité, Ni Putes Ni Soumises, Les Sciences-Potiches se Rebellent, Les Pénélopes and Chiennes de Garde. As Célestin et al. (2003: 7) have noted, feminist activism is increasingly aware of the need to contextualise and to integrate women’s rights into broader national and international movements. Multilayered concerns, questions of multiple, composite identities, and above all the notion of intersectionality thus characterises French feminism in practice in the twenty-first century.7 Feminist theory and philosophy continue to flourish in France. Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva persist in pushing debates forward, along with other important figures such as Sylviane Agacinski, Élisabeth Badinter, Françoise Collin, Christine Delpy, Françoise Héritier, Gisèle Halimi, Michèle Le Dœuff, among several others.8 Nonetheless, beyond activist or academic circles, the place of feminism is uncertain and its representations in the media

10

The Becoming of the Body

and in culture are often nebulous. Above all, the intimate relationship between feminism and women’s writing that dominated the 1970s in France, and characterised notions of ‘French feminism’ abroad, has become dislocated. W R I T I N G I N A P O S T F E M I N I S T C L I M AT E ? While the 1970s fired the search for new ways of expressing female experience that arguably bordered on the essential, by the 1990s women’s writing has developed into a ‘chorus of diverse, even occasionally discordant voices’ (Rye and Worton 2002b: 8), by no means united by a specific feminist agenda. The squarely feminist political impetus assigned to writing by second-wave feminism – namely, the deconstruction of phallogocentrism – has not generally carried through into the aims of most contemporary female authors. Although many of these writers may define themselves as feminist, they are also extremely wary of explicitly aligning their ‘feminism’ with their textual production. Despite their inheritance of, and engagement with, previous generations of feminism, it cannot be denied that this generally comes with the caveat ‘not in writing’. And despite the fact that their works often treat experiences that are central to feminist concerns, these writers openly reject any labels that might precede their writerly status or harness their writing to particular gendered categories. The attitudes of the four authors – Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui – that this book will explore in subsequent chapters exemplify this point.9 As Jordan (2007b: 135) has noted, rejection of the categories ‘women’s writing’ and ‘woman writer’ is standard among young French women authors, although it is clearly the case that much of their writing is devoted to the business of articulating women’s experience, is marketed as such, and achieves collective resonance.

While Jordan suggests that the description of such authors of themselves as ‘feminist’ should be understood as a ‘taken-for-granted starting point’, Morello and Rodgers (2002b: 45) observe that these writers conceive of themselves as implicitly feminist, while producing texts that cannot easily be recuperated to feminist thought. For Jordan, this signals a murky relationship to feminism that is ‘conceptually nebulous and interestingly incoherent’ (Jordan 2007b: 135). Elsewhere, she has coined the term ‘fuzzy feminism’ to describe the confusing positions that writers of this new generation seem to adopt with regard to questions of femininity (Jordan 2004: 38). The term ‘postfeminist’ has also recently been taken up as a means to describe the post-1970s climate of women’s writing in France (Holmes



Introduction 11

2005: 108; Jordan 2007b: 133–5; Rye 2001: 18), and this is a notion that, in some senses, might be said to frame my analysis in this book. However, since ‘postfeminist’ and ‘postfeminism’ have been variously defined within philosophical, political and cultural frameworks, these are terms that require careful unpicking and delicate handling. It is crucial to make the distinction first of all that, and in the vein of other critics working on contemporary women’s writing, this book in no way participates within the context of a backlash against feminism. This is not a call for ‘what comes next’, in the sense of feminism’s work being done, nor is it a suggestion that feminist politics are no longer relevant to contemporary society. Not only is this assuredly not the case, such strident and stark notions are also not apparent in the works of the writers under study. If the term ‘postfeminist’ has been used to characterise contemporary women’s writing in this particular context, this should not be interpreted as having anything in common with the backlash signalled by Susan Faludi (1992), with new traditionalism or with the outright rejection of second-wave ‘victim feminism’ in favour of the ‘power feminism’ advocated by the likes of Réné Denfeld (1996), Katie Roiphe (1994) or Naomi Wolf (1993). A resonant example of such attitudes in France is that of Elle editor Valérie Toranian, whose Pour en finir avec la femme (2004) also calls for a radical dissociation of femininity with innocence and victimhood, and distances itself from feminism on grounds that it is not only complicit in, but instantiates female subjugation. These are not positions with which I wish to align either myself or the writers I will later analyse: this study does not want to ignore the work of previous waves of feminism or to disregard the ongoing importance of issues highlighted therein, most, if not all, of which remain under-represented and unresolved today. I want to use the term ‘postfeminist’ with critical care, then, particularly as I am extremely reluctant to attach myself to it as a politics. Nonetheless, I do find it a helpful way to think through the complexities of contemporary reactions to feminism as negotiating a realm of interactions and encounters, within which the genealogies and trajectories of feminism are incorporated into rather more multilayered responses to questions of gender, agency and power, and in opening out a theoretical space that is not necessarily a movement forward or beyond, a resolute ‘after’ to that which has preceded it, but that draws different critical strands into a web or network of cultural signification.10 If the authors under study in this book can be described as writing within a postfeminist climate, at stake here is a sense of multiple positioning, within which feminism, its legacy, its continued relevance and its critical reformulations might implicitly be contained. For two

12

The Becoming of the Body

specific reasons, I understand this multiple positioning more in terms of ambivalence rather than the confusion or incoherence that ‘fuzzy feminism’ might imply. Firstly, while feminism might conceptually be embraced by these authors, and while much of their work is concerned with articulating women’s experience, it is also characterised by an engagement with less sex-specific concerns wherein ‘feminism’ itself might not exert an overarching influence as a pure politics. Secondly, it seems helpful to interpret the move ‘beyond’ feminism that is suggested by the rejection of labels such as ‘feminist writer’ or ‘woman writer’ in terms of the defensive positions that these very categories might seem to provoke. Such attitudes are akin to a more generalised sense, in contemporary culture, of hesitation around the term ‘feminist’, which has come to be viewed as anachronistic, militant or elitist, and that results in the all too common caveat employed by (young) women addressing socio-political issues that concern them: ‘I am not a feminist, but . . .’ Toril Moi has made some useful observations about this defensive positioning with particular regard to the question of women’s writing. She too draws attention to the fact that the misgivings that contemporary writers appear to have about the term seem to coincide with a lack of attention to the relationship between women and writing in current feminist theory, in comparison with literature’s privileged status in the early years of feminism (Moi 2008: 259). But further, she demonstrates that while men rarely, if ever, feel the need to deny their sex or gender, the term ‘woman writer’ provokes a twofold defensive response that on the one hand requires women to conform to a code of what might be perceived to be ‘feminine writing’ and on the other paradoxically makes her feel that if she does not, she must do the opposite which is to write necessarily as a ‘generic human being’ (Moi 2008: 266). Taking Moi’s observations on board, the term ‘postfeminist’ might be deployed as a means of thinking through the particular climate of contemporary women’s writing, as being informed by this rather anxious relationship with the work of feminism. The use of the term ‘women’s writing’ to describe contemporary female authors writing in French is thus riddled with complexity, and requires sustained critical attention in order to avoid generalisations and facile groupings. Sometimes these authors highlight female experiences and/or their own positioning as female, and sometimes they do not. In deciding to continue to employ ‘women’s writing’, I am interested in pursuing the development of relations between feminism and female-authored texts, but, following Moi, when I claim that these authors are women writers, all that needs to be acknowledged here is that they have been perceived as women who write, and that they also



Introduction 13

take themselves to be women (Moi 2008: 267). I am not using the term ‘women’s writing’ primarily to signal these authors or their works as belonging to an under-recognised and marginalised body of literature, entirely set apart by the dominant cultural elite. Though Morello and Rodgers’s concerns about the still marginal status of female authors in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century are certainly relevant, it is worth noting that the writers analysed in this book have all been nominated for, or received, major prizes, and they are also all, to varying degrees, bestselling authors. Nonetheless, this study does want to bring these writers into contact with a broader critical readership, and it will be important to remain aware of the traces of the cultural history and the recent nature of the coming to prominence of women’s writing in French. It will also be interesting to hold in view the implications of the ways in which female authors’ burgeoning presence on the literary scene has been set in motion by the mass media, and of the impact that consumer choices have on precisely what is being written. Crucially, I am not using the term ‘women’s writing’ to make generalisations about a united political agenda, or to align contemporary women’s writing with a new ‘wave’ of feminism.11 I am also wary of using terms such as the ‘new generation of women’s writing’, which would seem implicitly to signal a new wave or a revisiting of the intimate relationship between feminism and women’s writing, and which have also arguably been artificially and strategically imposed on writers and literary texts by marketing and media. As Ruth Cruickshank (2009: 11) has argued, such labels run the risk of both falsely commodifying a heterogeneous field through market-led impulses to categorise, and promising ‘turning points’ that they ‘systematically fail to fulfil’. One might argue that the first of these risks cannot be avoided in using the label ‘women’s writing’ at all. In this book, however, it will become apparent that my interests are in using the term not as a label, but as a means of thinking through such a heterogeneous field of writing. The literary works of Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui that are analysed in this book are not always politically motivated, and like much contemporary writing, their texts cross boundaries between the highbrow and the popular. These are erudite authors whose own studies in areas of literature, linguistics, philosophy and anthropology, as well as a keen awareness of their literary and cultural heritages, is often very apparent in their writing, sometimes self-consciously so. At the same time, their works, like most bestsellers, are attuned to the popular pleasures of reading.12 Sometimes, then, these authors may impart a feminist agenda and sometimes they may reify gender stereotypes. In places they may pose challenges to the dominant order, and

14

The Becoming of the Body

elsewhere they may reinstate safe spaces of identification. Occasionally, they might do all of this at the very same time. But it is precisely in this crossing of boundaries that they provide fertile ground for the feminist literary critic to cultivate contemporary questions about gender, agency and power and to consider responses to multilayered concerns and anxieties about female experiences in the current cultural environment. I use the term ‘feminist literary critic’ deliberately. For my position is that, in reading these works of literature that may be characterised by putatively postfeminist attitudes, the relevance of, and need for, feminism and feminist critique in the contemporary realm becomes all the more transparent. While casting a feminist view into the multilayered and ambivalent climate of contemporary women’s writing in French, this book is mindful of not using such terms in an essentialising manner, but with a critical awareness of their slippage, and of the ways in which the writing under study might resist or strain against them. Criticism in this particular field tends to highlight the importance of collectivity, collective identification and collective thinking in readings of contemporary women’s writing (see, for example, Jordan 2004: 16; Rye 2001: 51), notions that have of course been integral to the feminist movement through the twentieth century. Drawing out collective concerns motivates the unfolding analysis here too. But collectivity will also be resisted in this exploration of the becoming of the body in contemporary women’s writing in French. For this book is driven by interactions and encounters, but also by layering and liminality, by irreducibility and difference, and by the counter-currents that crisscross through the collective. C RO S S C U R R E N T S I N T H E C O L L E C T I V E : STYLE AND THEME In the introduction to a recent volume that seeks to highlight trends in twenty-first century women’s writing in France, co-authored with Gill Rye (Damlé and Rye 2013b), we set out to show that since Cixous’s call for an avant-garde écriture féminine that might create ruptures within masculine representation (Cixous 1975; 1976; Cixous and Clément 1975; 1986), women’s writing in French into the twenty-first century has tended to be characterised by textual experimentation and creative innovation. The critical stance of this introduction is in keeping with my position in this book, which is that it is nonetheless crucial to situate recent trends in women’s writing in closer proximity to a broader sweep of diverse literary endeavours in French literature of the ‘extreme contemporary’, which Warren Motte (2008: 15) describes as the undefined



Introduction 15

terrain of the now as it perpetually escapes from us. It is perhaps not surprising to note that writers and critics alike have been preoccupied with the exact status of the literary text at this millennial moment, thinking through the cultural conventions of the past and projecting them into the future, or looking to new horizons alongside apocalyptic endings.13 Several critics have characterised developments in French literature through the trope of the ‘return’.14 Following on from a period of intricate and, arguably, inaccessible self-reflexive textual experimentation by the Nouveaux Romanciers, the Oulipo, Tel Quel and practitioners of écriture féminine, the ‘return’ has variously heralded the revisiting of history, the subject, creation, and, above all, the story and storytelling. Yet most of these critics have been keen not to define this sense of ‘return’ as the mere repetition of formerly established traditions, but as a revitalisation and reinvention of existing forms, as a critical dialogue with the cultural past in the creation of new literary experiments (Viart 1999: 114). This double movement is highlighted by Motte (2008: 16), who casts contemporary French novels as characters in a broader fiction, ‘[o]ne which speaks in the “now” but also well beyond it, in both directions. One which projects far into our cultural past, and which looks forward into a future we cannot yet imagine.’ Alongside this sense of the revisiting, renewal and rejuvenation of literary forms, however, the rather more apocalyptic notion of a crisis in French literature has also crystallised around the millennial moment.15 As Ruth Cruickshank (2009: 3) explains, however, this has not only been through familiar lamentations of the evacuation of meaning, or of a ‘waste ground brought about by now established avant-gardes’. New millennial discourses of crisis have emerged, particular to contemporary socio-economic, political and cultural factors, which describe French culture as having become ‘the victim of global market forces, homogenised into a mass media product, and succumbed to the putative dominant aesthetic of postmodernism’ (Cruickshank 2009: 3). And yet, interestingly, the invoking of the discourse of crisis might be said itself to vivify, and to generate new forms of creativity (Baetens and Viart 1999: 4). Cruickshank’s study arguably demonstrates this too, in its very analysis of aesthetic responses to these multiplied millennial, postmodern discourses of crisis in the work of four contemporary authors. Whether contemporary French literature is experiencing a period of crisis or one of rejuvenation is something over which critics will no doubt continue to disagree. What can perhaps be discerned from such critical conflicts is the increasing resistance that contemporary literary texts in fact pose to compartmentalisation, even as they are

16

The Becoming of the Body

often packaged and marketed under such bracketings. Charting new trends in French literature becomes a difficult and anxious procedure for the literary critic given the heterogeneity of the literary field, in particular the ways in which boundaries between different genres and putative ‘returns’ or ‘movements’ are being increasingly blurred. An example would be the return to stories and to storytelling which does not signal a rejection of formal innovation but is in fact interlaced with self-­reflexive experiment (see S. Kemp 2010; Motte 2003). Similarly, frontiers are being crossed and collapsed in writing between past and present trends and genres (see Viart and Vercier 2005), between the fantastic and the everyday (see Hutton 2009), minimalism and metaphor (see Motte 1999; 2003; Rabaté and Viart 2009), the public and the private (see Jordan 2014, forthcoming), the popular and the serious (see Holmes and Platten 2010) and further, in visual/textual or mixed media experiments (see Baetens and Blatt 2008; Edwards et al. 2011; Harrow 2010). If there is a common thread that weaves through the rich tapestry of contemporary literary texts in French, then, one might argue that it is their generic slipperiness. As close readings in subsequent chapters will reveal, the work of contemporary female authors participates actively in the textual experimentation and boundary crossing that characterise the field of literature in French (see Damlé and Rye 2013b). It is worth pausing here to highlight in particular the blurry genre of autofiction, which has held particular appeal for women writing in the decades preceding and succeeding the turn of the millennium, explored by authors as diverse as Angot, Bouraoui, Geneviève Brisac, Ken Bugul, Maryse Condé, Cusset, Darrieussecq, Delaume, Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Malika Mokeddem, Millet, NDiaye, Nothomb, Robin, some of whom have also produced theoretical meditations on the genre (see, for example, Burgelin et al. 2010). First coined by Serge Doubrovsky in his 1977 work Fils, and since subject to immense theoretical reflection, it is difficult to establish a firm grasp on this hybrid term. And this is, of course, precisely the point of autofiction’s deliberate fracturing of established genres as well as the site of its enduring critical and cultural fertility. Autofictional texts want to inspire a sense of hesitation in the reader as to the exact status of the text. They resist recuperation to homogenising labels, remaining beyond grasp and highlighting the unknowability of text, and of author.16 As a form of life-writing, autofiction often reflects a sense of crisis in representation of the self, and it sets up a rather more anxious, uneasy relationship to the reader than the autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975), a relationship through which the self is revealed just as it is concealed and camouflaged. Jordan (2013: 77)



Introduction 17

observes that autofiction carries a particular relationship to women’s writing, and argues that a ‘distinct phase in women’s self-narrative in French is underway: one which is remarkable for the extraordinarily difficult material it explores, for the sophisticated channels of selfapprehension it furrows, and for its fertile repositionings of the “I”’. Jordan provides some helpful insights into the ways in which autofiction has variously allowed women writers the means to experiment with ­(self-)­representations of subjectivity. Insofar as the genre creates a sense of distancing from the self, it thus provides a critical space within which to narrate excessive experience, from traumatic violence to the overspilling of desire, concerns that have been particularly prevalent in women’s writing in recent years (see Rye and Worton 2002a; Damlé and Rye 2013a). It also entails exploration of the self beyond the construct of its unity. Doubles, mirrors, masks and hybrids thus abound in contemporary female-authored autofiction, allowing the possibilities of pluralised forms of the self, and the invention and reinvention of subjectivity to come alive. The positioning and repositioning of the self that autofiction evokes provides a useful way into thinking through the themes that tend to surface in contemporary women’s writing in French. For if the return of the ‘subject’ has been signalled more broadly in recent French literature, questions of identity continue to be among the greater concerns of women’s writing, though they are refracted and recast in various ways and in relation to different issues. Since the 1990s, explorations of the self are situated among broader themes relating to history (for example, the violence and vicissitudes of World War II and the Algerian conflict), geography, space and the environment, society (issues of class, race, gender), familial questions (revisiting the conventionally ambivalent mother–daughter relationship, but also opening out relations with fathers and siblings), desire and sexuality, and the body.17 The decade leading up to the turn of the millennium has commonly been described as exposing the ‘darker’ side to women’s writing, focusing in particular on violence, loss and trauma (Rye and Worton 2002b), and into the twenty-first century writers have continued to grapple with the exposure of experiences that are difficult to assimilate, express and comprehend. Nonetheless, the past decade has also witnessed the emergence of more hopeful themes, and an emphasis on affect, ethics and creativity in relation to identity (Damlé and Rye 2013a; Damlé with Rye 2014, forthcoming; Rye with Damlé 2013). Whether conceived as fracture, splitting and self-estrangement, or in terms of the carnivalesque, hybridity and multiplicity, identity is undeniably expressed in contemporary women’s narrative and life-writing

18

The Becoming of the Body

alike in pluralised forms. As Morello and Rodgers note (2002b: 28) at the beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘Le sujet est donc de retour [. . .] mais on est cependant loin d’avoir affaire au sujet complet, continu, unifié et unique d’antan.’18 Though psychoanalysis has continued to play a major role in shaping notions of identity, female-authored texts are also frequently engaging with other poststructuralist and postmodern discourses of subjectivity. In addition, the political concerns raised by postcolonial thought in relation to exile, uprooting and migration have begun to influence notions of identity more broadly, as the world becomes increasingly globalised and arguably transnational. In raising questions of alterity and otherness (Asibong and Jordan 2009; Bragard and Ravi 2011a), the uncanny or fantastic (Connon 2010; Hutton 2009), plurality (Edwards 2011; Edwards and Hogarth 2010), the ‘in-between’ (Caine 2003; Thumerel 2004), hybridity (Rye 2004), displacement (Edwards and Hogarth 2008) and nomadism (Damlé 2011; Lasserre and Simon 2008), contemporary women writers have undermined in various ways the unified, stable subject, carving out plural forms of the self and evoking the slipperiness of subjectivity. This book is interested in thinking about how the shifting nature of female subjectivity that is borne out in so many literary texts and in so much critical and cultural criticism is brought to bear specifically on the body. The body has long been the focal point of female experience in feminist thinking and in women’s writing. Cast in a hierarchical binary relationship to the mind since Plato, the body is historically associated with passivity and stasis, a container for the internal mechanisms of the mind, and subject to its manipulations. The hierarchy of this relationship and its implications for femininity came to the fore in the French feminism of the 1970s and its engagement with Derridean deconstruction. Cixous and Clément (1975; 1986) argue that Western civilisation has been built up around a series of binary distinctions that revolve around the central hierarchical couple of masculine/feminine (or male/ female). Oppositions such as active/passive, day/night, culture/nature, logos/pathos can all be traced to the underlying couple of masculine/ feminine, and its correlation with positivity/negativity. Set apart from the logos, femininity is associated with the body and with lack of reason, and, as such, the female body is doubly relegated to positions of negativity and powerlessness. Cixous’s écriture féminine wants to unravel this phallogocentric concentration of meaning that serves to subjugate women, and to displace the binary by inscribing the female body in writing, a writing of milk and white ink. Where Cixous looks to deconstruct the signifying processes of binary oppositions that have confined women, Irigaray is interested in how the female body and her



Introduction 19

desires have been subject to patriarchal oppression and denial through what she terms a specular logic. For Irigaray, the masculine subject is defined through a process of reflection onto a feminine other, which serves to reaffirm his own masculinity as self-identical. Femininity, on the other hand, is prescribed by masculine specula(risa)tion, which necessarily refuses, or ignores, the desires of the female body (Irigaray 1977: 29; 1985b: 30). Irigaray’s Speculum (1974; 1985a) mobilises the multiple connotations of the speculum, an instrument used to dilate and explore bodily cavities, particularly in gynaecological investigations, whose original Latin meaning was ‘mirror’ (etymologically derived from the Latin specere – ‘to look’). The speculum is designed to illuminate the secrets of the cave, ‘pour percer le mystère du sexe de la femme’ (Irigaray 1974: 182),19 highlighting the masculine desire to view and to penetrate the otherness of the female body. Drawing together readings of Freud and of philosophers from Plato to Hegel, Irigaray’s text itself sets up a complex architecture of framing and mirroring devices that play on the image of the speculum, whose concave shape mimics that which it seeks to illuminate, and exposes and deconstructs the phallogocentrism of these thinkers, while exposing their incorporation within the feminine. Feminist writers of the 1970s such as Cixous and Irigaray thus sought to undercut dominant phallogocentric and patriarchal forms of signifying and representing femininity and the female body. They also sought new poetic forms of writing the female body, and of reinscribing the relationship between women and their bodies in terms of positivity, agency and assertion rather than negativity, powerlessness and mystery. However, women’s writing of the past twenty years has displaced such affirmations of corporeality, and disclosed far more complex and conflictual attitudes towards female bodily experience. Many of the corporeal questions that are explored in women’s writing are not necessarily new, and often they revisit, within the contemporary context, the ongoing cycle of life with its bodily changes: the emotional and physical transitions involved in adolescence (Bouraoui, Nothomb), the transformation of body and experience in pregnancy and mothering (Darrieussecq, Véronique Olmi), the exposure to vulnerability that comes with ageing (Régine Detambel), the confrontation with mortality that illness brings (Ernaux). Such (generally) common experiences reveal anxieties about the unpredictability of the female body and the impossibility of harnessing its fluctuations. However, women’s writing in French in recent years has also been concerned with figuring other, more particular, traumatic and extreme experiences of the strain and suffering of the female body, such as abortion (Nobécourt), eating

20

The Becoming of the Body

disorders (Geneviève Brisac, Anna Gavalda, Nothomb, Delphine de Vigan), abuse, violence and rape (Despentes, Devi). What is striking about such explorations is the unexpected nature of attitudes towards violence – literal or symbolic – that are often revealed. Far from the denigration and deconstruction of patriarchal oppression, misogyny or phallogocentric dominance that is drawn out in previous areas of women’s writing in French, contemporary female-authored texts express ambivalence, indeed sometimes collude with, the violent attitudes towards women that are expressed. In the contemporary climate, the dissemination of (often sexualised) images of the female body has been amplified by the mass media, arguably foregrounding physical appearance like never before. If the idealisation and regulation of the perfect female form is still an important concern, female-authored texts also tend to reveal ambivalent responses to objectification and the politics of beauty (Darrieussecq, Nothomb). Indeed, many have been concerned with the deliberate exposure of the female body in highly sexualised, often impersonal and sometimes explicitly pornographic terms (Cusset, Millet, Nimier, Reyes). Others respond in different terms of disembodiment and detachment (Devi, Nothomb). If the body remains a primary site of exploration in contemporary women’s writing in French, its articulations are clearly not as readily recuperable to feminist positions as in the past. Yet it is worth noting that this tendency, or rather the very capacity, to test the boundaries of the relationship between femininity and the body in cultural forms is possible only because the previous work of feminism has enabled it. As Jordan (2004: 57) astutely observes, ‘Women are enjoying almost unlimited freedom to represent and read about their sexual selves as the erstwhile taboo becomes mainstream, marketable, respectably shocking and culturally and politically interesting.’ For Jordan, such freedom of representation necessarily brings with it a certain risk factor: pushing at the limits of the body leaves such ‘difficult’ representations dangerously open to a very wide range of interpretations. On the other hand, and as Rye and Worton (2002b: 15) also suggest, there is an imperative for exploration of the underbelly of female bodily experience, which takes us in the contemporary realm into such difficult areas as pornography, violence and suffering. I would add that articulations of the female body that are ‘difficult’ or ‘dangerous’ are precisely the ones that invite critical interpretation and debate, and that force us to confront and think through the mechanisms of contemporary society through its cultural responses to the female body. In contemporary women’s writing in French, then, difficult experiences and difficult representations of the female body abound. But one



Introduction 21

of the greatest difficulties perhaps emerges in the marking out of the female body in, of and as itself. Invisible to ourselves and determined by others, the body marks the threshold between self and other, and the malleability of lines between the private and the public. Its surface is patterned with the markers of our identity and our differences make us recognisable to others. Yet how we appear to others is inevitably mediated by the very expectations of others, and by the requirements of socio-political norm and convention. In the contemporary climate, the cultural, political and national signifiers that are ascribed to the skin we live in and the garments and other signs with which we adorn our bodies serve to identify us, but also sometimes to contain us and our otherwise fluid identities within the strict parameters of gender, sexuality and race that are governed by assumptions formulated on the basis of biology or cultural identification. Reading contemporary women’s writing in French, this book will argue, reopens and renegotiates the parameters between specificity and difference that have concerned second-wave feminism. In the contemporary realm, we may ask what factors constitute and specify female corporeality. We may ask how the female body is materially defined and culturally constructed. But we may also ask how we might think about the female body’s difference beyond the sexual binary and whether the female body might differ not only from its other – or its multiple others – but also, perhaps, from itself and its own material reality. This book considers articulations of female corporeality in the writing of Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui, and argues for some resonance in their treatment of the contemporary status of the body. These writers have not been chosen as an entirely representative selection of the current climate of women’s writing in French as a means to signal a particular new trend, but as examples of some very different and difficult, multilayered textual responses to female corporeality that can be found in the contemporary climate of female-authored textual production. Though each of these authors now either lives or works in metropolitan France, it is worth noting that their writings proceed from diverse cultural backgrounds and ­perspectives. Nothomb is Belgian-born, Devi is Indo-Mauritian, Darrieussecq was born in the Basque country and Bouraoui is half-French and half-­Algerian and, to varying extents, these cultural backgrounds occupy a place in their works. Drawing these authors together, this book proposes a deliberate grouping of a multicultural corpus within the context of an increasingly globalised world to think about how women’s concerns might be shared and contested in different, though perhaps overlapping, cultural environments. Postcolonial politics may be relevant in some of

22

The Becoming of the Body

the readings that follow; however, the book proposes a transnational perspective, in keeping critics such as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (2005: 5) as ‘a space of exchange and participation’ in place of a rigid dichotomy between francophone ‘metropolitan’ and ‘postcolonial’ readings of texts. Though my chosen corpus is in some way reflective of recent debates about the postcolonial, the transnational and the possibilities afforded by a ‘littérature-monde’,20 I will not linger on these terms and it will suffice to say that my focus remains the drawing out of difference within my collective of Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui. The book will argue that the female body emerges in their works as a primary figure of exploration, expression, contestation and sometimes negation, a site of multiple discourses at the nexus of cultural and social intersections through which it articulates and is articulated, a body suspended in difference and in perpetual becoming. This book is thus concerned with how the plural forms of female subjectivity that have been apparent in recent women’s writing in French impact upon figurations of corporeality. In thinking through ‘the becoming of the body’, it might be helpful to invoke the word ‘transformation’. No longer concerned with the mere reappropriation and reinhabiting of historically silenced and excluded voices and bodies, these four writers share a common interest in the radical reconceptualisation of the female body. What is particularly striking about their works is that they appear to move beyond the cultural resignification called for by the second wave, and through the discursive iterations of gender signalled by queer theorists such as Judith Butler, to transformation and material redistribution, to the very unmaking and remaking of female corporeality. They are linked, then, by a profound interest in the morphological limits of the body, and how they might be exceeded, transgressed or disintegrated. These writers explore transformations of the female body through the operations of both the everyday and the fantastic, pushing at the boundaries of the body and challenging its forms. In Nothomb’s work, the notion of transformation is highlighted through figurations of anorexia, drawing together questions about the relationship between mind and body, beauty, illness and politics. In their depictions of transformations of sexuality, Devi and Bouraoui are both interested in how desire materialises, shapes and collapses the body and its interactions with others. The female body is formed, unformed and reformed through shapeshifting and metamorphosis for Devi and Darrieussecq’s characters, who explore the boundaries of the human, transforming into animals and flirting with traces and technologies. All four writers, to differing



Introduction 23

degrees, are concerned with the transformations wrought on the body through cultural uprooting and displacement. In different ways, and with different implications for notions of gender, power and agency within feminist contexts, these writers depart from concepts of origin and the fixity of the female subject, and mobilise the transformative becoming of the body. This book marks a move away from a tendency for studies of the body in literature, particularly in women’s writing, to propose psychoanalytical readings of texts. Though the instability of the body, its difference and its transformation are evoked in my readings of Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui, these will be framed not in terms of psychoanalytical alterity or fracture within the self, but in terms of the body being opened out beyond its conventional limits and propelled into vitality and flux. For the ways in which we think about the body, it would seem, are ever shifting away from psychic interiority and depth towards conceptions of corporeality as a surface figure. The writers discussed here are concerned with how bodies interact with the virtual. Rather than offering histories of female bodies, they are interested in their geographies and their horizontal movements. Rather than presenting bodies in terms of psychic integrity and wholeness of being, they engage with transformation. Through their explorations of the conceptual rearticulation, material redistribution, and the becoming of the body, Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui demonstrate the subject to be multilayered, and mechanise the sideways movement and mutation of embodied subjectivity, referred to by Rosi Braidotti in the epigraph to this introduction. In seeking innovative and creative ways to read these dynamics of female corporeality, this book turns to the philosophy of Deleuze, and to his collaborations with Félix Guattari. As we shall see, articulations of corporeality in the work of these writers hold great resonance with a Deleuzian vocabulary, one that invokes flux, mobility, geography, surface and aleatory connection. Navigating such a theoretical framework will not be without some critical risk. Deleuze has often been criticised for taking a masculinist approach to philosophical endeavour, for obscuring the body and feminine specificity. Nonetheless, this book will maintain that his philosophy is of increasing relevance to feminist concerns and to thinking about the dynamism of the female body. On the other hand, it will also propose that the critical risks that are admittedly involved in this possible obscuring of feminine specificity may well be particularly pertinent to the authors under study here, writing as they are with multilayered ambivalence and anxiety about the female subject.

24

The Becoming of the Body

This book begins by thinking through the dynamism of Deleuzian philosophy and reading an array of concepts and works through a feminist lens as a means of discerning their relevance to a contemporary theorisation of the (female) body. Chapter 1, ‘The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text: Encountering Bodily Becoming through Deleuze and Feminism’, analyses Deleuze’s work as a philosophy of flows, of possibilities and of vitality. It explores the ways in which his thought has been resisted by conventional feminism, and later taken up by a range of recent feminist and queer theorists, while providing its own particular readings as a feminist literary critic. The chapter unpicks Deleuze’s thinking through the conceptualisation of transcendental empiricism, exploring relations between a-subjectivity, the event and the fold. It then analyses Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-psychoanalytical theory through the aleatory flux of desire, the Body without Organs and notions of becoming. Finally, it considers the Deleuzian concept of difference, thinking through its possible relations with politics and with art, and unfolding a philosophy of the becoming of the body that lays the foundations for the rest of the work. The subsequent chapters discuss Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui in turn. Each chapter explores the becoming of the body in the author’s work, while focusing on different elements of Deleuzian philosophy. While the philosophy provides a fertile set of concepts that illuminate the literary works, reading these texts together also offers a means of providing crucial insights into Deleuze’s work, of experimenting with ideas and of seeking out the edges of their possibilities. Chapter 2, ‘Making a Body without Organs: Amélie Nothomb’s An-Organic Flux of Immanence’, explores hunger and the anorexic body in the author’s autofictional works. It analyses relations between hunger, desire and pleasure, sensation and immanence, before investigating the making of a Deleuzian Body without Organs through the dematerialising structures of anorexia, and the possibility of the rematerialisation of the body alongside literary experimentation with corporeality. The chapter shows how Nothomb’s work both resonates with and reorients Deleuze’s thinking, with particular regard to notions of molarity, to the politics of beauty and illness, to experiments with body and art, and to the location of the limit. Chapter 3, ‘Becoming Otherwise: The Transformative Encounter in Ananda Devi’s Writing’, investigates the concept of becoming otherwise as a form of resistance to socio-cultural hierarchies of difference. The chapter begins by exploring metamorphoses as examples of Deleuzian becoming-animal, then proceeds to analyse the space in-between subjects as a transformative encounter that collapses transcendent



Introduction 25

relations between characters, as well as between writer and text. In its analysis of Devi’s work, the chapter also opens out dialogues between Deleuze and Irigaray, looking in particular at the concept of mutual engenderment, as a means of shaping an affective philosophy of polyphony through the interlacing of embodied and creative lines of flight. Chapter 4, ‘The Flux and Folds of Consciousness: Marie Darrieussecq’s Literature of Simulation and Dispersal’, continues the theme of the becoming of the body through metamorphosis. The chapter analyses the interweaving in Darrieussecq’s writing of Deleuzian traces with contemporary feminist thinkers Judith Butler’s and Rosi Braidotti’s theories of performativity and parody. It then explores the interplay between simulation and dispersal in Darrieussecq’s work, relating this to a posthuman vision of the contemporary world within which consciousness is figured in terms of flux and folds. The chapter shows how Darrieussecq’s conceptually inventive writing illuminates Deleuzian notions of becoming and folding, not least in her reconsideration of relations between surface and depth in the torsion between mind, body and universe. Chapter 5, ‘Nomadic Vitalities: Becoming Beyond Boundaries in Nina Bouraoui’s Writing’, begins by exploring Deleuzian nomadism within the postcolonial context of Bouraoui’s work as a state of perpetually deterritorialised flux. Its analysis of subjectivity through constant shifts and transitions is then brought to bear on the reconfiguration of desire and sexuality in Bouraoui’s writing. The chapter considers the becoming of the body in terms of the trajectories of corporeality and the vital flows of an aleatory desire and plastic sexuality. Mobilising Deleuzian notions of space – smooth space and the any-space-whatever – the chapter suggests that Bouraoui’s writing interlaces the actual and the virtual in its perpetual invention of a queer future becoming. In its exploration of the becoming of the body in contemporary women’s writing in French, the arc of this book travels, then, from bodily dematerialisation and destratification, through the affective transformative encounter, to the torsion of consciousness as embodied surface, arriving at a vision of corporeality that is formless yet driven by its own very material desires. Into the twenty-first century, the fashioning and refashioning of the self is central to the way we experience our identities and our bodies, socially and culturally, and, with rapid developments in bio-science and technology, ever-new means of constructing and deconstructing ourselves are becoming available to us. From plastic surgery to new reproductive technologies, from clones to cyborgs, from iPads to Facebook,

26

The Becoming of the Body

the malleability of forms of subjectivity and corporeality and what they can differently achieve is endlessly revealed. The questions about the lines and shapes of the female body that these particular authors raise go some way to disclosing its contemporary positioning as no longer caught merely between the oppositional nature/culture debate, but at the crossroads of multiple intersecting discourses, overlapping and blurring divisions between nature and culture, depth and surface, the actual and the virtual, the passive and the active. In its interweaving of Deleuzian philosophy with feminism, the following chapter explores some of these intersections as a means to begin shaping notions about the becoming of the body in contemporary women’s writing in French. N OT E S   1. ‘whether at the level of works published, literary prizes obtained or critical recognition’. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.   2. For critical studies of the 1990s generation of women authors, see Jordan 2004; Morello and Rodgers 2002; Rye 2002, 2004, 2005b; Rye and Tarr 2006; Rye and Worton 2002a; Sarrey-Strack 2002. See Jordan 2004: 16–17, in particular, for how this notion of a ‘new generation’ came into play. For critical overviews of women’s writing over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first-century, see Damlé and Rye 2013a; Damlé with Rye 2014, forthcoming; Rye with Damlé 2013.   3. See, for example, Best and Crowley 2007 for an exploration of the ‘new pornographies’ in recent French culture; Worton 1998 for an analysis of promiscuity and violence in contemporary French fiction.   4. See Jordan 2013 for an account of the relationship between autofiction and the ‘feminine’.  5. Christine Angot, for example, has twice been publicly accused of plagiarism by Élise Bidoit, the former wife of Angot’s partner of the time. Bidoit is currently suing Angot for the invasion of privacy effected in Le Marché des amants (2008) (The Lover Market) and Les Petits (2011) (The Little Ones), which she claims elaborates unethically on the private life of her family. The publication of Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort (2007) (Tom Is Dead) (2009) sparked a major literary scandal when Camille Laurens accused Darrieussecq of psychical plagiarism. Laurens claimed that Darrieussecq’s book about the loss of a child bore an uncomfortable resemblance to her own autobiographical work on the same theme, Philippe (1995). The much publicised argument between these two authors, who had until then both published with P.O.L, gave rise to much critical debate about the ethics of autofiction, about authenticity, integrity and privacy. Both authors published critical responses (see Burgelin et al. 2010), and Darrieussecq continued her defence with the publication of



Introduction 27

an essay on the cultural history of accusations of plagiarism, Rapport de police (2010) (Police Report).   6. See Holmes 2013 for an account of reading pleasures and the bestseller in contemporary women’s writing in French.   7. See, for example, Virginie Despentes’s feminist manifesto (2006); for critical responses to this work, see Damlé 2013d; Sauzon 2014, forthcoming; Schaal 2012.   8. See Oliver and Walsh 2004 for a critical overview of contemporary French feminist theory; Howells 2004 for a contemporary reader of French women philosophers.   9. Consider the following statements, which all in some way disengage questions of femininity or gender from writing, whether in terms of subject matter, authorial positioning or readership: Nothomb claims in an interview that ‘moi, j’écris vraiment pour tout le monde, hommes et femmes. Et le mystère humain pour moi concerne aussi bien l’homme que la femme: alors pourquoi limiter le mystère, pourquoi le catégoriser?’ (Bainbrigge and den Toonder 2003: 200) (‘I don’t know, I really write for everybody: men and women. And, for me, the human mystery concerns men just as much as women, so why limit the mystery, why categorise it?’) (Bainbrigge and den Toonder 2003: 201); in response to a question regarding specificity, Devi affirms, ‘Je me considère d’abord comme un écrivain, tout simplement. C’est la vraie constante de ma vie’ (Sultan 2001) (‘I consider myself first and foremost a writer, that’s all. It’s the true constant in my life.’); Marie Darrieussecq states: ‘Je suis féministe dans la vie, pas nécessairement dans mon écriture. Je ne crois pas à une écriture féminine. Idée dangereuse, ghettoïsante, minorisante. Il y a peut-être des thèmes féminins, mais l’écriture est sans sexe, de même que le cerveau’ (Concannon and Sweeney 2004a) (‘I am a feminist in my life, but not necessarily in my writing. I don’t think I am a feminist writer. The ideas involve danger, ghetto and minorities. There are maybe feminine themes, but the writing has no sex, just like the mind.’) (Concannon and Sweeney 2004b); finally Nina Bouraoui claims, ‘Quand j’écris je suis libre. Je ne suis pas ni fille ni garçon. Je me laisse emporter par l’écriture’ (Geffroy 2007) (‘When I write, I am free. I am neither a girl nor a boy. I let myself be carried away by writing’). 10. The work of Patricia Mann, for example, who theorises postfeminism as the crossing of discursive boundaries, seems relevant here, insofar as it acknowledges the critical productivity in thinking through interactions between discourses that might see feminism as an ally, but also as a potential source of conflict. For Mann (1994: 31), postfeminism is thus a ‘fertile site of risk’ that involves working through multiple subject positions and negotiating a ‘bricolage of competing and conflicting forms of agency’. Mann argues that, as a critical discourse, postfeminism thus represents a frontier, and ‘bring[s] us to the edge of what we know and encourage[s] us to go beyond’, although it remains to be seen whether that ‘beyond’

28

The Becoming of the Body

is in fact enabling for questions of contemporary female subjectivity and agency, or not. 11. I will not be arguing here that the particular writers I focus on form part of a ‘third wave’ of feminism, which implies a more politically orientated writing than they admit to. See Oliver and Walsh 2004 for a discussion of the third wave in France; Schaal 2012 for a literary perspective on the third wave. For theoretical debates about the oppositions and possible intersections and overlapping between third wave feminism and postfeminism, see Genz and Brabon 2009; Gillis et al. 2004; Heywood 2006. 12. See Holmes 2013 on women’s writing and the popular pleasures of reading. For studies of the relationship between reading pleasure and contemporary French fiction more broadly, see Holmes and Platten 2010; for the place of the popular in contemporary French culture, see Holmes and Looseley 2012. 13. See also Havercroft et al. 2010 on the extreme contemporary. 14. See S. Kemp 2010: 1–2 for an overview of this recent critical tendency to signal the ‘return’, particularly to the story, seen in, among others, Nadeau 1989; Lebrun and Prévost 1990; Viart 1999; Davis and Fallaize 2000. 15. On discourses of crisis, see Baetens 1999; Dandrieu 2006; Rakocevic 2007. See Viart and Demanze 2012 and 2013 for contemporary aesthetics and discourses of the notion of the ‘end’. 16. For recent studies on autobiography and autofiction, see Boyle 2007; Burgelin et al. 2010; Colonna 2004; Havercroft and Sheringham 2012; Jeannelle 2009; Jeannelle et al. 2007; Ouellette-Michalska 2007. 17. For overviews of these themes, see Damlé and Rye 2013a; Damlé with Rye 2014, forthcoming; Jordan 2004; Morello and Rodgers 2002a; Rye 2002, 2004, 2005b; Rye with Damlé 2013; Rye and Worton 2002a. For a particular focus on such historical and political interventions, cultural/ religious tensions and immigration, see, for example, Cairns 2011; El-Nossery 2012; El-Nossery and Rocca 2011; Freedman and Tarr 2000; A. Kemp 2010; Rice 2012. This list is, of course, not exhaustive, and does not attempt to include the numerous critical works that engage with wider francophone and/or postcolonial contexts beyond the scope of this study, although those relating to the francophone islands of the Indian Ocean and to North Africa will be picked up in Chapters 3 and 5. For space and the environment, see, for example, Barnet and Jordan 2010a; Lasserre and Simon 2008. For family questions, see, for example, Barnet and Welch 2007; Rye 2009a. For identity quests, the body, sexuality and materiality, see, for example, Allison and Kershaw 2011; Allison and Long 2013; Détrez and Simon 2006; Edwards and Hogarth 2010; McFadden and Teixidor 2010; Medeiros and Fréville 2012; Rye and Tarr 2006. 18. ‘The subject has thus returned [. . .] however, we are far from dealing with the complete, continuous, unified and unique subject of days gone by.’ 19. ‘to pierce the mystery of woman’s sex’ (Irigaray 1985a: 146).



Introduction 29

20. ‘world literature’. See Le Bris and Rouaud 2007 for this manifesto, one of whose signatories was Ananda Devi; see also Hargreaves et al. 2010 for critical approaches to the usage of the postcolonial, transnational and of littérature-monde.

1. The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text: Encountering Bodily Becoming through Deleuze and Feminism La philosophie est la théorie des multiplicités. Toute multiplicité implique des éléments actuels et des éléments virtuels. Il n’y a pas d’objet purement actuel. Tout actuel s’entoure d’un brouillard d’images virtuelles. (Deleuze 1996: 179)1 Non pas en arriver au point où l’on ne dit plus je, mais au point où ça n’a plus aucune importance de dire je. Nous ne sommes plus nous-mêmes. Chacun connaîtra les siens. Nous avons été aidés, aspirés, multipliés. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 9)2 A P H I L O S O P H Y O F F L OW S This chapter seeks to unpick the philosophy of becoming of Gilles Deleuze, in his sole-authored work and in collaborations with Félix Guattari,3 to trace their connections to the theorisation of the body in feminist thought, and to unearth therein some conceptual grains with which to fertilise my readings of the female body in contemporary women’s writing in French. I am hesitant to posit the aims of this chapter as forging a solid, unmoving theoretical terrain, or as focusing a narrow lens, which would no doubt be illuminating, but which might also restrict the view into the literary texts I read. This book is driven by encounters and interactions and, as such, does not wish to present readings of texts that are resolutely consigned to a particular theoretical grid.4 It might be more helpful, then, to think of this chapter as an attempt to spin a web of interconnected ideas – ideas that will fruitfully engage with the corpus of literary works, albeit often in very different ways – as a means of mutually enriching both theory and text. 30



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 31

To begin, some preliminary thoughts on the positioning of Deleuzian philosophy, and its contribution to broader trends in French poststructuralist thought from the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Like other poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Deleuze’s work is driven by a desire to open out new ways to conceptualise language and identity. Poststructuralists seek to move beyond both the phenomenological model and its basis in sensory embodied experience and the structuralist approach distinguished by the exploration of systems of meaning, and want instead to destabilise the very notion of structure. By interrogating and breaking down the structures that might attribute certain meanings to life in the relation of components to one another, by recognising the insufficiency of experience as foundational or stable, meaning itself inevitably collapses. But for these thinkers, such collapse should not be viewed in terms of failure, negativity, fracture, lack or loss. Rather, the very opening out of thought and resistance to closure can be celebrated in that it seeks not to reduce the flux of the real to prescribed unities of truth and knowledge. This openness of thought, and openness to thought, is a key characteristic of poststructuralist philosophy. If traditional metaphysical questions about being, knowledge and morality were initially displaced by Nietzsche’s death of god, early-twentieth century thought has nonetheless been characterised by an anxious relationship between the individual and knowledge. Poststructuralist thought strips certainty away to the extent that the search for knowledge, even within the arbitrary systems of structuralist thought, or the flux of phenomenological experience, is replaced by a conscious destabilisation not only of these structures and experiences, but of the very place of the subject within them. A recurrent notion that threads through the work of poststructuralist thinkers is that systems and systematisations inevitably constrain and contain the vitality of existence. Foucault’s genealogical investigation of institutionalised structures of power, for example, demonstrates the historical and contingent nature of what he terms the order of things. For Derrida, such constraints not only lie in historical legacy, but are to be found in the structures of language, which serves to privilege certain themes and concepts over others, creating a hierarchy of difference: presence over absence, identity over difference, masculinity over femininity. In Deleuze’s work, the unfolding of thought and language beyond systems and systematisations rests on what might be termed a philosophy of dynamism, a ‘belief that “life” is frequently imprisoned and that it could be freed’ (Marks 1998: 4). To grasp the immanent flux of ‘life’, for Deleuze, is to engage with flows, encounters, rhizomes,

32

The Becoming of the Body

multiplicities, differences, nomadism and becoming, philosophical paradigms that are seen as liberating rather than constraining. Moving beyond the fixity of being, truth and knowledge, the Deleuzian celebration of dynamism means that ‘possibility’ itself becomes a key concept. As such, his philosophical project is not so concerned with conventional metaphysical questions such as ‘what is?’, ‘what can I know?’, or ‘how should I act?’, and experiments instead with the vitality of ‘what is possible?’ Philosophy, according to Deleuze and Guattari, no longer provides a simplifying structure or framework through which to understand and interpret the universe. It does not involve contemplation, reflection or communication, but gestures towards the concept in a creative act: ‘la philosophie est l’art de former, d’inventer, de fabriquer des concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 8).5 Concepts are not there for the taking as pre-established forms, nor do they crystallise as facts once they are created. A concept implicates itself within itself in touching the flux of difference; it is a multiplicity of components, an event rather than an essence (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 26; 1994: 21). Concepts do not explain, give meaning or aspire to conclusions, then, rather they allow difference to emerge. As Todd May (2005: 20) rather evocatively puts it, concepts palpate, in the way that a doctor might palpate the body in order to understand a lesion that they cannot see, creating a ‘zone of touch’: ‘Concepts palpate difference, and by doing so they give voice to it. It is a strange voice, eerie and penetrating.’ Deleuzian thought involves being unsettled, and open to jolts and disturbances. It is nomadic, it passes and flows across the surface of immanence, in the vein of Nietzsche, for whom, as Deleuze writes, À travers tous les codes du passé, du présent, de l’avenir, il s’agit [. . .] de faire passer quelque chose qui ne se laisse et ne se laissera pas coder. Le faire passer sur un nouveau corps, inventer un corps sur lequel cela puisse passer et couler: un corps qui serait le nôtre, celui de la Terre, celui de l’écrit. (Deleuze 2002: 352–3)6

A philosophy of possibility undercuts codes and invents new bodies within and across our immanent reality, bodies of thought and bodily thought that intersect the actual and the virtual. As we shall see, a Deleuzian approach to philosophy as flow thus holds immense appeal for a project of this kind that aims to open out perspectives on the body in contemporary culture, to think through – or across – the body while respecting its suspended becoming.



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 33

THE RECEPTION OF DELEUZE IN FEMINIST THOUGHT The past twenty years have been witness to an explosion of critical interest in the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, in keeping with Foucault’s (1994: 76) claim that ‘un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera Deleuzien’.7 Whether we translate the ‘siècle’ here as ‘century’ or as something akin to an ‘inner circle’ or ‘in-crowd’ (see Faubion 1998: xix, xxxix), the scope of thinking about or after Deleuze in academic circles would seem to fulfil this prophetic point. And yet, moving beyond the possible elitism of the ‘in-crowd’, what has been particularly striking is the range of criticism that strives to read Deleuze ‘with’ or ‘and’ something else, something that is either perhaps perceived not to be so obviously Deleuzian or that might commonly invite a non-Deleuzian, and perhaps non-esoteric, approach. This is evidenced by the recent appearance of journals such as Deleuze Studies and Deleuze Connections, whose volumes place Deleuzian philosophy in conversation with various subject areas, including politics, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism, the body, geography, space, cinema, performance, art, music and literature.8 My own critical thinking is in keeping, then, with a revitalised interest in Deleuze’s work, and in particular with a desire to set his thought in motion beyond the confines of the ‘in-crowd’ of French poststructuralist philosophy, to bring it into a contemporary realm and to engage it with political, cultural and aesthetic debates. Deleuzian philosophy has historically experienced a troubled relationship with the work of feminism, compared with other areas of poststructuralist thought, which have been mobilised in a great deal of feminist writing from the 1970s onwards. While Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction provided Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva with helpful ways of thinking about the place of the female subject within symbolic or logocentric structures, Foucault’s groundbreaking work on the history of sexuality has given rise to a wealth of valuable critical thinking in feminist and queer theory, most notably the work of Judith Butler. However, from the outset, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari have been heavily criticised by feminists for a number of theoretical concepts that would seem to indicate a disconcerting lack of attention to sexual specificity or a ‘masculinist’ approach, and it has taken a great deal longer for feminism to find any value in their work. Irigaray has heaped critical coals on these philosophers’ heads, claiming that their vocabulary of multiplicity and nomadism necessarily extinguishes any kind of specificity, and

34

The Becoming of the Body

thus denies women their identities and desires in a dangerous erasure of sexual difference. For Irigaray, the collapsing of the subject that Deleuzian philosophy entails can be nothing but an impossibility for women, arguing as she does, quite rightly, that one cannot take apart an identity which has never fully been inhabited in the first place: ‘ne faut-il pas avoir eu au langage et au sexe – aux organes – un rapport que les femmes n’ont jamais eu?’ (Irigaray 1977: 139).9 Irigaray further objects to the terminology of machines, technologies and assemblages that peppers Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (in that it signals a technocratic discursive tradition which has historically excluded women), and to their elegy of the schizophrenic as another minoritarian figure alongside women (as reinforcing a damaging association between women and madness, and overly romanticising suffering). Similarly, in the Anglo-American context, feminist thinker Alice Jardine (1985: 217) rejects Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy on the basis of the concept of becoming-woman, which, she argues, invisibilises female materiality while continuing to appropriate the feminine within male discourse. These are stark and seemingly valid criticisms and I shall return to their persistent implications later in this chapter, and, indeed, throughout the book. And yet, since the 1990s a variety of feminist and queer thinkers have reassessed Deleuzian philosophy as a means to think through contemporary female corporeality in terms of multiplicity. Much productive work has been done in this area towards a so-called ‘corporeal feminism’, by thinkers who include Claire Colebrook, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Tamsin Lorraine and Dorothea Olkowski, among others.10 In focusing on folding, flux and becoming, my own positions are perhaps closest to those of Braidotti and Grosz. Braidotti argues that the relevance of French poststructuralism to feminism lies not so much in what it might or might not have to say about women, sexuality or the body; of greater importance is its redefinition of thinking, and its opening out of the theoretical process towards a creative envisioning of subjectivity (Braidotti 1994a: 100). Braidotti’s own work thus projects subjectivity as intensive and multiple, ‘rhizomatic, embodied, and therefore, perfectly artificial; as an artifact it is machinic, complex, endowed with multiple capacities for interconnectedness in the impersonal mode’ (Braidotti 1994b: 162). She ­repositions gendered constructions of subjectivity within the contemporary millennial climate in which the body is subject to multiple layerings and interconnections. As she writes, there is no question that what, even and especially in feminism, we go on calling, quite nostalgically, ‘our bodies, ourselves’ are abstract technological constructs fully immersed in advanced psycho-pharmacological industry,



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 35 bio-science and the new media. This does not make them any less embodied, or less ourselves, it just complicates considerably the task of representing to ourselves the experience of inhabiting them. (Braidotti 2000: 161)

Braidotti thus compellingly argues that the Deleuzian concept of nomadism holds great promise, insofar as it offers contemporary feminism a way of acknowledging the multiplicity and difference of subjectivity, of occupying different subject positions at different times, and of combining coherence with mobility, contingency and transformation. Nomadic ruptures or shifts open out spaces for new and different forms of agency to be engendered, she argues, and as such they m ­ obilise ‘a creative sort of becoming; a performative metaphor’ (Braidotti 1994a: 6). Elizabeth Grosz also highlights the relevance of multiplicity to a contemporary theory of the corporeal subject, and in particular signals the reversal of Platonism as a crucial common target shared by Deleuzian philosophy and feminism (Grosz 1994b: 190). Grosz presents a persuasive set of arguments that illuminate the advantages of a Deleuzian framework to contemporary feminism. These include (Grosz 1994a: 180): (1) the ‘flattening out of relations between the social and the psychical so that there is neither a relation of causation (one- or twoway) nor hierarchies, levels, grounds, or foundations’; (2) the refusal to ‘duplicate’ the world into real and representation; (3) positing an ‘in-between’ as a critique of binarism; (4) the demassification of the entities that binary thought counterposes against each other; and (5) the incessant refusal of a single explanatory paradigm. Braidotti and Grosz variously draw attention to the ways in which Deleuze enables the rethinking of bodily subjectivity as an overlapping between nature and culture, and between interiority and exteriority, rather than placing bodies in categories that are pulled back to the putative oppositioning of earlier feminist debates around biological essentialism or social constructionism. While Braidotti focuses largely on nomadic becoming and metamorphosis, Grosz highlights aleatory desire, the Body without Organs, and the folding of corporeality, which she figures through the model of the Möbius strip. Thinking through Lacan, neurophysiological discourse, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Foucault and Kristeva, Grosz formulates a model of female corporeality that draws significantly on Deleuze in its theorisation of the torsion of the body, and in its interrogation of the conventional relationship between depth and surface: The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way

36

The Becoming of the Body

of problematising and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside and the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior, by showing not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside. (Grosz 1994a: xii)

The work of these feminist philosophers forges new ground and offers stimulating perspectives on contemporary female corporeality in its engagement with Deleuzian thought. Moving away from the positions on sex and sexual difference of the second wave that oft give rise to concerns about essentialism, these thinkers reconceive female subjectivity within the very terms of dynamism, vitalism and possibility that govern Deleuze’s work. However, drawing on Deleuze as a feminist is not achieved without some margin of reserve. As we shall see, certain Deleuzian concepts and turns of phrase continue to provoke critical consternation for the feminist thinker, in particular the contested concept of ‘becoming-woman’, and, as such, Braidotti, Grosz and others tend to stress the process of counter-position that is involved in Deleuzian feminism, which is invoked as ‘Deleuze and feminism’ or ‘Deleuze with feminism’. Feminist approaches to Deleuzian philosophy often require taking a certain risk on the potential use-value of Deleuze’s thought, rather than strictly adhering to its principles. Accordingly, Braidotti (2002: 83) refers to her ‘nomadic feminism’ as ‘zigzagging through Deleuze and feminism’. And as Jerry Aline Flieger (2000: 62) remarks, like the orchid and the wasp, the relation of Deleuzian thought and feminist thought may be ‘mapped’ or interwoven in a kind of productive disjunction. It is perhaps neither a matter of window-dressing, masquerade and cosmetic solutions, nor of conflict and irreconcilable differences, but a matter of paradox.

