Mulier sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the sexual metamorphoses of 'Bare Life'

French Cultural Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 169-177

  Asibong, Andrew ^a,b  

^a King's College

^b KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845254684     PISSN: 09571558     EISSN: 17402352     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/01427237030142003     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2. Marie Chauvet, Amour, colère et folie (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
3. Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
4. Agamben, Homo sacer, 187.
5. Here the ideas of Foucault concerning a new economy of 'corps et plaisirs' (see Volonté du savoir, Paris: Seuil, 1976)
6. those of Deleuze and Guattari concerning the need to cultivate 'n' sexes (Mille Plateaux, Paris: Minuit, 1980)
7. and, most recently, those of Judith Butler concerning the multiple possibilities of performative 'gender trouble' (Gender Trouble, London/New York: Routledge, 1999) are clearly pertinent, in that all attempt to articulate the possibility of an 'unreadable' subject via an active subversion and reconfiguration of the gendered and sexualized identity that subject is offered.
8. I borrow Achille Mbembe's term from his provocative article 'The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony', Public Culture, 4/2( Spring 1992).
9. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
10. See Dayan's article 'Erzulie: A Women's History of Haiti?' from Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Green, Gould et al. (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
11. The philosopher and cultural commentator Slavoj Žižek remarks effusively towards the end of his book The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999) that 'there are acts, that they do occur, and that we have to get used to them' (375, his emphasis). But his insistence on the need for the authentically liberating Act to incorporate within it the traumatic, unrepresentable element of the Lacanian Real consistently refuses to articulate how such incorporation could be maintained without either falling into madness, death, or unrestricted violence. My purpose in this article is precisely to attempt to sketch out both more nuanced and realistic terms through which a specific, politicized, and successfully revolutionary trajectory of 'deathliness' might be achieved.
12. This crucial question of how one might find some kind of real agency within the potential condition of homo sacer is precisely what Agamben has more recently embarked upon in his brilliant follow-up to Homo sacer, Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Clearly perceiving the difficulty of claiming a radical political agenda for somebody who will never be allowed to live to tell of their encounter with 'sacredness', Agamben in this later work sets about investigating the importance of the witness to the conversion of human into non-human, he or she who is ready and able to speak and act on behalf of the unspeakable and unliveable.