The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé (review)
- The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé
Amaleena Damlé’s The Becoming of the Body brings the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to bear on the literary work in French of four contemporary women writers in an insightful study of how they question and test “the limits of the body” (1) through their creative expression. By focusing on four women of diverse cultural backgrounds, whose writings exhibit very different literary styles and approaches, Damlé convincingly shows that they are not without commonality. They all “turn towards the absolute extremes of experiences” (5) as they “position” and “reposition” the self through the use of autofiction, expressing identity as plural and in flux, continually influenced by interactions and encounters forever moving, transforming, becoming. The author underscores the positive potential of bringing together Belgian-born Amélie Nothomb, Indo-Mauritian Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq who hails from the Basque country, and Nina Bouraoui who is half-French and half-Algerian, because this “deliberate grouping of a multicultural corpus within the context of an increasingly globalized world” allows us “to think about how women’s concerns might be shared and contested in different, though perhaps overlapping, cultural environments” (21).
The book begins with an introduction that provides an overview of “contemporary women’s writing in French,” all while problematizing this loaded description that serves as the publication’s subtitle. Damlé calls attention to the fact that even though many “female authors have become increasingly integrated into mainstream literary culture” in France today, it is nonetheless “vital to remember the relatively recent nature of this achievement” in a country that “largely excluded women from the academic literary canon” until the 1970s (3). The introduction evokes the second wave of feminism in France, explaining theory alongside politics in a manner that is respected throughout the book. The first chapter outlines various feminist reactions to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, bringing up the “troubled relationship” that has marked the reception of Deleuzian philosophy among feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Alice Jardine, but also bringing out the positive inspiration that thinkers like Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz have found in particular concepts such as nomadism and aleatory desire.
The notion of becoming is central to the four chapters devoted to each of the writers in this study: “becoming-child in Nothomb, becoming-molecular in Devi, becoming-animal in Darrieussecq, becoming-nomadic in Bouraoui” (50). Nothomb’s oeuvre is marked by “an anorexic aesthetic” (66) that Damlé analyzes from different angles in Biographie de la faim and Métaphysique des tubes, paying special attention to the “micropolitics of the body that reveals the [End Page 100] multiple layers and codes that signify, construct and constrain corporeality” (67) and to the ways “[w]riting a metaphysics of a tube” “enacts a becoming-child that is figured as the site of immanent experience, desires and flows” (85). In Devi’s Moi, l’interdite and Ève de ses décombres, protagonists escape from “the logic of binary difference” by “entering into a relation with the animal” (103), a “becoming-other” that is tactile and transformative, placing Devi’s writing in harmony “with the Deleuzian notion of becoming otherwise,” all while reframing this concept in feminist terms (116). The “becoming-animal” in Devi’s writing is not unlike that found in Darrieussecq’s Truismes, wherein the narrator transforms into a pig in a gesture that the author meant to be emancipatory, and therefore “intertwined with the possibility of attaining political agency” (133); her Bref séjour chez les vivants also illustrates an “erudite engagement with gender politics and with philosophies of the mind,” in which a protagonist’s “becoming-animal-human-woman” effectively “sets in motion a posthuman metamorphosis that at once parodies and deconstructs the category of femininity” (148). The ways in which desire and sexuality surface in Bouraoui’s texts push “the becoming of the body beyond its very boundaries,” revealing a conception of nomadism that is “always already deterritorialised...