In itself, this seems a way of thinking that corresponds to a philosophy of flows, a gesture of thought that touches upon difference and allows it to emerge rather than strictly encoding it, an encounter with Deleuzian thought, such that Deleuze himself might advocate (although, as we shall see, an encounter or dialogue that he might not have put into practice himself). The analysis that follows is indebted to the work of Braidotti, Grosz and others, which provides a conceptual springboard for my own readings of Deleuze in this chapter. As a feminist literary critic, however, my purposes both overlap with and depart from these thinkers. My concern in this book is with how reading Deleuze can help us to understand contemporary experiences of female corporeality, but also with how reading Deleuze opens out perspectives on contemporary expressions of female corporeality. It will be important



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 37

to hold in view here the relationship between body and text. Is there room for more engagement with Deleuze in thinking about the female body on the level of the literary rather than the literal? Can one take more risks with Deleuze in such a context? And what would be the point? I shall return to these questions briefly at the end of this chapter and throughout this book. First, however, we will take a closer look at some key areas of Deleuzian thought – the philosophy of transcendental empiricism, desire, the Body without Organs, notions of becoming, nomadism and difference – in order to establish something, at least, of a grasp on their relevance to a theorisation of contemporary female corporeality. T R A N S C E N D E N TA L E M P I R I C I S M : T H E A-SUBJECTIVE, THE EVENT AND THE FOLD Deleuzian philosophy proposes a vital rethinking of the relationship between subject, object and universe. In Deleuze’s formulation of transcendental empiricism, the subject is not merely repositioned but rather dislocated, allowing a philosophy to emerge that is instead shaped around an a-subjective consciousness. The potentially negative implications of a-subjectivity for the purposes of feminism are immediately apparent. For how can one reconcile the a-subjective with a philosophy or politics whose impetus is precisely to emphasise a localisable subject? In other words, if one does not have a starting point from which to speak, how can one possibly begin to identify as, for example, a woman? And if one cannot, then, is the entire purpose of feminism not rendered futile? My position here is that while the Deleuzian a-subjective invokes tensions with a conventional feminist politics, it nonetheless opens out illuminating perspectives on the folds and flux of consciousness that go some way to inform contemporary experiences and expressions of corporeality, even as it may be conceived of in feminine terms. As Claire Colebrook (2000: 113) observes, questions of sexual difference have traditionally been aligned to a transcendental philosophy: ‘the recent debate over sexual difference concerns nothing other than the possibility that the gendered subject may not just encounter a world, but that sex occurs as a specific relation to the world.’ In countering transcendence, however, the Deleuzian philosophy of transcendental empiricism explodes that relationship between the subject and the world, and seeks less to provide meaning for the given, than to open out responses to what is taken as given. The implications for questions of sexual difference will be drawn out over the course of this chapter, but as this section will begin to reveal, any

38

The Becoming of the Body

kind of theorisation after Deleuze thus requires trying to think ‘without the illusion of transcendence’ (Colebrook 2000: 125). For Deleuze, a major problem in the tradition of Western philosophy emerges in that experience is always already imparted to a fixed and pre-existing subject. From the moment of the Cartesian cogito, the subject is thus constructed as a ‘plane of transcendence’, whereby it is imagined that there is some stable meaning or truthful foundation behind that which we create as identity. Deleuze wants to collapse Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ on the very grounds that it presupposes a thinking subject that exists externally to the rest of the world. While for Descartes the possibility of thought itself proves the existence of the subject, there unfolds for Deleuze a problematic assumption that the way one relates to the world is necessarily rooted in knowledge and judgement, that the world exists before the subject as a set of facts to be represented. For Deleuze, the flux of the real, or the ‘plane of immanence’, is a field of flows of difference, a collection of energies and multiplicities, which lies in opposition to the world as mediated through subject and object. Rather than ordering experience in a Cartesian manner, then, ideas are instead the effect of experience. It is from immanent experience itself that an image of the subject is formed, and that the contrasting ‘plane of transcendence’ is produced from the given. Deleuze’s philosophy is shaped here by his reading of Humean empiricism, and he explains that, ‘Du donné, j’infère l’existence d’autre chose qui n’est pas donné: je crois. [. . .] Dans la même opération, et en même temps, je juge et je me pose comme sujet: en dépassant le donné. J’affirme plus que je sais’ (Deleuze 1953: 90).11 It is important to highlight that the mind receives ideas and connections that create the impression of a transcendent subject, and that the subject does not create ideas but is constituted by them. Deleuze (1953: 150) thus maintains an important distinction between subject and mind: ‘Par luimême, l’esprit n’est pas sujet: c’est une collection donnée d’impressions et d’idées séparées.’12 Humean empiricism entails the substitution of a psychology of the mind, in and of itself, by the ways in which the mind is ‘affected’ (Deleuze 1953: 1; 1991: 21). The mind is thus not nature, or a system, but is identical with the very collection of ideas that exist in the mind, and it becomes subjected under the effect of the principles of passion and association. As Deleuze (1953: 15) writes, ‘L’esprit n’est pas sujet, il est assujetti. Et quand le sujet se constitue seulement dans l’esprit sous l’effet des principes, l’esprit se saisit en même temps comme un Moi parce qu’il est qualifié.’13 If the subject is the product of principles within the mind, though, it is also the mind that transcends itself. In other words, the mind exists as a collection of



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 39

impressions and ideas, but it is the repetition of connections between these that produces the transcendent subject. The mind thus becomes subject through the principles of passion, through its vividness: ‘quand il mobilise sa vivacité de telle façon qu’une partie dont elle est le caractère (impression) la communique à une autre partie (idée), et d’autre part, quand toutes les parties prises ensemble résonnent en produisant quelque chose de nouveau’ (Deleuze 1953: 151, original italics).14 But further, such repetition and connection result in the anticipation of them, producing through the principles of association – contiguity, resemblance and causality – the transcendent subject through the fixing and naturalisation of the mind (Deleuze 1953: 5; 1991: 24). Belief, then, rests on anticipation and invention, and ultimately on turning the given itself into a nature (Deleuze 1953: 152; 1991: 133). Through Hume, Deleuze thus formulates the coming into being of the transcendent subject, which his own philosophy of transcendental empiricism wants to undermine. In contrast to transcendence, transcendental empiricism refuses to attribute experience to a subject, liberating thought from metaphysics, and opening out the immanence of experience. The notion of the event, as Deleuze conceives it, further dislocates the subject, and it also provides a way to think through the relations between the actual and the virtual that underpin his philosophy of countering transcendence. Following the Stoics, Deleuze makes a distinction between bodies and their corresponding states of affairs, and incorporeal effects. The former can be understood in Deleuzian thought in terms of the actual, or the immediate perception of experience, whereas the latter can be understood as the virtual. The event is a virtual or incorporeal effect. Yet there is a double movement involved in the event insofar as it is actualised in, or attributed to, bodies and states of affairs, while nonetheless containing an altogether different, virtual dimension, ‘une part ombrageuse et secrète qui ne cesse de se soustraire ou de s’ajouter à son actualisation: contrairement à l’état des choses, il ne commence ni ne finit, mais a gagné ou gardé le mouvement infini auquel il donne consistance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 148).15 This element of the event is virtual insofar as it is distinguished from the actual. But it is also real, because, rather than corresponding to the immediate materiality of the actual, there remains, in what is not actualised from the event, pure immanence. This dimension of the event is thus immaterial, incorporeal and, indeed, unliveable (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 148; 1994: 156). Though this aspect of the event is described as unliveable, in countering transcendence, one must nonetheless aspire to be worthy of the event. Perspectives on the event can only be established in an

40

The Becoming of the Body

acceptance of it as separate from the subject in its transcendent form, in other words, in counter-actualising the event. Again, Deleuze follows the Stoics in his discussion of the ethics of amor fati: being worthy of an event, recognising its existence before the subject rather than its relation to the subject. Here he refers to Joë Bousquet’s notion of the ‘wound’, which proposes that suffering should not be experienced as something that happens to the subject: ‘Ma blessure existait avant moi, je suis né pour l’incarner’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 80).16 Rather than suffering an event, then, one rather aspires to the event that supersedes the subject. Being born to embody the event involves accepting the wound in its non-actualised form, and acknowledging its virtual immanence. As such, being born to embody the wound paradoxically involves being able to disembody it, to counter-actualise it by affirming the dimension of it that slips away from the actual. In another example of counter-actualising the event, Deleuze proposes that the abject desire ‘to be loved’ might be substituted with the power ‘to love’. This is not merely reversal of passive and active action. ‘To love’ should not be understood as specifying either a subject or object of that love, or an identification with the universe, but the power to love as pure event: dégager le pur événement qui m’unit à ceux que j’aime, et qui ne m’attendent pas plus que je ne les attends, puisque seul l’événement nous attend, Eventum tantum. Faire un événement, si petit soit-il, la chose la plus délicate du monde, le contraire de faire un drame, ou de faire une histoire. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 81)17

As we can see, Deleuze pays close attention to language in the formulation of the pure event, substituting passives for actives, and nouns for verbs. Elsewhere, he again draws on the Stoics in their supplanting of the statement ‘the tree is green’ with ‘the tree greens’, thus rendering the event neither an attribute nor a quality, but the incorporeal predicate of a subject of the proposition, and putting manner in the place of essence (Deleuze 1988: 71–2; 1993b: 53). ‘The tree greens’, or ‘the greening of the tree’, is the language of the event, then, that serves to dislocate further the illusion of transcendence: ‘quand les substantifs et adjectifs se mettent à fondre, quand les noms d’arrêt et de repos sont entraînés par les verbes de pur devenir et glissent dans le langage des événements, toute identité se perd pour le moi, le monde et Dieu’ (Deleuze 1969: 11).18 In his reading of Leibniz, Deleuze takes the notion of the event one step further, suggesting that the universe itself might be viewed as pure event, an incorporeal, virtual predicate, which is included in every subject who then extracts from it those manners which correspond to points of view. As Deleuze explains, ‘Le monde est la prédication



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 41

même, les manières sont les prédicats particuliers, et le sujet, ce qui passe d’un prédicat à un autre comme d’un aspect du monde à un autre’ (Deleuze 1988: 72).19 It is the concept of the fold that shapes Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz here, and which posits the universe in terms of continuous variation and difference. For Leibniz, matter is composed of an innumerable quantity of monads that have no parts, no doors nor windows, and yet contain the universe within them. The monad is thus a unity that envelops a multiplicity and that refuses the hierarchisation or organisation of parts, instead revealing matter through inflection, folds and pleats. The fold relies on what remains hidden, since the division between inside and outside depends on the very fact of the thing being folded, which in itself is neither inside nor outside. Unfolding thus involves opening up another fold. As Deleuze writes, ‘Plier-déplier ne signifie plus simplement tendre-détendre, contracter-dilater, mais envelopper-développer, involuer-évoluer’ (Deleuze 1988: 13).20 Yet, at the same time, what is folded is always enveloped, and thus included. Folding remains a virtuality that only exists in that which envelops it (Deleuze 1988: 31; 1993b: 22), and the fold thus provides another way to think through relations between the actual and the virtual, the subject and the universe. As Deleuze explains, le monde entier n’est qu’une virtualité qui n’existe actuellement que dans les plis de l’âme qui l’exprime, l’âme opérant des déplis intérieurs par lesquels elle se donne une représentation du monde incluse. Nous allons de l’inflexion à l’inclusion dans un sujet, comme du virtuel à l’actuel, l’inflexion définissant le pli, mais l’inclusion définissant l’âme ou le sujet, c’est-à-dire ce qui enveloppe le pli, sa cause finale et son acte achevé. (Deleuze 1988: 32)21

In his theorisations of the a-subjective, the event and the fold, Deleuze thus formulates a philosophy that counters the given. As Alain Badiou explains, the fold offers a concept of the multiple as an irreducible ‘labyrinthine complexity’, an anti-dialectic notion of the event, and an anti-Cartesian or anti-Lacanian concept of the subject. In Badiou’s words, ‘the fold allows us to conceive of an enunciation without “enouncement”, or of knowledge without object. The world as such will no longer be the fantasy of the All, but the pertinent hallucination of the inside as pure outside’ (Badiou 1994: 52).22 In its dislocation of essence, in reconfiguring relations between subject, object, universe and knowledge, and in the possibilities of counter-actualising the given through the event and in the continuous variations of the fold, Deleuze thus opens out experience beyond the illusion of transcendence. This book maintains that a Deleuzian philosophy has much to offer contemporary feminism in its moves beyond the transcendent relationship between subject and world, and towards a re-envisioning

42

The Becoming of the Body

of subjectivity as the site of folds and flux. Though the notion of the a-subjective may imply incompatibility with feminism, this is only the case if ‘speaking as a woman’ involves being tied to an essentialist understanding of sexual difference, rather than acknowledging that the subject ‘woman’ is, in Braidotti’s words ‘not a monolithic essence defined once and for all but rather the site of multiple, complex and potentially contradictory sets of experiences, defined by overlapping variables’ (Braidotti 1994a: 3–4). In its theorisations of the a-subjective, the event and the fold, Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental empiricism provides a starting point for thinking about counter-actualising the given on the level of gender and embodiment. And as we shall see, these notions hold great resonance with articulations of female corporeality in contemporary women’s writing in French: in Darrieussecq’s writing, for example, which explodes conventional relations between mind, subject and universe in its exploration of the folds of consciousness, or in the work of Bouraoui, where we see the shaping and reshaping of subjectivity by the flux of immanent experience. But where does the a-subjective leave us in terms of locating the materiality, the shape and form of the body? In the last section of Le Pli, Deleuze considers the movements of the fold between essences and existences, between the inorganic and the organic, between the species of monads, and also in terms of its billowing between body and soul: ‘C’est un pli extrêmement sinueux, un zigzag, une liaison primitive non localisable’ (Deleuze 1988: 162).23 These relations require further consideration at this point. Within a philosophy of transcendental empiricism and incorporeal events, can a body be materialised, or does it remain tied, sinuously, to the virtual? D E S I R E , T H E B O DY W I T H O U T O R G A N S AND BECOMING The countering of transcendence in terms of the body itself is largely mobilised in Deleuzian philosophy in his collaborations with Félix Guattari, and in keeping with notions of folds and flux, relations between desire and the body are reconfigured along the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of desire as pure ­positivity allows for a critical reconceptualisation of its movements beyond the Oedipal family romance and the logic of lack that has governed psychoanalytical theory. Meanwhile, their theorisation of what they term ‘le Corps sans Organes’ (the Body without Organs), offers a way into thinking through bodily materiality and affect beyond the boundaries of the essentialised biological form and into the flux of



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 43

becoming. On these counts, then, a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking affords an understanding of contemporary corporeality in terms of vitality, flux and flow, rather than negativity, abjection, passivity and/or stasis. The corporeal question upon which Deleuzian philosophy hinges is not so much ‘what is a body?’, but ‘what can a body do?’ Thinking about the body’s capacity allows corporeality to be set free from its transcendent constraints. Yet in its perpetual movements of doing and undoing, it nonetheless remains to be seen whether one can maintain a grasp on the body, or whether it will inevitably slip out of reach and flow irrevocably into imperceptibility. In a radical and energetic departure from psychoanalytical frameworks, Deleuze and Guattari reconfigure desire both as pure positivity and as pre-personal. For the psychoanalytical thinkers Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, desire is always constituted out of a lack, turning on the search for a lost object. This object, primarily envisaged to be the mother, as the archetypal Other, is continuously deferred into a chain of unnameable, though self-signifying, desire. As Lacan explains, Le désir, fonction centrale à toute l’expérience humaine, est désir de rien de nommable. Et c’est ce désir qui est en même temps à la source de toute espèce d’animation. Si l’être n’était ce qu’il est, il n’y aurait même pas la place pour qu’on en parle. L’être vient à exister en fonction même de ce manque. C’est en fonction de ce manque, dans l’expérience de désir, que l’être arrive à un sentiment de soi par rapport à l’être. C’est de la poursuite de cet au-delà qui n’est rien, qu’il revient au sentiment d’un être conscient de soi. (Lacan 1978: 261–2)24

In L’Anti-Œdipe, Deleuze and Guattari reverse the psychoanalytical formulation of the unconscious as a kind of ‘theatre’ which holds the key to the truth of desire, instead suggesting an immanent conception of the unconscious, which produces, rather than represents, desire. The central psychoanalytical figure of Oedipus, they argue, functions as a force that unites various forms of transcendence, normalising desire and forcing it into its own repression. Rather than turning on a vertical or nostalgic relation that wants to recuperate a missing object, then, desire according to Deleuze and Guattari takes on a lateral movement, taking neither subject nor object and collapsing this transcendent relation. Instead, desire is conceived as a principle of immanence that is formulated through productions and processes: homme et nature ne sont pas comme deux termes l’un en face de l’autre, même pris dans un rapport de causation, de compréhension ou d’expression (cause-effet, sujet-objet, etc), mais une seule et même réalité essentielle du producteur et du produit. La production comme processus déborde toutes les catégories idéales et forme un cycle qui se rapporte au désir en tant que principe immanent. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 12)25

44

The Becoming of the Body

In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of desire, the Freudian concept is thus reversed: desire is not something to be grasped or apprehended, rather to be produced. It is not something in front of which the subject can place itself, since its production occurs in its own perpetual movement of fluxes, connections and assemblages. Accordingly, Deleuze writes that the unconscious is a substance to be fabricated, to make flow. Desire does not aspire to attain pleasure, since, although pleasure may be agreeable, it in fact serves only to interrupt the processes of desire as constitution of a field of immanence (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 119; 2006: 74). Insofar as Deleuzian desire does not turn on lack, the fulfilment or resolution of pleasure cannot be its end goal. Desire, then, aims only towards its own proliferation and flux (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 96–7; 2006: 58) and its movements are transversal, aleatory and nomadic: le désir n’a pas pour objet des personnes ou des choses, mais des milieux tout entiers qu’il parcourt, des vibrations et flux de toute nature qu’il épouse, en y introduisant des coupures, des captures, désir toujours nomade et migrant dont le caractère est d’abord le ‘gigantisme’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 351–2)26

Deleuzian desire, as pure positivity, as vibration and proliferation, is ultimately revolutionary, calling transcendent structures into question and calling for ever more connections and assemblages (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 96–7; 2006: 58). As such, sexuality itself can be understood as flux, as one flux among others, a flux that enters into a zone of proximity with other particles of flux (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 121; 2006: 75). Sexuality, beyond psychoanalysis, is not formulated according to idealisation or phantasy, then, but in the proliferation of a thousand tiny sexes: ‘une trans-sexualité microscopique, qui fait que la femme contient autant d’hommes que l’homme, et l’homme de femmes, capables d’entrer les uns avec les autres, dans des rapports de production de désir qui bouleversent l’ordre statistique des sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 355–6).27 Though Deleuzian desire is a free flow that both produces and exceeds bodies, the transcendent unity of the boundaried corporeal subject comes into being through the very organisation of desire. Assemblages of desiring-production, otherwise termed desiring-machines, produce the body as an organism, but in its very production the body suffers from its organisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 15–16; 2004a: 8). There arises thus a conflict between desiring-machines that produce corporeality and the Corps sans Organes (CsO) that resists the transcendent body. Following Antonin Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the CsO might be understood in terms of the body as event,



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 45

as the counter-actualisation of the given. Though the CsO is a deterritorialised, destratified body, Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the fact that it does not involve negativity, nothingness or lack: ‘Le corps sans organes n’est pas le témoin d’un néant originel, pas plus que le reste d’une totalité perdue’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 16).28 It is important to note that the CsO does not refuse the organs in themselves, but rather the concepts of the organism, and, crucially, of the organisation of the body. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, ‘Le CsO ne s’oppose pas aux organes, mais, avec ses “organes vrais” qui doivent être composés et placés, il s’oppose à l’organisme, à l’organisation organique des organes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 196).29 The CsO, then, can be viewed as a whole, but it is a whole that does not unify or totalise its parts. In resisting its organs, and in refusing the organism and the organised, it marks the limit-point of pure multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 393; 2004a: 358). The CsO is what remains when everything else has been taken away, but it should not be interpreted as an empty vessel. Rather, its status as a surface is clearly highlighted, a surface that is populated with connections, flows, speeds and intensities. Often described as an egg, the CsO is crisscrossed with axes, gradients, longitudes, latitudes and passages. Its surface has nothing to do with the representation of a transcendent body, and everything to do with a material vitality: ‘tout est vie et vécu’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 28).30 As such, rather than the body existing in relation to desire, and despite its resistance to being produced as a transcendent body by desiring-machines, the CsO itself becomes desire: ‘Le CsO, c’est le champ d’immanence du désir, le plan de consistance propre au désir (là où le désir se définit comme processus de production, sans référence à aucune instance extérieure, manque qui viendrait le combler)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 191, original italics).31 In their movements away from psychoanalysis, lack and psychical depth, Deleuzian theorisations of desire and the CsO offer feminism ways of conceptualising corporeality as a surface of intersections and energies, of thinking about the limits and capabilities of the body, and of reconstituting subjectivity as affectivity through the material flux of desire beyond the limits of transcendence. As Braidotti writes, the body after Deleuze can be read as ‘the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces: it is not an essence, let alone a biological substance, but a play of forces, a surface of intensities, pure simulacra without originals’ (Braidotti 2002: 21). Further, insofar as the female subject is no longer theorised through the ‘truth’ of the transcendent body (Colebrook 2000: 125–6), there is scope for the Deleuzian feminist to dispense with the notion of the given as being

46

The Becoming of the Body

or as body and to think through corporeality in its various distributions: the anorexic body, for example, for Nothomb, the metamorphic body for Darrieussecq, the affective materiality of desire for Devi and Bouraoui. Rather than remaining anchored to stable, integral and integrated models, then, this book follows Deleuzian feminism in ­highlighting instead the affective ‘becoming’ of the body. The notion of ‘becoming’ itself courses through Deleuzian philosophy, in its toppling of Platonism and the foundations of ‘being’, and it requires closer attention here. Affirming becoming over being does not just mean acknowledging the value of the one over the other, but doing away with the binary distinction altogether. For Deleuze, bodies and states of affairs are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities. Multiplicity involves more than mere plurality: while plurality measures quantitative difference, multiplicities are rather conceived in terms of intensive differences (such as speeds). Multiplicity thus depends on internal difference, or, in other words, on what is inbetween. As Deleuze writes in the preface to the English translation of Dialogues, In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms of the elements, but what is ‘between’, the between, a set of relations which are not separable from each other. Every multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhizome. (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: vi–vii)

A multiplicity does not commence from a state of tabula rasa, or from a certain point, then, but emerges from the middle and is constituted by lines ‘of becomings without history, of individuation without subject’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: vii). Deleuzian becomings are not imitative or assimilative phenomena, and can be understood instead in terms of double capture, non-parallel evolution and of nuptials between two reigns (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 8; 2006: 2). Such nuptials, Deleuze is keen to stress, oppose the concept of the couple and are against nature insofar as they collapse the opposition of binary machines, rather than involving the transformation of one stark binary term (question, masculine, man) into another (answer, feminine, animal). Using the example of the orchid and the wasp, Deleuze develops this idea of becoming as a double capture, involving two things that have nothing to do with one another: L’orchidée a l’air de former une image de guêpe, mais en fait il y a un devenir-guêpe de l’orchidée, un devenir-orchidée de la guêpe, une double capture puisque ‘ce que’ chacun devient ne change pas moins que ‘celui qui’ devient. La guêpe devient partie de l’appareil de reproduction de l’orchidée, en même temps que l’orchidée devient organe sexuel pour la guêpe. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 8–9)32



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 47

The becoming-orchid of the wasp and the becoming-wasp of the orchid thus coalesce into a single bloc of becoming that involves evolution in non-parallel terms. Rather, it involves involution, being in-between, ‘au milieu, adjacent’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 38).33 Deleuze employs the term ‘and’ to explicate further the in-between, in-the-middle nature of becoming. The history of philosophy, he claims, is encumbered with the problem of being, and, playing on the homophony in the French, he argues that the ‘is’ should be substituted for the ‘and’: ‘Substituer le ET au EST. A et B’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 71).34 More than being a specific conjunction between terms, the ‘and’ subtends all relations, making them exceed their own terms. It explodes dualisms from the inside and traces a line of flight between two terms, ‘l’étroit ruisseau qui n’appartient ni à l’un ni à l’autre, mais les entraîne tous deux dans une évolution non parallèle, dans un devenir hétérochrone’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 43).35 In tracing lines of becoming, the ‘and’, as ‘extra-être, inter-être’, constitutes the multiplicity; thinking with ‘and’ rather than thinking ‘is’ or for ‘is’ thus lies at the heart of Deleuze’s empiricist philosophy (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 71).36 In becoming there is no past, future or even present, because there is no history. Becoming is thus a matter of transversal, or geographical linkages. Lewis Carroll’s Alice exists in an involuted state of becoming because she does not transform from one thing into another in a series of chronological movements. Rather, her becoming takes place transversally, as she becomes bigger and smaller in a simultaneity. As Deleuze writes, ‘le devenir ne supporte pas la séparation ni la distinction de l’avant et de l’après, du passé et du futur. Il appartient à l’essence du devenir d’aller, de tirer dans les deux sens à la fois: Alice ne grandit pas sans rapetisser, et inversement’ (Deleuze 1969: 9).37 Becoming slips away from the present and from the actual into the intermezzo. The movement and flight involved in becoming is not about movement in actual terms, then. The figure of the nomad provides some helpful distinctions here: Le nomade a un territoire, il suit des trajets coûtumiers, il va d’un point à un autre, il n’ignore pas les points [. . .] Un trajet est toujours entre deux points, mais l’entre-deux a pris toute la consistence, et jouit d’une autonomie comme d’une direction propre. La vie du nomade est intermezzo. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 471)38

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the migrant, who moves in actual terms from one point to another, and the nomad, who is instead always geographically in-between locations. The nomad is thus not marked by movement, but by the very territory that lies in-between two

48

The Becoming of the Body

points. Nomadic becoming may involve trajectory, but trajectory takes place within the virtual multiplicity of the intermezzo. In keeping with the CsO, Deleuzian becoming seeks to undermine the transcendence of the subject, but it is worth thinking more carefully about how becoming itself might take place at the level of the human body. There are three specific examples of privileged sites of becoming which proliferate in Deleuzian philosophy and raise particular concerns with regard to the body and the possibility of a body politics: these are the notions of becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becomingimperceptible. As an anti-anthropocentric encounter between terms that resists the transcendent logic of the human, becoming-animal does not mean that one merely assumes the behaviours of that animal, but enters into a mutually transformative relationship with it. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘Un devenir n’est pas une correspondance de rapports. Mais ce n’est pas plus une ressemblance, une imitation, et, à la limite, une identification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 291).39 Becomings are not masks based on imitation that can be assumed and discarded at will, but at the same time they should not be misunderstood as either dream or fantasy either. Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the point that becomings are ‘real’: ‘Le devenir-animal n’a rien de métaphorique. Aucun symbolisme, aucune allégorie’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 65).40 Becomings are real in the sense that the bloc of becoming exists on its own terms, without being qualified by the purportedly fixed terms of either ‘human’ or ‘animal’. Becoming-animal is thus not a matter of vertical or historical evolution, in terms of filiation or descendance, but a sideways alliance, or, rather, mutation: a virtual transformation in the perception of difference. Becoming-wolf, or wolfing (lupellement), resists the transcendence of the boundaried subject and allows for the apprehension of multiplicity. This Deleuze and Guattari refer to as deterritorialisation: ‘Devenir loup, devenir trou, c’est se déterritorialiser, d’après des lignes distinctes enchêvetrées’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 45).41 Just as they argue for becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari contend that the notion of becoming-woman does not involve the mere imitation of the female form but a movement towards a minoritarian position that resists the logic of transcendence. It is for this very reason, they argue, that becoming-man is impossible, since the concept of man implies a subject around which other things are organised. Deleuze and Guattari claim that since the concept of man can only ever occupy a majoritarian position, states of becoming must thus always be concerned with the opposite: ‘il n’y a pas de devenir-homme, parce que l’homme est l’entité molaire par excellence, tandis que les devenirs



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 49

sont moléculaires’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 358).42 Becomingwoman is thus a movement that takes place along the molecular plane, in opposition to being-a-woman, which is distinctly molar. While the molar regulates and stratifies social identities within binary constructs, the molecular comprises the flux and micro-particles of the plane of immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-woman involves the production of micro-femininities along a molecular plane that evades or disrupts the stratifying rigidity of the binary codes that are imposed by molar lines. To become-woman is to open out these processes of change and reorganisation in a movement away from the molar and the majoritarian and towards the molecular and the minoritarian; it is not to be female, but to create micro-femininities: ‘émettre des particules qui entrent dans le rapport du mouvement et de repos, ou dans la zone de voisinage d’une micro-féminité, c’est-à-dire produire en nous-mêmes une femme moléculaire, créer la femme moléculaire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 338).43 Becoming-woman is thus a process of destratification and demassification, the very destabilisation of female molar identity. To become is not to acquire a form through identification, mimesis or imitation, then, and ultimately it leads to a plane of immanence: ‘la zone de voisinage, d’indiscernabilité ou d’indifférenciation telle qu’on ne peut plus se distinguer d’une femme, d’un animal ou d’une molécule’ (Deleuze 1993a: 11, original italics).44 This plane of immanence is a space of indifferentiation and indiscernibility. If becoming-woman is posited as the key to all becomings, the processes of becoming eventually give rise to the flux of the real and to becoming-­imperceptible: ‘Se réduire à une ligne abstraite, un trait, pour trouver sa zone d’indiscernabilité avec d’autres traits, et entrer ainsi dans l’heccéité comme dans l’impersonnalité du créateur’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 343).45 In entering into a haecceity, becoming-imperceptible involves immanent and molecular perception, and absolute indifferentiability. In that sense, it brings us back to the a-subjectivity with which we began. Subject and world fold into one another, and their interconnectedness constitutes the multiplicity. As Tamsin Lorraine observes, such a model ‘evokes an image of collaboration of embodied subject and world, a singular coming together of multiple lines in which the specific location and shape of the subject is impossible to pin down to any one point’ (Lorraine 1999: 126). The undoing of specificity, boundaries and transcendence allows feminism after Deleuze to think through embodiment as a process of materialisation. It allows for an understanding of the situatedness of the body, in the sense of its becoming through a multiplicity of intersecting

50

The Becoming of the Body

forces and its interconnectedness with the material flux of the world, but also for an understanding of the movements of that very situatedness, of its transience. The chapters that follow will see the unfolding of the body into perpetual becoming: becoming-child in Nothomb, becoming-molecular in Devi, becoming-animal in Darrieussecq, ­becoming-nomadic in Bouraoui. In these works, a vital and dynamic conception of female corporeality is mobilised that liberates the body beyond the confines of the self-identical and the transcendent. But, as we shall see, the collapsing of specificity into absolute difference and imperceptibility nonetheless arguably raises concerns for anything that we might think of as a grounded feminist politics. DIFFERENCE: P O L I T I C S , P H I L O S O P H Y, L I T E R AT U R E The becoming of the body according to Deleuze does not involve the iteration of the same, but takes place in a relation of repetition and absolute difference. Deleuzian difference overturns the conventional Aristotelian principle wherein difference is produced between two terms in relation to something that they already have in common. Deleuze conceives instead of a concept of absolute difference, in which difference is not relative to that which is identical: Que l’identité n’est pas première, qu’elle existe comme principe, mais comme second principe, comme principe devenu; qu’elle tourne autour du Différent, telle est la nature d’une révolution copernicienne qui ouvre à la différence la possibilité de son concept propre, au lieu de la maintenir sous la domination d’un concept en général posé comme identique. (Deleuze 1968: 59, original italics)46

If difference is only understood with reference to what is self-identical, it will necessarily be given a negative dimension, Deleuze argues, since it will be identified purely in terms of not being something else which is. A concept of absolute difference, on the other hand, must have no sense of mediation by the identical. It must refer to other differences that do not identify it but rather differentiate it: ‘Chaque chose, chaque être doit voir sa propre identité engloutie dans la différence, chacun n’étant plus qu’une différence entre des différences. Il faut montrer la différence allant différant’ (Deleuze 1968: 79, original italics).47 Deleuzian difference as intensive, and as internal to itself, enables feminism insofar as it allows for a conception of sexual difference beyond an external binary that necessarily rests on a principle of identity. Such a conception might instead think through difference in terms of the ‘play of multiple differences that structure the subject’ that are



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 51

‘neither harmonious nor homogenous, but rather internally differentiated’ (Braidotti 2002: 28). Further, thinking through sexual difference in terms of intensive difference, and looking to different bodily distributions and behaviours that posit ‘different responses to the given within the given’ (Colebrook 2000: 125), allows sexual difference itself to be considered as a problem rather than a given. As Colebrook argues, ‘if sexual difference is not theorised from a metaphysics, but is confronted as a problem, then we might take the issues of sexual difference and use them to think’ (Colebrook 2000: 126, original italics). The becoming of the body as always perpetually other than itself thus necessitates the thinking through of sexual difference as a problem that strains away from its resolution. But it is at the two limit-points of becoming – becoming-woman as the key to all becomings and becoming-imperceptible as the end of all becomings – that the tensions of a Deleuzian conception of corporeality for the purposes of a feminist politics of difference are patent. As we have seen, the concept of becoming-woman has proved a particular point of contention for feminists such as Irigaray and Jardine, who argue that taking ‘woman’ as the starting point for becoming necessarily works towards the invisibilisation of femininity. Deleuzian feminists too find it difficult to reconcile Deleuze’s use of terms here. On the one hand, insofar as becoming-woman involves interrogating molar roles of femininity, it would seem to constitute a welcome sense of resistance to the binary polarisation that privileges men at the expense of women. At the same time, the concept raises problems for feminism precisely because Deleuze neglects to take into account the position from which one is becoming. Even as Deleuze acknowledges becoming-woman as a move towards the minoritarian, and as such seemingly acknowledges the position of women themselves as existing in a minority, he seems at the same time to obscure that very position. In other words, becoming-molecular-woman rather than being-a-woman may indeed prove enabling, but exactly what it involves may differ depending on the position from which one is becoming (Grosz 1994b: 207). As Braidotti notes, ‘Deleuze proceeds as if there was clear equivalence in the speaking positions of the sexes: he misses and consequently fails to take into account the central point of feminism’ (Braidotti 2002: 79, original italics). One might make the case that Deleuze is not exactly claiming a specifically feminist stance here, that becoming-woman takes part in a wider series of becoming-minoritarian, and, indeed, that the whole of Deleuzian philosophy is governed by the refusal of specific subject positions anyway, including those that indicate sexual identity. Nonetheless that becoming-woman is posited as the ‘key’ to becoming

52

The Becoming of the Body

seems both significant and unsettling. As I shall go on to discuss further below, one of the principal difficulties of reconciling a Deleuzian philosophy with any kind of conventional or molar identity politics lies in its resistance to a stable subject position. And yet, in limiting the becoming-otherwise of gender to the concept of ‘becoming-woman’, in disallowing a becoming-man, and thinking merely in terms of reversing the binary, Deleuze would seem somehow almost to be participating in its reiteration. As Lorraine (1999: 187) argues, labeling a becoming ‘becoming-woman’ is already to trade in stereotypes that the move from identity politics to a micropolitics was meant to counter if the possibility of the becoming-man of woman as well as the becoming-woman of man is excluded.

Despite the argument for a spectrum of a thousand tiny sexes, the specific and constrained use of terminology with regard to becomingwoman would seem strangely caught between the conditions of two limit-points: on the one hand, invisibilising femininity as an entrypoint to the imperceptible, and on the other, seeming to rehearse a binary, asymmetrical logic that is cast back to the molar. As a concept, becoming-woman will be under particular scrutiny in the chapters that follow, and its mobilisations in literature indicate both the stranglehold of particular conceptions of femininity on the female body as well as the possibilities for a micro-politics that it might otherwise reveal. There are further concerns for a feminist politics that assemble around the limit-points of becoming. For, while a Deleuzian philosophy of absolute difference read in feminist terms might open out intensive and internal difference, for Deleuze absolute difference is in the end irrevocably tied to indifferentiation, indiscernibility and imperceptibility. While the appeal of the concepts of becoming-otherwise and counter-actualising the given endures, the question for the Deleuzian feminist remains: how far can one go towards imperceptibility before losing oneself entirely? How far can one experiment with making oneself a Body without Organs? Deleuze and Guattari push at the limit: ‘Allons encore plus loin, nous n’avons pas encore trouvé notre CsO, pas assez défait notre moi’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 187).48 Countering transcendence seems to necessitate living on the edge, experimenting in anorexia, alcoholism or schizophrenia. Self-annihilation, or overdose, may well be a danger (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 198–9; 2004b: 177–8), but Deleuze advocates going just far enough, just enough to widen the crack, without falling into it completely. Lorraine (1999: 135) argues that, despite Deleuze’s insistence on molecular becoming, ‘one does not get the impression from reading his work that he really



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 53

intends to disappear’. Indeed, there is an insistence upon caution, or the art of dosages, and Deleuze and Guattari appear to provide parameters that would avoid losing oneself entirely: ‘On n’y va pas à coups de marteau, mais avec une lime très fine. On invente des autodestructions qui ne se confondent pas avec la pulsion de mort’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 198).49 But precisely how such criteria are upheld is rather less obvious, and this book will be concerned with seeking out the edges of female corporeality and thinking about where the limit might be located. A philosophy that pushes at the edges of existence cannot easily be reconciled with any kind of politics in the conventional sense. Thinking about politics after Deleuze, then, requires being open to the deconstruction of the very idea of identity politics, highlighting not only the flux of identity but recognising the contingent nature of politics too.50 Indeed, interrogating the essentialism of the idea of identity politics is resonant with recent feminism more broadly, in particular in the work of theorists such as Judith Butler or Diana Fuss.51 For Deleuzian feminists, deconstructing molar politics involves thinking through the possibilities of becoming-minoritarian in the terms of a micro-politics of desire. For desire, as we have seen, is ultimately revolutionary and through its flows and assemblages it has the capacity to transform and to destabilise the molar. Accordingly, Braidotti (2002: 84) argues for a ‘becoming-nomad’ as ‘undoing the oppositional dualism of majority/ minority and arousing an affirmative passion for the transformative flows that destabilise all identities’. A micro-politics thus goes beyond the logic of reversibility towards a Deleuzian a-subjective that transforms notions of individuality, where becoming is a ‘trans-personal mode, ultimately collective’ (Braidotti 2002: 85). For many feminists, grounding a politics after Deleuze also involves mapping different positions, tempering Deleuze with a more recognisable form of (identity) politics, or with psychoanalytical concepts that give some semblance of shape or form to Deleuzian vitality.52 Interestingly, then, a feminist micro-politics of difference involves engaging in creative reading and writing strategies, setting Deleuzian philosophy in motion as a means to forge a new feminism. Creating dialogues between literary articulations of female corporeality and Deleuzian philosophy, this book intends to open out further questions about the possible politics of the becoming of the body. Questions concerning the literary itself – reading, writing, creativity and art – become crucial at this point. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the three forms of thought – philosophy, science and art – are equally creative in their different ways of confronting the infinity of the

54

The Becoming of the Body

universe with the aim of tracing a map. While science renounces the infinite through the process of referential propositions and partial observations, philosophy is open to immanence and to the creation of the infinite. The relationship of art to the infinite is more reflexive and intertwined: ‘L’art veut créer du fini qui redonne l’infini: il trace un plan de composition, qui porte à son tour des monuments ou des sensations composées sous l’action de figures esthétiques’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 186).53 Art struggles against chaos but with the result of being able to cast light into it and allowing the virtual to be experienced: ‘L’art lutte effectivement avec le chaos, mais pour y faire surgir une vision qui l’illumine un instant, une Sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 192).54 For Deleuze and Guattari, art is not representation, nor does it have an opinion. Art intertwines with the flux of immanence and unravels the organisation of transcendent perception, creating affect and sensation. It is a becoming in the sense that it reaches beyond its own terms and enfolds the virtual, rather than representing the actual: ‘Le devenir est une capture, une possession, une plus-value, jamais une reproduction ou une imitation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1975: 25).55 Art thus involves an interaction of the actual and the virtual, insofar as it traverses immanence and allows life in its fullest sense to be grasped or experienced through sensation. Writing, or literature, can be understood as a flow through immanence that touches the actual and the virtual. As Deleuze writes, ‘Écrire est une affaire de devenir, toujours inachevé, toujours en train de se faire, et qui déborde toute matière vivable ou vécu. C’est un processus, c’est-à-dire un passage de Vie qui traverse le vivable et le vécu’ (Deleuze 1993a: 11).56 It is in an understanding of art as an interrelation of the actual and the virtual that this book proceeds. It conceives of writing, above all, as a site of slippage. In the chapters that follow, it will be argued that literary articulations of the becoming of the body touch upon the flux of immanence, creating new forms of the body that traverse the actual and the virtual and experimenting with the edges of corporeality. As an art form, literature will of course offer more scope for the creative experimentation with the shape and form of the female body, and a Deleuzian philosophy of pushing at the limit will be easier to reconcile with literary experiment in women’s writing than with a feminist conception of the materiality of experience. But in analysing forms of female corporeality, the chapters that follow are concerned precisely with testing further the relations between the actual and the virtual, between Deleuze and feminism, and between art and experience. As outlined in the Introduction, the writers that I analyse in subsequent chapters do not write with a particular feminist politics in mind. If Deleuzian philosophy provides



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 55

a fertile set of concepts with which to think through their creative­ re-envisionings of corporeality, one can also perceive reflections between these writers and Deleuze in their ambivalent attitudes towards embodiment, disembodiment and the location of the limit. The book is thus interested in exploring that ambivalence within the context of contemporary women’s writing in French sketched in the Introduction. It will also linger upon whether, despite the vital creativity of their imaginings, such writings may end up mobilising Deleuzian visions of experience around deterritorialisation, dissipation and flight, that, as Peter Hallward (2006: 162) has argued, ‘can only offer the most immaterial and evanescent grip on the mechanisms of exploitation and domination that continue to condition so much of what happens in our world’. Interestingly, for all of Deleuze’s insistence on encounters and on the creation of new concepts, his own practice of reading literature seems somehow to resist the openness to thought that his entire philosophy engenders. As Colin Davis argues, Deleuze’s acts of literary interpretation are presented as a rather resolute and repetitive insistence on a particular set of rehearsed (Deleuzian) concepts. In his readings of Proust and Kafka, it is certainly striking that, in Davis’s (2010: 79) words, ‘He seems to learn little that is new from the creators to whom he nevertheless attends in such careful detail.’ This book hopes not to fall into a similar trap, and intends to open out perspectives on female corporeality without reducing the creativity of different writers, texts and concepts to a resolute paradigm. My readings of the female body in subsequent chapters will address different aspects of Deleuzian philosophy, then, rather than overstating an absolute resonance for each author with a more global conception of his thought. Further, my readings of literary texts aim to instantiate the ways in which a Deleuzian vocabulary resonates with articulations of female corporeality, but also to address its possible insufficiencies in terms of theorising the ­becoming of the body. For Deleuze, if art has no opinion, it nonetheless contains a ­micro-political function insofar as it helps to avert the illusion of transcendence through its counter-actualisation. The writer him- or herself is always minoritarian, not necessarily in that he or she belongs to a minority, but in that writing always encounters a minority that does not write. Though the writer does not write on this minority’s behalf, there is an encounter, ‘où chacun pousse l’autre, l’entrâine dans sa ligne de fuite, dans une déterritorialisation conjuguée’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 56).57 Writing thus involves composition and counterpoint, connection and encounter. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991: 178) words,

56

The Becoming of the Body

‘Le contrepoint ne sert pas à rapporter des conversations, réelles ou fictives, mais à faire monter la folie de toute conversation, de tout dialogue, même intérieur.’58 Literary counterpoint entails the intertwining of creative encounters that form a collective. As Ian Buchanan and John Marks explain, Ultimately, the political task of writing consists in ‘inventing’ a people who do not yet exist. In the same way that writers do not write with their ego, so they do not write on behalf of a people. The collective emerges, in this way, from the writer’s creation of pre-individual singularities. The ‘collective’, in Deleuzian terms, is a form of ‘delirium’, speaking with, writing with. (Buchanan and Marks 2000: 2, original italics)

This book suggests that, though the authors under study do not write from a clearly positioned feminist politics, their articulations of female corporeality nonetheless mobilise in writing an encounter with the political through the very invention of the new and the interfacing of the actual and the virtual. Further, the book itself aims to participate in a strategy of ‘speaking with, writing with’. If Deleuzian feminists have engaged creatively with Deleuze as a means to think through a contemporary politics of difference, this book too wants to map encounters between different positions, and in its particular engagement with the literary, it aims to open out its own political interventions. Such a rhizomatic strategy, or epistemic nomadism as Braidotti (1994b: 177) terms it, would seem crucial to contemporary feminism in an engagement with thought beyond its own particular terms, ‘going between different discursive fields, passing through diverse spheres of intellectual discourse [. . .] moving on, passing through, creating connections where things were previously disconnected or seemed unrelated, where there seemed to be “nothing to see”. In transit, moving, displacing . . .’ In this book, then, reading is conceived as a creative and rhizomatic act. The book seeks to unearth crosscurrents and connections, allowing the literary, the philosophical and the political to inflect one another in its consideration of the becoming of the body in contemporary women’s writing in French. In so doing, it conceives of both writing and of reading, after Deleuze, not as a mimetic, representational act that fixes meaning or that submits to ideological constraints, but as an agentive, aleatory and creative connection to the immanence of experience. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words: ‘La littérature est un agencement, elle n’a rien à voir avec de l’idéologie [. . .] Écrire n’a rien à voir avec signifer, mais avec arpenter, cartographier, même des contrées à venir’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 10–11).59



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 57

N OT E S  1. ‘Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images’ (Deleuze 2006: 112).   2. ‘To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 3–4).  3. From this chapter onwards, reference will be made to a range of soleauthored and collaborative works by Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. To avoid clumsy and confusing phrasing, I will generally refer to ‘Deleuze’ and to ‘Deleuzian’ theories; but where specific texts or concepts pertain to co-authored works, I will refer to ‘Deleuze and Guattari’ and to ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s’ theories.   4. My approach is in keeping with literary critics such as Françoise Lionnet (1989: 27), among others, in its concern not to impose a ‘theoretical grid’ on the literary text. But it also resonates, as we shall see, with a Deleuzian philosophy of encounters and rhizomatic reading.  5. ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2).   6. ‘it is about getting something through in every past, present, and future code, something which does not and will not let itself be recorded. Getting it through on a new body, inventing a body on which it can pass and flow: a body that would be ours, the body of Earth, the body of writing’ (Deleuze 2004a: 253).   7. ‘one day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian’.  8. Published by Edinburgh University Press, under the series editor Ian Buchanan.   9. ‘isn’t it necessary to have had a relation of language and sex to the organs – that women have never had?’ (Irigaray 1985b: 141). 10. See Colebrook 2000, 2009; Braidotti 1994a, 1994b, 2000, 2002; Grosz 1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1999, 2008; Lorraine 1999; Olkowski 1999, 2000. 11. ‘From what is given, I infer the existence of that which is not given: I believe. [. . .] At the same time and through the same operation, while transcending the given, I judge and posit myself as subject. I affirm more than I know’ (Deleuze 1991: 85–6). 12. ‘In itself, the mind is not subject: it is a given collection of impressions and separate ideas’ (Deleuze 1991: 132). 13. ‘The mind is not subject; it is subjected. When the subject is constituted in the mind under the effect of principles, the mind apprehends itself as a self, for it has been qualified’ (Deleuze 1991: 31). 14. ‘when its vividness is mobilized in such a way that the part characterized by vividness (impression) communicates it to another part (idea), and also,

58

The Becoming of the Body

when all the parts taken together resonate in the act of producing something new’ (Deleuze 1991: 132, original italics). 15. ‘a shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization: in contrast with the state of affairs, it neither begins nor ends but has gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156). 16. ‘My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it!’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 49). 17. ‘extracting the pure event which unites me with those whom I love, who await me no more than I await them, since the event alone awaits us, Eventum tantum. Making an event – however small – is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite of making a drama or making a story’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 49). 18. ‘when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God’ (Deleuze 2004b: 5). 19. ‘The world is predication itself, manners being the particular predicates, and the subject, what goes from one predicate to another as if from one aspect of the world to another’ (Deleuze 1993b: 53). 20. ‘Folding-unfolding no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution’ ­ (Deleuze 1993b: 8). 21. ‘the whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world. We are moving from inflection to inclusion in a subject, as if from the virtual to the real, inflection defining the fold, but inclusion defining the soul or the subject, that is what envelops the fold, its final cause and its completed act’ (Deleuze 1993b: 23). 22. See also Badiou’s critique of Deleuze in Badiou 1997. 23. ‘It is an extremely sinuous fold, a zigzag, a primal tie that cannot be located’ (Deleuze 1993b: 120). 24. ‘Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire. In the pursuit of this beyond, which is nothing, it harks back to the feeling of a being with self-consciousness, which is nothing but its own reflection in the world of things’ (Lacan 1991: 223–4). 25. ‘man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other – not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc);



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 59

rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 5). 26. ‘desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures – an always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its “gigantism”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 322). 27. ‘a microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman containing as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all capable of ­entering – men with women, women with men – into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical order of the sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 325). 28. ‘The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 9). 29. ‘The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its “true organs,” which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the organic organization of the organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 176). 30. ‘it is all life and lived experience’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 21). 31. ‘The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 170–1). 32. ‘The orchid seems to form a wasp image, but in fact there is a waspbecoming of the orchid, and orchid-becoming of the wasp, a double capture since “what” each becomes changes no less than “that which” becomes. The wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 2). 33. ‘in the middle, adjacent’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 22). 34. ‘Substitute the AND for IS. A and B’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 42). 35. ‘the narrow stream which belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but draws both into a non-parallel evolution, into a heterochronous becoming’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 26). 36. ‘extra-being, inter-being’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 43). 37. ‘becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa’ (Deleuze 2004b: 3). 38. ‘The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points [. . .] A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency

60

The Becoming of the Body

and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 419). 39. ‘A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 262). 40. ‘There is nothing metaphoric about the becoming-animal. No symbolism, no allegory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 35). 41. ‘To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 36). 42. ‘There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 322). 43. ‘emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 304). 44. ‘the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule’ (Deleuze 1997: 1, original italics). 45. ‘To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 309). 46. ‘That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical’ (Deleuze 1994: 40–1, original italics). 47. ‘Every object, every thing must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing’ (Deleuze 1994: 56, original italics). 48. ‘Let’s go further still, we haven’t found our BwO yet, we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 167). 49. ‘You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive’ (Deleuze and Guattari: 2004b: 177). 50. See Patton 2000 and Protevi 2001 for accounts of the deconstructive relationship between Deleuze and politics more broadly. 51. Diana Fuss (1989: 104–5), for example, calls into question the view that, in order for feminism to be politically effective, political identities themselves must necessarily be secure and coherent. Further, she seeks to undermine the idea that politics must be ‘steady and localizable’, a notion that she believes itself can easily lead to ‘disaffection and political factiousness’. Similarly, Judith Butler (2004: 224–6) argues that any kind of social transformation must entail the recognition of its own instability and must maintain a continual process of reworking, such that it emerges ‘anew as



The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text 61

a result of the cultural translations it undergoes’. For Butler, politically transformative work is necessarily based on uncertainty as to the future, on openness and unknowingness, and on an awareness that a certain agonism and contestation must be in play for politics to be democratic. 52. Braidotti 2002, Lorraine 1999 and Olkowski 2000, for example, are interested in tracing lines between Deleuze and Irigaray, while Grosz 1994a and Driscoll 2000 track relations between Kristeva and Deleuze. Braidotti’s work (1996; 2006) also interweaves Deleuze with the cyberfeminism of thinkers such as Donna Haraway. 53. ‘Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 197). 54. ‘Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 204). 55. ‘The act of becoming is a capturing, a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or an imitation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 13). 56. ‘Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived’ (Deleuze 1997: 1). 57. ‘in which each pushes the other, draws it on to its line of flight in a combined deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 33). 58. ‘Counterpoint serves not to report real or fictional conversations but to bring out the madness of all conversation and all dialogue, even interior dialogue’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 188). 59. ‘Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology [. . .] Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping even realms that are yet to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 5).

2. Making a Body without Organs: Amélie Nothomb’s An-Organic Flux of Immanence Que faire du corps? (Nothomb 2002a: 190)1 L’anorexie m’avait servi de leçon d’anatomie. Je connaissais ce corps que j’avais décomposé. (Nothomb 2004a: 227)2 La vie est ce tuyau qui avale et qui reste vide. (Nothomb 2000: 146)3 I N T RO DU C T I O N Amélie Nothomb was born in 1967 to a Belgian family with an illustrious political history and, from her very earliest days, her life has sparkled with an eclectic and eccentric clutch of experiences. As her father worked in the diplomatic service, much of Nothomb’s childhood was spent living in different countries, encountering various social and political environments and experiencing significant cultural upheaval and dislocation. Nothomb spent her earliest years in Kobe, Japan, a period of her life that she claims to remember vividly and that she has chronicled in autofictional texts Métaphysique des tubes (2000) (The Character of Rain) (2004b) and Biographie de la faim (2004a) (The Life of Hunger) (2007b) as fostering an idyllic existence. Nourished by the Japanese worship of the divinity of the child that was conveyed through the adoration of her governess, Nishio-san, the young Amélie developed a precocious persona and a love for beauty that was irrevocably tied to Japanese culture. As such, she was devastated to be torn away from her home at the age of five when her father was posted to China, a country that she experienced by contrast as drab and impoverished, 62



Making a Body without Organs 63

and that made her long for her former life as an ‘okosama’ (‘lord-child’) in Japan. As she admits in an interview, memories of childhood loom large in her imagination: ‘Handicappé par une enfance trop heureuse, je me suis abonné à la nostalgie.’4 Through her childhood and into her teens, Nothomb moved with her family from Beijing to New York, Bangladesh, Burma and Laos. At the age of seventeen she lived in Belgium for the very first time, as she began a degree in philology at the autonomous university of Brussels, a period in which she claims to have felt most alienated with regard to her cultural surroundings. After her studies, she returned to Japan, where she worked as a translator in a competitive and hierarchical Japanese company, an experience that she narrates in the critically acclaimed Stupeur et tremblements (1999) (Fear and Trembling) (2002b). She also fell in love with a Japanese student whom she had been tutoring in French. However, a series of difficult experiences at work mingled with the feeling that her engagement to her boyfriend did not feel quite right, something she attributes in Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam (2007a) (Tokyo Fiancée) (2009b), with characteristically dark undertones, to not wanting to kill him. Nothomb’s reinhabiting of Japan perhaps not having quite lived up to the gold standard set by her childhood memories, she returned to Belgium. It was at this point that she began to pursue her literary endeavours in earnest, having spent her teenage years devouring the classics and dabbling in her own imaginative writings. Hygiène de l’assassin (1992) (Hygiene and the Assassin) (2010) was the first novel that Nothomb published, and she has consistently turned out a new literary creation to coincide with the rentrée littéraire every year since then. Nothomb now lives and works in Paris, and over the past twenty years she has established herself as a literary phenomenon, achieving bestselling figures and a high media profile. As Mark Lee has evoked in a recent study, the media has played a huge role in mythifying, demythifying and remythifying Amélie Nothomb as a person and as a writer: presque aucun aspect de la personne d’Amélie Nothomb n’échappe à l’oeil scrutateur des médias. On invente et réinvente Nothomb au fil des rentrées; avec le succès on ne mentionne plus l’air de soupçon qui a marqué sa première rentrée, néanmoins une certain méfiance en ce qui concerne son ‘personnage’ et son identité persiste. (Lee 2010: 11)5

Lee is alluding here to the media frenzy surrounding the appearance of Nothomb’s first novel that gave rise to questions about the authenticity of this unknown author’s age, sex and nationality, with numerous commentators expressing their incredulity that the self-assured narrative voice could possibly belong to such a young writer, and a female one at

64

The Becoming of the Body

that (Lee 2010: 22). Since then, Nothomb has become a major player on the media stage, a flamboyant character notorious for disclosing the finer details of her eccentric lifestyle in interviews. When questioned about her prolific output, she describes her works as literary babies that she carries and gives birth to, and emphasises the fact that her publications are a mere portion of her creative productivity, with at least two-thirds of her writing remaining unpublished and out of reach. She works in the early hours in the morning, fuelled by cups of strong black tea, writing with a particular type of biro on squared paper in notebooks that cannot be bought in Paris. Delving beyond her work, the media has delighted in unravelling the mesh of Nothomb’s life by revealing her unusual food preferences, her experience of anorexia as a teenager, the closeness of her relationship with her elder sister Juliette, and focusing time and again on her singular physical appearance, choice of clothes, hair, make-up and hats. Given that her own life experience has provided inspiration for much of her work, and given her fascination for revisiting and reinventing herself in writing, questions about what really lies behind Nothombian masks and postures continue to abound. Nonetheless, Nothomb has built up a loyal and steady fanbase, and her works appeal as much to a younger teenage readership as to an adult one. Alongside her huge popularity, Nothomb has been nominated for several prestigious prizes including the Goncourt, and she has been awarded, among others, the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française for Stupeur et tremblements and the Grand Prix Jean Giono for her contribution to literature. The eclecticism and eccentricity that govern Nothomb’s life inside and outside the media filter through into her creative works. Though her texts can be easily identified by their characteristically compact form, they experiment with genre and push at the boundaries between experience and art, the everyday and the fantastic. And as Philippa Caine (2003: 72) notes, ‘Her numerous texts cleverly bring together features of (sub)genres as diverse as fairy-tale and film d’épouvante, tragi-comedy and autofiction.’ The themes that Nothomb engages with, however, have something of a universal draw. Her work revolves around the limits of experience, testing boundaries between self and other in endlessly dualistic or antagonistic relations, leaning precariously over the edge towards violence and death. As Jacques de Decker observes, the very appeal of her texts seems to lie in this visceral connection to the intimate anxieties of life: Les angoisses que Nothomb fait émerger au jour sont primitives, viscérales, et chacun peut s’y retrouver, ou y retrouver les premiers échos d’une sorte de



Making a Body without Organs 65 tragédie originelle. Dans cette expression du mal-être foncier, de la déréliction de se trouver jété-là dans le marasme du réel, Nothomb puise des fables qui parlent à chacun de nous, pour peu que l’on se souvienne de ses premiers vertiges et de ses premiers rejets. (Decker 2003a: xii)6

Yet despite this anxious exploration of the limits of existence, Nothomb’s work also reveals the voluptuousness of the visceral, the desirability of death and the transportations of terror. In the Nothombian imaginary, extremes intermingle. Life and death, pleasure and pain, self and other jostle and coalesce into a heady intoxication of beauty, as a form of life and a work of art. The relationship between femininity and the body is a particular concern in Nothomb’s work and its analysis has been a major focal point for critical engagement.7 Her writing commonly invites criticism for seeming to remain confined to patriarchal dictates on female beauty. The female form is generally described in terms of an idealised beauty associated with child-like angelic purity, whiteness and thinness, and the bodies of female protagonists are subjected to disintegration and dissolution through violent or self-destructive acts. In Nothomb’s first novel, Prétextat Tach murders his beloved Léopoldine upon the onset of puberty in order to preserve the idyll of their childhood and to save her from the leaky existence of an adult female body. This signals a refrain that is echoed across Nothomb’s work: the return to the murder of adult female characters in texts such as Attentat (1997) (Assassination), Mercure (1998) (Mercury) and Cosmétique de l’ennemi (2001) (The Cosmetic of the Enemy), as well as depictions of the stultifying effects of anorexia on the female body in Robert des noms propres (2002a) (The Book of Proper Names) (2005) and Biographie de la faim, all seeming to signal the privileging of a prepubertal state. Indeed, Nothomb’s famous claim that ‘Tach, c’est moi [. . .] ce qu’il pense des femmes, je le pense aussi, même si j’en suis une’ (Tombeur 1998) only reinforces the idea that an anxiety about femininity and an aggression towards adulthood propel her work. For critics such as Catherine Rodgers (2003: 60), Nothomb’s literature, in its obsession with a particular ideal of female beauty and refusal of mature female sexuality, cannot be reconciled with a feminist position. As she writes, ‘the problem with Nothomb’s texts is that the ideal of beauty they promote corresponds to that of the Iron Maid, thus reinforcing the Beauty myth and consequently patriarchal ideology.’ Nothomb’s more recent work has arguably responded to such criticism insofar as it has begun to figure adult relationships that do not end in murder. Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam, for example, explores Amélie’s first love in Japan, and Le Fait du prince (2008) (The Prince’s Act), Le Voyage d’hiver (2009a)

66

The Becoming of the Body

(Winter’s Journey) and Tuer le père (2011) (Kill the Father) all feature adult relationships. Nonetheless, even in these later works, there is a certain withdrawal from representation of adult sexuality, and though a character such as Tuer le père’s Christina deviates slightly from the model of the conventional Nothombian heroine with her tanned skin and darker features, she nonetheless remains impossibly thin. Broadly speaking, then, Nothomb’s entire oeuvre etches out an insistence on an anorexic aesthetic. Focusing on her autofictional work, this chapter reads the particular experience of anorexia as the making of a Body without Organs, and aims to open out perspectives on Nothombian corporeality that cast new light on what is generally perceived as an aspiration to the body beautiful and nostalgia for childhood as a rejection of desire. Hilde Bruch (1978: ix) has famously defined anorexia as the ‘relentless pursuit of excessive thinness’ (original italics), a definition that immediately displaces a primary relationship with beauty. Rather than stemming from a lack of appetite, as the name etymologically suggests, Bruch (1978: x) explains that anorexics consider ‘self-denial and discipline the highest virtue and condemn satisfying their needs and desires as shameful self-indulgence’. In recent years, and as eating disorders have become increasingly prevalent and increasingly dissected and discussed across disciplines, it has become quite difficult to fix anorexia with a particular meaning. Contemporary culture and the media teem with ideas and opinions about the causes, diagnosis and treatment of anorexia, and theoretical discourses range from the medical, to the psychoanalytical, psychological, cognitive, neuroscientific, sociological, cultural, feminist and postmodern, including overlapping and interdisciplinary approaches.8 And as Leslie Heywood (1996: 178) notes, Anorexia has recently been read as everything from a prototype for the discourse of liberal humanism (Gillian Brown) to a feminist strategy of resistance to a still-patriarchal culture (Sandra M. Gilbert), and perhaps because of its malleability as a trope, it still remains in the words of Hilde Bruch, an ‘enigma’.

