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Unbecoming Language UNBECOMING LANGUAGE UNBECOMING LANGUAGE Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions ANNABEL L. KIM THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS This edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs License. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog. loc.gov. Cover design by Angela Moody Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Sarraute’s Indeterminacy: A Universe without Contours 36 CHAPTER 2 Inside Wittig’s Chantier: To Build a Trojan Horse 79 CHAPTER 3 Garréta: No Subject Here 125 CHAPTER 4 Toward a Poetics of Unbecoming; or, Language Has a Body 165 CONCLUSION Unbecoming Language 234 Bibliography 241 Index 251 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IT’S ONLY FITTING that in a book that tracks influences, I acknowledge my own. At Williams, Brian Martin and Kashia Pieprzak opened up my horizon of possibility, making me want to become a professor of French (and a person) like them. At Yale, Alice Kaplan taught me to think for myself, and her gift of and with language continues to inspire. Thank you, from one A. K. to another. Margaret Homans was an early believer in my work and her interest and engagement were invaluable. I’m grateful that Howard Bloch and Maurice Samuels have continued to support and encourage my work throughout the years. Agnès Bolton sustained me through more crises of faith than I can count. The anagram Ange(s) Bolton is a fitting one. At Duke, the Contemporary Novel Group, the Triangle French History and Culture Seminar, Nancy Armstrong, Michèle Longino, Helen Solterer, and Kate Costello were thoughtful interlocutors indispensable to the crucial work of reframing the project and discovering what shape it was supposed to take. Anne Garréta pushed me to write freely without looking to her for approval or permission. Rey Chow’s quick laughter and careful listening and reading modeled an intellectual engagement and generosity to which I aspire. Robyn Wiegman showed me how important the psychic dimension of writing is, and vii viii • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS how much of it is craft and labor. Karen Bell and Tiwonda Johnson-Blount’s warmth and kindness reminded me of the humanity that all this work is about and for. I’m grateful for the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for my two for- mative years there. Across the Atlantic, Suzette Robichon was a stalwart supporter who taught me much about French feminism, and Olivier Wagner guided me through Sarraute’s papers at the BnF, helping me get a sense of the texture of the real lives that were hers and her interlocutors’ and serving as an incisive reader and critic of her work. I am thrilled to have landed in the Romance Languages and Literatures department at Harvard to finish this book. I thank Alice Jardine for helping me, at a crucial juncture, gain perspective on how to tell this story. Harvard French was so important in bringing French feminism to the United States and starting this conversation—I’m humbled by the opportunity to contribute. I couldn’t have done this without my editor, Kristen Elias Rowley, and her unflagging support in seeing this through from its earliest iteration to what it’s now become. The comments of the Press’s readers, anonymous and known, have improved the book immensely. Many thanks to Jennifer Willging for a generous and meticulous reading that attended to both content and form. I do not have sufficient words to thank Lynne Huffer for the labor and care with which she read the manuscript and pushed my thought to where it needed to go. If the final product reflects just half her brilliance, I will be satisfied. No acknowledgments would be complete without my family, who’ve always believed in me, and my friends, especially fellow academics—Raisa Rexer, Julie Elsky, Kristin Okoli, Kevin Holden, Marika Knowles, Joy Kim, Taylor Moore, Durba Mitra—for their solidarity, and in Durba’s case, for kick- ing my introduction into shape. Finally, in all these places listed, and every page, Hannah Frydman was there. During this project of reimagining the world through literature, she’s made this world we live in my (feminist) home, and this text we’ve lived in a true chantier littéraire. Part of Chapter 3 was originally published as “The Riddle of Racial Differ- ence in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx.” © 2018 Cornell University. This article first appeared in Diacritics, Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2017, pages 4–22. Publication of this book was generously supported by subventions from Harvard’s FAS Tenure-Track Publication Fund and the Romance Languages and Literatures Department’s Potter Publication Fund. INTRODUCTION WHAT ABOUT THE WORLD needs to be undone? This book turns to the French writers Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta for answers. For Sarraute, it’s