"This is not an autofiction": Autoteoría, French Feminism, and Living in Theory

in 2015, maggie nelson published the argonauts, its back cover announcing a term that would soon trend: "autotheory." In Monica G Pearl's words, "autotheory" names "the combination of autobiography and critical theory," but rather than fusing these genres, it stretches and transforms them (200). For Nelson, autotheory is attractive because it enables experimentation and allows her work to be differentiated from memoir. In interviews following the publication of The Argonauts, she traced her enthusiasm for the concept to Paul Preciado's 2008 Testo Yonqui, a hybrid text that opens, in the English translation, with the declaration: "This book is not a memoir" (15). In Nelson's words, "I flat out stole the term [autotheory] from Paul Preciado's amazing Testo Junkie" ("Riding the Blinds"). But the move from memoir to autotheory comes at a cost, as behind the English translation of the opening line lurks the term "autofiction" ("Este libro no es una autoficción"). The English translation seems to avoid the "auto-" compound altogether, since it translates "una ficción auto-política o una autoteoría" as "this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, a self-theory" (15; Benderson 11). In the 2013 English edition, which was translated from French five years after the Spanish and the French editions, the terms that should have been translated as "autofiction," "autopolitics," and "autotheory" were lost in translation. These mistranslations conceal a number of important critical relations, including the role of autofiction, a genre initially named and popularized in France, in shaping contemporary trans-Atlantic poetics; the French contribution to the deconstruction of literary genres more generally; and the fictionalizing practices at play in the arenas of both self-writing and theory from which autotheory is said to emerge. In addition, such mistranslations obscure the significance of French feminism as autotheory's precursor, especially its critique of theory's phallocentrism and autofiction's reliance on a psychoanalytical framework for exploring the self.

My contribution to this special issue on autotheory seeks to restore these critical and cultural contexts by situating the notion of "auto-teoría" in relation to French feminist writers and thinkers. The discussion which follows offers an account of the French feminist legacy of autotheory by explicating its long-standing interest in a transversal account of self-writing and self-theorizing. I begin by addressing French feminism's well-known critique of the phallocentric "master-discourse" of Western philosophy and critical theory before considering how this critique was used by feminist writers in France to challenge the growing influence of autofiction as it came to be described in the late 1970s, a hybrid form of autographical and fictional writing. By the end, I argue for critical attention to what I am calling the "2008 moment" which offers an alternative constellation of influences for interrupting the trend to fix autotheory as a new and largely American genre.

Gendering theory

In the larger context of feminist practices and writings, the combination of critical thinking and first-person writing has many antecedents. As Lauren Fournier notes in her article on autotheoretical practices across media, "the history of feminist theory and practice has encouraged an exploration of the personal and the embodied alongside the critical and the theoretical" (644). Instead of denying this heritage, The Argonauts acknowledges Nelson's debt to "the many gendered-mothers of my heart" (57). Among the text's numerous references and quotations is Luce Irigaray, whose work is used by Nelson to deliberate on the feminist response to the impossibility of the female subject.

In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence.

Irigaray's answer to this conundrum?: to destroy … [but] with nuptial tools. … The option left to me, she writes, was to have a fling with the philosophers.

(38–39)

This reference underscores a key feminist starting point of Nelson's writing. Yet, the...