At once an assertion of agency, and a disintegration of subjectivity, a desire for individual control in the face of externally imposed sociocultural exigencies and a compliance with concurrent corporeal ideologies, the particular conditions of anorexic experience would seem above all to require a subtlety of approach that is sensitive to not wanting to reduce corporeality to the very constraints and parameters from which it wishes to escape. As I have argued elsewhere, as an intricate web of



Making a Body without Organs 67

conflictual desires and corporeal practices, anorexia is not easily unravelled and it is this very resistance to ‘being held in view’ – being seen in one’s totality, being defined, categorised, interpreted or represented – [that] exposes a heightened tension in the anorexic subject’s negotiation between body and signification, one that riddles the endeavour to write about or to theorise anorexic experience with immense complexity. (Damlé 2013a: 115)

Deleuze’s becoming of the body, opened out in the previous chapter, will be analysed here precisely as a refusal of signification. In the construction of a Body without Organs (see Chapter 1), anorexia counters the transcendent unity of the hierarchised body and engages in a micropolitics of the body that reveals the multiple layers and codes that signify, construct and constrain corporeality. Opening out intensities and flows allows the anorexic the suspension of perpetually becoming, otherwise and differently (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 132; 2006: 82). This chapter explores the life of hunger, relations between pleasure and immanence, and anorexic destratification in Biographie de la faim, before analysing images of the egg and the tube in Métaphysique des tubes as creative projections of the Body without Organs. It suggests that these articulations of corporeality expose a far more complex relationship with hunger and the body than is generally anticipated in Nothomb’s work. Rather than resolutely refusing the body and desire, these works reconstitute the very relationship between them, seeking, in a Deleuzian manner, to open out their irreducible immanence. In making a Body without Organs, however, it will remain to be seen whether a Deleuzian theory of experimentation with the body, and of going ‘far enough’ towards the plane of immanence might be held, just, within the grasp of a liveable life. L A FA I M : S U P E R H U N G E R , D E S I R E , I M M A N E N C E Upon picking up the 2004 text, Biographie de la faim, a reader well acquainted with Nothomb’s writing and with the details of her life will have a sense of what this book – her only prose work whose title is not followed by the word ‘roman’ – might be about. Yet this is not an autobiographical account of anorexia. It is a ‘biography’ of hunger, a meditative piece of life-writing that explores the very nature of hunger, which, as a trope, is interwoven into the narration of fragments of her childhood, teenage and early adult years. Given the characteristic slippage between life and literature in the Nothombian imaginary, it seems more helpful to think about Biographie de la faim and Métaphysique des tubes both as autofictional rather than strictly autobiographical.

68

The Becoming of the Body

Nothomb may claim in Biographie de la faim a ‘souci d’authenticité envers le délire d’une gosse’ (103),9 but authenticity and credibility are less important to her self-narration than the pleasures that creativity can bring (Nothomb 2000: 114–15; 2004b: 97–8). Beyond her enthusiasm for embellishment, autofiction also affords Nothomb the possibilities of grappling with her slippery subject matter and evoking the surges of hunger and the becoming of the body in glimpses and in fragments. Biographie de la faim and Métaphysique des tubes are texts that counter assumptions and rethink relations between experience and experiment, and between hunger and desire, pleasure and creativity, body and words. It is with the nature of hunger itself that Biographie de la faim opens, in the evocation of the island of Vanuatu, an island of such natural fertility and richness that nobody who inhabits it has apparently experienced any form of hunger whatsoever. This perpetual superabundance of the island has instilled in its people, Nothomb claims, a certain peacefulness, amiability and civility that is to be seen nowhere else in the world. And yet, in her encounter over dinner with three men from Vanuatu, who admit that they enjoy the food but do not finish their plates because they are not hungry, she observes a further dimension to their incommunicable lack of hunger: ‘on avait l’impression qu’ils étaient un peu las: comme s’ils ne s’intéressaient à rien. Leur vie était une flânerie à perpétuité. Elle manquait d’une quête’ (18).10 In contrast to the lack of hunger in Vanuatu there lies the rest of the world, united in having experienced famine at some point or another, which serves to validate its subsequent concern with food. Above all, there lies the narrator, Amélie herself, who makes the rather grandiose claim that ‘La faim, c’est moi’ (22; 1111). Amélie explains that though hunger may be more or less universal, she considers herself to be something of a champion at it, with extraordinary capabilities that allow her to speak of a superhunger in the vein of the Nietzschean superhuman (25; 12).12 And such a hunger goes beyond mere hunger for food towards a generalised sense of desire: ‘Par faim, j’entends ce manque effroyable de l’être entier, ce vide tenaillant, cette aspiration non tant à l’utopique plénitude qu’à la simple réalité: là où il n’y a rien, j’implore qu’il y ait quelque chose’ (23).13 Though Nothomb chooses the word ‘lack’ to characterise her hunger, this description, and the meditations that follow, seem to be resonant less with the fulfilment of a lack in psychoanalytical terms that provides the resolution of desire, and more in keeping with a Deleuzian conception of desire as a positive, productive force. As Deleuze explains, desire has nothing to do with lack, but is a process that unrolls a plane of



Making a Body without Organs 69

consistence, a field of immanence that is crisscrossed with particles and flux (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 108; 2006: 66). Hunger, for Nothomb, would appear to participate in such a process of fabrication, connection and assemblage (‘j’implore qu’il y ait quelque chose’), given that it aspires to the flux of the real rather than a return to a utopian plenitude. As Nothomb continues, La faim, c’est vouloir. C’est un désir plus large que le désir. Ce n’est pas la volonté, qui est force. Ce n’est pas non plus une faiblesse car la faim ne connaît pas la passivité. L’affamé est quelqu’un qui cherche. (23–4)14

Nothombian hunger does not take particular objects that are then substituted in a psychoanalytical chain of desire, then; it exceeds conventional conceptions of desire as merely responding to privation, and moves towards the assembling of desire as immanence. Erika Fülöp (2011: 217) has recently made a similar case for the resonance of Nothombian hunger with Deleuzian desire, arguing that hunger does not seek its own elimination through satisfaction (discharge), but represents a state of ‘wanting’ that generates an active force. With its inherent activeness that pushes the subject to search and produce, this is also more than just a will. Hunger is an urge to search, whose culmination is the search itself . . .

Indeed, for Nothomb, the emphasis on desire as process relies on a resistance to satiety. Hunger remains suspended, ‘pour nous laisser à ce point sur notre faim’ (26).15 One must go just far enough so that hunger is not entirely sated, so that desire remains in play and in motion. As Nothomb writes, ‘Il est bon que l’âme conserve une part de son désir. Mais entre rassasier et se payer carrément ma tête, il y avait de la marge’ (26).16 Biographie de la faim reveals superhunger to be an aleatory force that moves beyond hunger as mere fulfilment or sustenance. Superhunger, Nothomb asserts, hungers after everything in its pursuit of pleasure: ‘À l’état natif et non contrarié, la surfaim sait très bien ce qu’elle veut: elle veut le meilleur, le délectable, le splendide, et elle se charge de le découvrir dans chaque domaine du plaisir’ (29).17 For the young Amélie, such banalities as cheese, hard-boiled eggs and apples provoke a sense of indifference, since hunger for her is not merely a functionality of the body that can be filled with sustenance. In this, her hunger is contrasted to that of her father, a martyr to food, who eats with great speed without chewing properly, ‘c’est l’anxiété personnifiée, incapable de jouir du présent’ (35).18 Superhunger instead requires pleasure in the form of what is most delectable, and, for the child, this is sweetness. Amélie’s hunger, then, is for chocolate and for sweets (28–9; 15–16),

70

The Becoming of the Body

and, soon enough, for alcohol too, as she experiences the sublime syrupy taste of plum brandy and the sparkling delight of champagne (53–4; 29–30). Hunger leads Amélie to pleasure, which is intoxification. If Nothomb’s depiction of hunger holds great resonance with Deleuzian desire, it both converses with and digresses from Deleuze in its emphasis on pleasure. For Deleuze, pleasure enacts something of an interruption of the process of desire. Though pleasure may be agreeable, attractive and even indispensable, pleasure-as-discharge involves a sense of attainment which fixes the self within the otherwise dizzying and overwhelming flux of desire: ‘il est le seul moyen pour une personne de “s’y retrouver” dans le processus de désir qui la déborde. Les plaisirs, même les plus artificiels, ou les plus vertigineux, ne peuvent être que de re-­territorialisation’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 119).19 One might well argue for a similar sense of the establishing of transcendent identity through the experience of pleasure in Nothomb’s work that seems to suggest a more psychoanalytical conception of desire. It is in Métaphysique des tubes that after two years of inertia the young Amélie is suddenly brought to consciousness after being given a piece of white chocolate by her grandmother. Tasting the unfamiliar pleasurable sweetness for the first time seemingly allows the child an entry into the Symbolic, a formative articulation of the thought ‘I am me’ that provides a signifying, reterritorialising sense of identity in terms that reflect the developments of the Lacanian mirror stage:20 ‘C’est moi! C’est moi qui vis! C’est moi qui parle! Je ne suis pas “il” ni “lui”, je suis moi!’ (Nothomb 2000: 30).21 And yet, even in this formative moment there is a sense of the dissolution of subjectivity. This interruption in the self is not, however, drawn out in the terms of the specular split of the Lacanian subject, whose recognition of herself in the mirror brings about a notion of identity while at the very same time signalling that very identity to be an image set apart from herself. Rather, in Nothomb’s writing, subjectivity is given shape but it is also unfurled through the affective experience of pleasure: Le plaisir est une merveille, qui m’apprend que je suis moi. Moi, c’est le siège du plaisir. Le plaisir, c’est moi: chaque fois qu’il y aura du plaisir, il y aura moi. Pas de plaisir sans moi, pas de moi sans plaisir. (Nothomb 2000: 31)22

Amélie becomes pleasure, and pleasure becomes Amélie. Subject and pleasure coalesce and are mobilised in an involuted becoming. This is not a psychoanalytical understanding of desire, then, what Deleuze refers to as an error ‘qui rapporte le désir à la Loi du manque et à la Norme du plaisir’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 119).23 While Deleuze calls for a notion of desire that relates neither to lack nor to pleasure,



Making a Body without Organs 71

Nothomb’s evocation of hunger in this episode, as in Biographie de la faim, moves beyond Deleuze’s relegation of pleasure to a psychoanalytical norm, and instead reconfigures pleasure along a plane of immanence. In this sense, pleasure does not reterritorialise the subject with an illusion of its transcendence. As the following extract from Biographie de la faim reveals in its description of Amélie, closeted away with a treasure trove of sweets, pleasure short-circuits the brain and redistributes the body, collapsing subjectivity and pleasure into one another and into the affectivity of becoming: Quand à force de recherches clandestines je tombais sur des sucreries, marshmallows ou souris en gomme, je m’isolais et mâchouillais les larcins avec ardeur, et mon cerveau réquisitionné par l’urgence du plaisir provoquait des courts-circuits, si haut était le voltage de mon extase qui ne respectait pas les normes du compteur électrique, et je m’enfonçais dans l’ivresse pour mieux remonter dans son geyser terminal. (32–3)24

If Nothombian superhunger designates the positivity of desire as a force, pleasure is no longer related to fulfilment but to the flows and surges of immanent desire. This notion is echoed in a later episode where Amélie is described tasting the Belgian Speculoos for the first time. Delighted, she watches herself in the mirror as she devours the spicy biscuits. When her mother comes across her, she is at first perplexed, before realising that Amélie is experiencing pleasure and that she wants to witness that very fact. With this act of specular recognition, one might again be tempted to regard Amélie’s desire to look at herself in the mirror as further indication of the reterritorialising effects of pleasure on the subject, as an impulse to fix the self. Yet it is not Amélie as plenitude or as transcendence that she is drawn to observe. What is more, Amélie does not to wish to witness the fulfilment of her desire, rather she is fascinated by the very process of that desire, by the enfolding of herself into pleasure, by her corporeality as a dissolution of the body into affect. Thus she watches as her face becomes the taste of Speculoos, and as the boundaries between her and her pleasure intertwine: c’était forcément du sucré, sinon je n’aurais pas eu l’air aussi heureuse; ce sucre devait être de la cassonade, à en juger l’émoi caractéristique des fossettes. Beaucoup de cannelle, disait le nez plissé de jouissance. Les yeux brillants annonçaient la couleur des autres épices, aussi inconnues qu’enthousiasmantes. Quant à la présence de miel, comment en douter, au vu de mes lèvres qui minaudaient l’extase. (89–90)25

Sensation and affect sculpt experience in this scene, and if the sight of Amélie’s exquisite pleasure only serves to intensify it, this is not because of a resolute reterritorialisation of her sense of self. Rather, her

72

The Becoming of the Body

ecstasy is amplified by her ecstatic position that collapses the subject into pleasure as the very process of desire. As Deleuze writes, ‘Loin de supposer un sujet, le désir ne peut être atteint qu’au point où quelqu’un est dessaisi du pouvoir de dire Je’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 108).26 Pleasure, then, may project the young Amélie into consciousness but, rather than identity being understood in terms of the boundaried transcendent subject who hungers for a lack to be fulfilled, or for pleasureas-discharge, subjectivity assembles with pleasure, and desire opens out along the infinity of immanence. If hunger leads to pleasure, pleasure itself is not driven by the possibility of attaining more pleasure: ‘c’était la possession du principe même de la jouissance, qui est l’infini’ (38).27 In Biographie de la faim, the fragmented episodes that are narrated of the young Amélie’s childhood as she moves from Japan to China, and later to New York, continue to circle around questions of hunger, and they highlight in a striking manner this notion of a hunger that is bound up not with the law of lack and the norm of pleasure, but with the overarching positivity of desire. And in her hunger for what is most delectable, Amélie is not limited to food. The powerful sensations of pleasure-as-process are multiply apprehended in her relations with others, for example, as Amélie hungers for the pleasure of contact and of love (52, 154–5; 28, 89–90) and gorges on the sight of human beauty and natural wonders (56, 108; 31, 62). Her hunger for pleasure begets contact and connection, and whether the backdrop is the beloved beauty of Japan, the apocalyptic atmosphere in China, or the excessive skyline of New York, childhood is richly evoked as the place of pleasures that surge into infinity and jouissance. REDISTRIBUTING HUNGER: A R T, S E N S AT I O N ,   B O DY As Amélie moves with her family from New York to poverty-stricken Bangladesh, hunger begins to take on new meanings and contexts. Bangladesh is awash with hunger, firing the blood of its people whose only activity is ‘la lutte contre l’agonie’ (170).28 While Amélie’s parents get on with the task of helping those in need, she and her sister Juliette become frozen by the sight of the impossible hunger that surrounds them. This is the first time in Biographie de la faim that the negative effects of hunger are materialised upon the body rather than being perceived in an immanent form connected to the vibrations of pleasure. This is not superhunger, whose desire lies in its very own process, but a hunger that requires sustenance. Viewing the effects of



Making a Body without Organs 73

a hunger whose fulfilment is denied is horrific for the eleven-year-old Amélie: Je recevais dans l’estomac le direct de ces corps d’une maigreur inconnue, de ces moignons surgissant là où ils étaient inconcevables, de ces plaies, de ces goîtres, de ces œdèmes, mais surtout de cette faim hurlée par tant d’yeux à la fois qu’une paupière n’eût pu empêcher de l’entendre. (172)29

Hatred overwhelms Amélie, and it becomes hatred for hunger itself and for the necessity of reliance on hunger. Her hatred is directed at material constraints, at the realities of men, animals and plants: ‘Seules les pierres étaient épargnées. J’aurais voulu être l’une d’elles’ (172).30 Seeking solace from the sight of illness, pain and death, Amélie and Juliette retreat into silence, hardly leaving their bunker and immersing themselves in books. The imaginative world of art offers a sense of escape from the seepage of the suffering of those around them into their own lives. As Nothomb explains, ‘Nous n’avions rien contre les gens qui mouraient autour de nous. Nous nous sentions seulement très poreuses face à tant d’agonie et, pour ne pas être emportées par ce fleuve de trépas, nous nous accrochions chacune à notre livre’ (185).31 The pleasure that the imagination can bring is not a new phenomenon for Amélie, who has thrilled in her own made-up stories of frogs and princesses as a younger child. Nothomb describes the child’s feverish imagination, after Rimbaud, as a search for something powerful, vertiginous, unbearable, sickening and bizarre. The child’s internal narratives are not merely thoughts but rhythmic vibrations, le son à zéro décibel qui n’est que vibrations des cordes muettes et rythmes purement crâniens, auquel seul s’apparente le bruit des stations de métro désertes quand il ne passe aucune rame. C’est avec ce genre de mugissement sourd que l’on se sidère le mieux l’esprit. (32)32

This is thought unleashed, and its murmurs affectively transform the mind. Even at the age of three or four, Amélie has a sense of the infinity of the imagination, and this is only intensified by her immersive reading in Bangladesh. One evening, when reading a short story by Colette, she experiences a moment of absolute captivation with the text that provokes in her an incommunicable feeling: ‘un influx parcourut ma colonne vertébrale, ma peau se hérissa, et malgré une température ambiante de trente-huit degrés, j’eus la chair de poule’ (188).33 Meditating on the reason behind the reaction, Amélie realises that it has nothing to do with the content of what was being expressed in the text, and that this spectacular rush of emotion is an affective response to the indefinable beauty of the words. There is little point dissecting the operations of the language, for Amélie, for that would be to reduce the very delight

74

The Becoming of the Body

of incommunicability that sparks such a response. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, sensation, the vibration and flux of creative intensity that surges through the body in the contemplation of art: ‘La sensation est contemplation pure, car c’est par contemplation qu’on contracte, se contemplant soi-même à mésure qu’on contemple les éléments dont on procède. Contempler, c’est créer, mystère de la ­création passive, sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 200).34 Sensation allows for an apprehension of the virtual, of the immanence that otherwise slips away from our actual grasp. For Amélie, the discovery of sensation is tremendous. If at the age of three and four she was not quite able to consider a cure for her hunger for sweetness, ‘l’appel du sucre’ (31),35 reading now rivals sugar in the pleasures and sensations that it may bring forth. Reading becomes, along with alcohol, the essence of Amélie’s existence, ‘la quête de cette beauté insoluble’ (189).36 For Deleuze and Guattari, language necessarily implies a deterritorialisation of the mouth, tongue and teeth, parts of the body whose primary territoriality is in food. By devoting themselves to the articulation of sounds, the primitive functions of these parts are displaced, creating something of a disjunction between eating and speaking. Further, they argue, there is a disjunction between eating and writing. Certainly, one can write while eating far more easily than one can speak while eating. Nonetheless, Deleuze and Guattari (1975: 36) argue that ‘l’écriture transforme davantage les mots en choses capable de rivaliser avec les aliments’.37 In Biographie de la faim there is a similar sense of words beginning to compete with food; however, these are words in the form of reading rather than writing. For as Amélie grows into her teens, the relationship between superhunger and pleasure-as-process is displaced into a voracious hunger for words. Reading becomes a way of counter-actualising the given, and replacing food by words opens out the sensation of the immanent through art. At the same time, as Amélie’s adolescent body begins to transform, she starts to resist organic constraints on her corporeality, and to make an-organic of herself as way of redistributing the body and counter-actualising its given materiality. At the age of twelve, while still living in Bangladesh, Amélie takes a trip to Calcutta, where she visits the Hindu temple of the living goddess, an experience that remains indelibly marked in her mind. This is a shrine to a baby girl who has been chosen for worship at birth on the basis of various astrological, karmic and social criteria. Enclosed in the temple, the immobilised child sits on a throne, and is sumptuously fed, garlanded and blessed. Once a year, a procession is held and the goddess is carried on a palanquin through the town, the only moment



Making a Body without Organs 75

that other people are allowed to look upon her as well as the only time that she has a glimpse of the real world. However, on the occasion of her twelfth birthday, she suddenly falls from grace. The young girl, who at this stage is obese and unable to walk on her own, is abandoned. When Amélie visits this temple, and observes the photographs of the goddess at different stages of her young life, she identifies with her plight: ‘Le temple de la Déesse Vivante me mit nez à nez avec une vérité qui était mienne depuis mon aube: c’était qu’à douze ans, les petites filles étaient chassées’ (201).38 Having grown up in Japan where the child is divine, Amélie has learned at an early age that growth means decrease and perpetual loss. On the cusp of puberty this takes on a fresh significance, and the age of twelve signals a frontier for the young girl as ‘le dernier anniversaire enfantin’ (187)39 before the inevitable transformations of the adolescent body. Amélie’s anorexia develops at the age of thirteen, when she and her family are living in Burma, a country that she describes as the most beautiful in the world. But for all her hunger for beauty, Amélie can no longer stand to contemplate its splendour and admits that ‘je ne pouvais tout simplement pas la digérer’ (203).40 In comparison with the abjection and despair of Bangladesh, such beauty appears excessive, even to Amélie, who as a child felt that nothing could possibly be too beautiful. In Bangladesh, reading constituted a flight into the imagination from the abject horrors that surrounded her, and it is significant here that the sublime can no longer be tolerated either. The external world, it appears, has become oppressive for Amélie in its excessive materiality and in its accumulation of meaning. Amélie has always been superhungry for the pleasures of beauty. But after Bangladesh, Calcutta and Burma, the relationship between hunger and pleasure becomes dislocated and turns in on the body. Too much beauty, decides Amélie, requires a sacrifice (204; 119). On 5 January 1981, St Amélie’s Day, Amélie stops eating and for two years, she leads an anorexic life. Her refusal of food leads to an untenable loss of weight, her body becoming skeletal and invaded by the cold. Catalysed as it is by the occasion of adolescence, it is easy to read Amélie’s anorexia merely as a desperate attempt to hold onto her childhood form. There is a repulsed reaction, for example, to growing the breasts that she tries to burn away with a lighter (205; 120). There is an implicit fear of her superhunger leading to a similar plight as that of the abandoned, obese former living goddess (201; 117). There is the attempt to stave off the desires that she is beginning to feel in a crush for a boy in her English club, and to privilege control and cerebral restraint over the unpredictable materiality of the female body (206–7; 120–1).

76

The Becoming of the Body

These elements would all seem to correspond to a fear of the leaky female body and of mature female sexuality, such that is eradicated by Hygiène de l’assassin’s Prétextat Tach. But other factors converge upon the anorexic body. Might there not also be the memory of the hunger of those in Bangladesh that has provoked a hatred for hunger itself (210; 123)? Might there be another significant memory from Bangladesh, that of being molested while swimming in the sea, that has provoked a need to control and protect the body (191–2; 112)? Might there be a retreat not only from the adult female body but from the excessive materiality of the world, in its extremes both of horror and beauty? Might there be a strategy of control as a response to the weight, the transcendent ‘too-muchness’, of the world (203–6; 119–20)? Might there also be a desire to experience the extreme, to internalise the apocalyptic, to test the limit, to seek out the immanent (209; 123)? And what does the skeletal body signify for Amélie? Can the deprivation of the body be read in terms of a nostalgia for the supposed purity and innocence of childhood, if childhood itself has been evoked as the very place of desire and jouissance? And how can we understand anorexia as an aesthetic ideal, or as a privileging of the body beautiful in Nothomb’s work more broadly if it is triggered here precisely by a desire to destroy beauty? (204; 119) These questions illuminate the complex and often contradictory impulses that tend to inform anorexic experience, as well as its resistance to a singular interpretation. Entangled in the mesh of signification, anorexia might, instead, be read precisely as a way of wresting the body away from the accumulation of meaning, as a way of counter-actualising the given materiality of the body and of working through the very layers of signification that demand particular and fixed meanings for hunger and the body. It might be read, then, as the making of a Body without Organs. M A K I N G A B O DY W I T H O U T O R G A N S Deleuze argues that anorexia is among the least understood of ­phenomena, particularly when theorised within the domain of psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 109; 2006: 67). In its refusal of the ­stratified organism and redistribution of corporeality, the anorexic body epitomises the Deleuzian Body without Organs. Dismissing any connection to lack, Deleuze figures anorexia instead as a means to escape the organic constraints of lack. It is not a refusal of the body, as such, but the refusal of the organism and its demands, ‘un refus de ce que l’organisme fait subir au corps’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 132).41 The anorexic body should not be thought of in terms of regression,



Making a Body without Organs 77

then, but instead as the involution of the body. The making an-organic of oneself involves a plane of construction, the point of which is to float in one’s own body. It consists of a destratification that opens the body out to the particles and flux of immanence. In this, the Body without Organs acquires something of an ascetic quality, ‘divine est l’énergie qui le parcourt, quand il attire toute la production et lui sert de surface enchantée miraculante, l’inscrivant dans toutes ses disjonctions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 21).42 The anorexic body plays with voids and fullnesses, resisting the unified hierarchy of the body and redistributing its affects. As Branka Arsic explains, ‘The anorexic experiments with becoming ever lighter so that in moving faster she turns extensions into intensities or pure affects [. . .] The anorexic is the inventor of a light and liquid body’ (Arsic 2008: 36). That starvation brings about a disjunction in sensory experience is a common observation of theorisations of anorexia: in the stripping away of the materiality of the body, physical sensations are necessarily displaced. Yet, alongside Amélie’s decision to stop eating is a vow never to forget a single sentiment and from that point, every night, she views and registers the inner screening of her emotions (210; 123). Her experience of anorexia illustrates the opening out of a different rhythm of affects, and, when her hunger finally disappears, it is replaced by ‘une joie torrentielle’ (211).43 Amélie’s corporeality takes on the qualities of lightness and asceticism that Deleuze evokes, and she compares it to a ‘mode de vie janséniste’ which allows her to float, suspended in ‘une ère glaciaire où les sentiments ne poussaient plus’ (211).44 Nonetheless, the void itself is intoxicating, and Amélie glorifies in intensities of physical and mental activities and in the an-organic inhumanity of her existence (217; 128). Pitting hunger against itself provokes the exquisite pleasure of the spectacle of her own limits and viewing herself in the mirror, she sees ‘un squelette au ventre hypertrophié. C’etait si monstrueux que cela me ravissait’ (219).45 This involution of the body is anticipated not long before Amélie’s decision to stop eating, as she ravishes pineapples in the night, armed with the knowledge that they make her gums bleed and spurred on by the vision of her blood spattered through the yellow flesh of the fruit: ‘Je mangeais le rouge au cœur de l’or. Le goût de mon sang dans l’ananas me terrifiat de volupté’ (208).46 Anorexia too participates in such a process of turning the body inside out in order to seek out the inner folds and flux of corporeality, and, as Nothomb writes, destratification affords a knowledge of the immanence of the body stripped bare of its signifiers: ‘L’anorexie m’avait servi de leçon d’anatomie. Je connaissais ce corps que j’avais décomposé’ (227).47 Anorexia, then, can be understood as a paroxysm of hunger. Nothomb

78

The Becoming of the Body

admits that ‘j’avais faim d’avoir faim’ (217),48 revealing an involution of hunger that reconfigures the transcendent coherence of the body. For Deleuze, as a becoming of the body, anorexia involves a micropolitics of deterritorialisation as something of a protest against molar female roles: L’anorexie est une politique, une micro-politique: échapper aux normes de la consommation, pour ne pas être soi-même objet de consommation. C’est une protestation féminine, d’une femme qui veut avoir un fonctionnement de corps, et pas seulement des fonctions organiques et sociales qui la livrent à la dépendance. Elle retournera la consommation contre elle-même. (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 132)49

Deleuze goes on to discuss anorexia as a feminine strategy of resistance that imitates molar structures, only to undo them from within. As such, he claims that the anorexic will often be a cook or a model, and cook-model is figured as an assemblage that wrests food, eating and the body away from their sedimented meanings, betraying hunger just as hunger has betrayed the anorexic body in submitting it to organic constraints (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 132; 2006: 82). Whether male or female, the anorexic participates, Deleuze argues, in becomingmolecular-woman. For all of Deleuze’s emphasis on the destratification of the Body without Organs, strangely, his discussion of anorexia here seems to bring up some contradictions, and we might return to some of the reservations raised in the previous chapter about Deleuze and Guattari’s problematic use of the term becoming-woman, which shuttles between the invisibilisation of femininity and the recasting of molar feminine roles, as well as their outright dismissal of the possibility of becoming-man (see Chapter 1). Even though Deleuze emphasises molecularity and micro-politics in the assemblage of the cook-model, figuring the anorexic body as such would seem somehow to reify a problematic association between women, beauty and domesticity, rather than to draw attention to the ways in which anorexia might otherwise counter-actualise the given, or interrogate the sexual binary. This is not to comment on the socio-cultural relationship between anorexia, the fashion industry, or the culture of cooking, about which there is of course plenty to say,50 but to acknowledge that emphasising this correlation precisely as an aspiration, rather than recognising it as being bound up with assumptions about femininity and with body politics, may serve to reinstate a molar logic more than it offers the possibilities of a micro-politics. Turning consumption, as hunger, against itself is certainly resonant with Nothomb’s depiction of anorexia in Biographie de la faim but there is a stronger sense in this text of anorexia as an interrogation of



Making a Body without Organs 79

molar femininity and of sexual difference, rather than a reification of connections between thinness and forms of female beauty or domesticity. On a trip to the mountains to visit a Buddhist monastery, for example, Amélie’s parents are approached by monks who are delighted with her porcelain complexion, and declare that they wish to buy her. At this, Amélie feels a sense of relief at the knowledge of the ongoing redistribution of her corporeality which will ensure her increasing thinness to a point that no one would consider paying money to own her (214–15; 127). Anorexia here is shown to resist what is seen to be the inevitable commodification of the female body. Biographie de la faim has certainly showcased thus far the strong associations between femininity and the body beautiful that Amélie has grown up with. Indeed, she has previously hungered for the spectacle of female beauty herself, crammed full of the beauty of her mother who is described as ‘une splendeur connue, une religion révélée à la lumière des foules’, and ever devouring the image of her sister, ‘une ravissante petite tête sur un corps délicat, fine, des cheveux de fée et des expressions d’une fraîcheur déchirante’ (56–7).51 At a younger age, Amélie is convinced that the consumption of beauty does not spoil it, that the object of human beauty remains intact in spite of devouring eyes (57; 31). But rather than being an imitation of or an aspiration to the unity of the idealised feminine form, it is precisely this intactness that is resisted by the anorexic Body without Organs.52 Femininity, whether in the form of the excessively beautiful mother, the celestial Inge or the exquisite Juliette, is cast into a molar role bound to a beauty that is susceptible to being consumed. These are images of unity and plenitude that the anorexic Body without Organs denies, and Amélie is fascinated instead by her skeletal body stripped bare that resists being submitted to the norms of consumption (219; 129). By opening out the flux of corporeality, the anorexic Body without Organs unbinds the molarity of pre-supposed gender roles. As a child, Amélie is identified with her father, and, habituated as she is to being introduced to guests by her mother as ‘Patrick’, she begins to do this herself: ‘Ainsi, je portais des robes, j’avais de longs cheveux bouclés et je m’appelais Patrick’ (36).53 This identification on the part of her mother riles Amélie who knows very well that she is not her father, since, as she declares, she is not a man, but also because she is not a slave. Amélie in fact goes on to describe both her parents as slaves: her father is a slave to his work, and to his appetite; her mother, being the primary food-giver as is generally the case in conventional family structures, is enslaved to the administration of his hunger (36–7; 19). These are the perceived molar roles of masculinity and femininity, then,

80

The Becoming of the Body

both rejected by Amélie who claims to be beyond the norms of such enslavement. There is also the implication in this text of a refusal of submission to Oedipal structures of identification that bind subjectivity to molar identity and that codify the unconscious flux of experience. As Deleuze and Guattari (1972/3: 59, original italics) argue, to enclose the child within the universality of the Oedipal romance is to deny the productive positivity of the unconscious, ‘Car l’inconscient est orphelin, et se produit lui-même dans l’identité de la nature et de l’homme.’54 Amélie’s capacity to resist enslavement as a child is attributed to her superhunger, which, as we have seen, enfolds subjectivity and desire into one another, and opens out pleasure as process into the vitality of immanence. This resistance to Oedipal identification is a refusal of molar roles, feminine and masculine, precisely as a containment of the infinity of the productive unconscious. As such, it anticipates and illuminates the anorexic Body without Organs’ destratification, counter-rhythms of affect, lightness, speeds and immanent intensities. As Amélie notes, her resistance to being imprisoned within transcendent molar identities is a result of her own infinity: ‘J’étais le déferlement, l’être, l’absence radicale de non-être, le fleuve à son plus haut débit, le dispensateur d’existence, la puissance à implorer’ (37–8).55 In Biographie de la faim’s articulations of superhunger, pleasure as process and the anorexic Body without Organs, Nothomb variously mobilises the counter-actualisation of the body, opening it out beyond its transcendent forms into the virtual multiplicity of immanence. Though hunger may be opposed to anorexia in a conventional sense, Nothomb’s text redistributes the very structure of hunger, allowing it to be conceived in terms of an immanence towards which the redistributions of the Body without Organs also strive. The resonance of Nothomb’s evocation of the becoming of the body with Deleuzian philosophy is striking. Nonetheless, her text reorients Deleuze’s work in interesting ways. Firstly, pleasure is viewed not as an interruption of desire but as participating in its very process, lending a heightened sense of affectivity to Deleuze’s more machinic notion of desire. Secondly, the anorexic Body without Organs as figured in Nothomb moves beyond Deleuze’s uneasy reinvoking of a molar vocabulary towards a becoming that allows for a sense of the flux beyond the constraints of gender. But lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Nothomb’s work, unlike Deleuze’s, ultimately demonstrates the anorexic Body without Organs to be completely untenable. Aged fifteen, Amélie reaches a stage of absolute coldness and her body responds by starting to eat (221; 131). In his discussion of



Making a Body without Organs 81

anorexia, Deleuze wonders, why it is that the anorexic body comes so close to going off the rails. He suggests that an answer can only be formulated by seeking out the dangers that arise within the experimentation of limits, rather than thinking about anorexia in relation to a pre-established interpretation of lack (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 133; 2006: 82–3). The trick, then, would be in knowing how far to go with one’s destratification. But, given that how that knowledge is achieved cannot be determined through means other than the experiment itself, one can easily lose one’s footing. In Biographie de la faim, going just far enough involves marking a limit point to counter-actualisation itself, and reconfiguring the body as a body. Anorexia may serve as an anatomy lesson that allows Amélie to turn her body inside out, but at a certain point she becomes aware of the necessity of holding onto the actual: ‘Je connaissais ce corps que j’avais décomposé. Il s’agissait à présent de le reconstruire’ (227).56 If, at an earlier point in the text, reading involved a superhunger that provided something of a substitute for Amélie’s taste for sweetness, the experience of anorexia alters this relationship with words. Rather than the act of reading stimulating the sensation of the immanent, words begin to represent a much-needed form of sustenance for the mind that is otherwise withering away. Amélie thus reads the dictionary from beginning to end, and retranslates Homer in order to nourish her neurons. Though Biographie de la faim’s evocation of anorexia reveals the counter-actualisation involved in making a Body without Organs, Nothomb, unlike Deleuze, is acutely aware of its unliveability, and of inevitable risks of destratification, in its physical movements towards death and in its melting away of the mind: ‘L’erreur serait d’y voir une intelligence propre à l’anorexie. Il serait bon que cette évidence soit enfin acquise: l’ascèse n’enrichit pas l’esprit. Il n’y a pas de vertu aux privations’ (213).57 As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari argue that words, and in particular writing, deterritorialise the primitive functions of the mouth. But in Biographie de la faim, if reading initiates a flight from the material world into the virtual that is concurrent with the counter-actualising destratification of the body, it is writing that in fact begins to tether the body to the plane of the actual. And, for Nothomb, it is writing, rather than reading, that maintains this connection, because writing – as well as being a creative act – is also a physical one: ‘C’était d’abord un acte physique: il y avait des obstacles à vaincre pour tirer quelque chose de moi. Cet effort constitua une sorte de tissu qui devint mon corps’ (227).58

82

The Becoming of the Body

THE EGG AND THE TUBE: T H E C R E AT I V E M E TA P H Y S I C S O F A B O DY WITHOUT ORGANS As Amélie begins to rematerialise her body, she experiences discomfort, pain and illness in responding to a hunger that has turned in on itself. She welcomes the intensity of the feverish state that illness brings, since delirium allows her a semblance of respite from her renewed material engagement. The hallucinations that are described in Biographie de la faim focus on a strikingly unusual image: Amélie as a cone wandering around an interstellar void with the task of transforming into a cylinder. Becoming this tube seems to be a matter of some urgency, as Nothomb explains: Je me concentrais, de toute la force de mes quarante degrés de température, pour devenir le tube espéré. Parfois, la sensation d’avoir réussi ma mission géométrique me donnait une grande fierté. Je m’éveillais inondée de sueur et savourais quelques minutes d’apaisement. (223)59

A similar interstellar setting is echoed just a few pages later. Now studying at university in Brussels, Amélie has confessed to her sister that she has started to write, and Juliette reads her story of an egg. This is a giant egg, whose yolk has not resisted a coup staged by revolutionaries. As such, it spreads into the white, provoking an explosion of the shell. The egg then becomes an omelette, ‘une titanesque omelette spatiale qui évoluerait dans le vide cosmique jusqu’à la fin du temps’ (229).60 Juliette’s sole comment after reading this story is that it is autobiographical. It is not in Biographie de la faim, however, but in Nothomb’s other autofictional text about her childhood, Métaphysique des tubes, that the egg and the tube are in fact fully mobilised as autobiographical expressions. And, as we shall see, these forms act as creative figurations of the Body without Organs, as the invoking in writing of the destratification of the body that anorexia materially intends but that it cannot sustain. In Métaphysique des tubes, Nothomb presents an account of the first two years of her life as an unresponsive, immobile and unspeaking ‘vegetable’. At the beginning of the text, the young Amélie is written in the third person as ‘Dieu’, though her parents refer to her as ‘la Plante’.61 There is no sense of beginning to the existence of God, no notable starting point. God simply exists, in a Deleuzian fashion, emerging somehow from the middle. It is absolutely satisfied and absolutely inert, ‘Il ne voulait rien, n’attendait rien, ne percevait rien, ne refusait rien et ne s’intéressait à rien’ (5).62 God has no language, no thought and no



Making a Body without Organs 83

sight (6; 2). Though it may look like a baby, it does not cry, nor does it respond to sounds, changes in temperature or emotions (10; 5). And since it does not move, it has no sense of the passing of time (16; 10–11). God is immobile and impassive. It is the ruler of the universe, though this fact does not impress upon it, since ‘Dieu se fichait éperduement d’être Dieu’ (6).63 This description of the child’s body would seem to be very far removed from Deleuzian philosophy, in its immobility, fixity, plenitude and seeming transcendence. Yet, intriguingly, the articulation of the body of God both as an egg and as a tube reconfigures it in fact as a light and liquid body marked by Deleuzian intensities and affects. God’s body is depicted first of all as being full and dense like that of a hard-boiled egg, with a rounded, compact form (5; 1). Nothomb’s choice of an egg as a metaphor is striking, given that Deleuze and Guattari frequently describe the Body without Organs precisely as an egg, traversed with axes and gradients that mark the molecular flows and passages of matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 28; 2004a: 21). According to their figuration, the egg figures a zone of zero intensity, of production and becoming: L’oeuf est le milieu d’intensité pure, le spatium et non l’extensio, l’intensité Zéro comme principe de production. [. . .] l’oeuf désigne toujours cette réalité intensive non pas indifférenciée, mais où les choses, les organes, se distinguent uniquement par des gradients, des migrations, des zones de voisinage. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 202)64

Nothomb’s egg may be full and hard, but it is also composed of a network of passages, and, as such, it is also referred to as a tube. The tube’s only activities are swallowing, digestion and excretion, of which God has no particular awareness or control. Corporeality is expressed, then, as a continuous activity of flows that are not submitted to the mind, as ‘Dieu ouvrait tous les orifices nécessaires pour que les aliments solides et liquides le traversent’ (7).65 These circulations immediately recall the Deleuzian egg as crisscrossed with molecular flows. It is worth quoting the following passage at length for the startling resonance that the egg-tube holds with the Deleuzian Body without Organs: Il y a une métaphysique des tubes. [. . .] les tubes sont de singuliers mélanges de plein et de vide, de la matière creuse, une membrane d’existance protégeant un faisceau d’inexistance. Le tuyau est la version flexible du tube: cette mollesse ne le rend pas moins énigmatique. Dieu avait la souplesse du tuyau mais demeurait rigide et inerte, confirmant ainsi sa nature de tube. Il connaissait la sérénité absolue du cylindre. Il filtrait l’univers et ne retenait rien. (7)66

This is a body that retains nothing but that is nonetheless composed of voids and fullnesses, bringing to mind the Deleuzian anorexic who

84

The Becoming of the Body

makes a Body without Organs, ‘avec des vides et des pleins’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 132).67 For Deleuze, voids and fullnesses do not alternate in the anorexic body, rather they exist in a relationship of involution, an involution that is also apparent in the tube’s supple inertness and cylindrical serenity. Nothomb writes that the tube opposes a philosophy of flux, such as is put forward by the ancient philosopher Heraclitus who claims that nothing endures but change. In her words, ‘Le pauvre Héraclite se fût suicidé s’il avait rencontré Dieu, qui était la négation de sa vision fluide de l’univers’ (14).68 But this flux, if it does not characterise the world according to the tube in its immutability and exterior hardness, is internal to the tube’s body itself, a body of infinite passage that filters everything and retains nothing. In her evocation of the egg-tube, Nothomb presents a light and liquid body without organs.69 And the image of the circulations and flows of the tube persists throughout Métaphysique des tubes, even after the ‘tube’ has seemingly entered into ‘normal’ consciousness. Amélie delights in the mistaken notion that her father works in the tubes and tunnels of the sewers, for example (104–8; 88–93). The three carps she is given for her birthday hold a fascinated revulsion for their tube-like mouths (136; 115), though, in exposing their own insides, they perhaps reveal the machinations of digestion that the egg-tube in fact resists in filtering everything and retaining nothing. The circulations of the egg-tube are recalled in further passages describing Amélie swimming or bathing in the rain, where she experiences a form of liquefaction such that she becomes water itself, corporeality melted away into immanent flux and flow: L’eau en dessous de moi, l’eau au-dessus de moi, l’eau en moi – l’eau, c’était moi. Ce n’était pas pour rien que mon prénom, en japonais comportait la pluie. À son image, je me sentais précieuse et dangereuse, inoffensive et mortelle, silencieuse et tumultueuse, haïssable et joyeuse, douce et corrosive, anodine et rare, pure et saississante, insidieuse et patiente, musicale et cacophonique – mais au-delà de tout, avant d’être quoi que ce fût d’autre, je me sentais invulnérable. (109)70

Amélie is invulnerable here, in the same sense of omnipotence that is conferred on ‘Dieu’ the egg-tube. This invulnerability is not a result of transcendence, but of the immanent flows of a body becoming, a liquefaction that rivals pleasure in its rapturous collapsing of corporeality (110; 94). And it is reflected in Amélie’s excessive thirst for water, a dipsomania that liquefies the body from within, making another Body without Organs, where her thirst for water, like her superhunger, may be quenched but is never satisfied: ‘L’eau désaltérait sans s’altérer et sans s’altérer ma soif. Elle m’enseignait l’infini véritable, qui n’est pas une idée ou une notion, mais une expérience’ (Nothomb 2004a: 61).71



Making a Body without Organs 85

In its various depictions of the liquid egg-tube body, then, Métaphysique des tubes thus figures a corporeality of flows, reflecting the anorexic Body without Organs that itself proves to be materially unsustainable. If, according to Biographie de la faim, the first story Amélie writes that is read by someone else is the story of an egg, this is an egg that has turned into an omelette, an egg that is no longer crossed through by passages and flows, an egg that is cooked and that acquires a form. Its autobiographical aspect perhaps resides in this materialisation of a solid shape. Métaphysique des tubes, then, might be read as the making of a Body without Organs that allows for a different vision of the egg, one that allows for the absolute destratification of corporeality through an act of writing that interfaces the actual and the virtual. Writing is itself a form of counter-actualising the given, of experimenting with limits and forms, and of becoming otherwise through creative endeavour. And it is significant, then, that in these two texts that figure Nothomb’s own experiences of corporeality, autobiography is displaced in favour of an autofiction in which other forms of the body can be explored. For though Biographie de la faim recounts Amélie’s childhood up until her early twenties in chronological terms, this is not a straightforward autobiographical account and Métaphysique des tubes even more obviously dispenses with factual recall. There is no beginning to the unnamed Amélie’s life, no birth, no family romance to form transcendent identity through identification. If ‘Dieu’ does not submit to the inanity of its parents or to their expectations of infantile development, Nothomb refuses to submit to our expectations of the child’s relation to the world as well as of what a person can or should remember about their earliest years. In so doing, she counters our assumptions not only about childhood but also about the relationship between memory, authenticity and narration. Writing, Nothomb creates a line of flight into the flows of corporeality. Writing, Nothomb envisions a Body without Organs that might be understood in terms that do not merely relate to a facile nostalgia or a regression to the child’s body. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, la meilleure façon dont un auteur manifeste l’inanité et la vacuité d’Œdipe, c’est quand il arrive à injecter dans son œuvre de véritables blocs récurrents d’enfance qui re-amorcent les machines désirantes, par opposition aux vieilles photos, aux souvenirs-écrans qui saturent la machine et font de l’enfant un fantasme régressif à l’usage des petits vieux. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 473)72

Writing a metaphysics of a tube – for what, Nothomb suggests, could possibly be more metaphysical than a tube? – enacts a becoming-child that is figured as the site of immanent experience, desires and flows.

86

The Becoming of the Body

CONCLUSION In Biographie de la faim, as we have seen, Nothomb describes her coming to writing as coinciding with the material reterritorialisation of her body. She writes in this text that the effort ‘constitua une sorte de tissu qui devint mon corps’ (227);73 elsewhere in an interview she has talked about experiencing writing after anorexia as a form of suture between mind and body.74 Writing in the Nothombian universe thus crosses through the actual and the virtual, and allows for an experimentation with the limits of the body without leaning too far over the edges of material existence, without falling into the cracks that inevitably open up in the anorexic making of a Body without Organs that Deleuze appears to overlook. Reading anorexia and hunger in Nothomb through a feminist and Deleuzian frame may allow for an understanding of the making of a Body without Organs as a means of working through the accumulation of meaning and signifying codes that tie the body down; but despite this reorientation of the idea of anorexia as lack or regression, destratification undeniably dances with dangerous forms of desire. If, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, words rival food, it is writing, finally, as a creative, physical act that opens out the productive flux of desire that corresponds to Amélie’s superhunger. In its surges through its hunger for sweetness, for experience, for contact, for connection, for art, for hunger itself, superhunger is channelled through the creativity of writing as opening out the virtual sensations of immanence. Writing, for Nothomb, may form the fabric of a body but it does so precisely as an affective corporeality of flows that keeps desire in play as an overarching productive force. As Nothomb writes in Biographie de la faim, ‘Écrire n’avait plus rien à voir avec l’extraction hasardeuse des débuts; c’était désormais ce que c’est aujourd’hui – la grande poussée, la peur jouissive, le désir sans cesse ressourcé, la nécessité voluptueuse’ (234).75 N OT E S   1. ‘what should we do with the body?’ (Nothomb 2005: 126).   2. ‘Anorexia had given me an anatomy lesson. I knew the body that I had taken apart’ (Nothomb 2007b: 134).   3. ‘Life is a tube that swallows and remains empty’ (Nothomb 2004b: 122).  4. ‘Disarmed by an overly happy childhood, I’ve yielded to nostalgia.’ Interview in Psychologies magazine (January 2000), cited in a flyer for a production of Le Sabotage amoureux (Nothomb 1993) by the Compagnie Biloxi 48 (12 January–18 February 2011), (last accessed 1 August 2012).



Making a Body without Organs 87

 5. ‘scarcely a single aspect of Amélie Nothomb’s persona has escaped the media’s keen eyes. Nothomb has been invented and reinvented with every rentrée; with her success the air of suspicion that marked her first rentrée is no longer mentioned, nevertheless a certain mistrust with regard to her “character” and her identity persists.’   6. ‘The anxieties that Nothomb brings to light are primitive, visceral, and anyone can identify with them, or recognize in them the first echoes of a kind of primal tragedy. By voicing that fundamental uneasiness with self, by depicting what it feels like to find oneself abandoned in the midst of life’s dreariness, Nothomb creates fables that have meaning for every one of us, if only we can remember our first moments of disorientation and the first time we felt rejection’ (Decker 2003b: xiii).  7. The past ten years have seen increasing numbers of critical studies on themes ranging from identity to irony in Nothomb’s work. These are largely articles and book chapters, though there are also some excellent major book-length studies, for example, Amanieux 2005, 2009; Bainbrigge and den Toonder 2003; David 2006; Lee 2010; Margaux 2004. A selection of articles and book chapters that focus particularly on the body, and bodily identity include Berglund Hill 2009; Caine 2003; Cowles 2011; Damlé 2009a, 2013a; Fülöp 2011; Jaccomard 2003; A. Kemp 2012, 2013; Korzeniowska 2003; Larkin 2011; McIlvanney 2007; Pries 2003; Rice 2005; Rodgers 2003; Terasse 2003a.  8. Key critical works on anorexia that relate in particular to social and cultural contexts include Bordo 1993; Bruch 1973, 1978; Heywood 1996; MacSween 1995; Malson 1998; Orbach 1986, 2010; Suleiman 1985. Criticism that looks at anorexia in French literature includes Damlé 2013a; A. Kemp 2012; McEachern 1998; Meuret 2006, 2007; Rodgers 2003.  9. ‘a concern for authenticity in depicting the delirium of a [. . .] child’ (59). 10. ‘one had the sense that they were a little flabby: as though they weren’t interested in anything. Their life was one of perpetual idleness. It lacked a quest’ (8). 11. Original French given in translated edition; the phrase translates as ‘I am hunger’, or ‘Hunger is me’. 12. Throughout this chapter, where two page numbers are given, the first is to the French edition and the second to the English edition of the text under discussion. 13. ‘By hunger, I mean that terrible lack within the whole being, the gnawing void, the aspiration not so much to a utopian plenitude as to simple reality: where there is nothing, I beg for there to be something’ (11). 14. ‘Hunger is want. It’s a broader desire than desire. It isn’t the will, which is strength. Neither is it a weakness, for hunger doesn’t know passivity. He who hungers searches’ (12). 15. ‘to be left hungry to such an extent’ (13).

88

The Becoming of the Body

16. ‘It’s good for the soul to preserve part of its desire. But there was still a bit of a gap between filling me up and taking me for a ride’ (13). 17. ‘In its native, unhindered state, superhunger knows very well what it wants: it wants the best, the most delectable, the most splendid, and it sets out to find it in every area of pleasure’ (15). 18. ‘he is anxiety personified, incapable of enjoying the present moment’ (18). 19. ‘it is the only means for a person to “find himself again” in the process of desire which overwhelms him. Pleasures, even the most artificial, or the dizziest, can only be reterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 74). 20. See Lacan 1966, 2007. 21. ‘“It is I! I’m talking! I’m not an ‘it’ I’m a ‘me’!”’ (Nothomb 2004b: 24). 22. ‘“Pleasure is a wonderful thing, for it has taught me that I am me. Me: where pleasure is. Pleasure is me. Wherever there is pleasure there is me. No pleasure without me. No me without pleasure!”’ (Nothomb 2004b: 24). 23. ‘which relates desire to the Law of the lack and to the Norm of pleasure’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 74). 24. ‘When my secret investigations led me to sweets, marshmallows or jelly mice, I sought solitude and ardently devoured my booty, and my brain, commandeered by the urgency of pleasure, short-circuited, so high was the voltage of my ecstasy, far beyond the range of any measuring instrument, and I plunged myself into intoxication the better to rise once more in its terminal geyser’ (17). 25. ‘there was definitely something sweet or else I wouldn’t have looked so happy; the sugar must have been brown, judging by the characteristic agitation of my dimples. A lot of cinnamon, said my nose, wrinkled with delight. My gleaming eyes announced the colour of the other spices, as unknown as they were exciting. As to the presence of honey, how could anyone have doubted it, seeing how my lips twitched with ecstasy?’ (52). 26. ‘Far from presupposing a subject, desire cannot be attained except at the point where someone is deprived of the power of saying “I”’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 66). 27. ‘it’s the possession of the very principle of bliss: infinity’ (20). 28. ‘the struggle against death’ (99). 29. ‘I was hit right in the stomach by the sight of those extraordinarily gaunt bodies, those stumps appearing from the most inconceivable places, scars, goitres, oedemas, but particularly that hunger cried out by so many eyes at once that no eyelid could have kept the images out’ (99–100). 30. ‘Only stones were spared. I wished I was one of them’ (100). 31. ‘We had nothing against the people dying around us. We just felt very porous in the face of so much agony, and, to avoid being carried away by this river of death, we each clung to our books’ (108). 32. ‘sound at zero decibels, the mere vibration of mute strings and purely cranial rhythms, like nothing so much as the sound of deserted stations



Making a Body without Organs 89

on the underground when no train passes. It is with this kind of muffled bellow that we best amaze our minds’ (17). 33. ‘a nervous impulse ran down my vertebral column, my skin shivered, and despite an ambient temperature of thirty-eight degrees, I developed gooseflesh’ (110). 34. ‘Sensation is pure contemplation, for it is through contemplation that one contracts, contemplating oneself to the extent that one contemplates the elements from which one originates. Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 212). 35. ‘the importunate call of sugar’ (16). 36. ‘the quest for this insoluble beauty’ (110). 37. ‘writing goes further in transforming words into things capable of competing with food’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 20). 38. ‘The temple of the Living Goddess brought me face to face with a truth that had been mine since the very beginning: it was at the age of twelve that little girls were banished’ (117). 39. ‘the last birthday of childhood’ (109). 40. ‘I simply couldn’t digest it’ (119). 41. ‘a refusal of what the organism makes the body undergo’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 81). 42. ‘But the energy that sweeps through it is divine, when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and server as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 14). 43. ‘torrential joy’ (124). 44. ‘Jansenist way of life’; ‘an ice age in which feelings ceased to grow’ (124). 45. ‘I was a skeleton with a hypertrophied belly. It was so monstrous that I was utterly delighted’ (129–30). 46. ‘I ate the red in the heart of the gold. The taste of the blood in the pineapple terrified me with its exquisite pleasure’ (122). 47. ‘Anorexia had given me an anatomy lesson. I knew the body that I had taken apart’ (134). 48. ‘I was hungry for hunger’ (128). 49. ‘Anorexia is a political system, a micro-politics to escape from the norms of consumption in order not to be an object of consumption oneself. It is a feminine protest, from a woman who wants to have a functioning of the body and not simply organic and social functions which make her dependent. She will turn consumption against itself.’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 82). 50. See Bordo 1993; Heywood 1996; MacSween 1995; Malson 1998; Orbach 1986, 2010. 51. ‘a well-known glory, a revealed religion adored by multitudes’; ‘a ravishing little face atop an elegant, delicate body, the hair of a fairy and facial expressions of agonizing freshness’ (31). 52. In Robert des noms propres, the ballerina Plectrude’s experience of

90

The Becoming of the Body

anorexia differs slightly. Though an equally complex range of factors inform her anorexia (see Damlé 2013a), there is more of a sense of aspiration to a particular form of beauty, as well as a signalling of the contemporary socialisation of the aesthetic of thinness and the relationship between food and the female body in a capitalist logic of consumption. See also A. Kemp 2012; Larkin 2011. 53. ‘So I wore dresses, had long curly hair and called myself Patrick’ (19). 54. ‘For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 52, original italics). 55. ‘I was the surge, the being, the radical absence of non-being, the river in flood, the dispenser of existence, the power to be beseeched’ (20). 56. ‘I knew the body that I had taken apart. Now it had to be rebuilt’ (134). 57. ‘It would be a mistake to see it as an intelligence inherent in anorexia. This obvious fact should finally be attested: asceticism doesn’t enrich the spirit. There is no virtue in deprivation’ (126). 58. ‘At first it was a physical act: there were obstacles to be overcome if I was to get anything out of myself. That effort constituted a kind of tissue, which became my body’ (134). 59. ‘I concentrated, with all the strength of my forty-degree fever, to become the wished-for tube. Sometimes, the sensation of having succeeded in my geometrical mission made me very proud. I woke up soaked in sweat, and savoured a few minutes of peace’ (132). 60. ‘a titanic, spatial omelette that would move around the cosmic void until the end of time’ (135). 61. ‘God’; ‘the Plant’. 62. ‘wanting nothing, expecting nothing, perceiving nothing, rejecting nothing, interested in nothing’ (1). 63. ‘God cared nothing about being God’ (2). 64. ‘The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension. Zero intensity as principle of production. [. . .] the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 181–2). 65. ‘God simply opened all the appropriate orifices for it to pass in, and through, and out’ (2–3). 66. ‘There have been theories about tubes. [. . .] they are singular combinations of fullness and emptiness; they are hollow substance, a something that contains nothing. Tubes can be flexible, but it renders them no less mysterious.   God’s body was supple yet inert, thus confirming its total absorption in cylindrical serenity – filtering everything in the universe, retaining nothing’ (3). 67. ‘with voids and fullnesses’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 81). 68. ‘The ancient philosopher would have been driven to despair had he met the Tube, who was the very negation of his fluid vision of the universe’ (9).