the categorizing social forces that impose deaden- ing contours onto our otherwise boundless subjectivities and flatten us into socially legible types and characters. For Wittig, it’s the straight mind, that purportedly universal thought that animates the dominant social order and sorts humanity into the various identity categories that constitute the hierar- chy that heteropatriarchy requires and is built on. For Garréta, the response could be articulated positively as a call to queer the world. For all three writ- ers, though, their works problematize and resist difference, understood as the concept that makes categories possible. My concern here is with those catego- ries that produce hierarchy and oppression (e.g., sex, race, class, sexual orien- tation, and nationality). Deployed as identity, difference has a stranglehold on the way we live. Its categories are the ones that govern how we navigate the world and know it or, at least, claim to know it. These categories are so natu- ral to our thought and our processes of knowledge formation that they seem indispensable—givens. Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta, however, write novels that refuse to accept these categories as givens and reject the idea that differ- ence is a necessary condition for human existence. In their writing, difference does not work the way it normally works in the extratextual world that both 1 2 • INTRODUCTION writer and reader live in. Unbecoming Language tells the story of this literary fabrication of a way of being where difference is not necessary. This book thus tells a political story—the story of literature’s political potential, and of how the novel not only thinks, to use Nancy Armstrong’s phrase,1 but how it can act. This book is also a feminist story, as it takes as a starting point the premise that feminism is a theory and practice that aims for the end of identity-based oppression. In my view, feminism should be con- cerned not only with sex- or gender-based oppression but also with hierarchy, the conceptual foundation for such oppression, which is the same founda- tion for all other forms of oppression such as racism, classism, homophobia, etc. Feminism, then, as I use it, locates the origins of its political drive in a consciousness-awakening around gender-based oppression that radiates cen- trifugally to expose the way all systems of oppression are imbricated such that, to combat one, one must combat the others.2 This book can also be thought of as a supplement to accounts of French literature that treat Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta, but not their interrelation- ship—the intergenerational chain of influence where Sarraute is a central influence on Wittig’s writing, and Wittig is, in turn, a central influence on Garréta’s writing. Treating Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta together as a literary configuration loosens each writer’s anchoring in the groups or collectivities with which she is associated (the New Novel for Sarraute; the radical lesbian feminist movement and the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes [Women’s Liberation Movement], or MLF, for Wittig; and the Oulipo for Garréta), and articulates a strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminism. Anti-difference French feminism (i.e., feminism that rejects the idea of essential or constitutive sexual difference to argue that it is instead con- structed) has largely been relegated to and compressed within the tumultu- ous decades of the MLF’s action and organizing—the 1970s and 1980s. While histories and accounts of this strand of French feminist thought and action exist,3 anti-difference French feminist thought hasn’t been taken up by schol- ars and critics as the foundation for a feminist poetics and literary practice the way differentialist French feminist thought has. Where literature’s intersection with feminism is concerned, the differentialist poetics of écriture féminine— the writing of feminine difference through a writing of the female body—as articulated and theorized by Hélène Cixous, has dominated and continues to 1. Armstrong, How Novels Think. 2. See hooks, Feminist Theory, which speaks powerfully to the need for feminism to con- test more than sexism and misogyny. 3. See Duchen, Feminism in France; Picq, Libération des femmes; Collectif, “MLF.” INTRODUCTION • 3 dominate our sense of feminist literary possibility.4 As a result, anti-difference thinkers such as Monique Wittig, Colette Guillaumin, and Christine Delphy have existed in the long shadows cast by their differentialist counterparts.5 This book thus also reframes not only literary histories but the history of French feminism and the adventure of its transatlantic life. When we think of French feminism, we most often think of differentialist feminism, which dominates Anglo-American accounts of French feminism.
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