Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim (review)

Annabel Kim’s book Unbecoming Language breathes new life into French feminist theory and fiction. While labeling the book as “theory” is a misnomer, Kim’s argument that the writers and novels studied present a poetics of “unbecoming” not only re-endows literary narrative with the stimulating power to generate theoretical ideas, but also allows literature to energize French feminism and theory with the politicized charge of “anti-difference,” long neglected in American studies of these traditions and movements.

Kim defines “anti-difference French feminism” as a rejection of the idea of sexual difference as essential and argues instead that such difference is constructed (2). While some strands of differentialist French feminism also argue that difference is constructed, Kim’s anti-difference French feminism imagines the possibility of leaving the idea of “difference” behind altogether. In Unbecoming Language, Kim unveils anti-differentialist thought that presents subjectivity without subjecthood, what Kim calls unbecoming, by reading together for the first time the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta. Collectively, Kim claims that their works “hollow out difference and rework our subjectivity” by resisting the literary fabrication of identity (4). This process of unbecoming is stimulated by these authors’ common belief in “language’s potential to transform a reality marked by compulsory identification and seemingly inescapable difference” (84). Kim establishes an anti-differentialist feminist poetics through this thorough study and places it firmly on par with differentialist French feminism. Unbecoming Language makes a valuable contribution to the field of French Studies, and to its branches of French feminisms and contemporary French fiction, but also to the study of contemporary literature more broadly.

The book’s introduction provides a presentation of the main argument as well as a helpful biography of each writer studied before moving on to definitions of terms and methodology. Working with the claim that difference is built on sameness––that is, that identity categories require collectives of “sameness” that bind individuals within an identity category––Kim argues that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta instead forego the idea of difference, which, the author powerfully asserts, has practical applications. In the introduction and elsewhere, Kim interrogates the ways in which engaging with “unbecoming language” might influence the way we unknow ourselves and thus others. This becomes an underlying goal of the book: to propose a radical disarmament that makes “difference” easier to bear, or at the very least, to remember that our world based on difference is a fictive fabrication. The project is admittedly utopian (34), but refreshing and welcomed. The introduction presents ample evidence to demonstrate the relationship between these three authors and the book’s organization and methodology are major strengths. Unbecoming Language is organized into four chapters: the first three examine each writer’s corpus independently through the lens of “unbecoming language,” while tending to their overlaps, and the fourth constructs a feminist poetics inspired by the combined study of Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta.

Another strength in Kim’s approach is the choice to read these authors outside of a theoretical framework. While the reader may expect to engage with “French theory” or “queer theory” in a book that argues for the disintegration of identity, Kim’s work insists rather on these novels’ capacity to fashion theory on their own, thereby resisting the division between “narrativity” (or literature) and “theory.” This approach seems appropriate given that reading these authors through a pre-existing theoretical framework would not correspond with the book’s project to shed identity labels, as Kim explains. Instead, these authors generate a new relationship with language that allows for a “subjectivity without subjecthood,” or “a non-delineated subjectivity” (32) . . . a framework that could very well become a “theory” itself.

In Chapter 1, “Sarraute’s Indeterminacy,” Kim rejects the traditional reading that categorizes Sarraute as a New Novelist or as a woman writer. Instead, Kim asks about the possibilities that arise when Sarraute is read alongside Wittig and Garr...