Making a Body without Organs 91

69. Laureline Amanieux (2005: 18) too observes the correlation between the tube and anorexia and argues: ‘L’image du corps-tube, ce corps dépourvu d’organes différenciés, ne représentant qu’un seul et même appareil digestif, se retrouve dans l’imaginaire de l’anorexique qui rêve d’éliminer de son corps ce qui pourrait le souiller ou le menacer de l’intérieur.’ (‘The image of the body-tube, this body deprived of differentiated organs, representing one single digestive apparatus, can be found in the imaginary of the anorexic, who dreams of eliminating from the body anything that might soil or threaten it from the inside.’) 70. ‘Water beneath me, water above me, water in me – I was water. How appropriate that one definition of the Japanese character for my name was “rain”. I, too, was precious and copious, inoffensive and deadly, silent and raucous, joyous and despicable, life-giving and corrosive, pure and grasping, patient and insidious, musical and off-key – but more than any of that, and beyond all those things, I was invulnerable’ (94). 71. ‘The water quenched but didn’t change my thirst. It taught me about true infinity, which is not an idea or a notion, but an experience’ (Nothomb 2007b: 33). 72. ‘the best way for an author to demonstrate the inanity and vacuity of Oedipus is to inject in his work recurring blocs of childhood that get the desiring-machines rolling again, in opposition to old photos, screen memories that saturate the machine and make the child a regressive fantasy for the purposes of little old men’. 73. ‘constituted a kind of tissue, which became my body’ (134). 74. Nothomb discusses this in the 2012 film documentary for France 5 (Empreintes) 75. ‘Writing no longer had anything to do with the hazardous extraction of beginnings; from now on it was what is today – a big push, blissful fear, desire constantly re-sourced, voluptuous necessity’ (138).

3. Becoming Otherwise: The Transformative Encounter in Ananda Devi’s Writing

We can be everything at once. My characters face the problems of identity. But while they look back, they are not defining themselves from the past. They look to the future. (Nair 2007) Quand on écrit, le plaisir [. . .] c’est de se couler dans un autre personnage, c’est de devenir autre. (Nkonlak 2007)1 le livre n’est pas image du monde, suivant une croyance enracinée. Il fait rhizome avec le monde, il y a évolution aparallèle du livre et du monde. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 18)2 I N T RO DU C T I O N Born in 1957 in Trois-Boutiques in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is a critically acclaimed author who has published a diverse range of literary texts over the last three decades, including short stories, novels, poetry and essays. A descendent from Andhra Pradesh, Devi grew up in Mauritius, and lived in London and Congo-Brazzaville before settling on the border between France, where she currently resides, and Switzerland, where she works. Devi holds a PhD in anthropology and ethnology from the School of African and Oriental Studies in London, and she also works as a translator. Though she began writing fiction at an early age, displaying a prodigious talent that led her to win a literary prize in a Radio France Internationale competition at fifteen, Devi started to devote her time in earnest to literary pursuits in the 1980s. Her first novel Rue la poudrière3 appeared in 1989, and since then her 92



Becoming Otherwise 93

work has been published variously with Indian Ocean, African and French presses. After a period of time with Gallimard’s ‘Continents noirs’ series, her texts now appear alongside such established and canonical authors as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, André Gide, Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre in their prestigious ‘Collection blanche’.4 Devi has become known above all for her lyrical explorations of liminal positions of subjectivity. Her sensitive treatment of themes such as marginality, difference and suffering, particularly as they are drawn out in relation to feminine experience, has attracted a diverse francophone readership in Mauritius, in metropolitan France and abroad. Devi’s work has been lauded on several occasions, including an award of the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie in 2006 for Ève de ses décombres (2006) (Eve from her Ruins).5 Devi’s writing carries an intimate link to her native Mauritius and to exploring the political and cultural inequalities of this island with its complexly constructed postcolonial society. The island of Mauritius claims a distinctive status in colonial history: unlike the Caribbean archipelago and unlike Madagascar, the inhabitants of Mauritius have no claim to an indigenous pre-colonial identity (see Hawkins 2007: 93; Ravi 2007). In a space where different communities have assembled, from Arabic and Portuguese settlers, Dutch, French and British colonials, to slaves, plantation owners, and indentured labourers from India, China and Malaya, the demarcation of a specific ‘Mauritian’ national identity or culture thus becomes a fraught exercise. As Srilata Ravi observes (2007: 2), ‘The fact that there was no indigenous population in Mauritius means that all Mauritians are immigrants [. . .] Each successive wave added a new layer to an existing complex cultural, socioeconomic and political milieu.’ Modern Mauritian society is comprised of a diverse collection of ethnic backgrounds, socio-political and religious allegiances, and though French, English and Creole are the official languages, Telegu, Tamil, Hindi, Bhojpuri and Chinese are just some of the other twenty-two languages that are spoken on this island. This composite society gives rise to complex relations between identity and difference, belonging and marginalisation, cultural tensions that form the backdrop of Devi’s writing. In Mauritian society, as is illustrated in Devi’s work, there is a strong sense of identification within communities with their particular ethnic, religious or linguistic heritages, which has served to forge a segregated society where different groups resist encountering one another. As Devi has commented of the Indian Mauritian community, which is the largest ethnic group in Mauritius, ‘They hold onto their original identity. It is a factor of solidarity for the group but also a factor of separation from others’

94

The Becoming of the Body

(Nair 2007). Separation and segregation are important themes in Devi’s writing, and many of her characters experience extreme forms of ostracisation and isolation as a result of their putative ‘difference’ from the community. Different forms of alterity return as tropes in Devi’s literature, and any deviance from the norm results in a state of alienation and dislocation, which has much to reveal about the broader ruptures, divisions and hierarchies within the Mauritian universe. And yet, this postcolonial society that has formed through the persistent influx of immigration also appears to engender a hybrid form of identity, one that might go some way to unsettle and disrupt such strict and deeply entrenched codes of belonging and segregation. This rather more triumphant, rejuvenating form of postcolonial hybridity, such that Homi Bhabha (1994) might advocate, is also a notion that Devi has alluded to. In so doing, like Bhabha, she forges connections between cultural heritage and the multiplicity of linguistic enunciation. Like many Mauritian writers, Devi writes in French, the language that the islanders commonly associate with creative expression, though her linguistic range covers Telegu, Creole, French, English, Bhojpuri and Hindi. Though Devi may consider herself a francophone writer on an objective level, she is keen to emphasise that the centrality of Mauritius in her writing lends a particular character to her work that exceeds the generality of ‘francophonie’. As she claims in an interview: ‘Je suis francophone, objectivement, puisque j’utilise le français mais ne suis pas française. Je suis éminemment mauricienne et insulaire dans ma manière d’écrire’ (Sultan 2001).6 In defining that sense of the Mauritian character in her writing, Devi takes recourse to metaphors of multilayering and hybridity, seeming to suggest the possibility of mobilising difference beyond hierarchical social structures: On ne pouvait ni me définir en tant qu’écrivain indien, ni en tant qu’écrivain créole. Cela m’a posé des difficultés de définition personelle jusqu’à ce que je me rends compte qu’être mauricien, c’est précisément cela: faire partie de tous ces mondes, et à travers un processus de synthèse et de syncrétisme, en extraire quelque chose de neuf et d’authentique. (Sultan 2001)7

‘Mauritian’ identity for Devi, then, involves a sense of multiple attachments and belonging to a variety of cultural strands. Further, her comments underline the extent to which the idea of ‘being Mauritian’ might demand an active process of synthesis and syncretism. As I have argued elsewhere (Damlé 2013b), in exploring the contours of the human, Devi’s representations of subjectivity in the Mauritian postcolonial context signal the very formulation of subjectivity within modes of passage, transience and transformation, a process in which creativity itself would seem to play a vital role.



Becoming Otherwise 95

Devi’s literary universe is structured through these tropes of hybridity and syncretism that characterise postcolonial Mauritian identity. Yet in this chapter, I am less interested in how such notions of subjectivity in passage relate to these postcolonial contexts and want to consider instead the ways in which the vitality of subjectivity, conceived in Deleuzian terms of becoming (see Chapter 1), might hold particular appeal for the female characters in Devi’s work. An empowering sense of becoming may appear at first glance to be at a far remove for Devi’s female characters, who experience the island’s social hierarchies and divisions not only in terms of ethnic, religious and linguistic markers, but also as a result of strict codes of gender imperatives. As Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi (2011b: 12) observe, L’île est un paysage marin ou chtonien, et surtout au fur et à mésure que son œuvre se développe, un espace social où des personnages s’affrontent, se cherchent et se déchirent [. . .] La folie et la violence sont [. . .] liées à une société en perte de repères ou imposant des repères ataviques liés à la position traditionelle de la femme.8

Deeply entrenched gendered power relations structure the social realities evoked in Devi’s work, and these hierarchies are particularly drawn out within the characterisation of Indo-Mauritian and Indian contexts. Devi’s female protagonists are consistently pitted against the enclosing universe of a hyper-patriarchal society, trapped by social and religious rules, dominated by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. Stifled and confined, subjected to symbolic violence and to physical abuse and rape, Devi’s female characters struggle to liberate themselves often to find themselves being cast back into subjugation and powerlessness. Their paths to freedom are limited, and tend to consist of a complicated internalisation of abjection or an appropriation of violence that is embedded in self-destruction (Ramharai 2001: 8). The socio-cultural exigencies of femininity are drawn out in relation to family roles: the impossibility of straying away from one’s duties as mother, wife, daughter is foregrounded in works such as Le Voile de Draupadi (1993) (Draupadi’s Veil), Pagli (2001) (Madwoman), Indian Tango (2007) (Indian Tango) (2011b) and Le Sari vert (2009) (The Green Sari). In Devi’s writing, an insistence upon female suffering is framed in terms of the othering of femininity through explorations of forms of difference, inscribed in the language of labelling and materialised in symbolic and literal spaces of confinement. The protagonist of Moi, l’interdite (2000) (Me, The Forbidden One), for example, is enclosed in the abject space of a limekiln because of a visual sign of difference (a cleft palate), while Pagli’s Daya is branded a madwoman

96

The Becoming of the Body

and similarly incarcerated for embarking on an illicit extra-marital relationship. Female corporeality is submitted time and again to male desires and to sexual violence, from Devi’s explorations of prostitution in Rue la Poudrière, to rape in Pagli, sexual abuse in Moi, l’interdite, the circulations of the female body subjected to violence, sexual control and murder in Ève de ses décombres, and domestic violence and murder in Le Sari vert. As Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo (2011: 200) notes, women in Devi’s writing are damaged, or otherwise disposable: ‘Réifiée, souillée, la femme n’est guère plus qu’un objet jetable.’9 In Devi’s writing, then, the female body in many ways becomes the stage upon which the various tensions that crystallise around the island’s violent postcolonial social divisions are played out. Yet, if for Devi postcolonial Mauritian subjectivity involves, on the one hand, experiencing forms of segregation and hierarchy, and on the other, opening out to the creative enunciation of a regenerative, syncretic vision of cultural subjectivity, a similar emphasis on transformation inflects her articulations of femininity and the female body. In her work on women in postcolonial representations, Françoise Lionnet (1995: 5) draws on Édouard Glissant’s theorisation of métissage to argue that women writing in such contexts demonstrate female subjectivity in particular to be multiply organised across cultural boundaries. Similarly, Véronique Bragard has argued that ‘coolitude’, a term coined by Marina Carter and Khal Torabully to describe the nomadic, in-between identity of Indian ‘coolies’ exiled to Mauritius through indentured labour, carries particular relevance for the multiple constitution of female cross-cultural identity. As she explains in her study of Kala Pani women’s writing (2003: 376), ‘like coral or a massala preparation, the recipe to identity formation is to be tested again and again. [. . .] Identity is, as the phrase “Kala Pani crossing” echoes, in constant passages.’ If the socio-cultural backdrop to Devi’s literary universe binds the subject within codified gender roles and hierarchies of sexual difference, her writing, as we shall see, nonetheless seeks to open out these possibilities of multiplicity, of passage and of becoming otherwise. Just as creativity sets in motion Devi’s syncretic vision of cultural subjectivity, the creative act of writing is charged with the task of responding to the insistent voices of Les Hommes qui me parlent (2011a) (The Men who Speak to Me), a recent meditation on relations between men and women, whose opening paragraph tellingly ends with the words: ‘Je suis offerte à la parole des hommes. Parce que je suis femme’ (Devi 2011a: 11).10 The overarching conception that drives the analysis of Devi’s writing in both sections of this chapter is the Deleuzian notion of becoming (see Chapter 1), the vitality of experience that is produced in-between two



Becoming Otherwise 97

terms rather than enclosed within the boundaried stable subject. The chapter argues that, rather than submitting to the violent hierarchies of binary sexual difference and fixed roles (what Deleuze would refer to as the molar), Devi’s writing mobilises the multiplicity of internal difference (in Deleuzian terms, the molecular) and opens the subjugated subject out to encounters and to the in-between. Harnessing the idea of the body in transformation as a vital mode of passage, the chapter first explores the metamorphic potential of the protagonists of Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres, considering the ways in which Devi’s articulations of becoming-animal both engage with and shift the terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation. It then calls for a theoretical dialogue between Deleuzian theory and the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray to consider how becoming in Devi’s writing might recast Deleuzian becoming, lending it some semblance of the affectivity and form of the female body. Where the previous chapter’s analysis of Nothomb’s writing highlights the ways in which the anorexic making of a Body without Organs intends the destratification of corporeality, this chapter argues for transformative encounters in Devi’s writing that collapse transcendent relations between subjects and objects and allow for glimpses of immanent experience beyond the patriarchal stranglehold on the female body. In the second section, the chapter considers the relationship between the notion of becoming, the transformative encounter and writing, through an analysis of the polyphonic composition and interlacing of Deleuzian creativity and Irigarayan embodiment in Indian Tango. Ultimately, the chapter is interested in exploring the idea that writing, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, might enable the perpetual and perceptual transformation of the actual (see Chapter 1). More specifically, my reading of Devi’s literature suggests that the act of writing is engaged not only in the portrayal of dynamic modes of subjectivity but in the very mobilisation of the becoming of the female body. T R A N S F O R M I N G T H E S PA C E I N - B E T W E E N : BECOMING-ANIMAL, MUTUAL ENGENDERMENT AND THE FECUNDITY OF THE CARESS In Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres, Devi portrays the ­suffering of young women who experience familial rejection, social alienation and sexual violence. As these characters struggle against the abject circumstances to which they are submitted, and seek to emancipate themselves from the violence of hierarchical sexual difference, they undergo significant transformations that take place at the

98

The Becoming of the Body

very level of the body: while Mouna, the narrator of Moi, l’interdite, metamorphoses into a dog, the eponymous protagonist of Ève de ses décombres becomes a lioness.11 Devi has described Moi, l’interdite as a ‘mise en garde contre la culte de la différence’ (Mongo-Mboussa 2001).12 Exploring these corporeal transformations as examples of becoming-animal and becoming otherwise, this chapter suggests that Devi’s treatment of transformation disrupts this cult of difference in its opening out of multiple, intensive difference, enabling a vision of subjectivity as comprised of constant shifts and encounters that exceed the singular molarity of female identity. Born with a cleft palate, the narrator of Moi, l’interdite is associated with animality from the very beginning of her life, referred to by her family as ‘la guenon’ or a ‘mouna’,13 which becomes the name by which she is known. Mouna’s earliest memories are bound up with her mother’s profound rejection of her, a rejection that is played out in various terms that range from the psychical to the physical. In one image, Mouna describes the sigh of repulsion that accompanies the mother’s turning of her breast away from the child who eagerly awaits the nourishment of milk and of love (7–8); in the next she recalls being strangled by branches of ivy before realising that the tight grip on her neck in fact belongs to ‘les longs doigts flexibles de ma mère’ (12).14 Mouna is similarly cast out from the family by her father, her brother and sisters, who all believe her deformity to be a portent of malediction: ‘Il disent que je porte le signe de Shehtan. Il détournent les yeux ou prononcent des mots d’exorcisme. Donnez-moi le nom que vous voulez, rakshas, Shehtan, Satan ou autre’ (9).15 Indeed, as the years pass, the entire village begins to view Mouna’s visual sign of difference as a curse, attributing any and all misfortunes to what they perceive as her monstrous presence. As Mouna acknowledges, ‘Ce fut le village tout entier. Il fallait bien qu’ils trouvent une source à leur honte’ (17).16 Mouna’s perceivable difference precludes any possibility of belonging to her community, and the actions of her family towards her serve to exacerbate her exclusion. Her only ally is her grandmother, who cradles and comforts her, and regales her with tales, in particular the legend of Prince Bahadour and Princess Housna (21). But she too suffers from confinement, being shut away in the attic, and she is regarded as useless because of her own disability. Though she may offer Mouna love and guidance, she is helpless to change the circumstances of her suffering. Branded variously as witch, hysteric, devil and monster by those around her, Mouna is relegated to an alterity from which it seems impossible to recuperate herself. And in her subjection to sexual



Becoming Otherwise 99

abuse (19–20) and to violent attempts to murder her (58), her life is utterly debased and stripped of value and of meaning. When other members of the community come to pay a visit to the family, Mouna is cast away and locked up in a limekiln as a means of ensuring her invisibility (13, 33–4). That the community is shrouded in silence on the matter further enables Mouna’s disappearance as a way of obscuring difference. As Mouna writes, ‘Tout se sait, tout se tait. On ensevelit ce qui n’est pas pareil à soi. On le brûle à la chaux vive. On refuse de voir au-delà de l’apparence’ (35).17 Mouna comprehends that her consignment to the captivity of an animal stems from the desire to mark out hierarchies, and that her own perceived lack of humanity in fact reflects the grotesque nature of those around her. If it appears that ‘on ensevelit ce qui n’est pas pareil à soi’, that difference perceived on a surface level serves to reinstate a hierarchy within which those who differ from the norm, who are minoritarian in Deleuzian terms, are subject to division and disavowal, while those who coincide with the norm reiterate and uphold the transcendence of the majoritarian subject. As Mouna speculates, Les gens ont honte de la difformité des autres. Le plus curieux est qu’ils ne voient pas la leur. Pourtant, le miroir a bien dû leur en parler, à un moment ou à un autre. N’ont-ils jamais vu leur yeux torves, leur bouche rancie, leur chair tumifiée d’envies? (56)18

But the mirror does not disclose such images because, following Deleuze, the transcendence of the majoritarian human subject is produced precisely through the naturalisation of the mind, through the ordering, fixing and repetition of certain (shared) perceptions and on turning what may be given into a nature (Deleuze 1953: 5; 1991: 24; see also Chapter 1). It is in the already dehumanised state of enclosure in her limekiln that Mouna gradually begins to transform from a human into a dog. At first, she is covered in parasites, suspended in a sort of half-life as her body becomes a site of nourishment and rotting. These small beasts encase and cocoon her, nibbling away at her flesh. As they envelop and feed off her, the parasites recall Mouna’s family and community who have consistently confined, immobilised and vampirically asserted their own existence by sucking away at her life force. And yet, despite what initially appears to be nothing more than an abject, dehumanised state, Mouna begins to experience a sense of openness. For the dependence of the parasites on her body has no significance other than a need for nourishment, and Mouna herself begins to feel nourished in return by the simplicity of this encounter and exchange. As she explains,

100

The Becoming of the Body

‘Je nourissais les petites bêtes, mais j’étais aussi nourrie. De silence, d’immobilité, de transparence, d’absence (46–7).’19 Mouna begins to be lifted out of a life in which her perceived inhumanity is set against a majoritarian notion of the human, instead entering into a space of transformation that enables her to become otherwise. Time, memory and her human sense of self begin to slip away from her, and she becomes aware of life beyond the transcendent preconditions of humanity: Il y avait autre chose que nous. Une existence plus grave et plus somnolente que la mort me berçait. Dans cet état de demi-vie, mon esprit libéré s’est entrelacé au souffle d’une étrange création qui n’avait aucune mesure. Elle n’était ni plus vaste ni plus étroite que nous: elle était autre, et il y avait d’autres dieux pour lequels nous étions invisibles. (46)20

Despite submitting Mouna to an abject disintegration through feeding and rotting, the parasites allow her a different understanding of life, an encounter with something beyond death, an immanence that absorbs and transforms her (69). As the stench from Mouna’s rotting body grows, it attracts the attention of a passing dog and it is he who sets her transformation fully in motion. Since he is also flea-ridden and starving, Mouna imagines that this dog has been abandoned in much the same way that she has, and supposes his interest has been piqued by recognition of her existence. After being dragged by the dog to a nearby puddle to wash herself, Mouna begins to recover a sense of her own corporeality. But instead of her newly cleansed state restoring her human body, Mouna finds that her liberation from the parasites has irrevocably transformed her. Suddenly, she realises that she is no longer human: ‘J’étais autre chose,’ she writes, ‘un être sauvage et replié qui ne pouvait plus se faire comprendre, si tant est qu’il l’avait jamais pu. L’essence des bêtes à la faim urgente était restée en moi. J’avais développé un esprit de meute’ (72–3).21 Mouna is altered by her encounter with these parasitic beasts, but her metamorphosis is ultimately instigated by entering into a zone of proximity with the dog. Rather than resolutely inhabiting a new, fixed, molar identity as a dog, Mouna begins to acquire canine attributes by allowing her body to enter into composition and proximity with something else. As such, she begins to resemble her companion rather than precisely reflecting him: ‘Finalement à quatre pattes, je lui ressemblais’ (87).22 Consistent with the Deleuzian notion of becoming-animal, then, Mouna’s canine metamorphosis is neither absolute nor the result of imitation, but a means of entering into the proximity of the relation to the animal, of movement towards that relation and of opening out the molecularity of internal difference. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 335–6, original italics) urge in their theorisation of becoming-animal:



Becoming Otherwise 101 non pas imiter le chien, mais composer son organisme avec autre chose, de telle manière qu’on fasse sortir, de l’ensemble ainsi composé, des particules qui seront canines en fonction du rapport de movement et de repos, ou du voisinage moléculaire dans lequel elles entrent.23

Mouna’s transformation is gradual and hesitant, and as long as she continues to be marked by traces of human perception, she is horrified by herself as well as by the heavy, warm canine mass beside her with its bitter stench of breath and of flesh. But after a while, the dog’s instinctual simplicity and lack of self-reflexivity begin to infiltrate her consciousness and she moves further and further away from the perceptual constraints of her human existence into a molecular becoming: ‘il m’a appris progressivement à interrompre ma mémoire. À penser, comme lui, uniquement avec la certitude de l’instinct. À interdire toute question. À devenir’ (94).24 Just as she sheds her clothes for a blanket of fur, she is uncloaked of memories of her past and of her anthropomorphic identity. If her human body was aligned with monstrosity because of her deformity, Mouna’s animal corporeality is graceful and alluring. Being liberated into becoming-animal highlights the veiled inhumanity of the human world, and of her ‘famille-monstre’ (96), and Mouna is able to state that she becomes a beast ‘avec grâce et grandeur’ (96).25 As she begins to forget the traumas of the past, her animal corporeality embraces different speeds and affects. Entering into the multiplicity of the pack (90), Mouna’s metamorphosis disrupts the divisive hierarchies of transcendent, anthropocentric relations by opening out intensive, molecular difference. For Mouna, who has developed ‘l’esprit de meute’ (73), rather than belonging to a pack, the animal becoming itself is the spirit of the pack, ‘la multiplicité apprehendée comme telle en un instant, par son rapprochement et son éloignement de zéro – distances chaque fois indécomposables’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 44).26 As in Moi, l’interdite, the violence of the cult of difference is foregrounded in Ève de ses décombres, which similarly takes recourse to metaphors of transformation as a vital means of moving beyond the transcendence of the molar. Set in the fictional district of Troumaron in the Mauritian capital of Port-Louis, this text draws together the voices of four adolescents who experience life at the margins. The narrative alternates between Ève, Sad, Savita and Clélio, offering plural perspectives into contemporary Mauritian society that each serves to highlight the destitution, disenfranchisement, despair and, above all, the violence that is laid out in these young lives. As Patrick Corcoran (2007: 117) notes, the text’s portrayal of Ève’s ‘décombres’ reveals ‘both the physical rubble of the urban ghetto in a developing country and the metaphysical rubble of postcolonial alienation’. Troumaron is

102

The Becoming of the Body

experienced as an enclosed and enclosing world, a world perceived by Ève to be waging endless war against itself: ‘j’ai l’impression de vivre en état de siège. Nous sommes en guerre, oui, contre nous-mêmes et contre ces organismes qui croissent, parasitaires, sur nos flancs’ (78).27 The violence that tears through Troumaron focalises around the perception of difference, and sexual difference takes on a particular potency in this text. For as Ève reveals, the impulse to eradicate the other is a defining element of the social and sexual relations to which she is subjected. As she explains ‘On détruit ce qui nous est étranger’ (77).28 Through the figure of Ève, Devi explores the circulation of the female body in a hyper-patriarchal universe that submits the feminine to the violence of the sexual binary. Ève’s first sexual encounter gains her a small piece of stationery and her existence is thereafter dependent upon this material exchange that provides her a way out of her destitution: ‘Pour la première fois, mon cartable n’était plus vide. J’avais une monnaie d’échange: moi’ (20).29 Ève’s body is in constant negotiation, marked by the traces that others leave upon her, drawing their territorial lines and scarring her with sexual violence (20, 77–8). Devi’s narrative insists upon the fragility of Eve’s body, her thinness and vulnerability taking on the image of a ‘bateau en papier’ (18)30 that inspires conventionally masculine responses of violence and possession towards her. But the transparency and frailty of the paper boat that floats upon the desires of others belies a sense of lightness and detachment that allows Ève a ghostly existence outside, or perhaps beside, her own body. As ‘l’ombre d’un corps’,31 Ève, like so many Devian protagonists, draws strength from her own sense of fragmentation as a self-protective mechanism, asserting that, Le prédateur, c’est moi. On m’emmene, on me ramène. Parfois on me malmène. Ça ne me fait rien. Ce n’est qu’un corps. Ça se répare. C’est fait pour. Je passe outre les pièges et les obstacles. Je fais ma danse d’évasion. (22)32

Ève’s strong sense of her predatory status and insistent belief in the renewal of her body may seem overly optimistic, but this very possibility of corporeal rebirth and transformation does in some way lead her to avenge herself. In the end she is motivated not only by the violence committed to her own body, but by Savita, a friend with whom she has an intimate relationship. Transformed by grief after Savita’s unexpected murder, and by her father’s repeated violence, Ève internalises violence, disrupts the hierarchical logic of the sexual binary, and becomes animal, ‘une lionne prédatrice, une bête vampirisante’ (Bragard and Lindo 2011: 240).33 When Ève discovers that Savita’s killer is a teacher



Becoming Otherwise 103

with whom she herself has been having sexual relations, she confronts the man. Ordering him to kneel, as she has knelt before so many others, Ève inserts the barrel of a gun into his mouth. Fully conscious of being able to break even further out of the submissive role that she already subverts, she shoots him: Tu acceptes ces rôles inversés. Tu accueilles le mépris qui te remplit le ventre. Tu lui dis: agenouille-toi. Cela aussi, ils te le disent chaque fois. Agenouille-toi. Ouvre la bouche. Reçois. (152, original italics)34

The transformation that enables Ève’s actions is not a metamorphosis in an immediate, absolute or literal sense, but it is real in Deleuzian terms insofar as her becoming-animal is a means of opening out the molecular, moving beyond the imperatives of gender roles and entering into proximity with the composition of a lioness. The precise physical changes Ève undergoes involve cutting her hair and shaving her head, but this metamorphosis only intensifies the becoming otherwise that Savita’s murder appears to have catalysed. Becoming-lioness, Ève opens up her fragility to an encounter with physical empowerment: Une tête lionesque que personne n’osera regarder de face, qu’on n’osera pas toucher parce que toucher une lionne, c’est aller au-devant de sa morsure. Toucher une lionne, c’est sentir ses dents qui se plantent dans la chair, des dents pointues et broyeuses, des dents qui se teindront de sang. Et après, digérant au soleil, elle les léchera doucement pour les laver. L’haleine de la lionne est brumeuse et sanglante. C’est beau une lionne qui digère, riche de ses dorures. (99–100)35

With all the allure and authority of a lioness, Ève refuses to be bound to feminine passivity. Releasing her body from its submissive position, then, Ève’s becoming-animal is a mode of passage that enables the transformation of the molar. In these two texts, then, becoming-animal affords both Mouna and Ève a release from molar roles of femininity that attempt to submit them to passivity and powerlessness, confinement and violence. By becoming other than themselves, these protagonists are able to experience difference in multiple, intensive terms, rather than remaining harnessed to the logic of binary difference. By entering into a relation with the animal, these protagonists’ transformations set subjectivity in motion. However, it might be argued that, despite the vital modes of passage that these transformations enable, the becoming-animal of these characters in both texts is ultimately ratcheted back to the molar. Indeed, the very forms that these becomings take – dog for Mouna, lioness for Ève – participate in a network of meaning relating to

104

The Becoming of the Body

abjection and violence that arguably only serves to reiterate the binary. Given the cultural signification of the dog as an inauspicious animal in the Hindu religion that governs the Indo-Mauritian social universe, Mouna’s becoming-dog internalises her projection as a portent of evil. And though her animal becoming may reflect a Deleuzian passage or encounter between terms, both animal and human shuttle uncomfortably between moments of redemption and resistance, and the reiteration of abjection and violence. Mouna eventually recovers her human form, ruptures relations with her dog companion, and meets Prince Bahadour of her grandmother’s tales, a tramp who impregnates her and runs away. Having killed her child, Mouna is then put away in an asylum, which is the place from which she tells her tale to a sympathetic listener, Lisa. Mouna is driven, then, to murder her child out of love, to spare him the existence that she has endured, in the knowledge that he will follow the same path to exclusion: ‘Il irait par les chemins comme moi, mi-homme mi-bête, pour être repoussé et rejeté de tous, chassé comme un loup-garou auquel on prête tous les pouvoirs, et qui n’a que celui de sa peur’ (118).36 Mouna’s act thus endeavours to save her child from the cult of difference. But even if it comes from a place of compassion, it is nonetheless inscribed within the very same violence of effacement. Lisa is the only human being who accepts Mouna’s difference and listens to her tale, but to encounter human compassion at this point is utterly overwhelming for Mouna. As Devi has commented, the possibility of redemption arrives ‘à un moment où elle n’a plus aucun espoir, aucune possibilité de vivre, et elle préfère détruire Lisa’ (Ravi 2011: 275).37 At the end of the text, then, it is uncertain whether or not Mouna has spared Lisa too from the violence of this world, killing her just as she intends to kill herself (121–2). As I have argued elsewhere, Mouna’s hesitating, transformative body in becoming may collapse division and demarcation, transgressing the violence of her perceived abject position, but in the end there is no wider sense of openness or redemption and her own act of compassion is bound to repeat the violence and effacement it wants to protect against (Damlé 2013b). Unlike Mouna, Ève’s transformation occurs at the climax of the narrative. And if Mouna’s becoming-dog internalises and rehearses images of abjection and inauspiciousness, Ève’s becoming-lioness clearly moves towards a more strident and triumphant position, the leonine being associated with authority, courage and strength. Yet in attaching itself to the opposite pole of power, this transformation again imbibes and regurgitates a binary logic, one that, again, can only empower itself within the same structures of violence and effacement. Ève may mobilise the grimacing lion from within the delicate butterfly,



Becoming Otherwise 105

but her metamorphosis also takes place in much more resolute terms than Mouna’s hesitating encounter. In the end, Ève may become the predator, but she is also dehumanised, impossibly invisible and, in her desire for vengeance, solely motivated by (self-)destructive impulse: ‘Je suis devenue invisible, à peine humaine, l’incarnation d’une volonté qui, seule, parvient à me maintenir debout et à me mouvoir’ (132).38 Despite these undeniably bleak outcomes, in both Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres, glimpses of a truly transformative becoming otherwise are momentarily captured for both Mouna and Ève. Somewhere along the way in both texts there has been an opening out of immanent experience through a reconfiguration of the relationship between self and other. For, significantly, what has preceded the machinations of metamorphic becoming-animal for both these protagonists has been an affective encounter of sorts: for Mouna with her dog companion, for Ève with Savita. And in both, this is an encounter that suggests a perceptual shift in the transcendent subject–object positions through which the hierarchies and cult of difference operate, an encounter that appears to harness the very possibilities of an empathetic encounter and that, for Ève at least, also in some way lends a feminine specificity to that very encounter. It is here that Devi’s work exposes the limitations of Deleuze’s conceptualisation of becoming, in its own inevitable moves towards imperceptibility (see Chapter 1), and recasts the notion alongside another mode of transformative encounter that admits of the possibility of a feminine specificity, namely that of Luce Irigaray. As discussed in Chapter 1, Irigaray has been sceptical of Deleuzian philosophy, though several recent feminist thinkers have read their work in tandem (see, for example, Braidotti 2002; Lorraine 1999; Olkowski 2000) as a means to theorise contemporary female subjectivity in terms of multiplicity. Tamsin Lorraine’s work is particularly useful here in drawing Deleuze and Irigaray together insofar as it provides a way of thinking further about the notion of a transformative encounter. As Lorraine argues, a common thread that runs through the work of both philosophers is a realm of the infinite, an immanent, inexhaustible realm that pushes at the edges of perception. Nonetheless, these thinkers are marked by significant differences, which can be summarised as follows: At the same time that Deleuze acknowledges that others are always implicated in our flights, he does not insist on recognition of the feminine other in the way that Irigaray does. And at the same time that Irigaray insists on the feminine other, she does not allow, perhaps, the same range of lines of flight as Deleuze. (Lorraine 1999: 19)

Reading Deleuze and Irigaray together, Lorraine suggests, engenders new ways of thinking about subjectivity and about encounters

106

The Becoming of the Body

between subjects. In particular, her work foregrounds the resonance between a Deleuzian becoming-other and Irigaray’s conception of the mutual engenderment of two embodied subjects, a non-appropriative, non-effacing creative encounter that transforms both subjects. As she explains, ‘The fecundity of the caress occurs between two, neither one of whom is left the same, just as Deleuze’s becoming-other occurs between two who become-other’ (Lorraine 1999: 232). The tactile vocabulary of mutual engenderment and the fecundity of the caress seems particularly to illuminate the idea of becoming otherwise in Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres. Mouna’s becoming-animal may be catalysed by entering into a zone of proximity with the dog, but this is also an empathetic relation that profits from being theorised beyond the abstraction of molecularity. For the dog’s desire to help Mouna is supported by lucidity and by an affective intelligence. As Mouna writes, ‘Je n’avais jamais lu tant d’intelligence dans les yeux d’un être vivant’ (70).39 As he enters her abode, he sniffs her out and has a companionable rest before going out to get water for her from a nearby puddle. Upon his return, he sets about ridding Mouna of her parasites, tenderly licking her wounds to dislodge any that remain embedded in her flesh before liberating her from her confines (72). In many ways, Mouna’s becoming-animal is in fact enabled by the compassion and admiration that she sees in the dog’s responses to her. For when she sits on all fours, and looks into his eyes, she experiences something completely new: the intimacy of connection that leads to a conversation, ‘faite de silences et de sourires’, ‘une conversation d’amour’ (73),40 and to companionship. In its non-effacing encounter with the other, the cross-fertilisation of Mouna and the dog thus reveals the immanence of relations beyond the divisive hierarchical structures of society and within the transformative space of an affective encounter. Where Mouna’s experience of the fecundity of the caress leads her to become-animal, it is Ève’s loss of that mutual engenderment that requires her to take on an animal corporeality. For it is in her relationship with Savita that she has experienced an immanent perception of the infinite. This transformative encounter is scripted in terms that again highlight tactility and empathy but also lends to that infinity a female specificity in its evasion of the specular logic of the patriarchal economy, in strikingly Irigarayan terms. It is in Savita that Ève finds a relation to the other that does not depend upon division, but on a poetic simplicity and mutual engenderment. When Sad, who is in love with Ève, speaks to her about poetry, hoping to impress her with his literary inclinations, she claims he has no idea about poetic femininity: ‘La poésie des femmes, c’est quand Savita et moi, on marche ensemble



Becoming Otherwise 107

en synchronisant nos pas pour éviter les ornières. C’est quand on joue à être jumelles parce qu’on se ressemble’ (30).41 Though Sad’s gaze is fixed upon her, Ève is oblivious to his presence when she is with Savita. This is something of which the lovelorn Sad is only too aware: ‘Ève et Savita dansent ensemble. Elles ne nous regardent pas. Elles ne regardent personne’ (34).42 The relationship between Ève and Savita thus excludes a masculine specular logic, through which, according to Irigaray, prescribed roles of femininity are projected with no regard to female desire (Irigaray 1977: 29; 1985b: 30). And this sense of resemblance between Ève and Savita, rather than resting on a reflective specular image of identity, comes into play through the mutual engenderment of their encounter, an encounter in-between terms. Though they may play at being twins, ‘Ève et Savita, c’est les deux faces de la lune’ (35).43 Between them, however, exists a relationship that features the multiple play of intensive difference, rather than binary difference or similarity, a cross-fertilising encounter, and the immanent perception of an infinity beyond the actual. This encounter also carries the two beyond the realities of the sexual relations that Ève experiences with the male characters in the text, something of which Sad becomes increasingly aware: Ce sourire des deux filles, œil noir, œil bronze, tremblement d’une minuscule lumière disparue avant même de briller, coulée d’une eau complice, presque comme un mélange de salives, ce sourire-là est une porte vers un endroit qu’elles seules connaissent. Une affaire de filles; évidemment, on ne connaît rien de tel, nous les coqs bagarreurs. (36)44

There is a constant tension in the text between the narrative voice of Sad, who watches Ève, desires her, and attempts to construct her through language, and Ève, whose thoughts, actions and desires resist and exceed his attempts to fix her. And it is the affective, tactile nature of the encounter between Ève and Savita that particularly resonates with Irigaray, in its perceptual shift away from the specular. Ève insists upon touch as a transformative gesture in describing her relationship with Savita: ‘Nos mains, lorsqu’elles se touchent, s’emboîtent parfaitement. Nous avons les mêmes mouvements, le même rythme. Pas besoin de nous regarder pour savoir ce que l’autre pense’ (48).45 Specularity is thus displaced by tactile perception, which, as Irigaray argues, constitutes the multiplicity of female auto-eroticism and desire outside of its male visual configuration and the logic of one (Irigaray 1977: 24). When Savita kisses Ève, both experience desire that evades the violence and possession that Ève has experienced in her relationships with men (51). With Savita, physical contact involves a non-appropriative, non-effacing fluid movement towards one another, and a multiplicity of perception, a plurality of senses (touch, smell) that goes beyond the specular:

108

The Becoming of the Body

Hors de l’emprise des hommes, nous sommes devenues joyeuses, joueuses, pour quelques instants. Un parfum tiède s’évadait de son nombril. Nous avancions sur la pointe des pieds. C’était si étrange. Nous sourions comme des noyées. Nous dansions sur une corde tendue de l’une à l’autre. (49–50)46

The relationship between Ève and Savita is never formulated specifically in terms of a lesbian identification, suggesting that the text seeks less to explore homosexual desire than to mobilise the feminine and the multiplicity of sexual difference and sexual desires. Through the movement involved in the dance towards one another, Ève and Savita thus experience a transformative encounter characterised by becomingother, through mutual engenderment, the fluidity and fecundity of the caress, rather than by the rigidity of a specular logic that depends upon the violence of the sexual binary. Reading Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres alongside the Deleuzian notion of becoming-animal highlights the ways in which these texts’ protagonists seek to liberate themselves from the molarity of female identity, as othered, as confined, as subjected to violence, as they move ever towards positions of subjectivity in terms of dynamism, transition and transformation. Yet, in the end, it is not in becoming-animal itself that Mouna and Ève are able to sustain that sense of fluidity, but in encounters that emphasise an empathetic cross-fertilisation and a (feminine) tactility that transforms actual perception. As Lorraine explains in her own drawing together of Deleuze and Irigaray, one can usefully supplement the notion of becoming-other with mutual engenderment as a means of specifying further the very nature of both, a specificity that would appear to be mobilised in Devi’s writing. In Lorraine’s (1999: 232) words, An organism and subject of signification and experience organized in a particular way becomes deeply implicated in the organism and subject of signification and experience of another. Allowing ‘contaminating’ particles of another to produce multiple effects on myself means relinquishing the self-identical repetition of a masculine form of subjectivity in order to allow new boundaries to form between self and other.

Becoming-other in these texts, then, can be understood in terms of mutual engenderment and the fecundity of the caress, as an encounter that exceeds the singularity of (masculine) specular perception and transforms transcendent relations between subjects, opening subjectivity up to the multiple and to the in-between. A P O LY P H O N I C DA N C E : I N D I A N TA N G O As we have seen, Devi’s articulations of becoming of the female body in Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres illustrate the relevance of



Becoming Otherwise 109

a Deleuzian philosophy to the conceptualisation of female corporeality, recasting the notion of becoming within Irigarayan terms. In so doing, Devi’s writing would seem both to validate feminist attempts to draw these two thinkers together and to reaffirm in this relation the inflections that an Irigarayan philosophy might bring to Deleuze. This section seeks to illuminate further the possible dialogues between Deleuze and Irigaray that appear to be staged in Devi’s writing, by looking more closely at the relationship between becoming, the transformative encounter, and the act of writing in Indian Tango. Indian Tango is perhaps Devi’s most lyrical and adventurous exploration of the transformative encounter. A simple love story, related through an intricate narrative architecture, Indian Tango moves away from Devi’s usual island setting and takes place instead in New Delhi. The text unfolds in 2004 against the backdrop of elections that involve the Italian, female candidate Sonia Gandhi. It portrays the encounter between an expatriate writer (whose gender is at first undisclosed), who is seeking renewed inspiration through a change of scene, and a middleaged woman, Subhadra, wife, mother and daughter-in-law, who lives in a stifling family environment and is on the cusp of the supposed decline of femininity that is the destiny of all women: the menopause. Like Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres, Indian Tango focalises around notions of becoming otherwise and the mutual engenderment of the caress. But in its self-reflexive style, and alternating between the first-person narration of the writer and the third-person narrative of Subhadra, this text goes even further towards mobilising a transformative encounter in Deleuzian terms. Though Ève de ses décombres also alternates between different voices, the chapter argues for a particular resonance with Deleuzian terms in Indian Tango, a polyphonic perspective (see Chapter 1), whereby text and world are collapsed into one another, and the very act of writing seeks not to represent, but to interlace with and to transform the actual. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, ‘le livre n’est pas image du monde, suivant une croyance enracinée. Il fait rhizome avec le monde, il y a évolution aparallèle du livre et du monde’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 18).47 The Indian cultural backdrop to this text of course raises similar concerns with regard to women’s position in society and female subjectivity as do those texts set in Mauritius, with their Indo-Mauritian context. Thus there is the same insistence on particular family roles, on confining cultural exigencies and on feminine difference. Here, Devi draws on the Hindu cultural mythology of reincarnation as a means of giving substance to the possibility of dynamic subjectivity and to the transformation of the experiences to which Subhadra finds herself submitted.

110

The Becoming of the Body

Subhadra is trapped within the tyranny of habit and duty in her marriage to Jugdish, and in her relations with her mother-in-law and son. Like many others in her position, her only mode of self-expression is in the illusory power of domesticity: ‘La cuisine n’offre aux femmes comme elle qu’une illusion de pouvoir, camouflant à peine la soumission qu’elle exige d’elles en réalité’ (57).48 Bound to satisfy the multiple desires of others, and above all the sexual desires of her husband, Subhadra is disconnected from her own corporeality and experiences her body as ‘un objet bien étrange et dangereux’ (17).49 Though Subhadra may be entirely oblivious as to how she might live differently, the narrative of the writer reveals her own awareness of the cultural insistence on reincarnation, placing this notion in dialogue with the possibilities of the multiplicity of female subjectivity: Connais-tu les multiples incarnations d’une femme, toi qui me lis? Ici, dans ce pays où rien ne meurt, où la croyance veut que tout renaisse, la question se pose. Les métamorphoses sont innombrables. Encore faut-il pouvoir suivre le fil discontinu de tous ses visages. (60)50

As in Ève de ses décombres, it is suggested that such reincarnations and metamorphoses are set in motion through a transformative encounter that depends upon mutual engenderment. The writer-narrator wonders whether men and women can ever be mutually intelligible, suggesting that only two women can begin to decrypt and decipher one another (61; 46).51 When Subhadra meets the writer, she is mystified but also intoxicated by her, and their sensual encounter transforms her, opening her out to the molecular and the multiple. The relationship requires Subhadra to become otherwise, it requires her to release herself from the exigencies of her molar role as well as effecting that very release through a metamorphosis: ‘Changer de peau pour mieux se retrouver’ (50).52 This transformative encounter consists of a movement towards the other in a non-appropriative and non-effacing relation. And, as can be seen in the following passage, narrated by the writer-narrator, it also entails perceptual transformation, a deciphering of female subjectivity that decomposes its multiple constitution and construction through the infinite hieroglyphic deconstruction of the body: Le chiffre de ton corps, ma belle, est tel que je n’aurai de cesse que de le décoder, syllabe après syllabe. Franchissant ainsi des étapes généralement contournées, où la connaissance se transforme subtilement, où la distance est contredite par un rapprochement plus subtil et plus inquiétant, au lieu de chercher son contraire, on voyagerait vers son pareil. (61)53

As in Ève de ses décombres, touch displaces the specular, collapsing flesh into flesh and into malleable materiality through the infinity of



Becoming Otherwise 111

gesture. The writer-narrator marvels at the spectrum of possibilities and impossibilities that a simple tactile gesture contains in its multisensory perception: ‘Plus je la touche, et plus je la sens. Son clair parfum de peau, l’ombre acidulée de la bouche, la douceur d’une chair infinie’ (123).54 If this immanent perception of the infinite startles the writer-narrator, it is utterly bewildering and irrevocably transformative for Subhadra, whose previous sense of relations is overturned: Un contact qui faisait basculer toutes les certitudes, tout ce qu’elle aurait pu croire d’elle-même et de l’autre, qui rejetait la possibilité d’une amitié comme il s’en nouait quelquefois entre étrangers et qui ne vous liait pas à grand-chose, qui n’aurait même pas de suite, non, ce contact racontait une autre histoire, il lui disait que sous ses pieds il y avait un monde auquel elle n’avait jamais pensée, un monde de femmes aux étranges requêtes, dont le corps exigent d’autres assouvissements, dont les attentes sont suspectes et les envies différentes. (156)55

Through the fecundity of the caress, the writer-narrator urges Subhadra to forget centuries of resistance, conventions, sacred roles, the division of the sexes, the condemnation of the specular (162; 133). As the writer-narrator explores Subhadra’s sex with her tongue, the infinity of the caress is evoked in liquid imagery and in fluid phrasing until finally she is ‘défaite’, her multiply coded corporeality and desire deciphered, her molecularity opened out: ‘debout, poitrine dénudée, toujours statufiée mais dans une posture de pâmoison antique, tête en arrière, bouche entrouverte, longue chevelure défaite’ (163).56 In her theoretical interweaving of Deleuzian and Irigarayan philosophy, Lorraine notes that while Irigaray’s terminology returns to an insistence upon ourselves in our material embodiment, Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary seems more relevant to ‘conceptual personae’ and to aesthetic figures. As she writes, Nomadic subjects must attempt to leave their coherence behind if they are to bring about new perspectives on living. To be too wedded to one’s morphology or psychic self can only thwart such a creative project. One can be schizophrenic as one writes, even if one does not want to actualize schizophrenia as an embodied subject. (Lorraine 1999: 236)

Lorraine here highlights the infinite possibility of becoming in aesthetic endeavour. For Deleuze, of course, literature itself is a matter of becoming, of investigating a zone of indiscernibility. To write is to create deterritorialising lines of flight; it is not to represent, but to become. The Deleuzian emphasis on writing as encounter in fact holds great resonance with Devi’s creative project, and she has claimed in an interview that the pleasure of writing itself is to become otherwise:

112

The Becoming of the Body

Quand on écrit, le plaisir [. . .] c’est de se couler dans un autre personnage, c’est de devenir autre. [. . .] le plaisir de l’écriture c’est de s’annihiler un peu au profit de ses personnages, devenir eux. À ce moment-là, on est conduit, on devient quelque chose par laquelle passent toutes les voix possibles. (Nkonlak 2007)57

Devi’s notion of flowing into her characters as she writes is amplified in Indian Tango, however, through the figure of the writer-narrator, who both narrates Subhadra and seduces her in the text. Where Lorraine suggests that a Deleuzian philosophy of becoming mobilises new perspectives on living in its engagement with the creative and the aesthetic, perspectives that an Irigarayan insistence on morphology might deny, others such as Peter Hallward (2006: 162), as we saw in Chapter 1, have raised the concern that Deleuze’s creative becomings are inevitably limited by their allegiance to creativity, their dynamic possibility necessarily being effected in a non-material realm. As we shall now see, Devi’s treatment of the writer-narrator in Indian Tango positions itself at the very heart of such a debate. In his discussion of Leibniz and the event, Deleuze argues that the fold of the Baroque unfurls all the way to infinity, in the manner of a labyrinth whose shape refers to the multiple, to what has many parts but is also folded in many ways (Deleuze 1988: 5; 1993b: 3). In musical terms, then, the Baroque becomes a flow of possibilities, whose contrapuntal lines and movements between harmony and dissonance reflect the folding and unfurling of the multiple. ‘Bref,’ Deleuze (1988: 111) writes, ‘l’univers baroque voit s’estomper ses lignes mélodiques, mais ce qu’il semble perdre, il le régagne en harmonie, par l’harmonie.’58 Yet harmony too goes through a crisis, leading to an emancipation of dissonance or unresolved accords that is not brought back to tonality. The musical model, according to Deleuze, is the most apt way to understand the rise of harmony in the Baroque and the dissipation of tonality in the neo-Baroque, the movement from harmonic closure to the opening out into polytonality, what Boulez refers to as a ‘polyphonie des polyphonies’ (Deleuze 1988: 112).59 In the folding and unfurling of musical polyphony, then, Deleuze finds a flow of infinite possibilities. The creativity of becoming in Indian Tango can be understood as being organised around a similar notion of polyphony, or rather the interlacing of multiple polyphonies. For a start, musical lines and metaphors weave through the text in different forms. When the writernarrator first catches sight of Subhadra in a sitar shop, her body is superimposed over an instrument that lies nearby, and throughout the text the female body and the sitar fold into one another. The writernarrator imagines gliding her hands over Subhadra’s body, ‘prêt à



Becoming Otherwise 113

être joué comme le sitar, cordes sympathiques, cordes mélodiques, écartèlement des doigts pour faire vibrer les centres du plaisir afin que la mélodie s’en échappe, neuve, claire et virginale’ (28).60 It is the music of the Argentine tango rather than the sitar that the writer-narrator listens to, however, and that awakens Subhadra’s desire when she hears her neighbours playing it. As the music carries upwards from a nearby apartment, she is overwhelmed by the unfamiliar dance of seduction, by the polyphonic lines of this music and its unfurling ‘de voies détournées, de rencontres buissonnières, de nuits passées à mourir en s’abandonnant à ses rêves pour mieux revivre dans d’autres élans et d’autres abandons’ (76).61 The music of the tango seeks a place where no one else dare venture. As Jeeveeta Soobarah Agnihotri (2008) suggests, it interlaces with Subhadra’s body, conversing with her corporeally. Encountering the music, the body becomes mellifluous and malleable, and opens out to the multiple: ‘La chair danse . . . Sinue, se fluidifie, se plastifie. Entre dans un autre langage, s’explique par d’autres codes’ (76).62 The flows and folds of the polyphonic tango thus allow the body to experience the immanent and the infinite. Musical metaphors and polyphonic music act in the text as catalysts towards Subhadra’s seduction and becoming otherwise. However, this sense of polyphony goes beyond metaphor, image and diegesis. For there is a Baroque quality to the very composition of the text, a polyphonic dance in the textual fabric between Subhadra and the writer-narrator. 63 As previously mentioned, the text slips between two narrative voices: the first-person narration of the writer-narrator and the third-person narration of Subhadra. These alternating voices are set in April–May 2004 for the third-person Subhadra stories, and March– May 2004 for the first-person narrative, a time-frame whose chronology is unsettled by the alternation between perspectives. For though each part is narrated chronologically, they begin at different points. In its weaving together of different strands, the narrative performs a counterpoint, whose voices are sometimes harmoniously layered and sometimes strain against one another. This polyphonic narrative technique is heightened by the multiple positioning of the writer-narrator, who collapses divides between inside and outside, folding life and literature into one another. When she arrives in Delhi, the writer-narrator sets out her desire for a change of scene that will unleash her imagination, a creative becoming of sorts: En arrivant ici, je me retournerais comme un gant. Faire peau neuve, c’est le cas de le dire. Mue magnifique du serpent qui se déleste de sa vieille peau devenue transparente et grisâtre pour renaître avec de nouvelles couleurs, même si elles ne sont pas visibles qu’à lui seul. (26)64

114

The Becoming of the Body

But throughout, she comments self-reflexively on the risks of writing and the possibilities of failure. There is nothing more boring, or more despicable than writers telling their own story, she writes (41; 29), yet she nonetheless expresses a desire to reveal a secret, carnal part of herself: Comment pourrais-je d’ailleurs livrer de moi ce visage que personne ne connaît? Exprimer mon envie de chair, des mots de la chair, des vies de la chair, des rires de la chair? Dire que l’écriture n’a été, finalement, qu’une manière de parler de cela, du corps et rien d’autre? Des fantasmes qui peuplent les phrases, des ombres livides qui en jaillissent pour se glisser entre mes cuisses et revenir ensuite imprégner l’encre de leur glu? (42)65

Such truth would be too dangerous, we are told, and the novelist’s aim is always to hide as much as possible behind words. And if the desire for self-revelation should take hold, it will be done in such a way that no one will recognise the truth. As the writer-narrator urges, ‘Méfiezvous du mensonge du romancier’ (43)66 at the end of this passage, then, the reader has become lost in a labyrinth of the multiple. Through revelation and disguise, through polyphonic dance, Devi’s writer-narrator folds into language, unfolding and enfolding herself within the fabric of the text. If, as Devi has suggested, writing involves flowing into another character, this flow might be interpreted from this passage in the very terms of unfolding and enfolding the narrative voice. But the idea of a writer flowing into a character takes on multiple meanings in Indian Tango. For the writer-narrator not only becomes other by creating Subhadra, she also seduces her and experiences the transformative encounter in a material sense. It is here that Devi’s text would seem to bring together so beautifully Deleuze’s more abstract, creative becoming otherwise and Irigaray’s embodied sense of mutual engenderment. Crossing through from the extra-diegetic into the diegesis, the writer-narrator becomes other within the very folds of the text. Writing becomes a physical act of seduction, but also an inky caress that physically awakens Subhadra (or Bimala as she occasionally refers to her) through words: ‘J’écrirai Bimala. Encre, plume, mots, tout cela sortira de mon corps et s’inscrira sur le sien. Quel plus beau papier que la peau vierge d’une femme? Et quelle plus belle poésie que celle écrite par la langue sur son corps?’ (83).67 It is thus imagined that the blank canvas of Subhadra’s skin becomes inscribed with a poetry that interfaces the creative and the embodied (‘la langue’ as language, and as tongue). If in this quotation, ink and words flow from the writer-narrator’s body, in another passage she suggests that writing involves drawing ink from within the body of others, the flow of an ink that scripts the intuitive and strange



