The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé (review)

Amaleena Damlé’s book investigates the ways in which the female body has been conceptualized and configured in the works of four contemporary francophone women writers, Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq, and Nina Bouraoui. In their writings, the body is apprehended as in flux and defying boundaries, which impacts its common representation and signification. Damlé situates these positions with respect to earlier feminist assessments of corporeality and links them to the reflection on becoming undertaken by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The first chapter of The Becoming of the Body is devoted to those thinkers’ recasting of subjectivity and/in the world, and the following chapters discuss the transformative interplay at work between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and each of the writers’ multifaceted approaches when addressing female bodily becoming.

Deleuze’s emphasis on non-binary difference, dynamism, and multiplicity is analyzed in its political and artistic potential for feminism and for rethinking desire and the shape and boundaries of essentialized biological bodies; yet Damlé returns more than once in her book to the ambivalent reception of Deleuze in feminist thought after exposing it at length in Chapter 1. On the one hand, Damlé recalls the feminist critique of Deleuze’s recourse to terms such as “becoming-woman,” and the concern of those for whom Deleuze’s project and terminology are inefficient political tools against oppression, a worry she seems to share at times. On the other hand, she convincingly argues that if Deleuzian philosophy does not address women’s identity or subjectivity, whether culturally constructed or self-fashioned, it is because, to begin with, these very concepts are profoundly put into question and undermined in his work, in a manner, however, which does not make it apolitical. On the contrary, his reflection on the event and on the fold, on becoming with rather than being, allows for another individuation and another politics. The assemblages of heterogeneities that are called for in his work are also “ethological” to the extent that they involve relations of bodies to one another that are neither pre-existing nor re-presented, but must be invented, baffling expectations and mutually transformative. This thought is not feminist in and of itself but its emphasis on the relations between the actual and the virtual and the rethinking of bodily subjectivity—for instance through the elaboration of a Body without Organs, becoming-animal, or nomadism—“ope[n] out perspectives on contemporary expressions of female corporeality” (36). Having cogently explained in Chapter 1 the stakes of Deleuzian thought, Damlé emphasizes the ways in which she mobilizes it in her reading of contemporary women writers, “as a starting point for thinking about counter-actualising the given on the level of gender and embodiment” (42), or asking “not so much ‘what is a body?’, but ‘what can a body do?’” (43). Reflecting on such abilities also testifies to new feminist strategies.

The Becoming of the Body energizes both the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari and the interpretation of contemporary francophone women writers, in particular because of Damlé’s focus on rethinking the female body through the examination of the relationship between body and text, or “on the level of the literary rather than the literal” (37). This approach entails that literary, and indeed philosophical, utterances are not read as if they were a literal prescription, the inapplicability of which could then be denounced as politically useless in everyday life; conversely, she underscores the extent to which literature imagines an alternative to given socio-cultural practices, proposed at times through metaphorical displacements. Thus literary experiments are interpreted not as mimicking but enfolding and shaping the actual as much as the virtual, and the unfurling of fictional potentialities is shown to contribute to the affirmation of socially invisible or culturally disregarded modes of being. Writing is reflected upon by all the writers Damlé gathers in The Becoming of the Body as an act of “connection and encounter” (55...