A Different Subject: Autotheory in Contemporary French Self-Writing
This thesis considers the increased entanglement of contemporary French self-writing and theorising in the 2000s, with particular reference to questions of gender, sex and sexuality. The study of modern French autobiography has long emphasised the intimate connection between developments in intellectual thought and formal experimentation. Yet while the belated reception of queer theory and gender studies in France has generated significant critical interest, how these paradigms are both absorbed into and reconjugated by life writing has yet to be extensively examined. Attending to this omission, this thesis focuses on the generically hybrid works of four contemporary writer-theorists — Anne F. Garréta, Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes and Didier Eribon — who make implicit and explicit use of theoretical precepts gleaned from gender studies and queer theory so as to narrate, reinterpret and retheorise the self. In so doing, this thesis establishes ‘autotheory’ — a genre which has gained recent critical interest to describe Anglophone texts that blend autobiography with theory — in the French context, arguing that its emergence marks a formal and ideological rupture with the predominant mode of autofiction. Chapter one establishes the critical ascendance and political valence of confessional French autofiction in the 1990s and 2000s through a reading of Anne F. Garréta’s faux autofiction, Pas un jour (2002). Bringing Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘juxtapolitical’ into conversation with Garréta’s baroque Oulipian textuality and her own literary criticism, this chapter considers the psychoanalytic diagnostic of desiring and gendered subjectivity contained by the genre and its potential for renewal. Chapter two addresses the underexplored Derridean impulses of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) to argue that Preciado rewrites the self beyond any one ‘genre’ through a deconstructive method of contamination, in which theory is both absorbed into and secreted out of the textual ‘body’. Chapter three re- positions Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Théorie (2004) as a work of ‘low theory’ that refuses to be confined to subject-centred realm of memoir and instead excavates a comprehensive theory of the sex-gender regime from Despentes’s exposure to sexual violence, sex work and pornography. Yet the chapter also examines the possible limitations of theorising in the first-person by narrowing in on the text’s racial lacunae. The final chapter discusses Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims (2009) as a work that demonstrates the autotheoretical undertow of the older French tradition of ‘autosocioanalyse’. Blending sociological theory with his own anti-psychoanalytic queer theories, Eribon inverts the primacy of interiority in his project of self-knowing, even as this rejection of the psychoanalytic reproduces the self’s opacity. French autotheory emerges as a lens through which to consider the divisions between the universal and the particular, the abstract and the embodied, the first-person and the political.
French literature, French theory, Gender studies, Life-writing, Sex and sexuality
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