Becoming Otherwise 115

writing of the infinite rather than the stories that society carves into their skin (120; 98). Flowing through the creative and the embodied, the act of writing thus interlaces becoming otherwise with the fecundity of the caress. For the writer-narrator, Subhadra, or Bimala, is both a woman and a character, an image and reality. She is a means of crossing through the creative barrier, a means of living the life of her characters, transforming the actual and experiencing the infinity of the fold. Thus far, she has followed the narrative of Subhadra’s life, just as she has followed all of her other characters. But something is about to change the relationship: je sais que, bientôt, bientôt, je franchirai l’impossible frontière: je m’évaderai de la page pour la saisir, et jamais contact ne sera plus brutal et plus brûlant, jamais la vraie vie ne m’offrira une telle profusion, ce qui m’arrivera en la saisissant sera si définitif qu’il n’y aura pas de retour possible: j’aurai conquis la mort. (119)68

Crossing that frontier between the actual and the virtual, then, the writer-narrator flows into the text and seduces Subhadra in the fluidity of the transformative encounter. If, as we have seen, the fecundity of the caress takes place at an embodied level through the affectivity and tactility of their relations, their encounter also sets in motion a sense of becoming otherwise and mutual engenderment on a creative level. The writer-narrator has spoken throughout of her dependence on and need for Subhadra, to transform both their lives, ‘pour faire de l’écrivain un étre humain et de la femme éteinte un noyau de brûlure’ (80).69 She may create her character but she is also her slave; her words may envelop her, dress her and undress her, but they cannot make her other than she is. When the writer-narrator wonders who or what it is that can enliven ‘cette femme qui n’en est pas une’ (140),70 the text once again appears strikingly to draw together Deleuzian and Irigarayan notions. For enlivening a woman ‘qui n’en est pas une’ – ‘ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – becomes a pursuit of embodiment that is mobilised through the writer’s ability to become other, to flow into the text and into the transformative encounter. And in this transformative encounter, creativity is not in opposition to embodiment but rather interlaces with it. As the writer-narrator concurs, ‘l’imagination nous offre cette métempsycose, ce don unique d’être ce que nous ne sommes pas’ (121).71 At the end of the text, the mutually transformative encounter is such that Subhadra/Bimala slips away from any grip the writer-narrator might have had on her. The story of this extinct woman turned into a burning core cannot, then, reach any conclusion, and whether Subhadra returns to the stifling conditions of her former life, or whether she

116

The Becoming of the Body

sustains a dynamic sense of her body in becoming is left open-ended. The writer-narrator insists that Bimala was always real, but that she is no longer able to narrate her story: ‘Je ne sais plus quelle est la suite. Aucun repère pour continuer l’histoire, puisque je n’en suis plus la génitrice’ (175).72 The text thus ends on an uncertain note: what has really been achieved in this crossing through realms, in these polyphonic lines and endless folding? Of this, the writer-narrator remains unsure, as she retreats from the world and peoples the walls of her thoughts with coloured, dancing images (196; 163). In its insistence on the transformative encounter, then, Indian Tango articulates becoming-other and mutual engenderment at the level of embodiment, while drawing into focus the possibilities of transforming the actual through creative lines of flight. Devi’s text dramatises both the interlacing of Deleuze’s more conceptual notion of becoming with Irigaray’s attention to the female body in mutual engenderment. In the reader’s encounter with the text, that interlacing vibrantly endures. But the question, ultimately, remains, for the reader and for the writer-­ narrator, what happens next? Does the writer-narrator’s retreat, enclosure and loss of self at the end of the text place a limit to the polyphonic crossing through of the creative and the embodied, the actual and the virtual? CONCLUSION Ananda Devi’s literary world addresses the subjugated female in IndoMauritian and Indian contexts that seek to reduce her to molar roles of passivity and powerlessness. Writing as a means to exceed the violent cult of difference, Devi’s narratives unbind the female subject, opening out the multiplicity and molecularity of a dynamic mode of subjectivity. Ultimately it is in becoming-animal, becoming-other, in undoing the molar, in perceptual shifts and glimpses of the infinite, and especially in the affective tactility of the transformative encounter, that Devi’s protagonists are able to experience this sense of vitality. If Devi’s writing resonates strongly with the Deleuzian notion of becoming otherwise, it also provides a way of drawing his theories closer to female, and feminist concerns, staging connections between Deleuze and Irigaray that illustrate how the concept of becoming might be reframed in feminist terms. The writer-narrator in Indian Tango often meditates on the transformation of social codes. By flowing into and out of the text, her seduction of Subhadra/Bimala sets in motion a transformation of molar roles, as well as of literary and philosophical codes, by traversing the creative and the embodied, and interweaving Deleuzian and Irigarayan traces



Becoming Otherwise 117

in its exploration of becoming otherwise. There is certainly a sense of hopefulness lent to the literary act in this text, a sense that writing itself might be transformative. Becoming-other, it is suggested, is not just a metaphor that is enshrined within the novel, as perhaps the egg and the tube are for Nothomb, since the very fabric of the text, in its interweaving of inside and outside, in its polyphonic folds, collapses distinctions between the actual and the virtual. Yet there is a hesitation as the text comes to a close, and uncertainty as to the fertility of the artistic space and its contrapuntal lines lingers. If Devi’s writing explores the dynamism of becoming as a mode of female transformation and as a creative endeavour, then, this is an endeavour that is perhaps exposed on both levels as being both precarious and ongoing. N OT E S   1. ‘When one writes, the pleasure [. . .] is to flow into another character, to become other.’   2. ‘contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 12).   3. A street name in Port-Louis, Mauritius.   4. See Waters 2008 for an analysis of postcolonial publishing politics in relation to Devi’s work.   5. Ananda Devi’s writing has attracted increasing critical interest over the past several years, along with other authors from the islands of the francophone Indian Ocean. A key reference in this area is Bragard and Ravi 2011a, which brings together a clutch of excellent chapters on Devi. Other important works, providing introductions to the literature of the region and close readings of different authors, include Bragard 2008; Hawkins 2007; Ravi 2007, 2013; Lionnet 2012. A numbers of articles and book chapters deal with Devi’s work. For questions relating to the island, postcolonial cultural identity and language, see, for example, Bannerjee 2011a; Compan 2007; O’Flaherty 2011; Tyagi 2011; Waters 2008. For femininity and the body, see, for example, Arnold 2011; Bannerjee 2011b; Bragard 2000, 2001; Damlé 2009b; Effertz 2008; Githire 2009; Kistnareddy 2011, 2013a; Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo 2011; Ramharai 2001, 2011; Waters 2004, 2011. For relations between humans and animals, see, for example, Damlé 2013b; Kistnareddy 2013b; Marson 2006; Meitinger 2008. See Lionnet 2011 for a vibrant engagement with Devi’s ‘art of fiction’.   6. ‘I’m francophone, objectively speaking, since I use French but I am not French. I’m eminently Mauritian and insular in my manner of writing.’   7. ‘I can’t be defined as an Indian writer, or a Creole writer. It’s caused me so many difficulties with regard to personal definition that I’ve come to realise that being Mauritian, it’s exactly that: to belong to all these worlds,

118

The Becoming of the Body

and, through a process of synthesis and syncretism, to extract something new and authentic.’   8. ‘The island is a marine landscape or an underworld, and above all as her oeuvre develops, a social space where characters confront one another, seek each other out and tear each other apart [. . .] Madness and violence are [. . .] linked to a society that has lost its markers, or that imposes atavistic markers in relation to the traditional position of women.’   9. ‘Reified, sullied, woman is scarcely more than a disposable object.’ 10. ‘I am offered up to the word of men. Because I am a woman.’ 11. For alternative readings of the relationship between humans and animals, see, for example, Damlé 2013b; Kistnareddy 2013b; Marson 2006; Meitinger 2008. 12. ‘a safeguard against the cult of difference’. 13. ‘female monkey’. 14. ‘my mother’s long flexible fingers’. 15. ‘They say that I bear the sign of Satan. They turn their eyes away or recite words of exorcism. Call me whatever you like, demon, Satan or whatever.’ 16. ‘It was the whole village. They needed to find a source for their shame.’ 17. ‘Everything is known, everything is silenced. Those who are different are buried away. They’re burned in the coal-fire. People refuse to look beyond appearances.’ 18. ‘People are ashamed of the deformities of others. The strangest thing is that they don’t see their own. But the mirror must have shown them at some point. Haven’t they ever seen their twisted eyes, their rancid mouths, their flesh tumefied with desire?’ 19. ‘I would nourish the little beasts, but I was also nourished. By silence, immobility, transparency, absence.’ 20. ‘There was something other than us. An existence graver and more somnolent than death cradled me. In this state of half-life, my liberated mind interlaced with the breath of a strange creation without measure. It was no wider nor narrower than us: it was other, and it had other gods for whom we were invisible.’ 21. ‘I was something else, a wild and withdrawn creature who could no longer make herself understood, as if she had ever been able to. The essence of the beasts, with their urgent hunger, had remained inside me. I’d developed the spirit of the pack.’ 22. ‘Finally on all fours, I resembled him.’ 23. ‘Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 302, original italics). 24. ‘he gradually taught me to interrupt my memory. To think, like him, merely with the certainty of instinct. To forbid any questions. To become.’ 25. ‘family-monster’, ‘with grace and grandeur’.



Becoming Otherwise 119

26. ‘the multiplicity instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it approaches or moves away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 35). 27. ‘I have the feeling of living in a state of siege. We’re at war, yes, against ourselves and against those parasitic bodies that grow on our bellies.’ 28. ‘One destroys what is foreign.’ 29. ‘For the first time, my satchel wasn’t empty. I had currency: me.’ 30. ‘paper boat’. 31. ‘the shadow of a body’. 32. ‘I’m the predator. They take me one way, and another. Sometimes they manhandle me. It’s nothing to me. It’s just a body. It repairs itself. It’s supposed to. I slip by traps and obstacles. My dance is evasion.’ 33. ‘a predatory lioness, a vampirising beast’. 34. ‘You accept these inverted roles. You welcome the contempt that fills your belly. You say to him: kneel. That too, they tell you that every time. Kneel. Open your mouth. Receive.’ 35. ‘A leonine head that no one will dare look in the face, that no one will dare touch, because to touch a lioness is to offer yourself up to its bite. To touch a lioness is to feel its teeth planting themselves in your flesh, sharp and crushing teeth, teeth that will be painted in blood. And afterwards, as she is digesting in the sun, she will lick them gently to clean them. A lioness’s breath is of mist and of blood. It’s beautiful: a lioness digesting, rich with her gold.’ 36. ‘He’d walk around like me, half-man half-beast, only to be pushed away and rejected by everyone, chased away like a werewolf who has been given all sorts of powers, and whose only real power is his fear.’ 37. ‘at a moment when she no longer has any hope, any possibility of living, and she prefers to destroy Lisa’. 38. ‘I have become invisible, scarcely human, the incarnation of a will which, alone, succeeds in keeping me upright and moving.’ 39. ‘I had never seen so much intelligence in the eyes of a living being.’ 40. ‘made up of silences and smiles’, ‘a loving conversation’. 41. ‘Poetry between women is when Savita and I walk together, synchronising our steps to avoid the cracks. It’s when we play at being twins because we resemble one another.’ 42. ‘Ève and Savita dance together. They don’t look at us. They don’t look at anyone else.’ 43. ‘Ève and Savita are the two faces of the moon.’ 44. ‘That smile between two girls, black eye, bronze eye, a quiver of minuscule light that disappears even before it shines, the flow of collusive water, almost like a mingling of saliva, that smile is a gateway to a place that only they know. Girls’ things; obviously, we don’t know anything about it, we fighting cocks.’

120

The Becoming of the Body

45. ‘Our hands, when they touch, interlace perfectly. We share the same movements, the same rhythm. No need to look at each other to know what the other is thinking.’ 46. ‘Beyond the hold of men, we became happy, playful, for a few moments. A warm aroma escaped from her belly. We rose up on the points of our feet. It was so strange. We were smiling like those out of their depth. We were dancing along a cord stretched out between us.’ 47. ‘contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 12). 48. ‘Cooking provides women like her with the mere illusion of power, barely camouflaging the submissiveness it actually demands from them’ (43). Page numbers in translations of Indian Tango are from the English edition. See Waters 2011 for an analysis of food and gender politics in Devi’s work. 49. ‘a very strange and dangerous object’ (8). 50. ‘Do you know the many incarnations of woman, you who are reading what I write? Here in this country where nothing ever dies, where according to belief everything is reborn, the question must be asked. The metamorphoses are countless. And you need to be able to follow the broken thread between all these faces’ (45). 51. Throughout this discussion of Indian Tango, where two page numbers are given, the first is to the French edition and the second to the English edition. 52. ‘Shedding your skin to find yourself again’ (37). 53. ‘The script of your body, my lovely, is such that I’ll never finish decoding it, syllable by syllable. Moving through stages usually bypassed, where knowledge is subtly transformed, where distance is contradicted by a subtler and more unsettling nearness, instead of seeking your opposite you would travel towards your double’ (46). 54. ‘The more I touch her, the more I sense of her. The light perfume of her skin, the dark tang of her shadowy mouth, the softness of infinite flesh’ (100). 55. ‘A touch that toppled all her certainties, everything she might have believed about herself and this other person, that rejected any possibility of the kind of friendship that sometimes brought strangers together and didn’t commit them to much, that would have no long term effects. No, this touch told quite a different story; it told her that there was a world beneath her feet that she’d never thought about, a world of women with strange requests, whose bodies demand another kind of satisfaction, who have dubious expectations and different desires’ (128–9). 56. ‘standing bare-breasted, still unmoving but in a classically swooning pose, head tilted back, lips parted, long hair falling loose’ (134). 57. ‘When one writes, the pleasure [. . .] is to flow into another character, to become other [. . .] the pleasure of writing is to annihilate oneself



Becoming Otherwise 121

a little to benefit one’s characters, to become them. At that moment, one is led, one becomes something through which all possible voices pass.’ 58. ‘In short, the Baroque universe witnesses the blurring of its melodic lines, but what it appears to lose it also regains in and through harmony’ (Deleuze 1993b: 82). 59. ‘polyphony of polyphonies’ (Deleuze 1993b: 82). 60. ‘ready to be played like the sitar, sympathetic strings, main strings, fingers stretching to make the pleasure centres vibrate and their melody rise up, new, clear and virginal’ (16). 61. ‘of sideroads, of secret encounters, of nights spent dying in surrender to your dreams, the better to live again through other impulses and other surrenders’ (58). 62. ‘The body dances . . . weaves, flows, shapes itself. Enters another language, explains itself though other codes’ (59). 63. See Lionnet 2011 for a reading of Devi’s work that similarly focuses folding, unfolding and enfolding, on the fictional relationship between inside and outside in the text. While my reading draws on the musical motif of polyphony, though, Lionnet’s analysis is organised around the folding of a fabric that clothes, encodes, hides and protects the female body in Devi’s texts: the sari. 64. ‘When I got here, I would turn myself inside out like a glove. Really start afresh. The way a snake magnificently casts off its old skin, gray and transparent, to be reborn with new colors, even if they’re visible only to the snake’ (15). 65. ‘How could I reveal this part of me that no one else knows? Give expression to my carnal desires, my longing for carnal words, for a carnal life, for carnal laughter? To say that writing has been no more than a way of talking about all this, about the body and nothing but the body? About the fantasies that inhabit the sentences, the pallid shadows that surge out of them and slip between my thighs, then return to enliven the ink with their mucus?’ (30). 66. ‘Beware of the novelist’s lies’ (31). 67. ‘I will write Bimala. Ink, pen, words, all this will emerge from my body and inscribe itself on hers. What paper is lovelier than a woman’s untouched skin? And what poetry lovelier than the poetry tongued on the body?’ (65) 68. ‘I do know that soon, very soon, I’m going to cross the impossible frontier: I’ll escape from the page to grab hold of her, and it will be the most brutal, the most burning contact ever. Real life will never offer me such abundance, what will happen to me once I lay my hands on her will be so final, there’ll be no possibility of going back: I will have conquered death’ (97). 69. ‘to turn the writer into a human being and the extinct woman into a burning core’ (62). 70. ‘this woman who isn’t one’ (114).

122

The Becoming of the Body

71. ‘imagination offers us this reincarnation, this unique gift of being what we are not’ (98). 72. ‘I don’t know what comes next. There are no beacons for carrying on the story, because I’m no longer its creator’ (145).

4. The Flux and Folds of Consciousness: Marie Darrieussecq’s Literature of Simulation and Dispersal Tout est géographie, dans mes livres. La psychologie, l’histoire, sont des géographies. Et l’écriture est très proche pour moi d’un exercice zen, d’un ‘rien faire’ où le moi psychologique est évacué. Écrire c’est être absent à soi-même, c’est résonner, être poreux au monde, posé là. (Concannon and Sweeney 2004a)1 Je cherche à inventer de nouvelles formes, à écrire de nouvelles phrases, parce que c’est le seul moyen de rendre compte du monde moderne, dont le mouvement sinon nous dépasse sans cesse, demeurant illisible, incompréhensible. (Miller and Holmes 2001a)2 I N T RO DU C T I O N Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in Bayonne, and grew up in a small village in the French Basque country. An avid reader from a young age, Darrieussecq immersed herself in the classics and trawled through the vast enclaves of her parents’ bookcases, developing an enduring fascination with language and literature, and declaring at the age of six that she wanted to become a writer. Specialising in the arts from the time of her baccalaureate, Darrieussecq pursued studies in French literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, which culminated in the Agrégation de lettres and a doctoral thesis on autofiction and irony in works by George Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky and Hervé Guibert. In addition to her writing career, she has taught French literature, written academic criticism, and in 2006 she also became a psychoanalyst. The origins of Darrieussecq’s creative career span back to her 123

124

The Becoming of the Body

childhood, and her voracious reading and academic criticism have been increasingly accompanied by her own literary explorations. Like Devi, she gained an early mark of recognition for her talents through the award of a literary prize, Le Monde’s Prix des Jeunes Écrivains in  1988.  By her mid-twenties, Darrieussecq had amassed a clutch of book manuscripts, early experiments that, though unpublished, have shaped her writing to come. It was in 1996, while finishing her doctoral  thesis, that she wrote Truismes (1996) (Pig Tales) (1998), the novel that would catapult her to the forefront of the literary scene in France and abroad, selling over a million copies worldwide and being translated into over forty languages. To date, Darrieussecq’s literary output includes several further novels, works of autobiography and autofiction, short stories, a translation of Ovid, a play and an essay on literary plagiarism, all published with P.O.L. Darrieussecq’s work ranges from humorous parody to intricate polyphony, from the purely imaginary to life experience, from third-person narrative to stream of consciousness, from intimate expression to fantasy and science fiction. Her writing is tremendously thoughtful, sometimes self-reflexive, and endlessly experimental; it seeks, above all, to unleash life from the tired forms of language that contain it. As she has explained in an ­interview, Toute écriture vraie se joue contre les clichés, les ‘truismes’, qui retiennent en arrière le mouvement de la pensée, qui ratent le flux de la vie, qui font verser le langage et l’homme dans l’aliénation et la mort. Cette écriture peut prendre de multiples formes, des plus simples au plus complexes; tant qu’elle est habitée par son auteur, elle est par essence poétique. (Miller and Holmes 2001a)3

This poetic plurality that opens out the flux of experience in innovative forms has seen Darrieussecq nominated for numerous literary prizes, including the Goncourt and the Femina, and she currently holds a prominent position as one of France’s leading authors. Constructions of femininity, female sexuality, gender politics and the body are concerns that are woven through Darrieussecq’s oeuvre.4 These are most explicitly expressed in Truismes, whose naive young female protagonist’s transformation into a pig reflects, parodies and indicts the aggressive and lustful nature of a hyper-patriarchal, rightwing near-future society, in its insistent shaping of the contours of the female body. In a sense, the focalisation of the female body currently bookends Darrieussecq’s oeuvre, with her most recent text to date, Clèves (2011) (All the Way) (2013)5 exploring the formulation of the adolescent desires and sexual relations of a young female protagonist. Though her other works might be said to be motivated by ever more



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 125

expansive themes, expressions of subjectivity and the body, particularly as they are traced in relation to female experience, ripple throughout her writing. Female sexuality and different responses to the body are threaded through explorations of borderline identities in the shortstory collection Zoo (2006), for example. And in the love story that shapes White (2003a), and the glimpses of sexual relations in Bref séjour chez les vivants (2001a) (A Brief Stay with the Living) (2003b), among others, Darrieussecq pays particular attention to the female sex. Motherhood also returns in its specificity as an experience that is transformative on many levels. As Gill Rye (2009a) has shown, as for many other contemporary female authors, Darrieussecq’s writing is illuminating for the new perspectives it brings to bear on mothering from the perspective of the mother, rather than the daughter. In work such as Le Mal de mer (1999b) (Breathing Underwater) (2001b), Bref séjour chez les vivants, Le Bébé (2002) (The Baby), Le Pays (2005) (The Country) and Tom est mort (2007) (Tom Is Dead) (2009), Darrieussecq lends an agency of expression to mothering. In so doing, she negotiates both the conventional image of an idealised, domesticated, self-sacrificing femininity that often continues to be narrowly projected onto the figure of the mother, and the anguished and ambivalent portraits of mothers penned by daughters in their struggle for individuation, ultimately orchestrating a plurality of perspectives on mothering and femininity that is unbound of cliché. Despite Darrieussecq’s seemingly close attention to feminine concerns, her works, much like those of Nothomb in this respect, are not always perceived as contributing to positive feminist visions of female subjectivity. Responses to Truismes and other early works have been varied, with readers, journalists and critics alike remaining undecided as to the messages they ultimately convey (for example, Jordan 2004: 145–6; Rodgers 2002: 84). In keeping with attitudes of the other authors explored in this book, Darrieussecq herself is resistant to the idea of writing through a politically refracted feminist lens. She claims, quite vehemently, to be a feminist in real life if not in writing, and is deeply suspicious of terms that might evoke any sense of an écriture féminine (Concannon and Sweeney 2004a; 2004b). As Shirley Jordan (2004: 143) has noted, Darrieussecq’s concerns are less ideological than they are literary. In their reach, then, her texts might be said to be suspended somewhere in-between a thematic engagement with feminist concerns (if not a poetico-political commitment to writing the body), and an openness to a world of infinite possibility beyond the specific lines of any one subject. Ultimately, Darrieussecq’s writing is exploratory. Refusing to self-enclose, it moves ever towards a thematic and

126

The Becoming of the Body

stylistic elsewhere, ‘ailleurs, dans l’évocation d’un monde autre qui serait aussi le nôtre’ (Rodgers 2002: 84).6 Opening out to the flux of the universe, Darrieussecq’s literature interacts intensively with scientific paradigms, her fascination with seemingly non-literary domains perhaps owing in part to the influences of close others in her life (her first husband was a mathematician, her second a physicist). Science, Darrieussecq claims, enriches her imagination, lending new metaphors and fictions through which to understand the world beyond conventional literary tropes (Holmes and Durand 2011). Though she may be trained as a psychoanalyst, and though the disappearance of a loved one, and the experiences of loss and grief pervade texts from Naissance des fantômes (1999a) (My Phantom Husband) (1999c) to Tom est mort, at work in Darrieussecq’s oeuvre is a curious interplay between reflection and resistance when it comes to psychoanalytical discourse (S. Kemp 2008: 440; Rodgers 2002: 87). This hesitation appears particularly apparent in relation to the Freudian perspectives on reality-testing and mourning that have so often been played out in literature (see Robson 2004). Indeed, Darrieussecq has suggested in an interview that psychology and psychoanalysis are overly focused on mourning as a process of coming to terms: Il existe une expression horrible: ‘faire le deuil’. C’est absurde! On ne fait jamais le deuil. Dès qu’il y a une catastrophe, on dépêche un pool de psychologues pour faire le deuil, mais merde, et si on ne veut pas le faire, le deuil! (Busnel and Gandillot 2001)7

Ghosts are not laid to rest in Darrieussecq’s work: they haunt the living in Naissance des fantômes, Bref séjour chez les vivants and Tom est mort, they appear as holograms in Le Pays, and in White their materialisation is complicit with their narration of the text. Darrieussecq’s work here perhaps coincides with a Derridean (1993: 15) emphasis on the impossibility of mourning, and concern with the ethical imperative to converse about and with the spectre. But in seeking new ways of theorising the mind, Darrieussecq’s work also reaches beyond continental psychoanalysis and philosophy, engaging with neuroscientific discourse, with cognitive science and neurobiological perspectives on the mind. As Simon Kemp (2008: 429) has assiduously argued, Darrieussecq’s figuration of the mind is materialist, ‘in that it rejects cartesian dualism to figure mind and brain as a single, physical substance’ (see also S. Kemp 2010). Darrieussecq’s work reveals intriguing perspectives on the orientation of mind and body within the flux of the world. Hers is a literature that deals with fissures, fractures and frontiers, with traces and



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 127

thresholds in its enfolding of body and space, and in its ‘scientific fascination with spaces of the body, and a global spatial consciousness, her landscapes ranging from Paris to Australia to Argentina to the South Pole’ (Barnet and Jordan 2010b: 5). It is a literature that speaks of landscape, but also of a matter that is atomised and dissipated into particles. If Darrieussecq is interested in materiality and space, she is also fascinated by the void, the ‘trou-noir’ and the ‘non-lieu’ (see O’Beirne 2006; Rodgers 2002). If her writing is driven to the very ends of the universe, leaning over the edge into an indefinable elsewhere, it also pushes at the temporal and technological frontiers of the world, as we inhabit it and as it lurches into a future populated by holograms and clones (Damlé 2012; Robson 2004). In its fascination with the body and with its suspension in the world, with geographies and with virtualities, with matter and with the elsewhere, with flux and with folds, Darrieussecq’s literary universe touches upon philosophical openings that resonate sharply with Deleuzian thought, then. Anne Simon has recently identified a spectrum of Deleuzian deterritorialisations that traverse the Darrieussecquian oeuvre. From becoming-animal in Truismes and Zoo, to the atomisation of subjectivity in Naissance des fantômes and Le Mal de mer, to distortions and transplantations of space, time and matter in Bref séjour chez les vivants, White and Le Pays, Darrieussecq’s literature insinuates the contemporary nature of a world caught off balance, in perpetual search of new axes and alignments. As Simon (2010: 18) proposes, À toute déterritorialisation, à toute sortie de territoire, correspondent donc une reterritorialisation sur un nouveau rhizome, un nouvel embranchement, [. . .] un réenclenchement sur un nouveau méridien, un nouveau fuseau horaire, une nouvelle latitude, voire un repolarisation.8

In its own exploration of Deleuzian traces in Darrieussecq’s work, this chapter casts its net over the flux and folds of consciousness. Firstly, it takes a close look at Darrieussecq’s exploration of female corporeality in Truismes. Revisiting the idea of metamorphosis addressed in the previous chapter, it seeks to think through the text in relation to Deleuzian becoming. It suggests that Darrieussecq’s work mobilises a becominganimal that chimes with a Deleuzian model, while at the same time, through its careful deployment of parody, undermining the very aspects of becoming that have been critiqued by feminist responses to his philosophy (see Chapter 1). From the simulation of a pig in Truismes, the chapter turns to consider the dispersal of materiality in Bref séjour chez les vivants. Engaging here with the Deleuzian philosophy of transcendental empiricism (see Chapter 1), the chapter is interested in exploring

128

The Becoming of the Body

the enfolding of mind and body, and of body and world. In its analysis of the flux of corporeality and the folds of consciousness, the chapter aims to tease out the interplay between simulation and dispersal in Darrieussecq’s work, and, ultimately, to disclose a vision of material consciousness that upends conventional relations between surface and depth. T R U I S M E S : T H E S I M U L AT I O N O F A P I G In his reading of Darrieussecq’s controversial first novel, Andrew Asibong argues that metamorphosis in Truismes serves to illustrate the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the modern state, while at the same time radically exposing the theorist’s conceptualisations of homo sacer and ‘bare life’ as being utterly indifferent to questions of sex and gender. Using Darrieussecq’s text as a way to nuance Agamben’s philosophy, Asibong (2003: 172) argues, When bare life is filtered through sex, the figure to emerge is not Agamben’s neutered homo sacer, but his obscenely sexualized counterpart mulier sacra, the paradigm of which is the fantastic sow of Truismes [. . .] She serves as an important reminder of the Law’s frequent use of specifically sexual criteria for the prescription of life that does not deserve to live.

Asibong’s reading of Truismes demonstrates the complexity of the text’s deep engagement with philosophical ontological concerns, as well as their specific framing within the context of gender politics that he claims is overlooked by Agamben’s own theories. In many ways, this chapter offers a similar critical perspective in that it, too, seeks to place the text in a mutually enriching dialogue with the philosophical theories it appears to engage with, and in so doing, it also highlights concerns relating to sex and gender that are neglected by that very philosophy.9 My interest here is in exploring the gendered implications of metamorphosis in Truismes in tandem with the Deleuzian concepts of becoming-animal and becoming-woman, which as we have seen in previous chapters, offer dynamic modes of subjectivity that seem enabling in terms of theorising the female body, yet also carry significant concerns for feminist frameworks. The intentions of this investigation are twofold. On the one hand, an exploration of Darrieussecq’s presentation of metamorphosis and its gendered implications in dialogue with Deleuze reveals the text’s engagement with a transformative redistribution of the female body. On the other hand, reading Darrieussecq’s text becomes a means of addressing feminist responses to Deleuze, in particular with regard to his use of female-specific vocabulary in



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 129

conjunction with a bewildering lack of precise attention to feminist issues and to sexual specificity. The relevance of Deleuzian becoming to Darrieussecq’s portrayal of metamorphosis is immediately apparent upon reading the work, and especially so if one takes into consideration Darrieussecq’s own thoughts about her text. For in conversation with students at the University of Rhode Island about metamorphosis in Truismes, she has stated: To me it’s rather a story of hesitation than transformation. More a story of ‘vacillation’ (en français) than of metamorphosis. When readers evoke Kafka, I think (without even daring to compare further) that there are two differences: Kafka ignores the female body; Gregor Samsa’s story starts with a complete, radical and irreversible metamorphosis. (Durand 2008)

Darrieussecq presents a notion of shapeshifting that hesitates, that moves from human, to pig, back to human in a sempiternal swing of becoming that contrasts with Kafka’s portrayal of decisive metamorphosis. If her suggestion chimes with a Deleuzian sense of motility though, it radically differs from both Deleuze and Kafka in its attention to the female body. This section explores Darrieussecq’s much-analysed treatment of metamorphosis precisely as a ‘hesitation’ within the terms of a Deleuzian becoming-animal (see also Chapters 1, 3). Yet, in its articulation as enmeshed within gender politics and parody, the Darrieussecquian becoming-animal reaches beyond Deleuze, opening out a way of thinking about the female body in becoming, and thus reconciling such a notion to a feminist politics. Drawing on Judith Butler on performativity and Rosi Braidotti’s work on parody, this chapter suggests that metamorphic simulation is the instrument of a Darrieussecquian becoming-animal-woman that articulates, ­rearticulates and transforms cultural significations of the female body. The narrator of Truismes is a young, attractive woman, who begins to notice slight physical alterations after starting a new job at a socalled perfumery. Under the pervasive masculine gaze that governs her environment (she is, in fact, though she does not realise it, gradually becoming less a perfume salesgirl, more a masseuse and finally a prostitute), her body becomes firmer and more supple. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she sees what the masculine gaze and the regulatory power of media images reflect onto her: ‘dans le miroir doré qui donne bonne mine, je me suis trouvée, je suis désolée de le dire, incroyablement belle, comme dans les magazines mais en plus appétissante’ (15).10 The use of the word ‘appétissante’ here is deliberately evocative of the sedimented relationship between women’s bodies and consumer

130

The Becoming of the Body

culture. But as Jeannette Gaudet (2001: 184) points out, it also anticipates the eventual outcome of these corporeal changes: ‘The adjective merely repeats a symbolic cultural construct in its usual figurative sense, but prefigures what is literally coming to pass. Unlike other domestic animals, a pig’s sole focus is to be human food.’ At this stage, the narrator has no inkling of her extraordinary gradual transformation into a sow. Rather her bodily changes are well received, both by herself and by her clients. As she begins to gain more weight, her symptoms become more dramatic, resembling those of pregnancy: her breasts and hips enlarge, her periods cease, and she experiences bouts of nausea. It soon becomes obvious that this is no pregnancy, however, as her skin begins to thicken, and while the hair on her head falls out, small wiry strands persist all over her body. Her new form and appearance has little currency in her profession, of course, and the director of her company urges her to recover her previous body in all its constructed desirability. As Nora Cottille-Foley (2002: 188) observes, ‘L’animalité qui la rendait désirable, poussée à l’extrême la rend désormais repoussante’.11 However, there seems to be little she can do any longer to conform to external symbolic definitions and regulations on female beauty, and her body continues to defy her greatest efforts. Soon enough, she finds herself on all fours and a glance in the mirror displays a pinky mass of cellulite, an entirely newly formed breast and the emergence of three further nipples, and when she sees an image of herself as the poster girl for the rising neo-fascist party she becomes aware of the full effects of her transformation: C’était moi. [. . .] La robe était très belle, rouge avec de petits festons et un tablier blanc sur le devant; et moi j’avais un peu de mal à me reconnaître, mais le regard sur la photo ne trompait pas. C’est-à-dire que ce que j’ai cru voir d’abord, c’est un cochon habillé dans cette belle robe rouge, un cochon femelle en quelque sorte, une truie si vous y tenez, avec dans les yeux ce regard de chien battu que j’ai quand je suis fatiguée. Vous comprenez pourtant que j’avais du mal à me reconnaître là-dedans. (73)12

Yet as Darrieussecq herself states, the narrator’s corporeal transformation is the story of a hesitation rather than an irreversible transformation, and as such it entirely reflects Deleuze’s anti-anthropocentric encounter between human and animal. Darrieussecq is as insistent as Deleuze that this metamorphosis is not a question of metaphor, but a transformation in very ‘real’ terms. As she explains: I don’t know what causes my character’s transformation [. . .] a nuclear disaster as a clin d’oeil to the science fiction novels I read when I was a teenager; or the mere way men look at her as a unique case of suggestion [. . .] Or maybe it was caused by an eating disorder pushed to a limit; or anger;



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 131 or desire [. . .] But none of these reasons is the reason: it just HAPPENS. (Durand 2008)

Like Ananda Devi’s Mouna in Chapter 3, the narrator of Truismes acquires animal attributes not only in her corporeal transformations but also in her affects. In keeping with a Deleuzian becoming-animal, she gains animal instincts such as a heightened sense of smell and appetite, while her ‘human’ linear consciousness is displaced in favour of a becoming which refuses ordered history, interrupting anthropocentric concepts such as memory in place of the ‘anti-mémoire’ of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 360).13 For example, Honoré, her misogynistic boyfriend in whom she had placed such importance, becomes irrelevant in a gradual interruption of memory: ‘Je me suis rendu compte que je ne me souvenais plus très bien du visage d’Honoré, j’avais beau me concentrer, son image fuyait dans ma mémoire’ (74).14 By the end of the novel, her escape to a natural environment threatens to supersede her previous existence in the ‘civilisation’ of urban life, just as her animal corporeality menaces the logic of the transcendent human. While sniffing out truffles, she has the sensation of having had a bite of the Earth itself and this explodes an animal consciousness in her that radically displaces human perception of ordered linearity and memory: Tout l’hiver de la Terre a éclaté dans ma bouche, je ne me suis plus souvenue ni du millénaire à venir ni de tout ce que j’avais vécu, ça s’est roulé en boule en moi et j’ai tout oublié, pendant un moment indéfini j’ai perdu ma mémoire. (139)15

But though the narrator acquires these animalistic qualities, her metamorphosis is never definitive, chiming with the hesitation of becoming-animal, and she experiences several movements back to ­ human form when her sow-like attributes fade away: ‘J’allais pour ainsi dire mieux, mes cheveux repoussaient, je pouvais presque marcher debout, j’avais à nouveau cinq doigts aux pattes de devant’ (112).16 Her movements between pig and human form are at first uncontrollable, seeming to reflect the flux of the reproductive female body, which is placed in contrast with her lover Yvan’s transformations into a werewolf, which, though dependent on a lunar cycle, are experienced by him as grandiose and heroic episodes. As Gaudet (2001: 186) notes, while the narrator tends to metamorphose in spaces of abjection, such as bathrooms or sewers, the werewolf does so in ‘Hollywood settings’, by moonlight on the Seine, at the Pont Neuf, by the Palais du Louvre. Yet by the end of the novel, though the narrator’s corporeality vacillates consistently between pig and human form, she realises that with ‘un gros

132

The Becoming of the Body

effort de volonté’ (142)17 she can control her transformations. Guided by Yvan, she notices the value of two rather than one state of being and when she prefers to be human rather than sow, she isolates herself and carries out breathing exercises to attempt to return to her former body (121; 108).18 The text closes with an image of her in pig form, neck craned towards the moon to facilitate transformation, echoing the behaviour of the now-deceased and stuffed Yvan. But where the moon transforms Yvan into his animal other, this is the manner by which the narrator retrieves her human corporeality. Her movement between human and pig, then, is ultimately predicated upon the ever-changing and mutable moon rather than stemming entirely from an act of will. By the end of the novel, the narrator has far greater awareness of the vacillatory nature of her own corporeality, which is neither fixed nor stable as either human or animal, but that resists binary categorisation. The narrator’s corporeality is suspended, then, between human and animal, in state of perpetual becoming that is figured in Deleuze’s work by the space in-between, by the ‘and’ that subtends all relations, making them exceed their terms: ‘Substituer le ET au EST. A et B’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 71).19 While Deleuze’s becoming-animal presents an encounter between a universalised human and a universalised animal, Darrieussecq’s story is of a vacillation between quite specific beings, a woman and a sow, and such, it articulates a highly charged and provocative vision of female corporeality. The metamorphosis is set against the backdrop of a misogynistic and totalitarian society, hypocritically obsessed with purity. ‘Pour un monde plus sain’ (86, original italics)20 is the political slogan of the neo-fascist party led by Edgar. Yet far from being pure, this is a society in which sexual violence is rife and the narrator’s accounts of her subjection to prostitution, abuse and rape reflect the pervasive regulations of society along hierarchical binary dichotomies of sex. Critics have noted that the narrator’s naive tone and the littering of the texts with truisms indicates her own inscription within the truisms of the category of ‘femme’ (Jordan 2004: 144). Her transformation at once disrupts the categorised corporeality of the desirable woman and augments her already low self-esteem as she perceives her own monstrosity. As Jordan (2004: 144) writes, ‘what comes to the fore are her increasingly acute sense of shame, negative self-perception and lack of autonomy as her body deviates from society’s exacting gold standard of sexual desirability.’ Indeed, her monstrous metamorphosis is itself a truism, given the age-old association between pig and woman. Both Cottille-Foley and Gaudet have referred to Stallybrass and White’s study of cultural interpretations of the pig, demonstrating that in Greek



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 133

and Latin, the pig was used to represent female genital organs, prostitutes were called pig merchants and that eating the stuffed vulva of a female pig was considered a delicacy that reflects misogynistic desire in its cannibalistic incorporation of the female sex organ. That the narrator is herself a prostitute and refers to this practice (‘j’avais lu que le plat préféré des Romains, et le plat plus raffiné, c’était la vulve de truie farcie’ (58))21 indicates Darrieussecq’s self-conscious use of a sow for her choice of animal. Indeed, she prefaces her collection of short stories, Zoo, with a meditation on the question apparently most often asked of her: ‘Pourquoi une truie?’ (7)22 and the immediate answer corresponds to Gaudet and Cottille-Foley’s observations that the relationship between femininity and the pig is cemented in the cultural imaginary. Further, this provides an excuse for women to be treated as one treats a pig, as Gaudet observes, for the sole purposes of consumption. As Darrieussecq writes in Zoo, On traite les femmes de truie plus souvent que de jument, de vache, de guenon, de vipère ou de tigresse; plus souvent encore que de girafe, de sangsue, de limace, de pieuvre ou de tarentule; et beaucoup plus souvent que de scolopendre, de rhinocéros femelle ou de koala. (7)23

Critics remain divided, however, on the extent to which Darrieussecq’s metaphor of the sow either merely reiterates or in fact mobilises through its satirical effects these long-held pejorative associations of the pig with female corporeality and/or sexuality (see, for example, Asibong 2003; Cottille-Foley 2002; Favre 2000; Gaudet 2001; Jordan 2004). Darrieussecq herself has suggested that, far from confining her narrator to a pig-corporeality that repeats the objectification and powerlessness of femininity, she intended emancipation through the sow’s act of telling the story herself. The narrator, she claims, begins to realise that she must think in order to create a decisive rupture from the truisms that have thus far directed her. In so doing, she is finally able to inhabit her own subjectivity, and, paradoxically, become human. In contradistinction to Deleuze, then, the Darrieussecquian becoming-­ animal is inextricably intertwined with the possibility of attaining political agency. As she attests, Elle devient une personne, c’est la métamorphose d’un objet femelle en femme consciente. Plus les pages passent, plus il y a du vocabulaire, plus la syntaxe s’enrichit et plus la pensée de cette femme se complexifie. Plus elle devient humaine en fait. Pour moi, c’est l’histoire d’une libération par la pensée. (Terasse 2003b)24

Cottille-Foley (2002) further suggests liberation through the mobilisation of symbolic codes, claiming that Darrieussecq’s novel not only

134

The Becoming of the Body

denounces consumer attitudes to female bodies, symbolic and physical violence, but that the hybrid body enacts a reversal, evading categorisation and surveillance (male, cultural, political, and medical). She also argues that this body effectively contaminates the social system in its obsession with purity, instead bringing alterity to the fore, be it in the form of femininity, animality, monstrosity, illness, ethnicity, or poverty. Asibong’s (2003) analysis is similarly predicated on the exclusion of the other, though differently theorised, however; for him, mulier sacra also brings to light the fact that the Law itself is always already sexualised, suggesting that it will never be truly menaced by any attempts to transgress it. Meanwhile, Jordan attests that the story of a pig that chooses to tell her tale raises problems in that it ultimately plays into precisely the binaries it seeks to evade, with the conclusion of the pig wallowing in the mud, struggling to write her story despite her trotters: The competing fluids of ink and mud reactivate the misogynistic nature– culture, body–intellect cliché – one of the harmful truisms the author is supposedly attempting to destroy through satire – thereby casting a shadow over any indicator of change or emancipation the conclusion may otherwise have held. (Jordan 2004: 145­–6)

But if we return to the notion of becoming or ‘hesitation’, however, it becomes clear that it is not exactly a juxtaposition of two extremes or binary codes that is presented at the end of the novel. Perhaps even ‘hybrid’ is not the correct term, though Cottille-Foley (2002) does present a compelling case for the disruptive potential of h ­ ybridity. Rather, we return to the idea of an encounter between two terms through which both are subject to mutation. This is not, then, a competition between the two fluids of mud and ink but a mutually transformative relation in the Deleuzian sense. Becoming-animal, the narrator’s human-ness is transformed in the redistribution of her consciousness and corporeality; becoming-human, the sow is afforded the ability to think differently, as well as the possibility of writing. Early on in her article, Cottille-Foley convincingly, though briefly, draws on Judith Butler’s work on the transgressive potential of parody to demonstrate how Darrieussecq’s satire collapses the binary logic of sex. She argues that Darrieussecq skilfully plays with misogynistic representation: ‘Elle choisit d’exagérer les caractéristiques attribuées à la femme selon la typologie binaire traditionelle sur laquelle se fonde l’identité distincte des sexes’ (Cottille-Foley 2002: 194).25 Cottille-Foley’s use of Butler reveals a crucial emphasis not only on Darrieussecq’s play with exaggerated and stereotypical binary categories of gender, but in the role that parody and simulation play in this portrayal of becominganimal within and through gender politics. If Darrieussecq’s narrator’s



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 135

metamorphosis articulates a becoming-animal in its hesitation and movement back and forth between pig and woman, it very obviously reaches beyond Deleuze in that this movement is heavily sexually and politically coded, rather than a becoming in a genderless sense. For when Darrieussecq’s narrator retrieves her human female form, this is not a ‘becoming-woman’ in Deleuzian terms. As Deleuze and Guattari stress, to become-woman is not to imitate or take on a female form, but ‘émettre des particules qui entrent dans le rapport de mouvement et de repos, ou dans la zone de voisinage d’une micro-féminité’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 338).26 Though Darrieussecq’s narrator’s transformation may strikingly resemble becoming-animal, then, it takes into account, where Deleuze does not, the political implications of a highly constructed femininity. As a result, and as we shall see, the narrator’s becoming-woman ultimately offers a radically different and welcome supplementation to Deleuzian formulations of becoming that responds to feminist critique. Whenever Darrieussecq’s narrator shifts to her more human persona, this is often the result of a performative act that is directly linked to categorisations of femininity. It is predicated on an ability to take on certain attributes or affects in a manner that brings to light the role of performance in the construction of gender. When she wants to recover her human female form, then, she performs specific poses of categorised femininity and consequently watches the shift occur: Je m’efforçais de retrouver figure humaine, je dormais beaucoup, je me coiffais [. . .] Je rognais mes ongles, je rasais mes jambes, et je voyais mes mammelles dégonfler, devenir de moins en moins visibles, il ne restait plus que les taches foncées des mamelons. J’avais même lavé ma robe en prévision d’un jour où je sortirais. (88)27

This example immediately recalls Butler’s by now infamous example of how drag reveals the performativity and thus the contingency of gender: ‘in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency’ (Butler 1990: 175, original italics). Making a conscious attempt to lose weight and to wear make-up, Darrieussecq’s narrator similarly assumes a feminine identity and begins to approach the figure of an idealised femininity in all its constructed desirability: ‘j’étais redevenue tout à fait présentable’ (90).28 Becoming-woman for Darrieussecq, then, does not involve the potential effacement of the category of woman in a move towards molecularity; rather, it comprises the parody of the molar woman juxtaposed with the vacillatory movement of becoming-animal-woman, and in so doing it demonstrates the very contingency of the subject position and its potential for transformation.

136

The Becoming of the Body

This suggestion is supported by the fact that parody pertains not only to the reassuming of the female form in Truismes, but is integral to her behaviour as a woman, revealing that, as Butler (1990: 173) argues, gender formation necessarily depends upon performative acts and gestures. The narrator as ‘truie’ represents the function of female sexuality to perform to male desire through its articulation of prostitution, and signals the necessity of the repression of female desire in the process (see also Rye 2000). But as the narrator begins to turn into a pig, she notices her own sexual appetite increase, though she quickly (and again, naively) realises that prostitution has nothing to do with achieving her own sexual desires. ‘J’ai compris que ce serait difficile de ne pas laisser l’intiative aux clients, et donc difficile d’obtenir ce que moi je voulais’, she writes (37–8).29 Rather than realising a sense of subjectivity by expressing her own desires, then, she inhabits the category of femininity through a performative act: ‘Alors j’ai fait comme au cinéma. Je me suis mise à lutiner et à faire la coquette. Les clients, ça les a rendu fous’ (38).30 As long as her performance is projected towards the masculine gaze, the clients are satisfied, for as the director informs her, ‘les chattes en chaleur ce n’était pas pour la maison’ (39, original italics).31 And Darrieussecq takes this further, revealing that performance is not only relevant in the construction of a female subject that ties in with male desire, and offering up a conception of simulation (or perhaps dissimulation) which parodies and performs in a way that works towards an empowering vision of female subjectivity. Though Cottille-Foley’s use of Butler has been helpful, it seems more relevant perhaps to turn to a Braidottian mode of parody. Like Butler, Braidotti finds such parody enabling, yet she specifically works through the Deleuzian terms of simulation and nomadism in her own conceptualisation. Further, beyond the fact that structures of parody and iteration expose the contingency of the gendered subject, she is also perhaps more interested than Butler in how this might particularly chime with femininity, or be brought back to female subjectivity. For Braidotti, a parodic mode of acting ‘as if’ opens up nomadic shifts in ideology, allowing for spaces where different forms of female and feminist agency might be engendered. As she writes, ‘parody can be politically empowering because it addresses simultaneously issues of identity, identifications and political subjectivity’ (Braidotti 1996). She argues that it is inevitable for feminist women who need to function in society as female subjects to act ‘as if’ they are still positioned in the category of Woman, but precisely in so doing, femininity is revealed to be a ‘set of available poses, a set of costumes rich in history and social power relations, but not fixed or compulsory any longer’ (Braidotti 1996). Darrieussecq’s



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 137

narrator admits that before her transformation, she would fake orgasm in her sexual relations. Now that she experiences pleasure, however, her cries reflect her own sensations; at the same time, the necessity for disguise is still relevant, because her natural moans do not correspond to those previously simulated: il fallait que je me souvienne de pousser exactement les mêmes cris qu’avant. Il fallait aussi que je me souvienne des clients qui aimaient que je crie et des clients qui n’aimaient pas que je crie. Or il est difficile de simuler quand les sensations vraies vous viennent dans le corps. (41)32

Paradoxically, parody, or simulation in Deleuzian terms, becomes a performance of the real itself, though it may be mediated and differently articulated. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, ‘[La simulation] porte le réel hors de son principe au point où il est effectivement produit par la machine désirante. Ce point où la copie cesse d’être une copie pour devenir le Réel et son artifice’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 107, original italics).33 And as a character named Chloé provocatively suggests in one of Darrieussecq’s short stories in Zoo, ‘De toute façon, les vraies simulatrices sont celles qui jouissent’ (139).34 Thus, for Braidotti, and for the narrator of Truismes, the performative ‘as if’ enabled by simulation thus exposes a set of feminine poses available to women, with the result that they are able to ‘simultaneously assert and deconstruct Woman as a signifying practice’ (Braidotti 1996). In Logique du sens, Deleuze (1969: 10, original italics) contends that, ‘Le pur devenir, l’illimité, est la matière du simulacre en tant qu’il esquive l’action de l’Idée, en tant qu’il conteste à la fois et le modèle et la copie.’35 The concept of becoming, then, ultimately radically problematises and contests the distinction between the original and the copy. But it is Darrieussecq, rather than Deleuze, whose formulation of becoming-animal and becoming-woman fully realises the potential of this contestation. For, as we have seen in Chapter 1, when Deleuze and Guattari employ the term ‘woman’ to signify ‘minoritarian’, they do not take into account the political implications of the vantage point from which that becoming-woman is effected, whereas Darrieussecq engages precisely in the gendered politics of becoming-woman. Darrieussecq’s narrator, then, in her becoming-animal, vacillates from a highly stylised animal that metaphorises the denigration of femininity through the image of a sow, to a highly stylised woman who exposes the workings of a hypocritical, image-obsessed, misogynistic culture, in a movement that is fomented by a performative simulation of acting ‘as if’. In so doing, far from reiterating the binary categories of sex, and asymmetrical sexual difference, she ruptures symbolic codes in two valuable ways.

138

The Becoming of the Body

Firstly, her hesitating becoming-animal reflects Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of two mutually transformative terms: as such, the sow escapes the bounds of nature and mud through the ability to write, and the woman escapes the regulatory matrix of surveillance by becoming other than herself corporeally and by assuming a subject rather than object position through transformation from truism to thought. Secondly, and beyond Deleuze and Guattari in its acknowledgement of sexual specificity, the narrator’s vacillating becoming-animal depends upon a facility for the pose, which reveals the constructed simulation of femininity, and, as such, suggests a metamorphic mobility as a framework for female corporeality. In an essay that presents contemporary subjectivity as ‘process ontology’, Braidotti dovetails Deleuze’s becoming-animal with Donna Haraway’s work on simulation, virtuality and the posthuman cyborg (Braidotti 2006: 201).36 In so doing, she notes that Haraway’s posthuman techno-bodies, upon which science and technology interface, displacing the real in favour of the virtual, emphasise the sheen of hyper-reality on contemporary culture in its focus on visualisation. It would seem quite helpful to think about Darrieussecq’s narrator’s ever-changing body as one such ‘posthuman’ body, at the crossroads of the multiple discourses that construct and inflect it. Darrieussecq’s portrayal of the media in Truismes as instrumental in forming a hypervisual culture, not to mention the pervasive masculine gaze and political and medical surveillance and their effects upon the body, would certainly seem to reflect posthuman culture. As Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone write in their introduction to a volume of critical articles entitled Posthuman Bodies: Posthuman bodies are the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences. The posthuman body is a technology, a screen, a projected image [. . .] The human body itself is no longer part of the ‘family of man’ but of a zoo of posthumanities. (Halberstam and Livingstone 1995: 3)

It would also seem quite fruitful to view Darrieussecq’s collection of short stories, Zoo, written over a period of twenty years, within this context of posthuman corporeality. Why a sow, she asks, and the answer certainly emanates from the cultural symbolisation of the sow, as previously discussed. But Darrieussecq remains unconvinced, explaining that the real response lies beyond this, situating it within the realms of her short story collection: ‘Je me dis que la réponse est peut-être dans ce Zoo: ces animaux un peu hagards, ces spectres à la recherche d’un corps, ces mères problématiques, ces bords de mers, ces clones tristes ou joyeux’ (8).37 Darrieussecq’s answer to the question of the sow, then,



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 139

is precisely a collection of posthuman bodies. Indeed, it is not just a collection; it is a zoo. And as Halberstam and Livingstone explain, with reference to popular rock band U2’s Zoo TV tour, a zoo encapsulates a liminal space somewhere between desire and captivity. ‘Is the performer screen or image, reflection or production?’ they demand. ‘By calling the rock extravaganza “Zoo TV” U2 confuses the distinction between who is looking out or in, who is in the cage, who look on, who is exoticised, what is rare, who is catalogued and how’ (Halberstam and Livingstone 1995: 3). This would seem to be Darrieussecq’s precise point, as becomes apparent when she continues, ‘Et comme dans les zoos, on se demanderait qui observe qui’ (8).38 The resolution to the puzzle of Truismes, then, ultimately lies in desire and captivity, performance and simulation. The narrator performs and simulates the becoming of the female body, responding to feminist demands that sexual difference be posed not as a given, but as a question or, as Butler puts it, as a border concept. Indeed in such a way, Darrieussecq’s hesitating, transforming becoming-animal-human-woman seems entirely to reflect Butler’s proposition that sexual difference is ‘not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition, but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes – but also never quite appears’ (Butler 2004: 186). U N R AV E L L I N G C O N S C I O U S N E S S : B R E F S É J O U R C H E Z L E S V I VA N T S In Truismes, Darrieussecq presents a highly polemical, provocative and politically engaged piece of literature, which was written in a spurt of anger over a period of just six weeks. She describes her second novel, Naissance des fantômes, as her first writer’s book, ‘où l’écriture devenait mon travail, prenait sa place dans ma vie, sans pathologie, sans m’empêcher de vivre’ (Miller and Holmes 2001a).39 From this point onwards, Darrieussecq’s writing seems to carry a certain subtlety of touch that is strikingly different to the candid presentation of Truismes. Though it continues to be intellectually engaged, thematically adventurous and stylistically inventive, the politically charged tone of Truismes gives way to a rather more fluid, elusive writing style. At the same time, Darrieussecq moves away from the arena of sexual politics and begins to consider the becoming of body and mind in terms that involve a greater degree of dissipation and dispersal – and perhaps a closer coincidence with Deleuzian philosophy – than that of the metamorphic simulation set in motion in Truismes. Despite this seeming shift in style, Darrieussecq’s first novel signals a fascination with one particular notion that endures across her work.

