“Le vide de ces yeux”: Consciousness and the Blank Slate in Marie Darrieussecq

Darrieussecq’s fictions demonstrate an interest in the essence of consciousness, explored through representations of minds shorn of memory and imagination, of a complex autobiographical self, even of language. Darrieussecq’s blank-minded clones and new-born infants, her speculations on the minds of animals and foetuses, or the subjective experience of the amnesiac or the dying brain, can be read as attempts to strip away the extraneous aspects of mind and delve towards an core of conscious awareness, even if this may neither be fully accessible to the imagination nor fully expressible in the language of her texts.