140

The Becoming of the Body

Her writing endlessly delves into the boundaries between human and non-human, testifying to a burgeoning interest in contemporary culture in animals, monsters, the living-dead and technologically enhanced hybrids in broader terms, while elaborating on her own unique and particular inventions.40 Ghosts, holograms and clones abound in Darrieussecq’s literature. They serve to explore relations between presence and absence, cause and effect, the material and the discursive, and to dissolve paradigms of temporality, spatiality and corporeality into a boundless flux. As I have argued elsewhere, posthuman and human bodies in Darrieussecq’s writing have much to say about one another. By reading them together, both are revealed to consist of complex webs of embedded material, both operate within different speeds of time, and both experience and open out gendered embodiment beyond conventional binary systems. Posthuman bodies in Darrieussecq’s work ‘crucially engage with and illuminate the contemporary experiences of embodiment in a zoo of posthumanities’ (Damlé 2012: 316). They disclose the circulation of life not in terms of humanistic limit points, but as the flux of zoe, ‘the endless vitality of life as a process of continuous becoming’ (Braidotti 2008: 182). However, it is not to the spectral forms of ghosts and clones that this chapter now turns, but rather to forms of consciousness that interlace and collapse body and mind, indeed to the seeming dispersal and dissipation of form in Darrieussecq’s writing. In an article on the posthuman, Slavoj Žižek suggests that in the contemporary environment of cyberspace, there is a return to bodily immediacy, but to an ‘uncanny, virtual immediacy’ (Žižek 2001). Plugged into digital media, we have a tendency to act as if there is a real entity behind the screen, even though we are fully aware that there is not. Žižek uses the example of the virtual pet, Tamagotchi, here, but his discussion takes on even further relevance in consideration of the rapid acceleration of our technological engagement with screens from mobile phones to iPads, and with the parallel lives offered by social media sites such as Facebook and virtual worlds such as Second Life. In Darrieussecq’s work, there is a similar engagement with an uncanny, virtual immediacy in Le Pays, whose narrator, Marie Rivière, converses with and emotionally invests in a holographic representation of her deceased grandmother animated in a House for the Dead, despite her awareness that the apparition is cobbled together from snippets of home videos and capable only of uttering clichés (Damlé 2012). But for Žižek, even more disturbing than the fact that there is no ‘real’ entity behind the ‘screen’ is the implicit reversal that this effects, the uncanny, virtual aspects of subjectivity that are illuminated by reflection in their posthuman counterparts. ‘What



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 141

if’, asks Žižek, ‘the “I”, my self-awareness, is also merely a superficial “screen” behind which there is only a “blind” complex neuronal circuit?’ (Žižek 2001). Of what, then, does consciousness consist? And if consciousness, too, carries an uncanny virtual immediacy in this posthuman realm, a screen behind which a material circuit of neuronal activity computes, how does this alter the relationship between mind and body? Bref séjour chez les vivants engages with precisely these kinds of questions, and it outlines them with a Deleuzian sense of consciousness, and with an a-subjectivity that can be thought through in terms of his philosophy of transcendental empiricism (see Chapter 1). The novel narrates twenty-four hours in the lives of a family, haunted by the drowning several years earlier of a little boy, Pierre. Deftly orchestrated in this polyvocal narrative is a cast of voices. The mother, Madame Johnson, has three daughters in addition to Pierre. She is divorced from their father and now lives with her partner Momo in the South of France. Jeanne, the eldest girl, has carried out humanitarian work in developing countries and now lives in Buenos Aires with Diego. Anne, the middle daughter, researches neuro-linguistic programming in Paris, and seems obsessed with the idea that she has been recruited and trained by aliens with some sort of higher consciousness. Nore (or Éléonore), the youngest, still lives with her mother and stepfather, and is the only member of the family who is unaware of the tragic death of Pierre. In addition to the four main characters, there is a brief interlude towards the end by the father, John, who lives in Gibraltar where he manages a wind power plant. The narrative fades in and out of these plural voices as the different members of the family live through one day in their now quite separate lives. At the end of the twenty-four hours, one of these voices is extinguished, as Jeanne drowns in the river Tigre after losing control of her car. The text concludes, then, with the mother ‘poised upon [a] fateful threshold’, as she receives a phone call, presumably from Argentina, ‘that will plunge her into renewed cycles of loss and mourning’ (Jordan 2005: 56). Bref séjour chez les vivants is a novel about consciousness, about the drift of memory, the spark of sensation and the shapes and sounds of thoughts as they emerge and dissipate in the mind. According to Darrieussecq, it is a text ‘qui essaie de mettre sur la page le fonctionnement du cerveau’ (Gaudet 2002: 117).41 Each voice maps the movements of consciousness as it drives forward in surges and leaps, associations and incoherence. The narrative voice slips between personal pronouns, as the characters encounter different aspects of consciousness, and negotiate their thoughts between subject and object positions. In a

142

The Becoming of the Body

single passage, as her thoughts range through the present, to imaginative speculation to past memories, Nore switches between the third person (‘L’ordonnance à la main elle a préféré aller s’acheter de nouvelles lunettes, plutôt qu’aller en cours’ (45)),42 the impersonal/second person (‘si on était assez grand pour s’asseoir sur la Terre pieds posés sur la Lune coudes baignant dans l’océan on sentirait le vent stellaire crépiter dans les cheveux, sable en paillettes venu des bords de l’univers’ (46)),43 and the first person (‘je jouais à ne pas avoir de l’ombre, boudeuse pieds mouillés, j’allais jouer plus loin, les vampires sont repérables à leur absence de-’ (47)).44 The fading in and out of perspective and temporal shifts captures the vibrancy of the mind as a dynamic cluster of impressions. Considered formulations collapse into ellipses and segues as the text seeks to evoke the very process of thought itself, ‘la forme de [la] pensée’ (Nicolas 2001: 8).45 Indeed, it is perhaps not thought, as such, that Darrieussecq’s narrative formulates in its excavation of consciousness, as mental processes expressed through particular forms of language give way to ideas and impressions in English, Basque and Spanish, to horoscopes and slogans, to fragments of songs and nursery rhymes, to fantasy, memory and dream, and to flashes of image and picture. Rather, as we shall see, consciousness unfolds through sensation, as the very structure of the mind is opened out onto the plane of the sensible. When Jeanne first realises that she has lost control of her car which is now slowly sinking in the river, she urges herself to concentrate, chastising her inability to focus her mind: ‘C’est idiot, cette incapacité à se concentrer, cette absence qui ne prévient pas’ (249).46 She speculates then, as she claims to have done before with her psychiatrist Dr Welldon, and as she and Anne have experimented with as children, that ‘se concentrer c’est l’inverse de penser’ (249).47 Charting the flux of thought as it pulses against the ordered concentration of the subject, as Jeanne explains it, Darrieussecq’s novel as a whole presents a vision of consciousness that bears a close connection to Deleuze’s philosophy of the mind. For, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Deleuze’s reading of Hume reveals that, rather than being a transcendental entity, the subject is constituted from within experience. Mind and subject are thus treated as separate: the mind is not subject, as such, rather it is subjected. Deleuze writes that: ‘L’esprit n’est pas nature, il n’a pas de nature. Il est identique à l’idée dans l’esprit. L’idée, c’est le donné, tel qu’il est donné, c’est l’expérience. L’esprit est donné. C’est une collection d’idées, pas même un système’ (Deleuze 1953: 3).48 It is the immanent flux of experience that gives rise to a mass of different perceptions which are then registered in the mind as collection of ideas



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 143

and impressions (Deleuze 1953: 150; 1991: 132). The subject is not given, then, but constitutes itself in the given, and it emerges as experience takes shape over time through repetition, anticipation and habit. The mind is thus subjected insofar as the flux and flow of differences is fixed, ordered and naturalised in the mind in the very form of a subject. The shifting kaleidoscope of ideas and impressions related in Darrieussecq’s text beautifully evokes such a notion of the mind as the site where the immanent flux of difference is perceived. Thought is thus unleashed from the ownership of an ordering subject and collapses into an affective relationship with the sensible. Darrieussecq has claimed in an interview that in the mind thought is rarely formulated in full, coherently constructed sentences: ‘C’est très rare qu’on a une phrase construite dans la tête. On a des images, des souvenirs, un bout de musique qui passe, une idée mais vague’ (Gaudet 2002: 117).49 When Madame Johnson pauses at midday to reflect on the housework that needs to be done, then, her mind fills up with other ideas. Memories of each of her girls emerge, memories of the absence of Pierre, impressions that are given in glimpses of thought, before a fragment of a nursery rhyme interrupts and echoes her memories, before the impressions meander and snatch at an image, inserted in the text, a doodle of a face scraped by a child on a car window: Les araignées swinguent sur leurs fils, chabada bada, chanson des araignées. Il faudrait passer le balai, nettoyer là, sous le lambris. Maison trop grande. Poussière partout, tous ces travaux sans cesse. Et pour quoi faire? Carrelage et maçonnerie. Ce matin pourtant tout allait bien. Le coup de fil d’Anne. Répertorier: Nore ici, Anne là, Jeanne tout là-bas   La jacasse a mal de tête   Titon tiont ti tireli Mon premier est Jeanne, mon deuxième est Anne, mon troisième est Nore, mon tout est. Il en manqué un: Toto tombe à l’eau. [. . .] Vapeur sur les carreaux. Du bout du doigt dans la voiture elles dessinaient des [. . .] têtes de Toto. (52, original italics)50

In this extract, ideas and impressions flit through the mother’s mind as words, sounds and images create a perceptual collage. But also apparent in the passage is the sense of a subject emerging from the repetition of ideas as the ordering of thought subjects the mind. As she focuses and concentrates, the mother pieces the fragments of her family together as a means of recalling through linguistic ritual her own constituted subject: ‘Répertorier: Nore ici, Anne là, Jeanne tout là-bas’. There is a constant tension, then, between the pulsating movements, shifts and slippages of perception as it imprints upon the mind, and the grasping nature of a subject that emerges from within

144

The Becoming of the Body

the flux of those very impressions to fix, naturalise and transcend the mind. If Deleuze’s reading of Hume instantiates a way of thinking about the processes through which the transcendent subject is constituted, his philosophy at large is of course concerned to undo that very transcendence. And Darrieussecq’s novel, too, appears to strain against the idea of the subject as given or transcendent. Shirley Jordan writes that ‘Darrieussecq’s approach stresses what is beyond volition rather than what is controlled or controllable by reason and will, and it thus works to confirm the fragility and impotence of the individual’ (Jordan 2005: 63). Certainly the mother’s repeated attempts to piece together the family in her mind speak of a hollowness that has been carved out by the loss of Pierre, that lends a vulnerability to each of the cast’s sense of subjectivity, even Nore. But in formulating thoughts as processes and impressions in the mind, Darrieussecq also opens out the immanent flux of the sensible, unbinding memories, circulating ideas between the different characters and suggesting the irreducibility of experience to the particular subject. In this novel, characters do not form ideas so much as come into contact with impressions as they float in spaces between them. Such a notion of transferability is foregrounded in the text in Madame Johnson’s mind, as she remembers, or rather half-remembers, the story of a king who has lost, quite literally, his memory. When it is found, he no longer remembers that it is his memory, so his head is cut off. Alternatives to the story weave through Madame Johnson’s mind: perhaps the king’s memory strayed from one mind to another, and everyone took a little bit, so that when it returned to him it was empty; or, perhaps another memory was found that fitted him, but that in fact belonged to someone else. In any case, the king can no longer remember anything about his own life, the address of his castle, where he put his crown, his laws, the name of his kingdom, or the fact that he is king and his mind is instead filled with the memories of others: ‘Alors il se souvint de sa nouvelle mémoire. Une mémoire de savetier. Une mémoire de femme. Une mémoire de cigale. Une mémoire d’éléphant’ (53).51 That Madame Johnson cannot quite pinpoint the exact story due to the elusive nature of her own memory of course doubles the effect of the ungraspability of thought. But further, the transferability and exchange of memory that is highlighted in the story points, selfconsciously, towards the flux of perceptions as they flit between the cast of different voices in the text, between Madame Johnson and her three daughters. Examples of these pervade the text, and are apparent from the very opening of the text. Despite the immensity of geographical distance, each narrative voice begins with an evocation of sunlight and



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 145

with a splash of yellow and pink hues. In the South of France, Madame Johnson reflects upon the summer heat as it draws to a close and tends to her roses, while Anne in Paris watches the sun creating light and shadows in a teak courtyard, her mind meandering towards memories of the sea and of coral. Nore’s first perceptions are of ‘Des dômes à l’italienne, jaunes et rosés sous le soleil, un soleil large, immobile, soleil et ville par filiation’ (13).52 Meanwhile, Jeanne, on the other side of the world, is saturated with the immensity of the sun, large in the yellow sky, like Italy: ‘les dômes roses sous le soleil jaune, poudre de pierre, bâtiments gréseux’ (16).53 These pinks and yellows cross through time zones and geographical locations as a collection of sensations, jostling in thoughts and percepts that form from the immanent flux of the sensible as it affectively imprints in turn upon each of these minds. It is through the mind of Anne that Darrieussecq most experiments with notions of consciousness that might be read in terms of a Deleuzian a-subjectivity. Anne’s mind persistently turns to thoughts of the availability and openness of the mind to something else, something beyond itself. She appears to attribute this to her own sense of empathy, or receptivity, but it is also bound up with her fantasies of being recruited by something higher to be plugged into some form of global consciousness. The following example illustrates how the two ideas meld into one another in her mind: il lui suffit de penser à Jeanne pour s’immiscer dans son cerveau, à quoi elle pense, ce qu’elle ressent, son irritante certitude de bien faire, il est clair que ses contacts, à elle, Anne, sont surdéterminés par les voyages de Jeanne, ses branchements sur le cerveau global sont rendus plus aisés, plus immédiats dans les zones défrichées par Jeanne, bonne tête chercheuse, bonne exploratrice inconsciente, bonne fournisseuse de données. (117)54

Supposedly selected for her exceptional concentration abilities and large mental capacity, for the purposes of the surveillance of the human brain, Anne’s mind is not only open to other minds, as a subject she is also ‘trained to disappear’ (28, original italics), to lose herself within the imperceptibility of the plane of immanence, or in her terms, a global consciousness: ‘à la surface du monde et vraisemblablement au-delà, il n’existe qu’une seule conscience, flottante, inchangée, mais fractionnée en individus’ (28).55 The mind must be porous, permeable, to think of nothing without seeing itself thinking, to be able to float along the plane of immanence, pour me loger dans la conque du monde tel le bernard-l’ermite, ou mieux, car ce lieu n’est pas vide, pour me jucher sur une conscience puis sur une autre, tel l’ibis débarrassant l’hippopotame de ses parasites, et sautillant ainsi, d’accompagner leur travail. (30)56

146

The Becoming of the Body

Anne’s passages are redolent with Deleuzian openings such as these. Instead of the subject standing before the universe, the mind is seen as the porous site of multiple connections disguised by the transcendent unity of the subject. A line from Charles Perrault’s La Barbe Bleue (1697) (Bluebeard), spoken by Sister Anne, and here repeated in Anne’s mind, seems particularly significant in this respect: ‘je ne vois que le soleil qui poudroie, et l’herbe qui verdoie’ (40–1).57 The syntactical formulation of this thought reflects the flux of consciousness in its striking resonance with Deleuze’s formulation of the becoming of the pure event seen in Chapter 1 as the ‘greening of the tree’. Anne’s thought process can thus be understood in Deleuzian terms as highlighting that the pure event is irreducible to ownership by a subject: ‘quand les substantifs et adjectifs se mettent à fondre, quand les noms d’arrêt et de repos sont entraînés par les verbes de pur devenir et glissent dans le langage des événements, toute identité se perd pour le moi, le monde et Dieu’ (Deleuze 1969: 11).58 In Darrieussecq’s novel, as in Deleuze’s philosophy, the universe as immanent flux of the sensible, as the becoming of the pure event, as continuous variation and difference, thus enfolds and enlivens the mind as the locus of percept and sensation. Bref séjour chez les vivants presents consciousness as the site of slippage and shifts, and of an affectivity that reaches beyond the transcendent subject. This consciousness may be fluid or transferable, and it may suggest that self-awareness is, in fact, a screen of sorts, in Žižekian terms. But rather than implying the impossibility of moving beyond surface, or a resistance to embodiment, consciousness in the novel slides in-between the mental processes of percept and the embodiment of sensation. For, as Jordan (2005) and Simon Kemp (2008; 2010) have shown, Darrieussecq’s notion of the mind is material. Using the word ‘cerveau’ rather than ‘esprit’,59 Darrieussecq’s novel can be interpreted as describing the thinking brain and its neurobiological processes, treading the boundary ‘that lies between consciousness and the basic neurological inputs of physical sensation, rather than that between consciousness and posited drives of the unconscious’ (S. Kemp 2008: 433). But the relationship between mind and body can also be thought through in Deleuzian terms of folding, an enfolding of mind and universe through the experience of sensation that is figured in Darrieussecq’s novel at the level of embodiment, and, interestingly, often at the very site of the female sex. Darrieussecq highlights, in Jeanne’s mind, the confluence of the brain and the vagina as a moment of absolute immanence, of pure sensation: Et le vagin, inverse exact, le clitoris retourné comme un gant, le point au fond s’étend s’étale s’étoile, rayonne millions de fibres se connectant à une



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 147 zone plus large: le cerveau tout entier; quand se superposent très exactement sans plus la moindre incertitude la zone vaginale et la zone cérébrale alors jouissance. (86)60

The body is the site of folding, then, an enfolding of mind and body though the twisting of millions of fibres as the mobilisation of sensation that is not bound to the fixity of a transcendent subject but opens out to affective immanence in its molecular dematerialisation: ‘membrane à membrane fibre à fibre nerf à nerf, deux organes ajustés, cerveau/ vagin, par le corps recréé, là, bien là, et dématérialisé aussi, rendu à l’apesanteur’ (86).61 As Simon notes, there is an affective branching, or invagination, in phenomenological terms, between flesh and the world: ‘le microcosme de la chair s’accorde, non sans vertige, avec le macrocosme de l’univers’ (Simon 2010: 20).62 In her work on corporeal feminism, Elizabeth Grosz draws on a Deleuzian vocabulary of folding to formulate a theory of female embodiment along the drift between inside and outside. As we saw in Chapter 1, she deploys here the model of the Möbius strip, and, compellingly, Darrieussecq too draws on this figure in the impressions on Jeanne’s mind when thinking about a sexual encounter: Cette lucidité, quand se révèlent l’envers et l’endroit des choses. Rêve mouillé, le sperme coule entre ses jambes: vagin à multiples dérivations s’ouvrant et se fermant aux différents temps de la nuit, écluses montant vers le fond de son ventre, du sexe au ventre à la gorge au cerveau; lumineuse assurance: que son intérieur est aussi son extérieur; continuité: suivre le ruban de soi comme celui de Moebius. Dans un glissement de toboggan. Elle existe constamment, sans rupture ni pointillés. Et si un enfant croissait en elle et s’y multipliait, elle serait nourricière d’un être dès l’origine hors d’elle. (49)63

In Jeanne’s fluid impressions there is a sliding between inside and outside, between brain and sex. These elements of consciousness are fused, or rather enfolded in a sinuous drift that collapses thought into sensation, into immanent experience. Embodied perception here resists the fixity and materialisation of a transcendent subject, instead tracing the affective through a perpetual slippage of mind into and through body. Grosz (1994a: 116–17) explains that tracing the outside of the Möbius strip leads one directly to its inside without at any point leaving its surface: ‘The depth, or rather the effects of depth, are thus generated purely through the manipulation, rotation, and inscription of the flat plane – an apposite metaphor for the undoing of dualism.’ Where, for Deleuze, folds and pleats involve the torsion between mind and universe, the slippage between thought and sensation, Darrieussecq’s novel locates that very slippage at the site of the female body, indeed

148

The Becoming of the Body

at the site of female sex, undoing transcendence or dualism, as in Grosz’s model, at a further level. Consciousness, then, is free-floating not in the sense of a screen that resists the body but as an embodied affective surface, ‘un ruban de soi’, ‘un glissement de toboggan’, whose ­‘inscriptions and rotations in three-dimensional space produce all the effects of depth’ (Grosz 1994a: 210). CONCLUSION Darrieussecq’s writing pulses with Deleuzian possibilities, and her erudite engagement with gender politics and with philosophies of the mind brilliantly illuminates perspectives on the becoming of body, and the flux and folds of consciousness. Framing becominganimal and becoming-woman with questions of desire and captivity as they relate to the construction of contemporary female corporeality, Darrieussecq’s work contests distinctions between the original and the copy. Her becoming-animal-human-woman thus sets in motion a posthuman metamorphosis that at once parodies and deconstructs the category of femininity, offering a dynamic mode of becoming that, unlike Deleuze, crucially acknowledges the position from which one becomes. Through these layers of parody and simulation, Darrieussecquian becoming reveals the very constitution of the transcendent subject, the constructedness of the female body and the fixing of molar roles, all the while signalling the very possibility of their unravelling. Her writing thus foregrounds an interplay between simulation and dispersal in the becoming of the body. And yet if the vocabulary of simulation and dispersal appears to suggest a form of consciousness that plunges entirely into the virtual, bearing no relation to this world and floating elsewhere, Darrieussecq’s writing in fact resists such a free fall. The mind may be figured in her work as a porous site of connections, a site upon which the flux of the sensible makes its imprint, but however shifting and transferable mental processes may be, their perception in the mind intertwines with sensation and is thus in some way fleshed out. Darrieussecquian consciousness is one of drift, the drift of mind into body, mind into world. But by figuring the female sex as the locus of the drift of thought into sensation, into world, Darrieussecq adds another dimension to Deleuzian philosophy, that of embodiment. Suspended in three-dimensional space, Darrieussecq’s Möbius strip is a figure of surface that weaves into depth, twists thought into sensation, locates consciousness at the site of the flux and folds of brain and sex, a surface, then, of perpetual flows.



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 149

N OT E S   1. ‘Everything is geography in my books. Psychology and history are geographies. And writing is close to a zen exercise for me, a sense of “doing nothing” where the psychological me is evacuated. To write is to be absent from myself, to echo, to be porous to the world, posed there’ (Concannon and Sweeney 2004b).   2. ‘I am looking to invent new forms, to write new sentences, because it is the only way to realise the modern world, whose movement otherwise surpasses us, staying unreadable, incomprehensible’ (Miller and Holmes 2001b).  3. ‘All real writing plays against clichés, the “truisms”, which hold back the movement of thought, which ruin the flow of life, which upset language and man in alienation and death. This writing can take multiple forms, from the simplest to the most complex; so much that it is lived by its author, it is essentially poetic’ (Miller and Holmes 2001b).  4. To date, Darrieussecq’s work has attracted a good deal of criticism, including a monograph, Chadderton 2012, a special issue, Chadderton and Rye 2012, and several articles and book chapters. For explorations of identity, the body, gender and sexuality, see, for example, Asibong 2003; Caine 2009; Chadderton 2010; Favre 2000; Gaudet 2001; Jordan 2004; Rodgers 2001; Sadoux 1999; Sarrey-Strack 2002. For representations of the mind, see, for example, S. Kemp 2008, 2010. For family relations, see, for example, Jordan 2007a; Rye 2005a, 2009a. For fantastic, virtual, deterritorialised worlds, see, for example, O’Beirne 2006; Robson 2004; Rodgers 2002, 2009, 2010; Rye 2009b; Simon 2010. For language and formal experimentation see, for example, Chadderton 2012, 2013; Jordan 2005.  5. The work’s French title references La Princesse de Clèves (1678) (The Princess of Cleves), by Madame de Lafayette, whose narrative of a young girl’s singular experience of the courtly conventions of seventeenth-century French society is here brought into a twenty-first century context.   6. ‘elsewhere, in the evocation of another world that might also be our own’.   7. ‘There’s that awful phrase: “to go through the process of mourning”. It’s absurd! One never goes through the process. Just as soon as some catastrophe occurs, a pool of psychologists is hurried along to set in motion the process of mourning, but damn, what if you don’t want to process!’  8. ‘Every deterritorialisation, every flight from territory, corresponds then to a reterritorialisation on a new rhizome, a new branching, a reengagement along a new meridian, a new time zone, a new latitude, indeed a repolarisation.’  9. Such an approach testifies to the richness of Truismes (indeed of Darrieussecq’s entire oeuvre), to the very many layers and levels of reading that the text invites, and is fuelled by the belief that it can be productively

150

The Becoming of the Body

read alongside a range of philosophies from feminist theory to thinkers such as Agamben or Deleuze. 10. ‘in the flattering reflection of the gilded mirror, I thought I looked – forgive me for saying so – incredibly gorgeous, like a fashion model, but more voluptuous’ (4). 11. ‘Pushed to the limit, the animality which rendered her desirable now renders her repellent.’ 12. ‘It was me. [. . .] The dress was very lovely, red with scallops and a white apron, and I did have some trouble recognizing myself, but there could be no mistake about the look in her eyes. Which is to say, what I thought I saw at first was a pig wearing that beautiful red dress, a kind of female pig – a sow if you like – and in her eyes was that hangdog look I get when I’m tired. You can understand, though, that it was hard for me to see myself in her’ (61–2). 13. ‘anti-memory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 324). 14. ‘I realized that I no longer remembered Honoré’s face very well: no matter how hard I concentrated, his image eluded my memory’ (63). 15. ‘All the winter of the Earth exploded in my mouth: I no longer remembered either the millennium to come or any of my experiences – everything rolled up into a ball inside me and I forgot it all’ (126). 16. ‘You could say I was getting better – my hair was growing back, I could almost walk upright, I had five fingers again on my front hooves’ (99). 17. ‘a huge amount of willpower’ (129). 18. Throughout this chapter, where two page numbers are given, the first is to the French edition and the second to the English edition of the text under discussion. 19. ‘Substitute the AND for IS. A and B’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 42). 20. ‘For a healthier world’ (74, original italics). 21. ‘I’d read that the ancient Romans’ favourite – and choicest – dish was stuffed sow’s vulva’ (47). 22. ‘Why a sow?’ 23. ‘Women are treated as sows more often than as mares, cows, monkeys, vipers or tigers; and even more often than as giraffes, leeches, slugs, octopuses or tarantulas; and much more often than as scolopendrids, female rhinos or koalas.’ 24. ‘She becomes a person, it’s the metamorphosis of a female object into a conscious woman. The more the pages pass, the more vocabulary there is, the richer the syntax, the more the thought of this woman complexifies. The more she becomes human in fact. For me, it’s the story of a liberation through thought.’ 25. ‘She chooses to exaggerate characteristics attributed to women according to the traditional binary typology upon which sexual difference is founded.’ 26. ‘emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 304).



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 151

27. ‘I tried to look human again, sleeping a lot, combing my hair [. . .] I bit my nails, shaved my legs, and watched my dugs become less swollen, less visible, until only the dark spots of the nipples remained. I’d even washed my dress in preparation for the day when I’d be leaving’ (76). 28. ‘I was completely presentable again’ (78). 29. ‘I realized that it wasn’t going to be easy to take the initiative away from the customers, which meant it wasn’t going to be easy to get what I wanted’ (27). 30. ‘So I took my cue from the movies. I began teasing and flirting. It drove the customers crazy’ (27). 31. ‘there was no room in the firm for bitches in heat’ (29, original italics). 32. ‘I had to remember to yell exactly the way I used to. I also had to remember which clients liked me to call out and which didn’t. Well, it’s hard to pretend when you’re feeling real sensations’ (30–1). 33. ‘[Simulation] carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced by the desiring-machine. The point where the copy ceases to be a copy in order to become the Real and its artifice’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 96, original italics). 34. ‘In any case, the true simulators are the ones who orgasm.’ 35. ‘Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy at once’ (Deleuze 2004b: 4, original italics). 36. Braidotti has since developed her work into an excellent and engaging fulllength study of the posthuman in Braidotti 2013. 37. ‘I tell myself that the answer is perhaps in this Zoo: these slightly haggard animals, ghosts in search of a body, problematic mothers, shorelines, sad or happy clones.’ 38. ‘And as in zoos, one wonders who observes whom.’ 39. ‘here writing became my work, took its place in my life, without pathology, without preventing me from living’ (Miller and Holmes 2001b). 40. See Braidotti 2000 for a discussion of the teratological grip on contemporary culture and the ways in which the monstrous metamorphic might be aligned to dynamic modes of female subjectivity; Braidotti 2013 for a fuller investigation of the posthuman; Desblache with Edwards 2012 for a critical overview of hybrids, monsters and posthuman figures in contemporary theory and culture. 41. ‘which tries to put the functioning of the brain on the page’. 42. ‘Holding her prescription, she decides to buy a new pair of glasses rather than go to her lessons’ (28). 43. ‘If you were big enough to sit on the earth, with your feet on the moon, elbows dangling in the ocean, you’d feel the stellar wind whistling in your hair, sparkling sand from the rim of the universe . . .’ (29). 44. ‘In a sulk I played at having no shadow, feet wet, I went off to play further out, you can spot vampires by their lack of . . .’ (29).

152

The Becoming of the Body

45. ‘the form of thought’. 46. ‘How silly, why can’t I concentrate, why do I suddenly lose touch with what I’m doing?’ (182). 47. ‘concentration is the opposite of thought’ (182). 48. ‘The mind is not nature, nor does it have a nature. It is identical with the ideas in the mind. Ideas are given, as given, they are experience. The mind, on the other hand, is given as a collection of ideas and not as a system’ (Deleuze 1991: 22). 49. ‘It’s very rare to have a complete sentence in your head. You have images, memories, a snippet of music passing through, a vague idea.’ 50. ‘The spiders swinging on their threads, chabada bada, the spider song. I should sweep the floor, clean up, beneath the panels. House too big. Dust everywhere. Endless work. And what for? Tiles and masonry. But this morning started well. Then Anne phoned. List them: Nore here, Anne there, Jeanne out yonder . . .   Ding dong bell   Pussy’s in the well . . .

The first is Jeanne, my second is Anne, my third is Nore and my answer is . . . One missing. Sonny Jim who stopped shining. [. . .] Steam on the glass. With their fingers, they drew on the car windows [. . .] funny faces’ (33, original italics). 51. ‘So he could now remember memories which were new to him. A shoemaker’s memories. A woman’s memories. A cicada’s memories. An elephant’s memories’ (34). 52. ‘Italianate domes, yellow and pink in the sunlight, a large sun, motionless, sun and city all handed down’ (4). 53. ‘Those pink domes under the yellow sun. Powdered rock, sandstone buildings’ (6). 54. ‘she just has to think of Jeanne to be able to get directly into her mind, what she’s thinking about, how she’s feeling, her irritating way of being sure she’s doing the right thing, and it’s clear that her, Anne’s, contacts are distinctly determined by Jeanne’s travels, plugging herself into the worldwide brain then becomes far easier, more immediate in the areas Jeanne has already opened up, because she’s an intelligent researcher and a good, if unconscious, explorer, an excellent data provider’ (82). 55. ‘on the surface of the world, and probably even beyond, there is just one consciousness floating there, changelessly, only split into individuals’ (15). 56. ‘to slip into the shell of the world like a hermit crab, or, rather, given that space isn’t empty, to slip over from one consciousness to another, like an egret ridding a hippopotamus of its parasites, always in motion, helping them in their work . . .’ (17). 57. ‘All I can see is the sun sparkling and the grass greening’ (24). 58. ‘when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of



The Flux and Folds of Consciousness 153

pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God’ (Deleuze 2004b: 5). 59. ‘brain’; ‘mind’. 60. ‘And the vagina just the opposite, a clitoris turned inside out, the rear point receding backwards, outwards, spreading millions of fibres, connection, over a broader surface, the entire brain, when the vaginal surface and brain surface precisely coincide, then it’s orgasm time, no doubt about it’ (58–9). 61. ‘Membrane to membrane, fibre to fibre, nerve to nerve, two adjusted organs, brain/vagina, via a re-created body, there, right there, and dematerialized too, given over to gravity’ (59). 62. ‘the microcosm of flesh is in vertiginous harmony with the macrocosm of the universe’. 63. ‘This lucidity when both the inside and the outside of things are revealed. Wet dreams dripping sperm down her thighs, vagina of various derivations opening and closing at various times of the night, sluice gates mounting up to the base of her belly, from her sex to her belly, to her throat, to her brain, a luminous reassurance – her insides are also her outside. A continuity you can follow like a Möbius strip. Down a slide. She exists constantly, without a break or gaps. And if a child was growing inside her and multiplying, she would be nursing a being outside her straight from the start’ (31).

5. Nomadic Vitalities: Becoming Beyond Boundaries in Nina Bouraoui’s Writing

Tous les matins je vérifie mon identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille? Garçon? (Bouraoui 2000: 163)1 Quand j’écris je suis libre. Je ne suis pas ni fille ni garçon. Je me laisse emporter par l’écriture. (Geffroy 2007)2 L’écriture est une pratique amoureuse. (Anon 2005)3 I N T RO DU C T I O N Franco-Algerian writer Nina Bouraoui was born in 1967 in Rennes to an Algerian father and a French mother. After spending the first couple of years of her life in Brittany, she moved in 1970 with her family to Algeria, which was to become their home for the following decade. As a child, she would often return to France for visits over the summer, and it was on one such holiday in 1980 that she was informed that the family would not be returning to live in Algeria. This was a decision brought on by her mother’s ill health (she suffered from a series of respiratory problems), and the sudden displacement had a profound effect on the adolescent Bouraoui’s life. As she has explained in an interview, ‘Tout est resté en Algérie: mes objets, mes amis, mon enfance. La rupture a été d’une grande violence’ (Simonnet 2004).4 Although this sense of symbolic violence was brought on by a specific movement of migration, Bouraoui’s childhood and teenage years were tinged more generally with a sense of insurmountable cultural alterity, in both French and Algerian contexts, a consequence of having 154



Nomadic Vitalities 155

been born of a historically, politically and culturally charged union of French and Algerian blood. As she has narrated in autofictional works such as Garçon manqué (2000) (Tomboy) (2007b) and Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) (My Bad Thoughts), Bouraoui consistently experienced her emerging sense of self in terms of splitting, of a cleaving of the body into two irreconcilable fragments, and of a pervasive feeling of never being able to inhabit fully either subject category. Cultural uprooting continued to characterise Bouraoui’s life as she spent later teenage years in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. After finishing her secondary education, however, she went back to France to study law and philosophy at university in Paris, where she still lives. Unlike for Nothomb, who, as we saw in Chapter 2, felt compelled as an adult to return to Japan, the country of her childhood, there appear to be psychological barriers to Algeria for Bouraoui, and her homeland has instead furnished a rich backdrop for her literary experiments in fiction and life-writing alike ever since her first work, La Voyeuse interdite (1991) (Forbidden Vision) (1995), published in 1991 with Gallimard.5 This novel narrates the story of the adolescent Fikria, in an exploration of the confinement of femininity in Islamic Algerian culture. The text considers the passive suffering, subjection to the male gaze and severely limited agency experienced by Fikria and others in her world, providing a sensitive portrayal of female subjugation. Situated within a cultural context that allows women only the most limited of contestatory tools, La Voyeuse interdite also explores the possibilities of the subtle subversion of patriarchal structures of power through the marginal appropriation of violence and vision. As critics have noted, the text thus investigates pain and suffering as inflicted, but also as reactive, performative and visionary (see, for example, McIlvanney 2004; Van Zuylen 2003). The difficult corporeal practices that Fikria and her sister engage in – self-harm, anorexia – reveal a complex bodily reality in which agency is simultaneously asserted and negated. These representations anticipate a fascination across Bouraoui’s work with the presence of death, near-death, the violence of borderlines and the dizzying sense of dissolution within the very experience of subjectivity. The texts that follow through the 1990s – Poing mort (1992) (Dead Fist), Le Bal des murènes (1996) (The Dance of the Morays) and L’Âge blessé (1998) (Wounded Age) – further develop the idea of the unravelling of corporeality, as they variously explore the body cloaked in melancholia, illness and death. Thematic expositions on childhood and adolescence recur in Bouraoui’s work, particularly in the texts published during the early and middle periods of her writing career to date. In an interview, she

156

The Becoming of the Body

has claimed that ‘l’enfance est un pays aussi’ (Anon 1999),6 designating childhood to be a geographical landscape that might be discovered, explored, unearthed or excavated. Indeed, childhood in her writing appears to be as much a departed land as the Algeria she grew up in, and many of the complex feelings of displacement and alienation described in moving between North Africa and Europe are reflected in transitions between child and adult. The poetic novella, Le Jour du séisme (1999) (The Day of the Earthquake), for example, starts and jolts with rhythmic uncertainty and territorial instability, as linguistic fragmentation and repetition link the violent transition between child and adult to the trembling of the earth ravaged by the turbulent legacy of the Algerian conflict. Meanwhile, Garçon manqué focuses on the child’s embodiment of the political violence of her environment; this autofictional text’s exploration of childhood has attracted particular critical attention for its depiction of tomboy Nina’s struggles to fit into the binary categories of national and gendered identity – French, Algerian, male, female – that encode and constrain her (see Angelo 2010; Fernandes 2005; Jaccomard 2004; Selao 2005; Vassallo 2007, 2009). From the turn of the millennium onwards, the focus of Bouraoui’s writing has tilted towards expressions and articulations of desire and sexuality. First love and lesbian desire are narrated in La Vie heureuse (2002) (Happy Life), while Poupée Bella (2004) (Baby Doll) explores the night-time underground lesbian club scene in Paris. Mes mauvaises pensées is a confessional stream of consciousness that surges with unconscious desires, and Avant les hommes (2007a) (Before the Men) takes a male adolescent perspective on sexuality. Appelez-moi par mon prénom (2008) (Call Me By My First Name) and Nos baisers sont des adieux (2010) (Our Kisses are Farewell) offer mature and considered meditations on relations between subjectivity and desire, experience and art, the actual and the virtual. If Bouraoui’s latest work, Sauvage (2011) (Savage) returns to the child’s landscape of Algeria, it figures childhood as a space of wildness and of unbound affect, and it thus elaborates on a youthful connection to sensuality and to the vitality of experience, such as Bouraoui has evoked in interviews: ‘J’ai toujours été fascinée par la jeunesse. C’est un état sauvage où on a l’impression que la sexualité va définir notre personnalité’ (Geffroy 2007).7 Bouraoui’s writing has attracted a popular readership and it has also been met with critical acclaim from the beginning of her writing career: La Voyeuse interdite was awarded the Prix du Livre Inter in 1991 and Mes mauvaises pensées won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2005. Her writing is steeped in a strong sense of literary heritage, in both its stylistic experiments and thematic engagement with



Nomadic Vitalities 157

liminal subjectivities and desires. Appelez-moi par mon prénom, for example, is explicitly inspired by Marguerite Duras, who, Bouraoui herself admits, exerts a strong influence across all of her work, along with Violette Leduc, Hervé Guibert and Annie Ernaux. Like the other authors in this book, Bouraoui tends to be associated with the 1990s generation of women writers in France, and also with trends in francophone Maghrebi writing, but she characteristically strives to resist any form of categorisation that might eclipse the plural positions that are glimpsed in her writing.8 As she stridently asserts, ‘j’ai voulu me battre contre les étiquettes qu’on tente toujours de m’appliquer. Quand on dit auteur français d’origine algérienne, je dis non. Auteur francophone, non, auteur maghrébin, non. À la rigueur, auteur franco-algérien’ (Anon 2000).9 Similarly, she views the term ‘women’s writing’ as highly charged. Writing, she claims, should not bear a gendered label, since its aesthetic capacity lies precisely in eliding taxonomy. As we have seen, the authors studied in this book tend to evoke the idea of an ‘écriture sans sexe’.10 Bouraoui, however, not only suggests that writing itself is genderless, but that the very act of writing might in some way collapse the experience of being a gendered subject: ‘Quand j’écris, je suis libre,’ she comments, ‘Je ne suis ni fille ni garçon. Je me laisse emporter par l’écriture’ (Geffroy 2007).11 If Darrieussecq refers to writing itself as genderless, her work nonetheless reveals that it opens out a space where the boundaries of the gendered subject might be sketched out, even if those very boundaries are then subject to sustained contestation. As we shall see, Bouraoui associates a sense of formlessness with writing which is reflected in her mobilisations of the becoming of the body that often reach beyond the very notion of boundary. Bouraoui’s works are largely written in the first person, and they follow an interminable rhythm of surges and leaps through the ebb and flow of phrasing, repetition and anaphora, producing the effect of a breathless urgency. The emphasis on the ‘je’ is ubiquitous in her writing, disclosing subjectivity to be key. But Bouraoui’s work seeks alternative in-between realms through which to rearticulate subjectivity, and writing is privileged as a place of the indefinite. If her writing on the one hand demonstrates the alienation and exile experienced by the imposition of restrictive binary labels onto subjectivity, it also on the other hand relentlessly searches for the possibility of dislocating those very categories. Bouraouian subjectivity emerges, then, as transitional and trajectorial, it resists form and location and it expresses itself in the nomadic becoming of the body. Stylistically, this is often set in motion by Bouraoui’s experiments with the genre of autofiction, as a means of reinventing subjectivity in in-between spaces. As she writes in

158

The Becoming of the Body

Mes mauvaises pensées, ‘il y a des auteurs qui masquent, d’autres qui ont choisi la vérité, moi je suis entre deux’ (Bouraoui 2005: 68).12 But in her autofictional and fictional texts alike, writing becomes a way of exercising creative power in order to inhabit a new world. As she has claimed in an interview, mon matériau, ce sont mes souvenirs, ma mémoire, ce qui m’est arrivé. Mais j’opère une conversion. Je trafique la vérité, c’est une forme de pouvoir. L’écriture c’est redire la vie d’une autre façon, non pour se protéger, mais pour la sublimer. Écrire, c’est avoir accès à un deuxième monde. (Aubel 2010)13

Writing life ‘in another way’ for Bouraoui, then, is not concerned so much with constructing complex webs of narrative as a means to veil or protect the self by signalling an undecidable authenticity as it is with opening out onto the sublime and suspending experience within the space of art. Writing the self in in-between spaces also thus becomes a means of writing about the other, or rather of slipping between the individual and the particular to the collective and the general, of collapsing the transcendent, boundaried subject into the vitality of experience. This chapter charts the becoming of the body in Bouraoui’s work in its resistance to transcendent signifiers of identity. Drawing on the Deleuzian notion of nomadism (see Chapter 1), it first explores the body’s relationship to conflict, violence and dislocation in Bouraoui’s Le Jour du séisme, a text that has until now remained surprisingly under studied. For despite its slightness, this text highlights many of the themes that are central to Bouraoui’s entire oeuvre, that are perhaps more explicitly foregrounded in Garçon manqué, but that take on a particular relevance and resonance with the notion of nomadism as a state of perpetually deterritorialised flux. The chapter then turns to expressions of sexuality in La Vie heureuse, Poupée Bella and Appelezmoi par mon prénom, reading these in dialogue with the Deleuzian conception of desire as an-Oedipal and as aleatory (see Chapter 1). This chapter suggests that writing, for Bouraoui, provides a virtual space for the redistribution of the body beyond the framework of binary codes, a smooth space or an ‘espace quelconque’ in Deleuzian terms. Slipping away from the actual, Bouraouian corporeality is discussed in the first section as being comprised of nomadic and seismic shifts, suspended within the space of writing as a place of deterritorialisation. In the second section, the body becoming beyond boundaries is revealed to resist form itself. Yet despite this seeming resistance to location and to form, despite this sense of nomadic detachment, this chapter suggests that Bouraoui’s depictions of the becoming of the body may



Nomadic Vitalities 159

nonetheless be tethered to materiality, even if that may be in a vital and dynamic sense. D E T E R R I T O R I A L I S I N G T H E B O DY In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism is evoked as a means of thinking through the notion of becoming as a process of deterritorialisation. Their use of vocabulary immediately implies a connection with postcolonial terms that invoke displacement, migration and exile, but it is worth remembering the precise distinctions signalled in Chapter 1 that the philosophers mark out between nomadism and migration. Contrary perhaps to what one might expect, the Deleuzian figure of the nomad is set in a stark opposition to the migrant. For, while the migrant moves from one point to another, the nomad inhabits the inbetween and experiences the vitality of the intermezzo. As Deleuze and Guattari write, Le nomade n’est pas du tout le migrant, car le migrant va principalement d’un point à un autre, même si cet autre est incertain, imprévu ou mal localisé. Mais le nomade ne va d’un point à un autre que par conséquence et nécessité de fait: en principe, les points sont pour lui des relais dans un trajet. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 471)14

The idea of relay here might be usefully read as the handover, exchange, or transmission that takes place within the nomad herself, as opposed to the migrant whose trajectory is marked by movement from one particular point to another, no matter how unstable or hybridised either point may be. The central difference between the nomad and the migrant relates, then, to movement, or rather to lack thereof. Deleuze and Guattari argue that: Le nomade se distribue dans un espace lisse, il occupe, il habite, il tient cet espace, et c’est là son principe territorial. Aussi est-il faux de définir le nomade par le mouvement. Toynbee a profondément raison de suggérer que le nomade est plutôt celui qui ne bouge pas. Alors que le migrant quitte un milieu devenu amorphe ou ingrat, le nomade est celui qui ne part pas, ne veut pas partir, s’accroche à cet espace lisse où le forêt recule, où la steppe ou le désert croissent, et invente le nomadisme comme réponse à ce défi. Bien sûr le nomade bouge, mais il est assis, il n’est jamais assis que quand il bouge. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 472, original italics)15

In Bouraoui’s work, this tension between the nomad and the migrant is fundamental to the extent that she tends to be concerned both with the cultural displacement that is effected by the movement of migration, but also with the existing hybrid nature of subjectivity that arises from being half-Algerian and half-French. As Katherine Harrington

160

The Becoming of the Body

(2006: 121) argues, the experience of nomadism ‘most often occurs in individuals who are essentially always already deterritorialized. They lack an internal “anchoring point” and may never feel completely “at home” anywhere’.16 This sense of the always already nomadic pervades Bouraoui’s writing, and is explicitly highlighted in Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées, where Nina’s parents’ charged union is far from unifying and it appears to foreclose the possibility of cultural attachment or belonging for their daughter. As a child, Nina’s body becomes a battleground, demarcated into different territories: Être séparée toujours de l’un et de l’autre. Porter une identité de fracture. Se penser en deux parties. À qui je ressemble le plus? Qui a gagné sur moi? Sur ma voix? Sur mon corps qui avance? La France ou l’Algérie? (Bouraoui 2000: 20)17

Whether in Algeria or France, Nina never feels fully at ease, or entirely at home, and her lack of a singular sense of origin gives rise to a feeling of being always already deterritorialised. As the narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées acknowledges, she has always been ‘une étrangère’ (95): ‘je garde ce sentiment d’être sans cesse étrangère’ (108).18 As the structure of this phrase betrays, the feeling of alienation and alterity is both persistent and perpetual. If the notion of nomadism as, after Deleuze and Guattari, an experience of being always already deterritorialised illuminates Bouraoui’s writing at large, it would seem to shed particular light on Le Jour du séisme. This is a text that appears to be concerned with the same selfstory of cultural conflict as Garçon manqué and Mes mauvaises pensées, but which, unlike the others, does not involve the narrator’s migration. In this text, Bouraoui describes an earthquake that rips through the physical landscape of Algeria, an earthquake that evinces the very real devastation of the seism of 1980, a year that takes on particular apocalyptic significance in Bouraoui’s life as marking the time of being wrenched away from her childhood in Algeria.19 However, within the text itself Bouraoui’s evocation of the earthquake is dislocated from a particular historical context, and within this figurative space it takes on multiple meanings. On the one hand, the earthquake signals the narrator’s personal sense of corporeal dislocation, as she encounters adolescence and the violent loss of childhood that it entails. On the other hand, it echoes the reality of a country ravaged by colonial rule and its violent legacy, as political unrest threatens to explode into civil war. As Bouraoui explains, ‘Le séisme est la violence [. . .] Tout cela est symbolique. J’ai l’impression que l’Algérie est prise par le diable, elle est dans une sorte de tourment diabolique’ (Anon 1999).20 Yet, despite



Nomadic Vitalities 161

this violent dislocation of the earth and of the narrator’s body, there is a sense in this text that the nomadic vitality of experience might be restored within the deterritorialised spaces of memory and of writing. In Le Jour du séisme, the narrator’s corporeal existence is intimately intertwined with her physical environment. Rather than recounting the events leading up to it, the specific details of the effects on the landscape or infrastructure, her own thoughts or community reactions, the narrator presents the earthquake through a visceral, corporeal understanding of the event: Ma terre se transforme. Elle est en éclats. Elle s’ouvre et se referme sur les corps. Elle prend, l’équilibre. Elle trahit. Sa violence achève les beaux jours. C’est un drame national. Ma terre devient fragile et mouvementée. J’épouse ses variations. J’entre dans le bruit. Je résiste aux forces, telluriques. Je suis marquée, à jamais. Mon aventure est unique. Son instant est un fragment et une épopée. Je viens d’un autre pays, un lieu modifié. J’obéis à un ravisseur. Je deviens une étrangère. Je suis traversée d’une histoire vraie, un acte de la nature, une révolte. Je change. Je sais ce qu’implorer le ciel veut dire. (9)21

The narrator’s body enters into a material relation with her physical environment, ‘marrying’ the variations and vibrations of the earth and penetrating its noise. Connected to the earth in physical terms, she endeavours to resist the events that forever mark, traverse and transform both herself and her land: her personal experience of the violence of adolescence, the physical violation of the earth through the quake, socio-political conflict and violence. The transformation of the earth to which she is so corporeally linked reflects and reinforces her own sense of violation, such that she becomes ‘une étrangère’, her language bruised by the same fragmentation and disruption that shatters the earth. She continues: Ma terre tremble. Elle est vivante et incarnée. Elle gémit. Elle est habitée. Un homme force mon enfance, de l’intérieur. Il tient le monde dans sa main. Il dirige les ruptures. Il broie les lignes, mes attaches. Il contrôle, les violences. Il organise, la destruction. Il vit, là, sous mon ventre, au feu de magma, sa lave et son terreau. Son visage est sans traits. Ses ongles sont noirs. Ses muscles sont en pierre. Ses gestes sont précis. Il applique, une méthode. Il perce, fend et abat. Il creuse, fouille et éventre. Il déforme et amplifie. Il renverse et dénature. Ma terre dérive et s’expose. Elle est, physique et composée, de gaz, de gravats, d’écorces chaudes et de bouillons. Elle gronde. Je grave sa rumeur. Je perds le ciel. J’entre dans sa guerre. Je suis mêlée. Elle est brutale. Je résiste. Je pense à mon corps qui tombe des rochers. Je perds la lumière, des lignes blanches.   Je suis désaxée. (11)22

Bouraoui’s insistent use of the pronouns ‘elle’ and ‘il’ to designate respectively the earth and the perpetrator of violence emphasises the

162

The Becoming of the Body

presence of postcolonial tensions in her evocation of the quake, in its appropriation of the feminisation of Algeria. In her personification of Algerian territory and repeated references to the loss of childhood, Bouraoui illustrates the physical vulnerability of the land faced with the organised destruction and violation inflicted in corporeal terms by a faceless invader. Both the country and the narrator are physically invaded, scratched, pierced, gouged out and gutted. With her short, urgent phrasing, the narrator conjures up not only the trembling of the earthquake, but the rhythms of violent sexual violation, while the alternation between the ‘elle’ of the earth and the ‘je’ of the narrator consistently emphasises the reflective relationship between the two. In the end, both are left ‘désaxée’, unbalanced, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, deterritorialised. The turbulence of the earthquake, and all that it symbolises, signals an uprooting of fixed identity and the body’s relationship to childhood is shattered. Corporeality is unhinged from its static origins: ‘On assassine mon enfance. Je perds l’origine. La terre disparaît avec mes secrets. J’entre en mouvements étrangers’ (22).23 Yet despite the traumatic effects of the earthquake, there is a sense in which its absolute uprooting and wrenching away from stability may, in some unexpected way, open out the disruptive flux of the real towards a restorative sense of perpetual renewal. That the earthquake, and all that it represents, has engendered exile and difference in an act of violence is undeniable, and nowhere does Bouraoui eclipse the suffering and fracture that is brought about by the earthquake, or its implicit resonances with colonialism and war. The earth becomes an injured body, an outsider, just as the narrator becomes an uprooted body, exiled, without referent (24, 30, 37), and the indistinguishability between the two is everywhere highlighted. Violence and loss unsettle the balance, creating blank spaces and endless voids; they uproot stability and certainty, replacing them with anger and hatred (73). The quake may be infinitely diabolic, and yet its disruptions of fixity and origin would nonetheless seem to enable a space in which violence – literal, in the physical sense, or symbolic – might in fact be resisted. As the narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées claims, ‘on doit se rendre compte de la perte de son histoire, il y a une violence à cela, mais il y a une vérité, c’est visible, quitter et se voir quitter c’est aussi avoir une réponse à ses questions’ (Bouraoui 2005: 108).24 In Le Jour du séisme, the mutual deterritorialisation of the earth and of the narrator’s body arguably enables a re-envisioning of the vitality of experience: the invention of nomadism, as Deleuze would have it, precisely as a response to ‘un milieu devenu amorphe ou ingrat’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 472).25



Nomadic Vitalities 163

In this text, nomadism becomes a political and creative response to the imposition of violent dislocation as engaging with the flux of experience seems to counter external rupture and exile. As the narrator explains, Je force ma mémoire. Je commence la vie. J’entre dans la peur. Je reconstruis, le vide. Je comble. Je redresse les murs. Je double la vie. Je fausse le réel. Je monte, les fondations. Je me souviens. J’apprends. Je réunis les temps, opposés, en un seul instant. Le séisme n’est rien. (37)26

This insistent juxtaposition of fracture and regeneration signals the flux of perpetual deterritorialisation, as the narrator simultaneously loses her place and gains a memory (22–3, 46). At the same time, the uprooting of the earth shatters fixed referentiality and enables a sense of renewal: ‘Je constitue. Je fabrique. Je bâtis. Je trace ma voie’ (47).27 The trembling of the earth takes hold of the body and demands its transformation, then: ‘Perdre, son enfance. Perdre son pays. Prendre, une autre langage, une interprétation. Je suis traversée et nouvelle’ (53).28 This transformation results in the rupturing of the narrator’s grounded relationship to Algeria, to childhood and to fixity, and propels her into a Deleuzian becoming, an experience of being always already deterritorialised: Je deviens sans Alger. Je deviens sans enfance. Je deviens sans attaches, soumise au bruit et au souffle violent. Je deviens une ombre sans lumière. (74)29

With the help of her friend Maliha, the narrator is able to overcome her fear of the void and the loss of stability that her childhood and earth represent, and she moves instead towards the uncertain flux of the future: ‘Je cours au-delà de moi. Je n’ai plus peur. Je sais la force, incroyable. Je deviens, concentrée. Je quitte ma fragilité’ (82).30 Leaving behind a sense of fear, and a desire to hold onto stable ground, the narrator enters into a renewed relationship with the flux of the earth. Rather than there being any sense of the subject standing in front of the terrain in a position of Cartesian judgement and knowledge, or of seeking the grounding of identity through the fixity of place, there is more of a Deleuzian sense of the enfolding of subject into world (see Chapter 1). Corporeality is suspended as an involuted encounter with the flux of the real through the affective traces of experience: Je sais ma terre, initiale. Ma connaissance est sensuelle. Je sais sa première forme, ses tracés, sa topographie. Je sais désormais son rythme, un éclat. Elle se lie, à l’enfance. Elle devient éternelle. Le séisme rompt sans anéantir. Il endommage. Il nuit. Il sinistre. Il ajoute. Il couvre mon enfance sans la

164

The Becoming of the Body

prendre vraiment. Il fige sous les pierres. Ma terre bat, ailleurs. Elle est, en profondeur. Il reste toujours, quelque chose. Il reste un nom, une trace, un vestige. (87)31

The narrator’s renewed relationship to the earth continues to insist on an intimate corporeal connection, then, but rather than being figured merely in the binary terms of grounding and ungrounding, an affective rhythm begins to emerge. The vibrations of the earth are now described as endless and eternal movements of flux, that resist complete destruction and surge forward, creating new connections. In parallel comes a renewed perception of corporeality: instead of the adolescent fear of the loss of childhood as the place of origin, there is recognition of the vitality of embodiment. The narrator hurls herself into the flux of her environment, running into the limpid centre of the world and discovering the material strength of her body in movement. This strength in transit allows for a sense of reconciliation with the transitions of her adolescent body: ‘J’apprends à être une femme. Je quitte mon enfance’ (83).32 If the earthquake represents an act of violence that uproots the narrator and commits her to a fragmentary experience, then, it also opens her out to a vital corporeality of becoming, a corporeality of trajectory, comprised of constant shifts and negotiations.33 The narrator’s corporeal trajectory is nomadic in the Deleuzian sense that does not involve movement. For, unlike her friend Arslan, this narrator is not confronted with the experience of actual migration from Algeria. She envisages leaving Algeria as representing the ultimate act of violence and uprooting, the absolute erasure of identity (90); wrenched away from his homeland, Arslan becomes indefinite, ‘sans nom’ (91),34 a condition imposed by migratory exile. The narrator, on the other hand, evades exilic rupture by remaining in Algeria, even though this entails separation from her friend: ‘C’est moi qui pars. Je vais vers l’Algérie sans Arslan. Je me détache de lui. Je dresse une frontière. Je vais vers ma terre’ (95).35 Yet the narrator’s movement ‘vers l’Algérie’ depends on a nomadic, rather than a static relationship to the country. For instead of returning to the fixed ground of her childhood, the narrator’s relationship with the earth is characterised by deterritorialisation. At the end of the text, she inhabits smooth space, in Deleuzian terms, a delimited nomadic space where points are subordinated to the trajectory itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 473; 2004b: 528). In Bouraoui’s text, smooth spaces are figured through images of the sea and the sky: ‘Ma terre revient avec les oiseaux qui volent vers la mer, une bande irisée. Ils suivent un tracé invisible, attirés, à contresens du flux migratoire’ (99).36 The sky is presented as a nomadic, in-between space, which the birds inhabit rather than traverse in a migratory sense.



Nomadic Vitalities 165

The sea, too, represents the in-between, the promise of the vital ‘force du monde’;37 elsewhere it has been contrasted to the illusory promise of another land (38). The sky and the sea thus frame the narrator’s renewed relationship to the earth, suspending her body within a double movement of becoming as a perpetual deterritorialisation. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, it is through the flux of deterritorialisation itself that the nomad is finally able to inhabit smooth space: Pour le nomade [. . .] c’est le déterritorialisation qui constitue le rapport à la terre, si bien qu’il se reterritorialise sur la déterritorialisation même. C’est la terre qui se déterritorialise elle-même, de telle manière que le nomade y trouve un territoire. La terre cesse d’être terre, et tend à devenir simple sol ou support. (Deleuze and Guttari 1980: 473)38

In Le Jour du séisme, the redistribution of the relationship between the narrator and the earth in nomadic terms is intimately linked to the creative flux of memory and to the space of writing. As Bouraoui has claimed in an interview, ‘L’écriture, c’est mon vrai pays, le seul dans lequel je vis vraiment, la seule terre que je maîtrise’ (Simonnet 2004).39 Yet if writing allows for this sense of reterritorialisation, this is precisely by virtue of its deterritorialising creativity. Writing, for Bouraoui, creates a monument, in Deleuzian terms, to the vitality of experience by suspending memory as a process of perpetuation. As the narrator of Le Jour du séisme explains, moving towards Algeria signifies entering into a close proximity with her memory: ‘C’est alors moi qui pars. Mon voyage est éternel. Je vais vers ma mémoire’ (95).40 Rather than being anchored in fixed ground, inhabiting a smooth space involves the temporal suspension of memory. As the narrator claims, ‘Ma mémoire est tout. Elle transmet. Elle raconte. Elle perpétue [. . .] Ma mémoire est un lieu permanent, une réalité sans vestiges’ (96).41 But instead of signalling a ‘preservation of the past’, or figuring the image of the sea ‘as a promise of future stability’ (Fulton 2001: 837), this voyage towards memory seems rather to signal a creative deterritorialisation. While there may be a sense of the recuperative value of memory in the face of the earthquake’s devastation, Bouraoui highlights the regenerative, rather than the preservative, effects of memory. For, memory is not described as a fixed and localisable repository of identity or the past, but as a process that is predicated on transmission, narration and perpetuation. Granted, in her words, memory may be ‘un lieu permanent’, but it is also ‘une réalité sans vestiges’, suggesting a conception of memory that does not admit of the conventional association with the trace, but that rather collapses past and present, and perhaps writing as well, into a creative flux with one another. Deleuze and Guattari argue that nomadic becoming counters memory, and that art, in creating

166

The Becoming of the Body

rhizomatic connections to experience and to the world, participates in the same sense of folding past and present into one another. Art becomes a monument, then, to experience. But this is not a monument that wants to capture and fix the past through memory or memorialisation. Rather, the monument consists of fabulation: Il est vrai que toute œuvre d’art est un monument, mais le monument n’est pas ici ce qui commémore un passé, c’est un bloc de sensations présentes qui ne doivent qu’à elles-mêmes leur propre conversation, et donnent à l’événement le composé qui le célèbre. L’acte du monument n’est pas la mémoire, mais la fabulation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 158, original italics)42

If the narrator speaks of a sense of permanency to memory, this nonetheless seems contingent on the creative space of writing a monument as becoming and as perpetuation. The narrative ends, then, with an image of the body intertwined with the earth through a regenerative fabulation: Ma terre revient avec les premières voix. Elle est. Ma mémoire sait. Mes mains reconnaîtront. (99)43

In its evocation of the earthquake, Le Jour du séisme pulses with ruptures and dislocations, overlapping the corporeal, the territorial and the political. Yet despite the violence and violation that the quake engenders, nomadism becomes conceived as a corporeal and a creative response to a volatile environment. The text suspends the body into a nomadic becoming that sustains a deterritorialised relation to the earth, folding corporeality into the flux of the world. If to write, for Bouraoui, is a means of inhabiting another place, it is also a means of inventing another world.44 With its episodic fragments that lurch across and through time, its hesitating autofictional style, its anaphoric repetitions of the ‘je’ in perpetual dislocation and difference, and its rhythmic, poetic intertwining of body and earth, Le Jour du séisme opens out a deterritorialised space that recounts the flux of experience, a smooth space populated by nomadic and vital forces. A L E AT O RY D E S I R E A N D T H E V I R T U A L S E R I E S OF SEXUALITY Bouraoui’s writing explores the possibility of inhabiting a different, deterritorialised terrain, of resisting political containers of violence and transcendent signifiers of identity and of suspending the body in



Nomadic Vitalities 167

perpetual becoming. If inter-national tensions cast a hierarchical, political conflict onto corporeality in Bouraoui’s work, the body is also captured by strict, and equally hierarchical, codes of gender and sexuality that script homosexuality as a shameful other to the heterosexual norm (see Vassallo 2009). But just as writing provides a smooth space for the deterritorialised relation between body and environment, it also offers a realm for the reconfiguration of desire beyond the transcendent signifiers of gender and sexuality that are conceived in heteropatriarchal terms.45 Exploring (lesbian) desire as aleatory and connective, rather than resting on Oedipal configurations of lack (see Chapter 1), the chapter now turns to analyse the depiction of sexuality in Bouraoui’s La Vie Heureuse and Poupée Bella as a vital flow of queer becoming. Finally, it considers the relationship between desire and writing in Appelez-moi par mon prénom, in order to reflect upon the space of writing as a Deleuzian ‘espace quelconque’, a realm of possibility that counter-actualises the body and opens out a virtual series of sexuality. In Deleuzian philosophy, theorisations of becoming frequently allude to homosexuality as one example in a series of becoming-minoritarian, but it is in the preface to Guy Hocquenghem’s L’Après-Mai des faunes (1974) that Deleuze elaborates particularly on homosexual desire. Deleuze’s reading of Hocquenghem posits that his writing does not call for recognition of the homosexual in terms of an identity politics, but rather discloses homosexuality to be an affective becoming of transmutating sexualities. Homosexuality, according to Deleuze’s Hocquenghem, does not enclose itself into the identity of a sex, and instead entails the very collapsing of identity into desire and into a future (virtual) sexual becoming. As Deleuze writes, Il n’y a plus de sujet homosexuel, mais des productions homosexuelles de désir, et des agencements homosexuels producteurs d’énoncés, qui essaiment partout, SM et travestis, dans des relations d’amour autant que dans des luttes politiques. [. . .] On comprend mieux comment Hocquenghem peut être partout sur sa spirale et dire à la fois: le désir homosexuel est spécifique, il y a des énoncés homosexuels, mais l’homosexualité n’est rien, ce n’est qu’un mot, et pourtant prenons le mot au sérieux, passons nécessairement par lui, pour lui faire rendre tout ce qu’il contient d’autre – et qui n’est pas l’inconscient de la psychanalyse, mais la progression d’un devenir sexuel à venir. (Deleuze 2002: 400, original italics)46

Bouraoui would seem very much to share in such a perspective on the becoming of sexuality, and she has commented in an interview on her unease that any notion of ‘gay identity’ necessarily, and problematically, ends up being defined in precise opposition to a heterosexual norm, a process that inevitably obfuscates the vitality of affect:

168

The Becoming of the Body

L’homosexualité, ce n’est qu’un mot [. . .] Dire que l’on est homosexuelle, c’est être cataloguée par sa sexualité, et cela me dérange profondément. L’homosexualité, ce n’est pas une identité. Je pense que le désir et la sexualité ne sont pas dissociables de l’amour. (Anon 2005)47

Bouraoui’s depiction of homosexuality in La Vie heureuse resonates sharply with a Deleuzian understanding of sexual becoming, not least in its figurations of desire as a pre-personal positivity, that exceeds its recuperation to particular subjects or objects. As we have seen in previous chapters, Deleuzian desire does not seek to supplement an originary psychoanalytical lack, but rather channels itself forward in aleatory, connective and productive movements. Sixteen-year-old Marie, the narrator of La Vie heureuse, lives in Zurich and falls in love with a friend, Diane. But desire envelops her existence in its nomadic search for its own proliferation: Je cours. La neige encercle. Je ne m’arrête pas. Je suis excitée. Ma peau brûle. J’ai du désir dans mon ventre. Un désir qui ne repose sur rien, nourri de ma chair. Rien de Saint-Malo, ni Antoine, ni Arnaud, ni les inconnus que j’embrasse dans mes rêves. Rien de Zurich, ni Olivier ni Michel, ni ce garçon plus jeune que moi, Gil, qui me regarde dans les couloirs du lycée. Rien de la télévision, ni les corps anonymes ni les images pornographiques. C’est un désir sans objet, sans réalité, lié à la forêt, à la neige, au silence. Je ne sens plus mes jambes. Je suis triste et heureuse. Je suis seule et envahie. Je veux rire et pleurer. Je tombe amoureuse, je crois, sans reconnaître le visage de celui que j’aime soudain plus que moi. (47)48

Desire, as it is described here, rests on nothing, and, rather than being produced from a lack within the subject, it seems rather to envelop and collapse the subject into its own movements. Marie’s experience of desire has nothing to do with either her lived experiences or her fantasies, existing in itself without object or reality. In this scenario, the psychoanalytical subject that precedes and propels desire is effaced: with a stream of contradictions and oppositions, the ‘je’ collapses into a multiplicity of affect – sadness, happiness, loneliness, invasion, laughter, tears and love. The aleatory forces of desire emerge as constitutive rather than constituted, and they exhibit a pure positivity that folds the subject into the vibrations and flux of the world, into snow, forest and silence. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, le désir n’a pas pour objet des personnes ou des choses, mais des milieux tout entiers qu’il parcourt, des vibrations et flux de toute nature qu’il épouse, en y introduisant des coupures, des captures, désir toujours nomade et migrant dont le caractère est d’abord le ‘gigantisme’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/3: 351–2)49



Nomadic Vitalities 169

La Vie heureuse recounts the story of Marie’s love for Diane, and it necessarily becomes, then, a story about a subject’s desire for an object. Nonetheless, in foregrounding the non-reactive and the non-causal, Bouraoui’s depiction of lesbian desire collapses both subject and object into a material malleability. Marie is insistent that her desire for Diane has nothing to do with psychical drives that would seek to recuperate the primary lost loved object or repeat the Freudian family romance: Diane ne remplace pas ma mère. Ce n’est pas ça l’histoire des filles. C’est autre chose. Ce n’est pas le souvenir d’enfance, l’odeur de la peau et du lait, la petite voix qui endort, les mains qui soignent. Ce n’est pas cela, aimer une fille. Ça ne remplace rien. Ce n’est pas nostalgique. (69–70)50

Diane is not an object in a chain of substitutions that stand in for the originary other or for an absolute primary sense of fusion. Marie’s desire does not hinge on the fulfilment of lack; indeed there is nothing nostalgic about it. Further, her lesbian desire has nothing to do with simplistic narcissistic (self-)identification.51 Rather it is depicted as an aleatory force that undoes the very corporeal subject. As Marie continues, ‘On n’est plus une fille avec une fille. On ne se retrouve pas en elle. On ne comble pas et on ne manque pas. C’est plus que cela. Ça n’a pas d’histoire. C’est sans passé.’52 Rather than repeating a scenario rooted in negation and lack, lesbian desire is figured here as a vital affective force that dissolves the boundaries of the transcendent subject. For Marie, ‘C’est irrésistible d’aimer une fille. C’est le corps qui s’évanouit’ (102).53 A Deleuzian notion of becoming-gay understands the affective as an assemblage of connective desire in which subjectivity is enveloped, effaced and multiplied by desire itself. Bouraoui’s articulation of desire in La Vie heureuse resonates strongly with such a concept, while presenting an alternative perspective on the aleatory that is thought through specifically in terms of female same-sex desire. This signals a point of divergence from Deleuze, whose theoretical formulations of desire remain bound to a vocabulary that centre on masculine positions. As Verena Andermatt Conley (2009: 34) remarks, ‘Deleuze and Guattari carry on an almost masculinist and homogenizing discourse by focusing on homosexuals and pédés exclusively without any mention of lesbians, bisexuals or transsexuals.’ Deleuze’s reading of Hocquenghem recognises that homosexual desire is specific, that there are homosexual utterances, even if this recognition enables passing through its very specificity and opening out all the otherness it contains. But this specificity is nowhere considered in terms of lesbian desire. The work of Elizabeth Grosz, who posits desire after Deleuze and Guattari as being

170

The Becoming of the Body

about energies and flows rather than wishes and aspirations, is particularly welcome here. With specific attention to lesbianism, Grosz argues for the plasticity of desire that reveals the malleable forms of sexuality as affective becoming: Lesbianism [. . .] attests to the fundamental plasticity of women’s (and also presumably men’s) desire, its inherent openness not only to changes in its sexual object (male to female or vice-versa), but also its malleability in the form and type of practices and pleasures available to it. In other words, to the more or less infinite possibilities of becoming. (Grosz 1995: 226)54

This sense of the plasticity and malleability of lesbian desire is particularly highlighted in Bouraoui’s Poupée Bella, a diary-text that reveals Nina’s experience of desire and sexuality in episodic fragments. This text would also seem to illustrate the Deleuzian notion of passing through homosexual desire, here understood through the configuration of lesbian desire as Grosz explains it, as a means of opening the otherness of sexuality out to the infinite possibilities of becoming. The vital force of desire is foregrounded from the very beginning of the text, with the narrator’s insistence that ‘il n’y a que mon corps, il n’y a que mon désir [. . .] je cherche quelqu’un, je cherche une fille’ (8),55 a phrase that is echoed in rhythmic urgency throughout the text. And despite the reiteration of the pronouns ‘je’ and ‘mon’, it becomes apparent that desire exceeds and enfolds subjectivity. Early on in the text, Nina poses the following question: ‘Combien de temps faudra-t-il pour trouver? Pour devenir ce que je suis?’ (9)56 The answer would appear to lie in the subsequent proliferation of the verb ‘chercher’ through which the accumulation of desire collapses the subject into the affective multiplicity of becoming. In Nina’s words, ‘Je cherche. Je cherche la femme de ma vie dans la nuit. Je cherche, dans la forêt. Je cherche, sous les vagues. Je cherche après les dunes. J’ai un destin amoureux. J’ai plusieurs vies. J’ai plusieurs corps sous mon corps’ (17).57 Desire suffuses Poupée Bella, and it is a connective aleatory desire that is not bound to the particular subject. ‘Nous avons toutes le même désir et je n’ai pas peur de cela’, claims Nina (18).58 And though her insistent night-time search may be for ‘la femme de ma vie’, desire is not closed off but moves instead into endlessly different scenes, fantasies and configurations, from desire for women, to women dressed as men, to gay men: ‘J’ai envie d’entrer chez Moon, de danser avec une femme déguisée en homme. J’ai envie d’entrer dans une backroom de garçons’ (20).59 Nina’s diary fragments thus disclose the plasticity and malleability of desire, as well as the becoming of the body within its movements. This is explored in particular with regard to Nina’s



Nomadic Vitalities 171

relationship with her gay friend Julien. ‘Je suis dans le corps de Julien’, she writes one day, and later: ‘Il y a un glissement du désir. J’aimerais tant être Julien’ (21).60 Elsewhere she writes, ‘Je peux avoir du désir en l’imaginant avec des hommes. C’est mon corps que je mets en scène. Julien n’est qu’un support’ (38).61 Nina does not want to be like Julien, or take on his body in the sense of resemblance or identification. There is instead more of sense that desire collapses the body into a web of affective sexuality. Bouraoui’s articulations of lesbian desire, then, not only attest to the plasticity of sexuality but to the infinite possibilities of the becoming of the body. Reconfiguring lesbian desire beyond questions of identification, beyond loss and lack, Bouraoui seems to suggest that sexuality is not constituted, as such, but endlessly invented. As Luciana Parisi (2009: 74) argues, homosexuality after Deleuze will not close itself ‘within an already constituted self but will remain open to all possible implications, a micrological, microphysical reversible sex, a transmutation of sexes from one order to another, from flowers to motorcycles’. Opening out the otherness of homosexuality into a future sexual becoming, as Deleuze conceives of it, is, in a sense, a form of counteractualisation. It involves slipping away from the biological or psychical determinations of sexual identity, towards the ‘agitating activities of virtual sexes ready to invent a future in the everyday’ (Parisi 2009: 74). As we have seen in previous chapters, art enables a perception of the virtual flux of experience by mobilising sensation and affect beyond the constraints of transcendent perception, and allowing us to view ourselves otherwise. In Poupée Bella, there is a strong sense that desire enfolds a future sexual becoming that is intertwined with the process of writing as space of perpetual counter-actualisation. As Nina writes, beautifully evoking a Deleuzian vocabulary, Je suis en devenir homosexuel, comme je suis dans le livre en train de se faire. Chaque fois c’est une mécanique amoureuse. Chaque fois c’est la déconstruction d’un système. Je ne suis plus comme avant. Je n’écris plus comme avant. (39)62

Nina urges that writing should carry (‘porter’) homosexuality, rather than recuperate, atone for, or rectify it (85). Writing, then, becomes a way of inventing the real in the everyday and of doubling the actual (106). As she tells us, Nina can change the story of what might have been by writing it: ‘Je peux encore changer de sujet’ (117).63 Echoing Deleuze, then, she asserts that homosexual identity does not exist, and suggests that the space of writing within this autofictional text seeks less to represent a transcendent subject with a boundaried or identifiable

172

The Becoming of the Body

sexual identity, than to evoke the affectivity of desire and the series of sexuality as what might be otherwise in a future, virtual sexual becoming. As she writes, Il n’y a aucune homosexualité. Cela n’existe pas. Déjà, dans les mots, se tient l’invention. Déjà, dans l’écriture, se deploie l’amour. (128)64

If an exploration of La Vie heureuse and Poupée Bella goes some way to illustrate the an-Oedipal and aleatory nature of desire and the collapsing of sexuality into a vital flow of becoming in Bouraoui’s writing, it is in Appelez-moi par mon prénom that the relationship between desire, sexuality, art and the virtual glimpsed in her earlier texts is fully mobilised. This is a highly intertextual piece that evokes the folding of life into art and art into life. Images and thoughts are shaped through transmission from lived experience to creativity, suspending the virtual within the actual and revealing, in Deleuze’s (1996: 179) words that, ‘Il n’y a pas d’objet purement actuel. Tout actuel s’entoure d’un brouillard d’images virtuelles.’65 Throughout the text, the narrator refers to the recurrence of images and thoughts in her creative consciousness and that of her lover P., frequently coming back to the observation that: ‘J’y voyais une forme de transmission’ (69).66 And this sense of transmission that is exposed in their textual encounter is echoed by their sexual desire, as the narrator herself writes: ‘J’avais l’idée que les relations amoureuses avaient un rapport avec la philosophie. Il y était question de vérité et d’illusion’ (78).67 Textuality and sexuality intermingle, then, as desire and creativity enfold the virtual into the actual and open out the vital materiality of experience. The text depicts the relationship between the narrator, a Parisian writer, and P., an artist sixteen years her junior who lives in Lausanne and has read and admired her work. From the very beginning of the text, their relationship is shaped by encountering each other in creative, fictionalised versions of themselves. If P. feels an intimate connection to her through reading the narrator’s works, she in turn visits his website, finding out about meetings he has organised, viewing his photographs, reading forum messages and his blog, to find out more about him. In so doing, she pieces together a sense of who he is, a sense that is dislocated from actual experience: ‘Je nageais dans l’illusion d’une image que j’avais construite à partir d’images recueillies, images fausses ou falsifiées par mes rêveries’ (11).68 Bouraoui’s text is woven of the various media that the narrator and P. engage with – messages, emails, blogs, photographs, the art that P. is working on, the new novel that the narrator is writing – creating a contemporary web of cultural



Nomadic Vitalities 173

interchange that is underscored by the nature of the new media to which she refers. In a virtual world (in the electronic, technological sense), meaning and experience are endlessly invented, reinvented and reformulated through the very processes of exchange. If what P. has written discloses something to the narrator of her life, this is perhaps unsurprising since he has self-confessedly been inspired by her own work. As the narrator writes, ‘En découvrant son écriture j’avais pensé découvrir la part de son histoire qui le reliait à moi’ (12).69 But beyond establishing a sense of familiarity, the complex interplay between artist and beholder, and between writer and reader, establishes a virtual plane of perception that interlaces with the actual. As the narrator later writes, ‘J’avais l’idée que l’écriture avait provoqué les événements’ (91).70 The virtual space that is suspended by the creation and reception of the art work, then, intertwines with the sensation of their desiring relationship: ‘P. m’avait aimée en me lisant, je l’avais désiré en l’épiant’ (95).71 The relationship between the narrator and P. in Appelez-moi par mon prénom would seem to mobilise the ‘not yet actualised’ virtual series of sexuality that Deleuze theorises (see Colebrook 2009). Their encounter begins from a distance and at a non-actualised level, with creative invention eliciting a connective desire that is kept in play as a vital and productive force. Throughout the text, it is words and images, rather than physical presence, that stimulate sexual desire and through which flesh is materialised: Ses images sur mes mots faisaient penser à ses mains sur mes épaules [. . .] Je sentais son corps près du mien [. . .] Je pensais que l’écriture avait un rapport avec la vie, la parole devenant la parole de la chair. (28–9)72

The lyrical rhythms characteristic of Bouraoui’s writing style are amplified here by an accumulative crescendo of communication and desire, as emails and text messages rally back and forth, weaving a textual fabric of urgency and unspoken potential desire: ‘Nous étions liés par le tissage des mots [. . .] Les mails devenaient de plus en plus nombreux, sans jamais rien dévoiler du désir que nous aurions pu avoir l’un pour l’autre’ (32, original italics).73 Writing, then, emerges as an affective realm that propels desire and engagement. Intimate questions and communication resemble a physical seduction, and a virtual corporeality is materialised from desire filtered through the textual encounter. The narrator imagines P. behind her, a hand on her shoulder, his breath in her hair (40) and his words shower upon her like kisses (51). If sexual relations are invented and materialised through language, this is underscored by the physicality of the spoken word, which becomes

174

The Becoming of the Body

apparent when they begin to speak on the phone: ‘Nous nous appelions plusieurs fois dans la soirée, le langage devenant un refuge. Il contenait les respirations, les arrêts, les reprises, les lenteurs, tout ce que le souffle charrie’ (53).74 Here language becomes a physicalised refuge, a sensual materialisation of the body. When the narrator and P. finally meet and act upon their material desires, the virtual and the actual intertwine. Since so many scenarios have already been imagined or fantasised in writing and physical seductions virtualised through communication, the creative invention of experience filters through into lived reality. As the narrator writes, ‘Je prenais conscience de mon corps et du sien, matérialisant les songes de mon hiver. Je ne pensais ni à Lausanne ni à notre soir à la librairie. Nos mots avaient inventé une autre histoire’ (64).75 Their words have invented a series of possible scenarios and encounters that have dislocated experience, and desire erupts as a vital force that passes though the actual and the virtual. When the narrator writes, ‘J’avais l’idée que les mots avaient préparé nos gestes’ (65),76 it appears that writing and desire are the vital forces that shape experience itself. Indeed, P.’s physical materiality reminds her of her creative encounter with him, and not the other way round. She writes, for example, that ‘Je pensais qu’il avait le physique de ses missives’ (82),77 and it is when she returns to Paris and reads his dissertation that she gains an intimate sense of his body: ‘Quand je rentrais à Paris, je lisais son mémoire comme si j’avais pu lire son corps. J’apprenais de lui, ce qu’il était vraiment’ (87).78 As in La Vie Heureuse and Poupée Bella, desire is described as an aleatory connective force that exceeds the subject, but here there is a stronger sense of its weaving through the virtual. The narrator’s desire for P. does not stem from a personal sense of lack, but is comprised of a web of desires, real and imagined, her own and others’. As she writes, ‘P. devint une forme d’obsession, composée de mon désir et du désir des autres ou de ce que je pouvais imaginer du désir des autres’ (12).79 But metaphors of geography and territory also pervade the text, highlighting the sense of the aleatory and nomadic movements of desire and creating a cartography of sexuality. The narrator seeks to ‘situate’ P. within a geography of desire, a ‘géographie amoureuse’ (20). Paris is described as having been fertilised by their aleatory desire, highlighting the folding of desire into the materiality of the world (62), and in the series of connections from one place to another, geographical place becomes intimately intertwined with sensation. In Venice, desire passes through the actual (the geography of the town), into the virtual (into art): ‘La ville ressemblait à mon labyrinthe amoureux, m’égarant



Nomadic Vitalities 175

désormais avec celui que j’aimais. Je me tenais au centre du désir que j’imaginais rouge, carmin, violacé, comme si j’avais pu le reproduire sur un dessin’ (110).80 Desire is opened out into the particles of the world and it envelops and enfolds the body, collapsing its boundaries (86) and creating ever-new visions of the limits of corporeality (76–7). Caught between the plane of the actual that is interwoven with geography, and the virtual that evokes sensation through the imagination, desire suspends the body within an image of a field of wild daisies, floating lightly, becoming-otherwise (21–2). The aleatory movements of desire in Appelez-moi par mon prénom and their intertwining of the actual and the virtual reveal the becoming of the body within the flux of sexuality. Though this text may describe a heterosexual relationship, in a similar fashion to Poupée Bella’s articulations of lesbian desire, it passes through this specificity as a means of opening out its own otherness to a virtual sexual becoming. Desire as a virtual force reinvents sexuality and the body, in its movements through what has not yet been actualised and through what might not be actualised. As Chrysanthi Nigianni (2009: 6) argues, desire after Deleuze is a vital and transformative force: a principal force that keeps the future unpredictable and thus opens up the capacity of the body to become-other through its encounters with other body-forces, through its involvement in a multiplicity of connections that changes qualitatively with every new connection added to it – a qualitative transformation that occurs both in the act of relating as such, as well as in the relating parts.

If writing has provided a smooth space for the nomadic deterritorialisation of the body, it opens out a similar space for the becoming of the body within the movements of desire and the spectrum of sexuality. Crossing through the actual and the virtual, desire materialises and suspends the body within a different realm. As the narrator writes, ‘Nous étions comme suspendus au-dessus de tout, dans un seul pays qui réunissait nos deux pays, dans un seul corps qui unissait nos deux corps’ (41–2).81 Bouraoui’s text thus opens out a virtual space of desire, an any-space-whatever or ‘espace quelconque’ in Deleuzian terms, ‘un espace de conjonction virtuelle, saisi comme pur lieu du possible’ (Deleuze 1983: 109).82 Writing becomes the place of unbound affect, that enfolds and enlivens experience, and that suspends the body in a sexual becoming within the vital flux and flow of materiality. As the narrator of Appelez-moi par mon prénom concludes, ‘Nous n’étions pas uniquement en vie, nous étions à l’intérieur de la vie, dans ce qu’elle

176

The Becoming of the Body

avait de plus beau et de plus incertain, de plus fragile et de plus puissant’ (112).83 CONCLUSION Bouraoui’s writing exposes the becoming of the body beyond its very boundaries. Ungrounding the body from location and form, corporeality is suspended within the flux of nomadic deterritorialisation and the flows of desire. Bouraoui’s writing understands the notion of nomadism as both a conception of experience always already deterritorialised, and a creative response to the violence and volatility of a particular environment. But nomadism also reveals the ways in which the body is undone by the aleatory forces of desire, material forces that exceed the constraints of the transcendent body and the coding of a particular form of sexuality. Beyond lack, beyond shape, the affective plasticity of desire suffuses, envelops and endlessly invents subjectivity in a queer flow of sexualities. Experimenting with ideas that recur in Deleuzian philosophy, there is in Bouraoui’s writing an efflorescence of becoming beyond form, beyond fixity, but an affectivity that is somehow still material, still tangible, still vital. Space takes on new significance in Bouraoui’s writing in the mobilisation of affect, whether in terms of the doubled deterritorialisations of earth and body in smooth space, or in the future sexual becoming of the ‘espace quelconque’. If, as we have seen throughout this book, writing opens up a space that crosses through the actual and the virtual, it is Bouraoui’s work, perhaps, that pushes this notion to its fullest, that explores writing as the unfurling of desire in all its creative possibility. Pulsating, inventive, dynamic, Bouraoui’s writing not only opens out transitions, shifts and flux, effecting a counter-actualisation of the contemporary subject, and of transcendent corporeality, it points to a future sexual becoming as the not-yet-actualised, an ‘espace quelconque’ that holds the promise of invention and the perpetual becoming of the body. N OT E S   1. ‘Every morning I scrutinize myself. I have four problems. Am I French or Algerian? Am I a boy or a girl?’ (Bouraoui 2007b: 98).   2. ‘When I write I am free. I am neither girl nor boy. I let myself be carried away by writing.’   3. ‘Writing is a practice of love.’   4. ‘Everything stayed in Algeria: my things, my friends, my childhood. It was an enormously violent rupture.’



Nomadic Vitalities 177

  5. Criticism on Bouraoui currently exists largely in the form of articles and book chapters, with the exception of the excellent recent comparative study of ‘the body besieged’ in Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar in Vassallo 2012. Articles and book chapters tend to focus on particular texts. On La Voyeuse interdite, see McIlvanney 2004; Van Zuylen 2003. On Garçon manqué, see Angelo 2010; Fernandes 2005; Jaccomard 2004; Selao 2005; Vassallo 2007, 2008. On Mes mauvaises pensées, see Angelo 2011; Leek 2012. On Sauvage, see Damlé 2013c, and on Nos baisers sont des adieux, see Damlé 2014, forthcoming. Vassallo 2009, 2012, 2013 cover Bouraoui’s writing trajectory from Garçon manqué to Appelez-moi par mon prénom.   6. ‘childhood is a country too’.   7. ‘I have always been fascinated by youth. It is a savage state, in which you feel that your sexuality will define your character.’ See Damlé 2013c for an analysis of the wild becoming of childhood in Bouraoui’s Sauvage.  8. Recent critical studies of francophone North African women’s writing include Cheref 2010; Détrez 2013; El-Nossery 2012; Farhoud 2013; A. Kemp 2010; Rice 2006, 2012. See also Orlando 1999 and Woodhull 1993, which both draw on Deleuzian (among other) theories in their readings of femininity in North African literature after decolonisation.   9. ‘I have wanted to fight against the labels that people always tend to attach to me. When someone says French author of Algerian origin, I say no. Francophone author, no, Maghrebi author, no. Franco-Algerian author, if you must.’ 10. ‘genderless writing’. 11. ‘When I write I am free. I am neither girl nor boy. I let myself be carried away by writing.’ 12. ‘There are authors who mask, others who have chosen the truth, as for me, I’m in-between.’ 13. ‘my material, it’s my recollections, my memory, what’s happened to me. But I operate a conversion. I tamper with the truth, it’s a form of power. Writing retells life in another way, not to protect oneself, but to sublimate it. To write is to have access to a second world.’ 14. ‘The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 419). 15. ‘The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does not move. Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where the steppe or the desert

178

The Becoming of the Body

advances, and who invents nomadism as a response to this challenge. Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 420, original italics). 16. Harrington’s article provides a helpful initial perspective on deterritorialisation and nomadism after Deleuze and Guattari in contemporary francophone writing, including in the work of Bouraoui. See also ­ Woodhull 1993 and Orlando 1999 for critical readings of recent francophone postcolonial (women’s) writing through Deleuzian tropes. 17. ‘Forever split between this one and that one, enduring a fractured identity, seeing myself as divided. Who do I look like the most? Who has conquered me? Who has won over my voice? My face? My body in motion? France or Algeria?’ (Bouraoui 2007b: 10). 18. ‘a stranger’; ‘I still have this perpetual feeling of being a stranger.’ 19. In Sauvage, too, the year 1980 is filled with fear and trepidation and with a sense of impending apocalypse, though in this text there is stronger sense of the immediate socio-political context and rise of religious fundamentalism. 20. ‘The earthquake is violence [. . .] All of this is symbolic. I have the sense that Algeria has been seized by the devil, that it is caught up in some sort of diabolical torment.’ 21. ‘My earth is transforming. She is splintered. She opens out and encloses onto bodies. She takes, the balance. She betrays. Her violence reaches new heights. It’s a national drama. My earth becomes fragile and mobile. I marry her tremblings. I enter into the noise. I resist the forces, telluric. I am marked, forevermore. My journey is unique. Its instant is a fragment and an epic. I come from another country, a changed place. I obey an abductor. I become a stranger. I am traversed by a true story, an act of nature, a revolt. I am changing. I know what it means to implore the sky.’ 22. ‘My earth is trembling. She is alive and incarnate. She quivers. She is inhabited. A man forces my childhood, from the inside. He holds the world in his hand. He conducts the ruptures. He crushes the boundaries, my connections. He controls, the violence. He organises, the destruction. He lives, there, beneath my belly, in the fiery magma, its lava and its compost. His face is featureless. His nails are black. His muscles are made of stone. His gestures are precise. He applies, a method. He pierces, cleaves and drains. He drills, excavates and eviscerates. He deforms and amplifies. He knocks down and denatures. My earth shifts and is laid open. She is, a physical compound, of gas, of rubble, of warm crust and of bubbles. She rumbles. I carve her out her humming. I lose the sky. I enter into the war. I am mingled. She is brutal. I resist. I think about my body falling from the rocks. I lose the light, the white lines. I become unbalanced.’ 23. ‘My childhood is assassinated. I lose the origin. The earth disappears with my secrets. I enter into strange and foreign movements.’ 24. ‘One should realise that there is a violence to the loss of one’s history, but



Nomadic Vitalities 179

there’s also a truth, it’s visible, to leave and to see oneself leave is also to gain a response to one’s questions.’ 25. ‘a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 420). 26. ‘I compel my memory. I begin my life. I enter into fear. I reconstruct, the void. I fill in the gaps. I rebuild the walls. I double my life. I falsify the real. I climb, the foundations. I remember. I learn. I reunite opposing aspects of time within a single instant. The earthquake is nothing.’ 27. ‘I build. I make. I construct. I trace my route.’ 28. ‘Losing, one’s childhood. Losing one’s country. Taking, another language, an interpretation. I am traversed and renewed.’ 29. ‘I become without Algiers. I become without childhood. I become without connections, submitted to the noise and to the violent puff of air. I become a shadow without light.’ 30. ‘I run beyond my own boundaries. I am no longer afraid. I know strength, incredible. I become, condensed. I leave my fragility behind.’ 31. ‘I know my earth, initial. My knowledge is sensual. I know her first shape, her lines, her topography. From now on I know her rhythm, a blaze. She is linked, to childhood. She becomes eternal. The earthquake shatters without annihilating. It damages. It destroys. It is sinister. It increases. It conceals my childhood without truly taking it away. It congeals underneath the stones. My earth churns, at the same time. She is, in depth. There remains, something. There remains a name, a trace, a vestige.’ 32. ‘I learn to be a woman. I leave my childhood behind.’ 33. See Vassallo 2012: 57–89, and Vassallo 2013, for exploration of the relationship between embodiment and environment in Bouraoui’s later texts, Poupée Bella and Mes mauvaises pensées. 34. ‘without a name’. 35. ‘It is I who truly departs. I move towards Algeria without Arslan. I become detached from him. I create a boundary. I move towards my earth.’ 36. ‘My earth reappears, along with the birds that fly towards the sea, an iridescent stripe. They follow an invisible path, drawn, in the opposite direction to the migratory flux.’ 37. ‘force of the world’. 38. ‘With the nomad [. . .] it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 421). 39. ‘Writing is my real country, the only one I truly live in, the only territory I command.’ 40. ‘It is I, then, who truly departs. My journey is eternal. I move towards my memory.’

180

The Becoming of the Body

41. ‘My memory is everything. It transmits. It recounts. It perpetuates [. . .] My memory is a permanent place, a reality without vestiges.’ 42. ‘It is true that every work of art is a monument, but here the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations that owe their reservation only to themselves and that provide the event with the compound that celebrates it. The monument’s action is not memory but fabulation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167–8, original italics). 43. ‘My earth reappears along with the first voices. She is. My memory knows. My hands will recognise.’ 44. Selao 2005 considers this notion of inventing another world in relation to the operations of autobiography and testimony in Garçon manqué. 45. It is interesting to note that it is not until La Vie heureuse, about halfway through her textual production, that Bouraoui explicitly addresses the question of sexuality (and that from this point onwards, she writes lesbian, or queer sexuality within Western spaces). Undeniably, because of the autofictional nature of her work, there is a tangible, historical explanation for this: her own sexual discovery coincides with her move to France at a certain stage of her life. But this should not be taken to suggest that the West is presented as entirely liberal and accepting of a spectrum of sexualities. Writing, as we shall see, becomes a means to counter the constraints upon sexuality that are imposed by heteropatriarchal structures of oedipalisation, as they have been symbolically constructed by a specifically Western tradition of psychoanalysis. 46. ‘There is no more homosexual subject, but homosexual productions of desire, and homosexual assemblages that produce utterances, proliferating everywhere, e.g. S&M and cross-dressing, in sexual relations as well as in political struggles. [. . .] We understand better how Hocquenghem can be everywhere on the spiral and say all at once: homosexual desire is specific, there are homosexual utterances, but homosexuality is nothing, it’s just a word, and yet let’s take it literally, let’s pass necessarily through it, to make it yield all the otherness it contains – and this otherness is not the unconscious of psychoanalysis, but the progression of a future sexual becoming’ (Deleuze 2004a: 287–8). 47. ‘Homosexuality is just a word [. . .] To say that one is homosexual is to be catalogued by one’s sexuality, and that disturbs me deeply. Homosexuality isn’t an identity. I don’t think that desire and sexuality can be dissociated from love.’ 48. ‘I run. The snow encircles me. I don’t stop. I’m excited. My skin burns. I feel desire in my belly. A desire that rests on nothing, nourished by my flesh. Nothing to do with Saint-Malo, nor Antoine, nor Arnaud, nor those unknown figures I kiss in my dreams. Nothing to do with Zurich, nor Olivier nor Michel, nor that boy who’s younger than me, Gil, who



Nomadic Vitalities 181

watches me in the high school corridors. Nothing to do with the television, nor anonymous bodies nor pornographic images. It’s desire without object, without reality, linked to the forest, to the snow, to silence. I no longer feel my legs. I am sad and happy. I am alone and invaded. I want to laugh and to cry. I fall in love, I think, without recognising the face of the one I love suddenly more than myself.’ 49. ‘desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures – an always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its “gigantism”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 322). 50. ‘Diane doesn’t replace my mother. That isn’t what it’s like between girls. It’s something else. It’s not the memory of childhood, the smell of skin and milk, the soft voice that sends you to sleep, the hands that care for you. That isn’t what it is, loving a girl. It doesn’t replace anything. It isn’t nostalgic.’ 51. See Cairns 2002a for an analysis of identification and difference in representations of lesbian desire in recent French literature. See also Cairns 2002b for further theoretical, political and cultural perspectives on questions of gay and lesbian identity in France. 52. ‘You’re no longer a girl with a girl. You don’t retrieve yourself in her. There’s no sense of fulfilment or lack. It’s more than that. It doesn’t have a history. It doesn’t have a past.’ 53. ‘It’s irresistible, loving a girl. The body vanishes.’ 54. The notion of the plasticity of lesbian desire occurs also in the work of Judith Butler (1993: 88–9), in particular in her theorisation of the lesbian phallus. If Butlerian desire also challenges the Oedipal in its reconfiguration of melancholic gendering through the foreclosure of homosexuality, it nonetheless still ultimately depends upon lack, meaning that desire is conceived as reactive rather than a positive, connective force. 55. ‘there’s only my body, there’s only my desire [. . .] I’m looking for someone, I’m looking for a girl’. 56. ‘How long will it take to find? To become what I am?’ 57. ‘I search. I search for the woman of my life in the night. I search, in the forest. I search, under the waves. I search beyond the dunes. I have a destiny of love. I have several lives. I have several bodies beneath my body.’ 58. ‘We all have the same desire and I’m not afraid of that.’ 59. ‘I want to go into Moon, to dance with a woman disguised as a man. I want to go into a boys’ backroom.’ 60. ‘I am in Julien’s body’; ‘There’s a slippage of desire. I would so love to be Julien.’ 61. ‘I can feel desire, imagining him with men. It’s my body that I place in the scene. Julien’s nothing more than a support.’ 62. ‘I am in a homosexual becoming, just as I am in the book that is becoming.

182

The Becoming of the Body

Every time it’s a mechanics of love. Every time it’s the deconstruction of a system. I’m no longer as I was. I no longer write as I did.’ 63. ‘I can still change the subject.’ 64. ‘There is no homosexuality. It doesn’t exist. Already, in words, invention occurs. Already, in writing, love unfurls.’ 65. ‘Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images’ (Deleuze 2006: 112). 66. ‘I saw there a form of transmission.’ 67. ‘I had the sense that loving relations had a connection to philosophy. There it was a question of reality and illusion.’ 68. ‘I was swimming in the illusion of an image that I had constructed from drawing images together, false images or falsified by my reveries.’ 69. ‘Discovering his writing I felt I was discovering the part of his history that linked him to me.’ 70. ‘I had the sense that writing had provoked these events.’ 71. ‘P. had loved me while reading me, I had desired him while spying on him.’ 72. ‘His images around my words made me think of his hands on my s­ houlders [. . .] I felt his body close to mine [. . .] I thought that writing had a connection to life, the word becoming the word of the flesh.’ 73. ‘We were linked by the weaving of words [. . .] The emails became more and more frequent, without ever disguising anything of the desire we might have had for one another.’ 74. ‘We would call each other several times during the evening, language becoming a refuge. It contained respiration, pauses, reprisals, slowness, all that breathing transports.’ 75. ‘I became aware of my body and of his, materialising the dreams of my winter. I didn’t think about Lausanne or our evening at the library. Our words had invented another history.’ 76. ‘I had the sense that words had prepared our gestures.’ 77. ‘I thought he had the physique of his missives.’ 78. ‘When I returned to Paris, I read his dissertation as if I were able to read his body. I learned from him, who he truly was.’ 79. ‘P. became a form of obsession, composed of my desire and the desire of others, or of what I imagine to be the desire of others.’ 80. ‘The town resembled my loving labyrinth, leading me even more astray from that point with the one I loved. I was suspended within the centre of desire imagined red, cochineal, purplish, as if I might have reproduced it on a drawing.’ 81. ‘We were as if suspended above everything else, in a single country which united our two countries, in a single body that united our two bodies.’ 82. ‘a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible’ (Deleuze 1986: 120). 83. ‘We were not only alive, we were within life, within that which was most beautiful and most uncertain, most fragile and most powerful.’

Concluding Thoughts

La philosophie a besoin d’une non-philosophie qui la comprend, elle a besoin d’une compréhension non-philosophique, comme l’art a besoin de non-art, et la science de non-science. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 205, original italics)1 In their collaborative work on the nature of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari delineate the fine lines between order and chaos in the ways in which we conceptualise the world and our place within it. Just a little order, they write, is a requirement to the prevention of absolute chaos. Nothing is more distressing than thought that escapes itself. Thought perpetually slips away from our minds, half-formed notions, forgotten fragments. Our minds pulse with sudden ideas, just as they then fade away, impressions appearing and disappearing in infinite variabilities. It is because we constantly lose our ideas that we endeavour to hold onto them somehow, to fix the mind, to order associations, to form opinions, to create systems through which to harness the jumble of impressions in our minds. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the association of ideas provides us with protective rules (resemblance, contiguity and causality) which help us to order our ideas, ‘empêchant notre “fantaisie” (le délire, la folie) de parcourir l’univers dans l’instant pour y engendrer des chevaux ailés et des dragons de feu’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 189).2 This is how we form opinions, Deleuze and Guattari explain, but philosophy and art (and science too) require something more. In their different ways, they require us to unground ourselves and to plunge into chaos. For Deleuze, as we have seen, art acts as a crucial counterpoint to philosophy in understanding the world. Emerging from within chaos and endowed with a capacity to unfurl further the vitality of experience, art and philosophy are allied, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, in ‘their capacity to ride the waves of a vibratory universe 183

184

The Becoming of the Body

without direction or purpose [. . .], to enlarge the universe by enabling its potential to be otherwise, to be framed through concepts and affects’ (Grosz 2008: 24). A Deleuzian philosophy of dynamism has been crucial to this project in its engagement with chaos, with the infinite, and with pushing at the very edges of thought. For, in many ways, this book has been motivated by the idea of unleashing thought. In its study of the female body in contemporary women’s writing in French, in reading literature and philosophy together, it has sought to open out new ways of thinking about and theorising experiences and expressions of the body. The works of Nothomb, Devi, Darrieussecq and Bouraoui share similar concerns and anxieties about contemporary female corporeality and they elaborate similar visions of the dynamic possibilities of becoming. Their writing by no means projects a particular form of feminism, nor do they, as a collective, provide a coherent set of feminist principles. The aim of this book has nonetheless been to illuminate, from a feminist perspective, the critical possibilities of thinking and expressing, through art, the body becoming otherwise. The authors studied in this volume shift the terms of engagement for thinking about the female body in feminist paradigms. Writing in an environment characterised by complex, multilayered and ambivalent attitudes to feminism, they are no longer merely motivated by reclaiming female voices, consolidating female identities and reinhabiting female bodies. Writing in an increasingly globalised and virtual world, they are drawn to deterritorialisations. These authors explore subjectivity as a dynamic mode of passage, the body in perpetual becoming, the flux and folds of consciousness. From a feminist perspective, they provide a means of thinking through the constitution of the transcendent subject, the constructedness of molar roles as they emerge in relation to hierarchies of gender and sexuality, the fixity of identity within particular forms of the body. In response, they offer an aesthetics of unravelling: making a Body without Organs and collapsing subject into infinity in Nothomb, becoming otherwise and transforming the space in-between in Devi, simulating the posthuman body and enfolding consciousness within the pleats of the universe in Darrieussecq, becoming nomadic and inventing a future flow of sexual becoming in Bouraoui. These authors are no longer merely reappropriating or rearticulating the body. They stretch its very contours, they push at its boundaries. Rather than ask what a body is, they experiment endlessly with what a body can do. As several thinkers have noted, drawing on Deleuzian philosophy as a feminist carries a certain degree of risk, and questions undoubtedly



Concluding Thoughts 185

remain. Not all of these articulations of the female body in becoming are necessarily that helpful to feminist work. Though Nothomb’s autofictional universe depicts recovery from anorexia, images of the anorexic body persist across her work. Though anorexia can, at best, be read as a micro-politics of protest, it nonetheless works within a patriarchal logic in which beauty and illness take on political meanings. And in its drift towards depletion and, inevitably, death, anorexia is a clear example of the impossibility in Deleuzian philosophy of locating the limit, and, in spite of a philosophy that revolves around vitality, of sustaining any sense of liveability. Similarly, in Devi’s writing, Mouna’s becoming-dog and Ève’s becoming-lioness unravel the body in ways that disable as much as they may enable, slipping dangerously into abjection and violence. If these particular articulations resist positive feminist interpretation, they nonetheless provide crucial examples of the kinds of insidious as well as explicit power structures that endure in contemporary society, that continue to shape our (gendered) experiences of the body and that require us to find new ways of thinking and experiencing ourselves. They also valuably expose the limitations and risks of a Deleuzian philosophy for a feminist theorisation of the body, and invite us to continue to rethink our assumptions anew, to temper Deleuzian positions by engaging them with other philosophies, other texts. This book has been written with the sense that reading literature and philosophy together allows for a kind of cross-fertilisation of ideas, an openness to thought and to what might emerge from within the reading encounter. Reading Deleuzian philosophy in and through these four authors offers ways of thinking about the body unbound, and of continuing to invent and think the body into the future. It insists, then, upon the unleashing of thought as a political and ethical imperative to the conceptualisation of corporeality, a means of allowing the body to become otherwise and differently. Peter Hallward has argued that a Deleuzian philosophy of deterritorialisation, dissipation and flight cannot be harnessed as a means to counter effectively the structures of exploitation and domination that persist in contemporary society. Accordingly, he argues that ‘Deleuze’s work is essentially indifferent to the politics of this world’, dealing as it does with virtual differences rather than actual others (Hallward 2006: 162). A Deleuzian philosophy in and by itself may well remain evanescent. But reading Deleuze with these authors, and with a feminist perspective, makes space for political engagement. It also makes space for thinking about the female body in terms that bring creative experiment and the spaces of the virtual ever closer to our actual world. Rather than the creative realm of art remaining a place of evanescent experiment, each of these authors

186

The Becoming of the Body

seeks in some way to open out the fluidity of encounters between art and world. In Nothomb’s autofictional work, writing becomes an act that sutures the mind and body. For Devi, polyphonic encounters form lines of flight that cross through creativity and embodiment. Darrieussecq’s writing captures the very relations between thought and sensation on the page. In Bouraoui’s writing, there is a perpetual interlacing of the actual and the virtual. Illuminating points of contact and friction at the intersection of Deleuzian philosophy and feminism, this is writing that unleashes thought, that sets in motion a vital and vibrant experimentation with the shapes and lines of the body, and that makes space for engagement with dynamic modes of thinking, writing – and experiencing – the becoming of the body into the future. N OT E S 1. ‘Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 218, original italics). 2. ‘preventing our “fantasy” (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 201–2).

Works Cited

Allison, Maggie, and Angela Kershaw (eds) (2011), Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French, Bern: Peter Lang. Allison, Maggie, and Imogen Long (eds) (2013), Women Matter/Femmes matières, Bern: Peter Lang. Allwood, Gill (1998), French Feminisms: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Theory, London: UCL Press. Amanieux, Laureline (2005), Amélie Nothomb: L’Éternelle affamée, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2009), Récits siamois: Identité et personnage dans l’œuvre d’Amélie Nothomb, Paris: Albin Michel. Angelo, Adrienne (2010), ‘Vision, voice, and the female body: Nina Bouraoui’s sites/sights of resistance’, Francophone Women Between Visibility and Invisibility, ed. Cybelle H. McFadden and Sandrine F. Teixidor, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 77–98. –– (2011), ‘Sujet buvard, sujet bavard: Nina Bouraoui’s words to say it’, Women’s Self-Narrative Across the Francophone World, ed. Natalie Edwards, Christopher Hogarth and Amy L. Hubell, a special issue of Women in French Studies, 79–90. Angot, Christine (2008), Le Marché des amants, Paris: Seuil. –– (2011), Les Petits, Paris: Flammarion. Anon. (1999), ‘Nina Bouraoui: d’enfance’, Delirium, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Anon. (2000), ‘Nina Bouraoui: le visage algérien et la voix française’, fnac, 12 July, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Anon. (2005), ‘Un interview avec Nina Bouraoui: l’écriture est une ­pratique amoureuse’, 16 November, (last accessed 23 August 2009). Arnold, Markus (2011), ‘Contre-violence et corporalité chez des écrivaines mauriciennes anglophones et francophones contemporaines’, Écritures ­mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 217–38.

187

188

The Becoming of the Body

Arsic, Branka (2008), ‘The experimental ordinary: Deleuze on eating and anorexic elegance’, Deleuze and Gender, ed. Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 34–59. Asibong, Andrew (2003), ‘Mulier Sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the sexual metamorphoses of “bare life”’, French Cultural Studies 14:2, 169–77. Asibong, Andrew, and Shirley Jordan (eds) (2009), Marie NDiaye: L’Étrangeté à l’œuvre, a special issue of Revue des Sciences Humaines 293:1. Atack, Margaret, and Phil Powrie (eds) (1990), Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Aubel, Damien (2010), ‘Nina Bouraoui: l’écriture au corps’, Transfuge 39 (April), 40–7. Badiou, Alain (1994), ‘Gilles Deleuze: the fold, Leibniz and the baroque’, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, New York: Routledge, pp. 51–69. –– (1997), La Clameur de l’être, Paris: Hachette. Baetens, Jan (1999), ‘La crise des romans ou le crise du roman’, Écritures contemporaines 2: États du roman contemporain, Revue des Lettres Modernes, ed. Dominique Viart and Jan Baetens, Paris: Minard, pp. 9–16. Baetens, Jan, and Ari J. Blatt (eds) (2008), Writing and the Image Today, a special issue of Yale French Studies 114. Baetens, Jan, and Dominique Viart (eds) (1999), Écritures contemporaines 2: États du roman contemporain, Revue des Lettres Modernes, Paris: Minard. Bainbrigge, Susan, and Jeannette den Toonder (eds) (2003), Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, New York: Peter Lang. Bannerjee, Rohini (2011a), ‘L’espace littéraire mauricien: l’hétérolinguisme dans l’œuvre francophone d’Ananda Devi’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15:5 (December), 505–12. –– (2011b), ‘La construction identitaire dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 79–94. Barnet, Marie-Claire, and Shirley Jordan (eds) (2010a), Women and Space, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 93 (Winter). –– (2010b), ‘Introduction’, Women and Space, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Shirley Jordan, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 93 (Winter), 3–6. Barnet, Marie-Claire, and Edward Welch (eds) (2007), Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Berglund Hill, Elizabeth (2009), ‘The violence of desire in Amélie Nothomb’s novels’, Women in French Studies 17, 103–15. Best, Victoria, and Martin Crowley (2007), The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Bordo, Susan (1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press.



Works Cited 189

Bouraoui, Nina (1991), La Voyeuse interdite, Paris: Gallimard. –– (1992), Poing mort, Paris: Gallimard. –– (1995), Forbidden Vision, trans. Melissa Marcus, New York: Station Hill. –– (1996), Le Bal des murènes, Paris: Fayard. –– (1998), L’Âge blessé, Paris: Fayard. –– (1999), Le Jour du séisme, Paris: Stock. –– (2000), Garçon manqué, Paris: Stock. –– (2002), La Vie heureuse, Paris: Stock. –– (2004), Poupée Bella, Paris: Stock. –– (2005), Mes mauvaises pensées, Paris: Stock. –– (2007a), Avant les hommes, Paris: Stock. –– (2007b), Tomboy, trans. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. –– (2008), Appelez-moi par mon prénom, Paris: Stock. –– (2010), Nos baisers sont des adieux, Paris: Stock. –– (2011), Sauvage, Paris: Stock. Boyle, Claire (2007), Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France, Oxford: Legenda. Bragard, Véronique (2000), ‘Cris de femmes maudites, brûlures du silence: la symbolique des éléments fondamentaux dans l’œuvre d’Ananda Devi’, Notre Librairie 146 (December), 66–73. –– (2001), ‘Eaux obscures du souvenir: femme et mémoire dans l’œuvre d’Ananda Devi’, Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practice, ed. Kathleen Ghyssels, Isabel Hoving and Maggie Ann Bowers, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 187–99. –– (2003), Voyages into Coolitude: A Comparative and Textual Analysis of Kala Pani Women’s Cross-Cultural Creative Memory. Doctoral thesis, (last accessed 23 July 2009). –– (2008) Transoceanic Dialogues: Coolitude in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Literatures, Bern: Peter Lang. Bragard, Véronique, and Karen Lindo (2011), ‘Débris d’humanité: altérité et autodestruction dans Ève de ses décombres d’Ananda Devi’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 239–48. Bragard, Véronique, and Srilata Ravi (eds) (2011a), Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, Paris: L’Harmattan. –– (2011b), ‘Penser l’altérité dans la littérature mauricienne au féminin’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 11–18. Braidotti, Rosi (1994a), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. –– (1994b), ‘Toward a new nomadism: feminist Deleuzian track; or, metaphysics and metabolism’, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed.

190

The Becoming of the Body

Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, New York: Routledge, pp. 159–86. –– (1996), ‘Cyberfeminism with a difference’, New Formations 29 (Autumn), 9–25,

(last accessed 20 March 2013). –– (2000), ‘Teratologies’, Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 156–72. –– (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press. –– (2006), ‘Posthuman, all too human: towards a new process ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society 23:7–8, 197–208. –– (2008), ‘The politics of life as bios/zoe’, Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience and Technology, ed. Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, Seattle: University of Washington Press. –– (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bruch, Hilde (1973), Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within, New York: Basic Books. –– (1978), The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa, London: Open Books. Buchanan, Ian, and John Marks (2000), ‘Introduction’, Deleuze and Literature, ed. Ian Buchanan and John Marks, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–13. Burgelin, Claude, Isabelle Grell, and Roger-Yves Roche (eds) (2010), Autofiction(s): Colloque de Cérisy, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Busnel, François, and Thierry Gandillot (2001), ‘Deux femmes la mort dans l’âme’, L’Express, 23 August, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. –– (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. –– (2004), Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge. Caine, Philippa (2003), ‘Entre-deux inscription of female corporeality in the writing of Amélie Nothomb’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeannette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 71–84. –– (2009), ‘Redefining the boundaries of corpo-reality for “la femme” in Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissances des fantômes’, Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, ed. MargaretAnne Hutton, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 45–64. Cairns, Lucille (2002a), Lesbian Desire in Post-1968 French Literature, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. –– (2011), Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in French, London: Legenda. –– (ed.) (2002b), Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France, Oxford: Peter Lang.



Works Cited 191

Célestin, Roger, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds) (2003), Beyond French Feminisms, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chadderton, Helena (2010), ‘Identity negotiation in Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Bébé and Le Pays’, Une et divisible? Plural Identities in Modern France, ed. Barbara Lebrun and Jill Lovecy, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 197–210. –– (2012), Marie Darrieussecq’s Textual Worlds: Self, Society, Language, Bern: Peter Lang. –– (2013), ‘Experience and Experiment in the Work of Marie Darrieussecq’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 183–95. Chadderton, Helena, and Gill Rye (eds) (2012), Marie Darrieussecq, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 98 (Spring). Cheref, Abdelkader (2010), Gender and Identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women’s Literature, London: I. B. Tauris. Cixous, Hélène (1975), ‘Le rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc 61, 39–54. –– (1976), ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paul Cohen, Signs 1:4 (Summer), 875–93. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément (1975), La Jeune Née, Paris: 10/18. –– (1986), The Newly-Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Colebrook, Claire (2000), ‘Is sexual difference a problem?’, Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, pp. 110–27. –– (2009), ‘On the very possibility of queer theory’, Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 11–23. Colonna, Vincent (2004), Autofictions et autres mythomanies littéraires, Auch: Tristram. Compan, Magali (2007), ‘Cette terre qui me ressemble: re-writing the island, re-writing the self in Ananda Devi’s Pagli’, Land and Landscape in Francographic Literature: Remapping Uncertain Territories, ed. Magali Compan and Katarzyna Pieprzak, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 41–59. Concannon, Amy, and Kerry Sweeney (2004a), ‘Entretien: White’, March, (last accessed 7 November 2012). –– (2004b), ‘Interview: White, March, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Conley, Verena Andermatt (2009), ‘Thirty-six thousand forms of love: the queering of Deleuze and Guattari’, Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 24–36. Connon, Daisy (2010), Subjects Not-at-Home: Forms of the Uncanny in the Contemporary French Novel, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, Eugène Savitzkaya, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

192

The Becoming of the Body

Corcoran, Patrick (2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cottille-Foley, Nora (2002), ‘Métaphores, métamorphoses et retournements symboliques dans Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq: mais qui finit à l’abbatoir?’, Women in French Studies 10, 188–206. Cowles, Mary Jane (2011), ‘Close encounters of the abject kind: the intercultural female body in Amélie Nothomb’s Japan’, Women in French Studies 19, 94–107. Cruickshank, Ruth (2009), Fin de Millénnaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damlé, Amaleena (2009a), ‘Death and the maiden: murder and eroticism in the work of Amélie Nothomb’, Aimer et mourir: Love, Death, and Women’s Lives in Texts of French Expression, ed. Eilene Hoft-March and Judith Holland Sarnecki, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 98–126. –– (2009b), ‘Phantasmal relics: psychoanalytical and deconstructive ghosts in Moi, l’interdite and Pagli by Ananda Devi’, Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture, ed. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 229–40. –– (2011), ‘Nomadic trajectories: postfeminism and contemporary women’s writing in French’, Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French, ed. Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 133–50. –– (2012), ‘Posthuman encounters: technology, gender and embodiment in recent feminist thought and in the work of Marie Darrieussecq’, Hybrids and Monsters, ed. Lucile Desblache with Simon Edwards, a special issue of Comparative and Critical Studies 9, 303–18. –– (2013a), ‘The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 113–26. –– (2013b), ‘Towards a poetics of reconciliation: humans and animals in Ananda Devi’s writing’, The Postcolonial Human, ed. Jane Hiddleston, a special issue of International Journal for Francophone Studies 15:3–4 (February), 497–516. –– (2013c), ‘The wild becoming of childhood: writing as monument in Nina Bouraoui’s Sauvage’, Writing Childhood in Post-War Women’s Writing, ed. Gill Rye, a special issue of Forum for Modern Languages 49:2 (April), 166–74. –– (2013d), ‘The mutant metamorphic subject: femininity and embodiment in Virginie Despentes’s King Kong théorie’, Experiment and Experience: Women’s Writing in France 2000–2010, ed. Gill Rye with Amaleena Damlé, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 1–27. –– (2014, forthcoming), ‘“Multiple et changeante”: amour, connaissance et fragilité dans Nos baisers sont des adieux de Nina Bouraoui’, Aventures et



Works Cited 193

expériences littéraires: Écritures des femmes au début du vingt-et-unième siècle, ed. Amaleena Damlé with Gill Rye, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Damlé, Amaleena, and Gill Rye (eds) (2013a), Women’s Writing in TwentyFirst Century France: Life as Literature, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Damlé, Amaleena and Gill Rye (2013b), ‘Introduction’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 3–16. Damlé, Amaleena, with Gill Rye (eds) (2014, forthcoming), Aventures et expériences littéraires: Écritures des femmes au début du vingt-et-unième siècle, ed. Amaleena Damlé with Gill Rye, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Dandrieu, Laurent (2006) [2001], ‘Le grand marasme de la littérature contemporaine’, March, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Darrieussecq, Marie (1996), Truismes, Paris: P.O.L. –– (1998), Pig Tales, trans. Linda Coverdale, London: Faber and Faber. –– (1999a), Naissance des fantômes, Paris: P.O.L. –– (1999b), Le Mal de mer, Paris: P.O.L. –– (1999c), My Phantom Husband, trans. Helen Stevenson, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2001a), Bref séjour chez les vivants, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2001b), Breathing Underwater, trans. Linda Coverdale, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2002), Le Bébé, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2003a), White, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2003b), A Brief Stay with the Living, trans. Ian Monk, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2005), Le Pays, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2006), Zoo, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2007), Tom est mort, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2009), Tom Is Dead, trans. Lia Hills, Melbourne: Text Publishing. –– (2010), Rapport de police: Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2011), Clèves, Paris: P.O.L. –– (2013), All the Way, trans. Penny Hueston, Melbourne: Text Publishing. David, Michel (2006), Amélie Nothomb, le symptôme graphomane, Paris: L’Harmattan. Davis, Colin (2010), Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Davis, Colin, and Elizabeth Fallaize (2000), French Fiction in the Mitterand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Decker, Jacques de (2003a), ‘Preface: Nothomb avec un b comme Belgique’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeannette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. x–xv. –– (2003b), ‘Preface: Nothomb with a b as in Belgium’, trans. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeannette den Toonder, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and

194

The Becoming of the Body

Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeannette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. x–xv. Deleuze, Gilles (1953), Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. –– (1968), Différence et répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. –– (1969), Logique du sens, Paris: Minuit. –– (1983), Cinéma 1: L’Image mouvement, Paris: Minuit. –– (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. –– (1988), Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris: Minuit. –– (1991), Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press. –– (1993a), Critique et clinique, Paris: Minuit. –– (1993b), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London: The Athlone Press. –– (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press. –– (1996), ‘L’actuel et le virtuel’, Dialogues, Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Paris: Flammarion, pp. 177–85. –– (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. –– (2002), L’Île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, Paris: Minuit. –– (2004a), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e). –– (2004b) [1990], The Logic of Sense, London: The Athlone Press. –– (2006) [1987], ‘The actual and the virtual’, trans. Eliot Ross Albert, Dialogues II, London: The Athlone Press, pp. 112–15. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1972/3), Capitalisme et schizophrénie I: L’Anti-Œdipe, Paris: Minuit. –– (1975), Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, Paris: Minuit. –– (1980), Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit. –– (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. –– (1991), Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris: Minuit. –– (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, London: Verso. –– (2004a) [1984], Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum. –– (2004b) [1988], A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet (1996) [1977], Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion. –– (2006) [1987], Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: The Athlone Press.



Works Cited 195

Delphy, Christine (2001), L’Énnemi principal 2: Penser le genre, Paris: Éditions Syllepse. Denfeld, Réné (1996), The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order, New York: Warner Books. Derrida, Jacques (1993), Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail de deuil et la nouvelle internationale, Paris: Galilée. Desblache, Lucile, with Simon Edwards (eds) (2012), Hybrids and Monsters, a special issue of Comparative and Critical Studies 9:3. Despentes, Virginie (2006), King Kong théorie, Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle. Détrez, Christine (2013), Femmes du Maghreb, une écriture à soi, Paris: La Dispute. Détrez, Christine, and Anne Simon (2006), À leur corps defendant: Les Femmes à l’épreuve d’un nouveau ordre moral, Paris: Seuil. Devi, Ananda (1989), Rue la poudrière, Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines. –– (1993), Le Voile de Draupadi, Paris: L’Harmattan. –– (2000), Moi, l’interdite, Paris: Dapper. –– (2001), Pagli, Paris: Gallimard. –– (2006), Ève de ses décombres, Paris: Gallimard. –– (2007), Indian Tango, Paris: Gallimard. –– (2009), Le Sari vert, Paris: Gallimard. –– (2011a), Les Hommes qui me parlent, Paris: Gallimard. –– (2011b), Indian Tango, trans. Jean Anderson, New York: Host Publications. Driscoll, Catherine (2000), ‘The woman in process: Deleuze, Kristeva and feminism’, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 64–85. Durand, Alain-Philippe (2008), ‘Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales discussion’, 7 January, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Edwards, Natalie (2011), Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Francophone Women’s Autobiography, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Edwards, Natalie, and Christopher Hogarth (eds) (2008), Gender and Displacement: ‘Home’ in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. –– (2010), This ‘Self’ Which Is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Edwards, Natalie, Amy Hubbell, and Ann Miller (eds) (2011), Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Effertz, Julia (2008), ‘Le prédateur, c’est moi: l’écriture de la terre et la violence féminine dans l’œuvre d’Ananda Devi’, Violence in French and Francophone Literature and Film, ed. James Day, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 71–82.

196

The Becoming of the Body

El-Nossery, Nevine (2012), Témoignages fictionnels au féminin: Une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne, Amsterdam: Rodopi. El-Nossery, Nevine, and Anna Rocca (eds) (2011), Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin: Enracinements et renégociations, Sarrebruck: Éditions universitaires européennes. Fallaize, Elizabeth (1993), French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction, Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press. Faludi, Susan (1992), Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, New York: Anchor Books. Farhoud, Samira (2013), Interventions autobiographiques des femmes du Maghreb, Oxford: Peter Lang. Faubion, James D. (1998), ‘Introduction’, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Michel Foucault, ed. James D. Faubion, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. xi–xli. Favre, Isabelle (2000), ‘Marie Darrieussecq ou lard de la calorie vide’, Women in French Studies 8, 164–76. Fernandes, Martine (2005), ‘Confessions d’une enfant du siècle: Nina Bouraoui ou la batârde dans Garçon manqué et La Vie heureuse’, L’Esprit Créateur 45:1 (Spring), 67–78.  Flieger, Jerry Aline (2000), ‘Becoming-woman: Deleuze, Schreber and ­molecular identification’, Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 38–63. Foucault, Michel (1994), Dits et écrits, Paris: Gallimard. Fraser, Nancy, and Sandra Lee Bartky (1992), Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Freedman, Jane, and Carrie Tarr (eds) (2000), Women, Immigration and Identities in France, Oxford: Berg. Fülöp, Erika (2011), ‘Amélie’s horse: writing as jouissance in Nothomb’, Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World, ed. Erika Fülöp and Adrienne Angelo, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 204–24. Fulton, Dawn (2001), ‘Review’, The French Review 74:4, 836–7. Fuss, Diana (1989), Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York: Routledge. Gaudet, Jeannette (2001), ‘Dishing the dirt: metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes’, Women in French Studies 9, 181–92. –– (2002), ‘“Des livres sur la liberté”: conversation avec Marie Darrieussecq’, Dalhousie French Studies 59 (Summer), 108–18. Geffroy, Lucie (2007), ‘Quand Nina Bouraoui parle des hommes’, Magazine 360˚, 11 June, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon (2009), Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



Works Cited 197

Gillis, Stacy, Gillian Howrie, and Rebecca Munford (eds) (2004), Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Githire, Njeri R. (2009), ‘The semiotics of (not)-eating: fasting, anorexia and hunger strike in Ananda Devi’s Le Voile de Draupadi’, Nottingham French Studies 48:1 (Spring), 82–93. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994a), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. –– (1994b), ‘A thousand tiny sexes: feminism and rhizomatics’, Gilles Deleuze and The Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, New York: Routledge, pp. 187–210. –– (1995), Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge. –– (2008), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press. –– (ed.) (1999), Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Future, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingstone (eds) (1995), Posthuman Bodies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hallward, Peter (2006), Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso. Hargreaves, Alec G., Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy (eds) (2010), Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-monde, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Harrington, Katharine (2006), ‘Writing between borders: nomadism and its implications for contemporary French and francophone studies’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 10:2 (April), 117–25. Harrow, Susan (ed.) (2010), New Ekphrastic Poetics, a special issue of French Studies 64:3. Havercroft, Barbara, Pascal Michelucci, and Pascal Riendeau (eds) (2010), Le Roman français de l’extrême contemporain: Écritures, engagements, énonciation, Quebec: Nota Bene. Havercroft, Barbara, and Michael Sheringham (eds) (2012), Fixxions de soi, a special issue of Revue critique de fixxion contemporaine/Critical Review of Contemporary French Fixxion 4 (June). Hawkins, Peter (2007), The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean, New York: Lexington. Heywood, Leslie (1996), Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. –– (ed.) (2006), The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopaedia of ThirdWave Feminism, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hocquenghem, Guy (1974), L’Après-Mai des faunes, Paris: Grasset. Holmes, Diana (1996), French Women’s Writing 1848–1994, London: The Athlone Press.

198

The Becoming of the Body

–– (2005), ‘The return to romance: love stories in recent French women’s writing’, A New Generation: Sex, Gender and Creativity in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, ed. Gill Rye, a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur 45:1 (Spring), 97–109. –– (2013), ‘What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 30–43. Holmes, Diana, and David Looseley (eds) (2012), Imagining the Popular in Contemporary French Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holmes, Diana, and David Platten (eds) (2010), Story-Telling in Contemporary French Fiction: Le Prêt-à-Penser and Reading Pleasure, a special issue of French Cultural Studies 21:4 (November). Holmes, Martha, and Alain-Philippe Durand (2011), ‘Mon métier, mon arme, mon plaisir, mon rôle, c’est d’écrire: pas plus et pas moins’, 9 June, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Howells, Christina (ed.) (2004), French Women Philosophers, A Contemporary Reader: Subjectivity, Identity, Alterity, London: Routledge. Hutton, Margaret-Anne (ed.) (2009), Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, Oxford: Peter Lang. Irigaray, Luce (1974), Speculum de l’autre femme, Paris: Minuit. –– (1977), Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, Paris: Minuit. –– (1985a), Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. –– (1985b), This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jaccomard, Hélène (2003), ‘Self in fabula: Amélie Nothomb’s three autobiographical works’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 11–23. –– (2004), ‘“Cours, cours Nina!”: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui’, Essays in French Literature 41 (November), 43–61. Jardine, Alice (1985), Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jeannelle, Jean-Louis (2009), Autofiction en théorie, Paris: Transparence. Jeannelle, Jean-Louis, and Catherine Viollet, with Isabelle Grell (eds) (2007), Genèse et autofiction, Louvain-La-Neuve: Academia-Bruylant. Jordan, Shirley (2004), Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Women’s Visions, Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives, Oxford: Peter Lang. –– (2005), ‘Un grand coup de pied dans le château de cubes’: formal experimentation in Marie Darrieussecq’s Bref séjour chez les vivants’, The Modern Language Review 100:1 (January), 51–67. –– (2007a), ‘Figuring out the family: family as everyday practice in contemporary French women’s writing’, Affaires de famille: The Family in



Works Cited 199

Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 39–58. –– (2007b), ‘New women’s writing and the feminist heritage in France’, Women’s Writing in Western Europe: Gender, Generation and Legacy, ed. Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 132–48. –– (2013), ‘État présent: autofiction in the feminine’, French Studies 67:1 (January), 76–84. –– (2014, forthcoming), Private Lives, Public Display: Intimacy and Excess in French Women’s Self-Narrative Experiment, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kemp, Anna (2010), Voices and Veils: Feminism and Islam in French Women’s Writing and Activism, Oxford: Legenda. –– (2012), ‘The child as artist in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres’, French Studies 66:1 (January), 54–67. –– (2013), ‘Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 237–50. Kemp, Simon (2008), ‘Darrieussecq’s mind’, French Studies 62:4 (October), 429–41. –– (2010), French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Kistnareddy, Ashwiny O. (2011), ‘Représenter l’altérité: le corps grotesque dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Ananda Devi’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérite, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 179–96. –– (2013a), ‘Rebelles, prostituées et meurtrières dans les romans d’Ananda Devi’, Rebelles et criminelles chez les écrivaines d’expression française, ed. Frédérique Chevillot and Colette Trout, Amsterdam: Rodopi. –– (2013b), ‘The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s Texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 127–40. Korzeniowska, Victoria B. (2003), ‘Bodies, space and meaning in Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et tremblements’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 39–49. Kristeva, Julia (1996), Sens et non-sens de la révolte: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I, Paris: Fayard. –– (2000), The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1966), Écrits, Paris: Seuil. –– (1978), Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre II: Le Moi dans la théorie

200

The Becoming of the Body

de Freud et dans la technique de la psychoanalyse 1954–1955, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, Paris: Seuil. –– (1991) [1988], The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, New York: W. W. Norton. –– (2007), Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton. Larkin, Áine (2011), ‘The ballet body beautiful: pleasure and pain in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres’, Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World, ed. Erika Fülöp and Adrienne Angelo, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 195–208. Lasserre, Anne, and Anne Simon (eds) (2008), Nomadismes des romancières contemporaines de langue française, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Laurens, Camille (1995), Philippe, Paris: P.O.L. Le Bris, Michel, and Jean Rouaud (eds) (2007), Pour une littérature-monde, Paris: Gallimard. Lebrun, Jean-Claude, and Claude Prévost (1990), Nouveaux territoires romanesques, Paris: Messidor. Lee, Mark D. (2010), Les Identités d’Amélie Nothomb: De l’invention médiatique aux fantasmes originaires, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Leek, Sara Elizabeth (2012), ‘“L’écriture qui saigne”: exile and wounding in the narratives of Nina Bouraoui and Linda Lê’, Contemporary Women’s Representations of Wounded Bodies and Minds, ed. Ana de Medeiros and Carine Fréville, a special issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies 15:2 (December), 237–55. Lejeune, Philippe (1975), Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil. Lionnet, Françoise (1989), Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, SelfPortraiture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. –– (1995), Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. –– (2011), ‘Cinq mètres d’ordre et de sagesse, cinq metres de jungle soyeuse: Ananda Devi’s unfurling art of fiction’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 283–314. –– (2012), Écritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie, Trou d’Eau douce: L’Atelier d’écriture. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih (eds) (2005), Minor Transnationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lorraine, Tamsin (1999), Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Macciocchi, Maria Antonietta (1978), Les Femmes et leurs maîtres, Paris: Bourgois. MacSween, Morag (1995), Anorexic Bodies: A Feminist and Sociological Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa, London: Routledge. Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo, Valérie (2011), ‘Les cris du corps dans quatre



Works Cited 201

romans mauriciens contemporains: démembrement et redéfinition du sujet’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 197–215. Malson, Helen (1998), The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa, New York: Routledge. Mann, Patricia S. (1994), Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Margaux, Kobialka (2004), La Création d’Amélie Nothomb à travers la psychanalyse, Paris: Le Manuscrit. Marks, John (1998), Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, London: Pluto Press. Marson, Magali (2006), ‘Carnalité et metamorphoses chez Ananda Devi’, Notre Libraire 163 (September–December), 64–9. May, Todd (2005), Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McEachern, Patricia A. (1998), Deprivation and Power: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. McFadden, Cybelle H., and Sandrine F. Teixidor (eds) (2010), Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility, New York: Peter Lang. McIlvanney, Siobhan (2004), ‘Double vision: the role of the visual and the visionary in Nina Bouraoui’s La Voyeuse interdite’, Research in African Literatures 35:4, 105–20. –– (2007), ‘“Il etait une fois . . .”: trauma and the fairytale in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres’, Representations of Trauma in French and Francophone Literature, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 81 (Winter), 19–28. Medeiros, Ana de, and Carine Fréville (eds) (2012), Contemporary Women’s Representations of Wounded Bodies and Minds, a special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies 15:2 (December). Meitinger, Serge (2008), ‘L’innocence meurtrière: humanité et animalité dans quelques récits d’Ananda Devi’, Francofonía 17, 161–78. Meuret, Isabelle (2006), L’Anorexie créatrice, Paris: Kincksieck. –– (2007), Writing Size Zero: Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary Work Literatures, Brussels: Peter Lang. Miller, Becky, and Martha Holmes (2001a), ‘Entretien’, December, (last accessed 20 March 2013). –– (2001b), ‘Interview’, December, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics, London: Methuen. –– (2008), ‘I am not a woman writer: about women, literature and feminist theory today’, Feminist Theory 9, 259–71. Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface (2001), ‘Entretien avec Ananda Devi: contre la culte de la différence’, Africultures, 1 February, (last accessed 3 March 2013). Morello, Nathalie, and Catherine Rodgers (eds) (2002a), Nouvelles écrivaines: Nouvelles voix?, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Morello, Nathalie, and Catherine Rodgers (2000b), ‘Introduction’, Nouvelles écrivaines: Nouvelles voix?, ed. Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 7–45. Motte, Warren (1999), Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. –– (2003), Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990, Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. –– (2008), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century, Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. Nadeau, Maurice (1989), ‘L’État des lieux’, Où va la littérature française, a special issue of La Quinzaine littéraire (16 May), 3–4. Nair, Nadini (2007), ‘The art of belonging’, Metro Plus Delhi, The Hindu, 18 October, (last accessed 3 March 2013). Nicolas, Alain (2001), ‘Marie et les cerveaux’, L’Humanité, 13 September, p. 8. Nigianni, Chrysanthi (2009), ‘Introduction’, Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–10. Nkonlak, Jules Romuald (2007), ‘Ananda Devi, Bessora, Angeline Solange Bonono: l’expression “littérature féminine” ne veut rien dire’, Quotidien Mutations, 5 January, (last accessed 22 June 2009). Nothomb, Amélie (1992), Hygiène de l’assassin, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (1993), Le Sabotage amoureux, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (1997), Attentat, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (1998), Mercure Paris: Albin Michel. –– (1999), Stupeur et tremblements, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2000), Métaphysique des tubes, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2001), Cosmétique de l’ennemi, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2002a), Robert des noms propres, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2002b), Fear and Trembling, trans. Adriana Hunter, New York: St. Martin’s Press. –– (2004a), Biographie de la faim, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2004b), The Character of Rain, trans. Timothy Bent, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2005), The Book of Proper Names, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2007a), Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2007b), The Life of Hunger, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Faber and Faber.



Works Cited 203

–– (2008), Le Fait du prince, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2009a), Le Voyage d’hiver, Paris: Albin Michel. –– (2009b), Tokyo Fiancée, trans. Alison Anderson, New York: Europa Editions. –– (2010), Hygiene and the Assassin, trans. Alison Anderson, New York: Europa Editions. –– (2011), Tuer le père, Paris: Albin Michel. O’Beirne, Emer (2006), ‘Navigating non-lieux in contemporary fiction: Houellebecq, Darrieussecq, Echenoz and Augé’, The Modern Language Review 101:2 (April), 388–401. O’Flaherty, Ailbhe (2011), ‘Every woman is an island? The island as an embodiment of female alterity in Mauritian women’s writing’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérite, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 43–60. Oliver, Kelly, and Lisa Walsh (eds) (2004), Contemporary French Feminism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olkowski, Dorothea (1999), Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press. –– (2000), ‘Body, knowledge and becoming-woman: morpho-logic in Deleuze and Irigaray’, Deleuze and Feminism, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 86–109. Orbach, Susie (1986), Hunger Strike, London: Faber and Faber. –– (2010) Bodies, London: Profile Books. Orlando, Valérie (1999), Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine (2007), Autofiction et dévoilement de soi, Montreal: XYZ Éditeur. Parisi, Luciana (2009), ‘The adventures of a sex’, Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 72–91. Patton, Paul (2000), Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge. Pries, Désirée (2003), ‘Piscina: gender identity in Métaphysique des tubes’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 24–35. Protevi, John (2001), Political Physics, London: The Athlone Press. Rabaté, Dominique, and Dominique Viart (2009), Écritures blanches, SaintÉtienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne. Rakocevic, Robert (2007), ‘Quelle politique de (la) crise d’après la critique littéraire française à partir de 1980? Une enquête bibliographique’, À ­ quoi bon la littérature?, a special issue of Trans: revue de littérature générale et comparée 4, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Ramharai, Vicram (2001), ‘Ananda Devi: repenser l’identité de la femme mauricienne’, Notre Librairie 146 (October–December), 7–10.

204

The Becoming of the Body

–– (2011), ‘Problématique de l’Autre et du Même dans l’œuvre d’Ananda Devi’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérite, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 61–78. Ravi, Srilata (2007), Rainbow Colours: Literary Ethno-Topographies of Mauritius, New York: Lexington. –– (2011), ‘Ananda Devi nous parle de ses romans, de ses personnages, de son écriture, des ses lecteurs . . .’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérite, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 271–81. –– (2013), Rethinking Global Mauritius: Essays on Mauritian Literatures and Cultures, Mauritius: L’Atelier d’écriture. Rice, Alison (2005), ‘Que faire du corps? La maîtrise de soi dans Robert des noms propres d’Amélie Nothomb, Nouvelles Études Francophones 20:2 (Autumn), 171–83. –– (2006), Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb, Lanham: Lexington Books. –– (2012), Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Robson, Kathryn (2004), ‘Virtual reality: the subject of loss in Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes and Régine Detambel’s La Chambre d’écho’, Australian Journal of French Studies 41:1, 3–15. Rodgers, Catherine (2001), ‘Aucune évidence: les truismes de Marie Darrieussecq’, Romance Studies 18:1 (June), 69–81. –– (2002), ‘Entrevoir l’absence des bords du monde dans les romans de Marie Darrieussecq’, Nouvelles écrivaines: Nouvelles voix?, ed. Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 83–103. –– (2003), ‘Nothomb’s anorexic beauties’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 50–63. –– (2009), ‘Between “white” and “blanc”: the margin of the fantastic in Marie Darrieussecq’s White’, Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, ed. Margaret-Anne Hutton, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 13–30. –– (2010), ‘Aux limites du moi, des mots et du monde: questions d’identité dans Le Pays de Marie Darrieussecq’, Le Roman français de l’extrême contemporain: Écritures, engagements, énonciations, ed. Barbara Havercroft, Pascal Michelucci and Pascal Riendeau, Quebec: Nota Bene, pp. 403–22. Roiphe, Katie (1994), The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Boston: Back Bay Books. Rye, Gill (2000), ‘Women’s writing’, Women in Contemporary France, ed. Abigail Gregory and Ursula Tidd, Oxford: Berg, pp. 133–51. –– (2001), Reading for Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant), Oxford: Peter Lang.



Works Cited 205

–– (2005a), ‘In uncertain terms: mothering without guilt in Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Mal de mer and Christine Angot’s Leonore, toujours’, A New Generation: Sex, Gender and Creativity in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, ed. Gill Rye, a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur 45:1 (Spring), 5–15. –– (2009a), Narratives of Mothering: Women’s Writing in Contemporary France, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. –– (2009b), ‘Marie Darrieussecq’s Le Pays: threshold worlds’, Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing, ed. Margaret-Anne Hutton, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 31–44. –– (ed.) (2002), Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, a special issue of Journal of Romance Studies 2:1 (Spring). –– (ed.) (2004), Hybrid Voices, Hybrid Texts: Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Millennium, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 68 (Fall). –– (ed.) (2005b), A New Generation: Sex, Gender and Creativity in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French, a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur 45:1 (Spring). Rye, Gill, with Amaleena Damlé (eds) (2013), Experiment and Experience: Women’s Writing in France 2000–2010, Bern: Peter Lang. Rye, Gill, and Carrie Tarr (eds) (2006), Focalising the Body in Contemporary Women’s Writing and Filmmaking in France, a special issue of Nottingham French Studies 45:3 (Autumn). Rye, Gill, and Michael Worton (eds) (2002a), Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s, Manchester: Manchester University Press. –– (2002b), ‘Introduction’, Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s, ed. Gill Rye and Michael Worton, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1–26. Sadoux, Marion (1999), ‘Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes: hesitating between fantasy and truth’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 7, 197–203. Sarrey-Strack, Colette (2002), Fictions contemporaines au féminin: Marie Darrieussecq, Marie NDiaye, Marie Nimier, Marie Redonnet, Paris: L’Harmattan. Sauzon, Virginie (2014, forthcoming), ‘Ni victim, ni coupable: Virginie Despentes, de la pratique littéraire à la théorie’, Aventures et expériences littéraires: Écritures des femmes au début du vingt-et-unième siècle, ed. Amaleena Damlé with Gill Rye, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schaal, Michèle (2012), ‘Virginie Despentes or a French third wave of feminism?’, Cherchez la femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World, ed. Adrienne Angelo and Erika Fülöp, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 39–55. Selao, Ching (2005), ‘Porter l’Algérie: Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui’, L’Esprit Créateur 45:3 (Fall), 74–84. Simon, Anne (2010), ‘Deterritorialisations de Marie Darrieussecq’, Space, Place and Landscape in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Writing, ed.

206

The Becoming of the Body

Marie-Claire Barnet and Shirley Jordan, a special issue of Dalhousie French Studies 93 (Winter), 17–26. Simonnet, Dominique (2004), ‘Écrire, c’est retrouver ses fantômes’, L’Express, 31 May, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Soobarah Agnihotri, Jeeveeta (2008), ‘Indian Tango ou la danse de la sensualité dans la trans(e)gression’, La Plume francophone, 16 March, (last accessed 7 November 2012). Suleiman, Susan Rubin (ed.) (1985), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sultan, Patrick (2001), ‘Ruptures et héritages: entretien avec Ananda Devi’,

(last accessed 7 November 2012). Terasse, Jean-Marc (2003a), ‘Does monstrosity exist in the feminine? A reading of Amélie Nothomb’s angels and monsters’, Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette den Toonder, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 85–90. –– (2003b), ‘Comment j’écris’, La Création en acte, ed. Paul Gifford and Marion Schmid, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 251–68, (last accessed 20 March 2013). Thumerel, Fabrice (ed.) (2004), Annie Ernaux: Une œuvre de l’entre-deux, Arras: Artois Presses Université. Tombeur, Madeleine (1998), ‘Amélie Nothomb/Christine Delmotte’, Le Logographe, 3 April, (last accessed 23 August 2009). Toranian, Valérie (2004), Pour en finir avec la femme, Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle. Tyagi, Ritu (2011), ‘Rethinking identity and belonging: “Mauritianness” in the work of Ananda Devi’, Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity, ed. Maeve McCusker and Anthony Soares, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Van Zuylen, Maria (2003), ‘Maghreb and melancholy: a reading of Nina Bouraoui’, Research in African Literatures, 34:4, 84–8. Vassallo, Helen (2007), ‘Wounded storyteller: illness as life narrative in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué’, Forum for Modern Languages Studies 43:1 (January), 46–56. –– (2008), ‘Embodied memory: war and the remembrance of wounds in Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué and Leïla Sebbar’s Lettres parisiennes’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1:2 (January), 189–200. –– (2009), ‘Unsuccessful alterity? The pursuit of otherness in Nina Bouraoui’s life writing’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 12:2 (January), 37–53. –– (2012), The Body Besieged: The Embodiment of Historical Memory in Nina Bouraoui and Leïla Sebbar, Lanham: Lexington Books.



Works Cited 207

–– (2013), ‘Embodiment, environment and the reinvention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing’, Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature, ed. Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 141–53. Viart, Dominique (1999), Le Roman français au XXe siècle, Paris: Hachette. Viart, Dominique, and Laurent Demanze (eds) (2012), Fins de la literature: Esthétiques et discours de la fin, vol. 1, Paris: Armand Colin. –– (2013), Fins de la literature: Esthétiques et discours de la fin, vol. 2, Paris: Armand Colin. Viart, Dominique, and Bruno Vercier (eds) (2005), La Littérature française au présent: Héritage, modernité, mutations, Paris: Bordas. Waters, Julia (2004), ‘Ton continent est noir: rethinking feminist metaphors in Ananda Devi’s Pagli’, Dalhousie French Studies 68 (Autumn), 44–55. –– (2008), ‘From continents noirs to collection blanche: from other to same? The case of Ananda Devi’, ‘Ici et ailleurs’: Postcolonial Literatures of the Francophone Indian Ocean, a special issue of E-France: an online journal of French Studies 2, 55–74. –– (2011), ‘The gender politics of food in Ananda Devi’s recent fiction’, Écritures mauriciennes au féminin: Penser l’altérité, ed. Véronique Bragard and Srilata Ravi, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 249–70. Wolf, Naomi (1993), Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It, New York: Ballantine Books. Woodhull, Winifred (1993), Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonisation and Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Worton, Michael (1998), ‘Looking for kicks: promiscuity and violence in contemporary French fiction’, French Erotic Fiction: Ideologies of Desire, ed. Jean Mainil, a special issue of Nottingham French Studies 37:1 (Spring), 89–105. Žižek, Slavoj (2001), ‘No sex, please, we’re posthuman!’, (last accessed 20 March 2013).

Index

abjection, 43, 75, 95, 97, 99–100, 104, 131, 185 abortion, 19 abuse, 20, 90, 96, 98–9 actual, 32, 39–42, 47, 54, 56, 74, 85, 86, 97, 107–8, 115–17, 156, 158, 172, 173–6 not yet, 173 transformation of, 107–8, 115–17 see also counter-actualisation; virtual adolescence, 19, 74–5, 101, 124, 155–6, 160–1, 164 aesthetics, 15, 33, 66, 76, 111–12, 157, 184 anorexic, 66, 76 of unravelling, 184 affect, affectivity, 17, 25, 38, 42, 45–6, 54, 70–1, 73, 77, 80, 83, 86, 97, 101, 105, 106, 108, 115–16, 131, 143, 145, 146–8, 156, 163–4, 167–76, 184 ageing, 19 agency, 11, 14, 19, 23, 35, 66, 133, 136, 155 Algeria, 17, 21, 154–6, 159–60, 162–5 alterity, 18, 23, 94, 98, 134, 160; see also difference Amanieux, Laureline, 90n69 Angot, Christine, 5, 16, 26n5 animals, animality, 22, 24, 46, 48, 49, 50, 73, 97–108, 127, 128–39, 140, 148; see also becoming: -animal anorexia, 22, 23, 46, 52, 62, 64, 65–7, 75–86, 97, 155, 185; see also eating disorders any-space-whatever see espace quelconque Arsic, Branka, 77 Asibong, Andrew, 128, 134 a-subjectivity, 24, 37, 41–2, 49, 53, 141, 145; see also subjectivity author, female, 3–7, 10–14, 16–23 authorship, 6

autobiography, 85, 124 auto-eroticism, 107 autofiction, 6, 16–17, 24, 62, 64, 66, 67–8, 82, 85, 123, 124, 155, 157–8, 166, 171, 186 Badiou, Alain, 41 Barnet, Marie-Claire, 127 beauty, 20, 22, 24, 62, 65, 66, 72–6, 78–9, 130, 185 becoming, 14, 22, 23–6, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 43, 46–50, 51–3, 54, 55, 56, 67, 68, 70–1, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96–8, 100–1, 103–6, 108–9, 111–17, 127, 128–9, 131–5, 137–9, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 159, 163–6, 167–72, 175, 176, 185–6 -animal, 48, 97–8, 100–1, 103–6, 108, 127, 128–9, 131–5, 137–9, 148 -animal-human-woman, 139, 148 -animal-woman, 135 of the body, 14, 23–6, 32, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 67, 68, 78, 80, 84, 97, 139, 148, 157, 158, 170–1, 175, 176, 186 -child, 50 -dog, 104, 185 future, 167, 171, 176 -gay, 169 -human, 134 -imperceptible, 48, 49, 51 -lioness, 103–4, 185 -man, 52, 78 -minoritarian, 51, 53, 167 -molecular, 50, 51, 52, 78, 101 -nomadic, 50, 53 -other, 103, 106, 108, 116 -otherwise, 52, 85, 96, 98, 103, 105, 109, 113–15, 117, 175 queer, 25, 167 sexual, 167–8, 171, 175, 176 virtual, 167, 175 -woman, 34, 36, 48–9, 51–2, 78, 128–9, 135, 137, 139, 148 Bhabha, Homi K., 94



Index 209

bisexual, 169 body, 1–3, 7, 14, 17–26, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42–6, 48, 49, 50–6, 65–8, 69, 71, 72, 74–81, 82–6, 96–7, 98–104, 108, 110, 112–13, 114, 116, 124–5, 126–7, 128–32, 134, 138–41, 146–8, 155, 157, 158, 159–66, 167, 170–1, 174–5, 176, 184–6 adolescent, 74–5, 164 anorexic, 24, 76–81, 85–6, 185 becoming of the, 14, 23–6, 32, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 67, 68, 78, 80, 84, 97, 139, 148, 157, 158, 170–1, 175, 176, 186 child’s, 82, 160 female, 1–3, 18–26, 30, 37, 52, 54–5, 65, 75–6, 79, 96–7, 102, 108, 112, 116, 124, 128–9, 131, 139, 147–8, 184–5 human, 100–1, 138 hybrid, 134 and mind, 126, 128, 139–41, 146–8, 186 politics, 67, 78 posthuman, 138–40 and text, 37, 68 writing the, 7, 125 Body without Organs, 24, 35, 37, 42–6, 48, 52, 66–7, 76–81, 82–6, 97, 184 Bouraoui, Nina, 1, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21–5, 27n9, 42, 46, 50, 154–82, 184, 186 Appelez-moi par mon prénom, 156, 157, 158, 167, 172–5 Avant les homes, 156 Garçon manqué, 155, 156, 158, 160, 177n5, 180n44 L’Âge blessé,155 La Vie heureuse, 156, 158, 167, 168–9, 172, 174, 180n45 Le Bal des murènes, 155 Le Jour du séisme, 156, 158, 160–6 Mes mauvaises pensées, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 177n5, 179n33 Nos baisers sont des adieux, 156, 177n5 Poing mort, 155 Poupée Bella, 156, 158, 167, 170–2, 174, 175, 179n33 Sauvage, 156, 177n5, 177n7, 178n19 Bragard, Véronique, 95, 96 Braidotti, Rosi, 1, 23, 25, 34–6, 42, 45, 51, 53, 56, 61n52, 129, 136–8, 140, 151n36, 151n40 Bruch, Hilde, 66 Buchanan, Ian, 56 Butler, Judith, 22, 25, 33, 53, 60–1n51, 129, 134–6, 139, 181n54 Caine, Philippa, 64 Célestin, Roger, 9

children, childhood, 26, 50, 62–3, 65–6, 67, 69, 70, 72–6, 79–80, 82–3, 85, 98, 104, 124, 142, 143, 155–6, 160, 162–4 Cixous, Hélène, 3–4, 7–8, 9, 14, 18–19, 33 Clément, Catherine, 4, 18 clones, 25, 127, 138, 140 Colebrook, Claire, 34, 37–8, 45, 51 Conley, Verena Andermatt, 169 consciousness, 3, 37, 70, 72, 84, 101, 124, 127–8, 131, 134, 139–48, 156, 172, 184 animal, 131 creative, 172 global, 127, 140 human, 131 political, 3 stream of, 124, 156 Corcoran, Patrick, 101 corporeality, 1–3, 19, 21–6, 34–7, 43–6, 50, 51, 53–6, 66–7, 74, 76–7, 79, 83–6, 96–8, 100–2, 106, 109–11, 113, 127–8, 130–4, 138, 140, 147–8, 155, 158, 160–4, 166–7, 169, 173, 175, 176, 184–5 animal, 101, 106, 131, 133 female, 1–3, 21–6, 34–7, 50, 53–6, 96–8, 109, 127, 132–3, 138, 147–8, 184–5 human, 132 see also body Corps sans Organes see Body without Organs Cottille-Foley, Nora, 130, 132–3, 134, 136 counter-actualisation, 39–42, 45, 52, 55, 76, 78, 80–1, 85, 167, 171 creativity, 15, 17, 55, 68, 86, 94, 96, 97, 112, 115, 165, 172, 186 Cruickshank, Ruth, 13, 15 cyborgs, 25, 138 Darrieussecq, Marie, 1, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21–5, 26–7n5, 27n9, 42, 46, 50, 123–53, 157, 184–6 Bref séjour chez les vivants, 125, 126, 127, 139–48 Clèves, 124 Le Bébé, 125 Le Mal de mer, 125, 127 Le Pays, 125, 126, 127, 140 Naissance des fantômes, 126, 127, 139 Rapport de police, 26–7n5 Tom est mort, 26n5 Truismes, 124–5, 127, 128–39 White, 125, 126, 127 Zoo, 125, 127, 133, 137–9 Davis, Colin, 55

210

The Becoming of the Body

death, 53, 64–5, 73, 81, 100, 141, 155, 185 drive, 53 of feminism, 8 of god, 31 Decker, Jacques de, 64–5 deconstruction, 18–19, 20, 33, 53, 110, 137, 148, 171 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 23–6, 30–61, 67, 68–9, 70, 72, 74, 76–7, 78, 80, 81, 83–4, 85, 86, 92, 96–7, 99, 100–1, 103, 105–6, 108, 109, 111–12, 114, 115–16, 127, 128–9, 130–1, 132, 135, 136–9, 141, 142–3, 144, 146, 147–8, 158, 159–60, 162, 164–6, 167–70, 171, 172, 173, 175–6, 183–4, 185–6 and Guattari, Félix, 1, 23, 30–61, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 92, 97, 100–1, 109, 111, 131, 135, 137–8, 159–60, 162, 164–6, 168–70, 183 and Parnet, 40, 44, 46–7, 55, 67, 69, 70, 72, 76–7, 78, 81, 84, 132 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 31, 33, 126 desire, 7, 17, 19, 22, 24, 25, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42–5, 46, 53, 66–7, 68–9, 70–2, 75, 80, 85, 86, 96, 102, 107–8, 110–11, 113–14, 124, 131, 133, 136, 139, 148, 156–7, 158, 166–76 abject, 40 adolescent, 124 aleatory, 24, 25, 35, 42–5, 69, 158, 166–76 female, feminine, 7, 19, 34, 35, 107–8, 136 homosexual, 108, 167, 169–70 as immanence, 42–5, 68–9, 70–2, 80, 85, 86 as lack, 42–5, 68, 71–2, 81, 167, 168–9, 171, 175, 176 lesbian, 156, 166, 169–71, 175 male, masculine, 19, 96, 102, 107, 136 micro-politics of, 53 misogynistic, 133 plastic, 170–1, 176 same-sex, 169 Despentes, Virginie, 5, 6, 20, 27n7 destratification, 25, 45, 67, 77–8, 80, 81, 85, 97 deterritorialisation, 25, 48, 55, 78, 81, 111, 127, 158, 159–66, 167, 175, 176, 184, 185; see also reterritorialisation Devi, Ananda, 1, 10, 13, 20, 21–5, 27n9, 29n20, 46, 50, 92–122, 124, 131, 184–6 Ève de ses décombres, 93, 96, 97–8, 101–8, 109, 110 Indian Tango, 95, 97, 108–17 Les Hommes qui me parlent, 96

Le Sari vert, 95, 96 Le Voile de Draupadi, 95 Moi, l’interdite, 95, 96, 97–101, 103–5, 106, 108, 109 Pagli, 95–6 Rue la Poudrière, 96 difference, 2, 9, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50–3, 56, 79, 93–4, 95–7, 98–110, 116, 137, 139, 143, 146, 162, 166, 185 absolute, 50, 52 binary, 103, 107 cult of, 98, 101, 104, 105, 116 feminine, 109 intensive, 51, 98, 107 politics of, 51, 53, 56 sexual, 34, 36, 37, 42, 50–1, 79, 96–7, 102, 108, 137, 139 virtual, 185 disembodiment, 20, 55 eating disorders, 66, 130; see also anorexia écriture feminine, 3, 7–8, 14, 15, 18, 27n9, 125 embodiment, 1, 23, 25, 31, 34–5, 42, 49, 55, 97, 106, 111, 114–16, 140, 146–8, 156, 164, 186; see also disembodiment empiricism, 24, 37–9, 42, 47, 127, 141 Humean, 38–9 transcendental, 24, 37–9, 42, 127, 141 espace quelconque, 158, 167, 175, 176 essentialism, 8, 35, 36, 53 ethics, 5, 17, 26n5, 40, 126, 185 ethnicity, 93, 95, 134 event, 24, 32, 37, 39–42, 44, 112, 146 body as, 44 exile, 18, 96, 157, 159, 162–4 Facebook, 25, 140 Fallaize, Elizabeth, 3, 4 family, 42, 62–3, 72, 75, 79, 85, 95, 98–9, 109, 138, 141, 143–4, 154, 169 romance, 42, 85, 169 fantastic, 16, 18, 22, 64, 128 fantasy, 41, 48, 124, 142 feminine, femininity, 1–3, 7, 8–11, 18–20, 23, 31, 34, 37, 46, 49, 51–2, 65, 78–80, 93, 95–6, 102–3, 105–9, 124–5, 133–7, 148, 155 categorisation of, 135–7, 148 construction of, 124, 135–6, 138, 148 decline of, 109 institution of, 1 micro-, 49, 135 molar, 79–80, 103



Index 211

pose, 137 specificity, 23, 105 feminism, 1–3, 7–14, 18, 19–20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33–7, 41–2, 43, 45–6, 49–50, 51–4, 56, 65–6, 97, 105, 109, 116, 125, 127, 128–9, 135, 136, 139, 147, 184–6 and activism, 9 corporeal, 34, 147 death of, 8 and Deleuze, 30–61 Deleuzian, 36, 46 power, 11 second-wave, 2, 7, 10–11, 21–2, 36 third-wave, 28n11 victim, 11 and women’s writing, 1–29 Flieger, Jerry Aline, 36 flux, 2, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 80, 84, 86, 124, 126–8, 131, 140, 142–6, 148, 158, 162–6, 168, 171, 175, 176, 184 fold, 24, 25, 35–6, 37, 41–2, 49, 71, 77, 80, 112–17, 127–8, 142, 146–8, 163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 174–5, 184 Foucault, Michel, 31, 33, 35 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 43, 44, 126, 169 Fülöp, Erika, 69 Fuss, Diana, 53, 60n51 Gaudet, Jeannette, 130, 131, 132, 133 gay experience, 170–1 becoming-, 169 identity, 167 rights, 9 see also homosexuality gaze, 2, 107, 129, 136, 138, 155 gender, 2–3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 27n9, 34, 37, 42, 52, 79, 80, 95, 96, 103, 124, 128–9, 135–6, 140, 148, 156, 157, 167, 184 categorisation of, 10, 167, 148 construction, 34, 35, 124, 135 contingency of, 135–6 hierarchies of, 96, 184 parody of, 129, 134–7, 148 performance of, 135–6 politics, 9, 124, 128–9, 134, 137, 148 roles, 79, 96, 103 stereotypes, 13 geography, 33, 47, 123, 127, 144–5, 156, 174–5 ghosts, 102, 126, 140 globalisation, 2, 18, 21, 184 grief, 102, 126 Grosz, Elizabeth, 34–6, 51, 147–8, 169–70, 183–4 Möbius strip, 36–7, 147

Halberstam, Judith, 138–9 Hallward, Peter, 55, 112, 186 harassment, 9 Harrington, Katherine, 159–60 Heywood, Leslie, 66 Hindu, 74, 104, 109 Hocquenghem, Guy, 167, 169 Holmes, Diana, 4 hologram, 127, 140 homosexuality, 9, 108, 167–72; see also desire; gay experience; lesbian desire; sexuality hunger, 24, 62, 67–81, 82, 84, 86; see also starvation hybridity, 18, 94–5, 134, 140, 159 hysteric, 98 identification, 14, 21, 40, 48, 49, 79–80, 93, 108, 169, 171 collective, 14 cultural, 21 lesbian, 108, 169 self-, 169 identity, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 17–18, 21, 25, 31, 34, 36, 38, 49, 50, 51–3, 63, 70, 72, 80, 85, 92–5, 96, 98, 100, 101, 107, 108, 125, 135, 136, 146, 156, 158, 162, 163, 164–5, 166, 167–8, 171–2, 184 anthropomorphic, 101 borderline, 125 composite, 9 female, 7, 49, 96, 98, 108, 184 feminine, 135 fixed, 162 fluid, 21 gay, 167–8 gendered, 156 hybrid, 94 Mauritian, 94–5 molar, 49, 52, 80, 100 multiple, 9 national, 93, 156 politics, 52–3, 167 postcolonial, 93–5 pre-colonial, 93 sexual, 51, 171–2 social, 49 transcendent, 38, 70, 72, 80, 85, 158, 166 women’s, 3, 34 see also self; subjectivity illness, 19, 22, 24, 73, 82, 134, 155, 185 immanence, 24, 31–2, 38–40, 43–5, 49, 54, 56, 67, 69, 71–2, 74, 76, 77, 80, 84–5, 86, 97, 100, 105–7, 111, 113, 142–7 immigration, 94 inequality, 93

212

The Becoming of the Body

Irigaray, Luce, 3, 7–8, 9, 18–19, 25, 33–4, 51, 61n52, 97, 105–8, 109, 111–12, 114–17 fecundity of the caress, 106, 108, 111, 115 mutual engenderment, 25, 106–10, 114–16 specular, specularisation, 19, 106–8, 110–11 Islam, 155 Jardine, Alice, 34, 51 Jordan, Shirley, 5, 6, 10, 17, 20, 125, 127, 132, 134, 141, 144, 146 jouissance, 72, 76 Kemp, Simon, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 33, 35 Lacan, Jacques, 33, 34, 41, 43, 70 language, 3, 31, 40, 73–4, 82, 93, 94, 95, 107, 114, 123, 124, 142, 161, 173–4 Laurens, Camille, 16, 26n5 Lee, Mark, 63–4 Lejeune, Philippe, 16 lesbian desire, 156, 167, 169–71, 175 identification, 108 rights, 9 sexuality, 171 see also homosexuality Lionnet, Françoise, 22, 57n4, 96, 121n63 littérature-monde, 22, 29n20 Livingstone, Ira, 138–9 Lorraine, Tamsin, 34, 49, 52, 105–6, 108, 111–12 love, 40, 63, 65, 72, 98, 104, 106–7, 109, 125, 126, 156, 168, 169 Macciocchi, Maria Antoinetta, 8 Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo, Valérie, 96 Mann, Patricia, 27n10 marginalisation, 4, 13, 93 Marks, John, 31, 56 marriage, 9, 110 homosexual, 9 materiality, materialisation, 21, 22–5, 34, 39, 42, 45–6, 49–50, 54–5, 72, 74–7, 81, 82, 85, 86, 110–12, 114, 126–8, 140–1, 146–7, 159, 161, 164, 169, 172–6 Mauritius, 92–6, 101, 104, 109, 116 May, Todd, 32 media, 5–7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 20, 35, 63–4, 66, 138, 140, 172–3 memory, 63, 76, 85, 98, 100, 101, 131, 141–5, 161, 163, 165–6 metamorphosis, 1, 22, 24–5, 35, 46, 97–8, 100–1, 103–5, 110, 127–32, 135, 138, 139, 148; see also becoming: -animal

métissage, 96 migration, 18, 83, 154, 159–50, 164 mind, 2, 3, 18, 22, 25, 38–9, 42, 73, 74, 81, 83, 86, 99, 126, 128, 139–48, 183, 186 and body, 2, 3, 18, 22, 25, 83, 86, 126, 128, 139–41, 146–8 naturalisation of, 39, 99, 143–4 misogyny, 20, 131–4, 137 MLF, 7 Moi, Toril, 12–13 molarity, 24, 49, 51–3, 78–80, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 108, 110, 116, 135, 148, 184 molecularity, 49–50, 51–2, 78, 83, 97, 100–1, 103, 106, 110, 111, 116, 135, 147 monsters, monstrosity, 77, 98, 101, 133–4, 140 Morello, Nathalie, 4–5, 10, 13, 18 morphology, 1, 22, 111–12 mortality, 19 mothers, mothering, 17, 19, 43, 71, 79, 95, 98, 109, 125, 141, 143–4, 154 Motte, Warren, 14–15 multiplicity, 17, 32, 34, 35, 41, 46, 48, 49, 80, 94, 96, 97, 101, 105, 107–8, 110, 116, 168, 170, 175 murder, 65, 96, 99, 102–3, 104 music, 33, 112–13 myth, 63, 65, 109 beauty, 65 Hindu, 109 narcissism, 169 narrative, 17, 63, 102, 104, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 115, 116, 124, 141, 142, 144, 158, 166 self-, 17 voice, 63, 107, 113–14, 144 Nigianni, Chrysanthi, 175 nomads, nomadism, 18, 25, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 44, 47–8, 50, 53, 56, 96, 111, 136, 157, 158–66, 168, 175, 176, 184 Nothomb, Amélie, 1, 6, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21–4, 27n9, 46, 50, 62–91, 97, 117, 125, 155, 184–6 Attentat, 65 Biographie de la faim, 62, 65, 67–81, 82, 85–6 Cosmétique de l’ennemi, 65 Hygiène de l’assassin, 63, 76 Le Fait du prince, 65 Le Sabotage amoureux, 86n4 Le Voyage d’hiver, 66 Mercure, 65 Métaphysique des tubes, 62, 67, 68, 70, 82–5 Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam, 63, 65



Index 213 Robert des noms propres, 65, 89n52 Stupeur et tremblements, 63, 64 Tuer le père, 66

objectification, 20, 133 Oedipus, oedipal, 7, 42, 43, 80, 85, 158, 167, 172, 180n45, 181n54 an-, 43, 85, 158, 167, 172 pre-, 7 organic, 24, 42, 74, 76–8 an-organic, 24, 74, 77 other, otherness, 1, 18, 19, 21, 22, 43, 64–5, 72, 95, 102, 105–6, 108, 110, 114–16, 132, 134, 138, 158, 167, 169, 170–1, 175, 185; see also becoming: -other; becoming: -otherwise pain, 65, 73, 82, 155 Parisi, Luciana, 171 parody, 25, 124, 127, 129, 134–7, 148 gender, 129, 134–7 past, 15, 16, 47, 101, 142, 165–6 patriarchy, 2, 19, 20, 65, 66, 95, 97, 102, 106, 124, 155, 167, 180n45, 185 hetero-, 167, 180n45 hyper-, 95, 102, 124 performativity, 25, 129, 135–7, 139 phallogocentrism, 2, 7, 10, 18–20 plagiarism, 6, 26–7n5, 124 pleasure, 13, 24, 44, 65, 67, 68, 69–75, 77, 80, 84, 111–12, 113, 137, 138, 170 reading, 13, 73 writing, 68, 111–12 politics, political, 2, 4, 7–14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 28n11, 33, 37, 48, 50–3, 54, 55–6, 60–1n51, 62, 67, 78, 93, 124, 125, 128–9, 132, 133, 134–9, 148, 155, 156, 160, 162–3, 166, 167, 185 of beauty, 20, 24 body, 48, 67 consciousness, 3 of difference, 51, 53, 56 feminist, 2, 7–14, 28n11, 37, 50–3, 54, 56, 60–1n51, 125, 129 gender, 9, 124, 128–9, 134, 137, 148 identity, 52–3, 60–1n51, 167 micro-, 52, 55, 67, 78, 185 sexual, 9, 139 polyphony, 25, 97, 109, 112–14, 116, 117, 124, 186 pornography, 6, 20 postcolonialism, 18, 21–2, 25, 33, 93–6, 101, 159, 162 postfeminism, 2, 10–14, 21, 23, 27n10, 55, 184

posthuman, 25, 138–9, 140–1, 148, 184 pregnancy, 19, 104, 130 privacy, 6, 16, 21, 26–7n5 prostitution, 6, 96, 132, 136 Psychanalyse et politique, 7 psychoanalysis, 4, 18, 23, 24, 42–5, 53, 66, 68–70, 123, 126, 168 puberty, 65, 75 queer, 22, 24, 25, 33, 34, 167, 176 becoming, 25, 167, 176 sexuality, 180n45 theory, 22, 24, 33, 34 race, 17, 21 rape, 6, 20, 95, 96, 132 Ravi, Srilata, 93, 95 readers, readership, 5, 6, 13, 16, 64, 67, 93, 114, 116, 123, 125, 129, 156, 173 reading, 5, 13, 21–4, 30, 36, 53, 55–6, 73–4, 75, 81, 82, 124, 172, 184–5 representation, 9, 14, 16–17, 20, 35, 45, 54, 56, 94, 96, 140, 155 masculine, 14 political, 9 postcolonial, 96 self-, 16–17 reterritorialisation, 70–2, 86, 127, 165; see also deterritorialisation rhizome, 32, 34, 46, 56, 109, 127, 166 Rodgers, Catherine, 4–5, 10, 13, 18, 65, 126 Rye, Gill, 5, 10, 20, 125 self, 6, 16–18, 21, 23, 25, 64–5, 66, 68, 70, 71, 95, 100, 105, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116, 132, 141, 146, 155, 158, 160, 169, 171 -annihilation, 52 -apprehension, 17 -awareness, 141, 146 -creation, 6 -denial, 66 -destruction, 95, 105 -esteem, 132 -estrangement, 17 -expression, 110 -harm, 155 -identification, 169 -indulgence, 66 narrative, 17, 68 and other, 21, 64–5, 105, 108 -perception, 132 pluralised, 17 -representation, 16–18 -revelation, 114 -story, 160 writing the, 6, 158 see also identity; subjectivity

214

The Becoming of the Body

sensation, 24, 54, 71–2, 74, 77, 81, 86, 131, 137, 141–2, 145–8, 171, 173–5, 186 sex, 12, 36, 37, 63, 111, 128, 133, 134, 137, 138, 146–8, 167, 171 sexism, 9 sexuality, 2, 17, 22, 25, 33, 34, 44, 65, 66, 76, 124–5, 133, 136, 156, 158, 167–8, 170–6, 184 female, 65, 76, 124–5, 133 lesbian, 171 virtual series of, 167, 172–3, 175 Shih, Shu-Mei, 22 signification, 1–2, 11, 21, 22, 67, 76, 77, 104, 108, 129, 158, 165, 166 Simon, Anne, 127, 147 simulation, 25, 127–8, 129, 134, 136–9, 148, 184 smooth space, 25, 158, 164–6, 167, 175, 176 specificity, 2, 7, 21, 23, 33, 49–50, 105, 106, 108, 129, 138, 169, 175 female, 7, 106 feminine, 23, 105 homosexual, 169 sexual, 33, 129, 138 starvation, 77 subjectivity, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25–6, 34–6, 37, 41–2, 45, 49, 53, 66, 70–2, 80, 93, 94–5, 96–7, 98, 103, 105, 108, 109–10, 116, 125, 127, 129, 133, 136, 138, 141, 144–5, 155, 156, 157, 159, 169–70, 176, 184 bodily, 35 cultural, 96 dynamic, 97, 108, 109, 116, 128, 184 embodied, 23 female, 18, 22–3, 33, 36, 45, 96, 105, 110, 136 gendered, 34 hybrid, 159 liminal, 93, 157 in process, 1, 138 virtual, 141 see also a-subjectivity; identity; self suffering, 19, 20, 34, 40, 73, 93, 95, 97, 98, 155, 162 tactility, 106–8, 111, 115–16 technology, 2, 5, 6, 22, 25, 34, 127, 138, 140, 173 thinness, 65, 66, 79, 102 Toranian, Valérie, 11 touch, 32, 107, 110–11 trans rights, 9 transcendence, 38–9, 41–5, 48–50, 52, 54, 67, 70–1, 76, 78, 80, 83–5, 97,

99–101, 105, 108, 131, 144, 146–8, 158, 166–7, 169, 171, 176, 184; see also empiricism: transcendental transformation, 2, 19, 22–3, 35, 46, 48, 94, 96–7, 98, 100–4, 108, 109–10, 116–17, 124, 129–32, 135, 137, 138, 161, 163, 175 transformative encounter, 24, 97, 105–6, 108, 109–10, 114–16 transnational, 18, 22 transsexual, 169 trauma, 17, 19, 101 uncanny, 18, 140–1 violence, 2, 5, 9, 17, 20, 64, 65, 95–6, 97, 99, 101–4, 107–8, 116, 132, 134, 154, 155–6, 158, 160–4, 166, 176, 185 domestic, 96 political, 156, 160–1 sexual, 96, 102, 132, 162 symbolic, 2, 20, 95, 134, 154, 162 virtual, 6, 23, 25, 26, 32, 39–42, 48, 54, 56, 74, 80, 81, 85, 86, 115–16, 117, 127, 138, 140–1, 148, 156, 158, 167, 171–6, 184–6; see also actual vitality, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, 43, 45, 50, 53, 55, 80, 95, 96–7, 101, 103, 116, 140, 156, 158–9, 161, 162, 164–6, 167, 169–70, 172–6 women’s writing, 1–26, 30, 42, 54–6, 184 new generation, 5, 7, 10, 13 Worton, Michael, 5, 10, 20 wound, 40, 106 writing, 1–26, 30, 33, 42, 53–6, 64, 65, 67, 70, 74, 81, 82, 85, 86, 93–7, 108, 109, 111, 114–15, 116–17, 123–7, 134, 139, 140, 148, 155–8, 160, 161, 165–6, 171–6 the body, 7, 19 as counter-actualisation, 85, 167, 171 and eating, 74 as encounter, 111, 114–15 life-, 6, 67, 155 and memory, 161 as monument, 165 and politics, 56 and reading, 81 the self, 158 as slippage, 54 space of, 165–7, 171, 175–6 as transformative, 117 see also women’s writing Žižek, Slavoj, 140