I am delighted to make available the address given by Emma Wilson at the launch of the latest volume in the Crosscurrents series, Amaleena Damlé‘s The Becoming of the Body. The launch took place at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, on 20 June this year as part of the “Celebrating Publications in Contemporary Women’s Writing” event.
Amaleena Damlé, The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French
I’m thrilled to be presenting this beautiful, trenchant and sinuous book. Amaleena begins with an epigraph from Rosi Braidotti that I want to quote in full:
The subject of feminism is not Woman as the complementary and specular other of man but rather a complex and multi-layered embodied subject who has taken her distance from the institution of femininity. ‘She’ no longer coincides with the disempowered reflection of a dominant subject who casts his masculinity in a universalistic posture. She, in fact, may no longer be a she, but the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the other of the Other, a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis.
[Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming]
Amaleena’s project, The Becoming of the Body, pursues this vision of ‘a complex and multi-layered embodied’ subjectivity, of a metamorphosing never fixed ‘she’. Her writing, graceful, lucid, delicate, acute, attends to this complexity with admirable patience. I love the disarming openness with which Amaleena states that the (many) issues the book treats ‘might all be said to stem from a fascination with one particular question, which has resounded in [her] mind over the past several years: what are the limits of the body?’ There is a new voice and consciousness here as she reflects on the meeting point of mind and body, on our experience of the body, on ownership, recognition, interaction: nothing is fixed. Her imagination is infinitely versatile as she considers what a body can do.
This book is extraordinary and illuminating in its uses in particular of Deleuze, as flagged in the title and its thought about the becoming of the body. Deleuze allows Amaleena’s thinking about new modes of resignification and the possibilities of perpetual transformation. The volume, and in particular its over-arching opening chapter, ‘The Orchid, the Wasp and the Text’, beyond the introduction, is attentive to Deleuze’s ‘vital rethinking of the relationship between subject, object and universe’ and it draws strategically on a Deleuzian unfixing of bodily limits and boundaries. Yet there is no fixed sense either that the book offers a reading of its texts through Deleuze. Rather Amaleena stages an encounter between Deleuzian thinking and the work of a series of women writers and this encounter is shifting, proteiform, in flux, yet always in contact with questions, beyond Deleuze, about feminist politics, about female embodied experience. Feminist and queer voices, Butler, Grosz and of course Braidotti, are also heard in this polyvocal book. Amaleena is concerned to stage a thinking about feminism and the body and to show the new complexities that can be sensed through Deleuzian thinking. As she argues:
[T]hough the authors under study do not write from a clearly positioned feminist politics, their articulations of female corporeality nonetheless mobilise in writing an encounter with the political through the very invention of the new and the interfacing of the virtual and the actual.
And so to the writers that Amaleena chooses for the volume. This is a book embedded in and responsive to the extraordinary work of scholars, particularly in the UK, of French women’s writing. Amaleena has long worked with Gill Rye, first on the Masters here, then on the seminar and on their collected volumes and Amaleena follows in Gill’s footsteps in her advocacy for French women’s writing and in her evidencing of the extraordinary formal dexterity and emotional complexity of these texts. Her work engages with Gill’s here, as it looks back to the work of Elizabeth Fallaize and on to Shirley’ Jordan’s writing and to that of many others.
In her own selected corpus, Amaleena brings together Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui, staging a new set of encounters between these writers. Perhaps the strongest rationale for attention to these women is the glorious literary value of their work that allows Amaleena to revel in their writings in her readings. These writers all in open ways bring mind and body, imagination and the sensory into coruscating and some unexpected contact. Yet Amaleena is sensitive too to the ways in which these different writers and their positionings in her volume speak to further identity questions. She writes beautifully of the threshold between self and other:
[H]ow we appear to others is inevitably mediated by the very expectations of others, and by the requirements of socio-political norm and convention. In the contemporary climate, the cultural, political and national signifiers that are ascribed to the skin we live in and the garments and other signs with which we adorn our bodies serve to identify us, but also sometimes to contain us and our otherwise fluid identities within the strict parameters of gender, sexuality and race
In her choice of writers, Amaleena privileges their ‘different and difficult, multilayered textual responses to female corporeality’ yet recognises too, and with delicacy, the relation of this to a multi-cultural positioning. I quote:
Nothomb is Belgain-born, Devi is Indo-Mauritian, Darrieussecq was born in the Basque country and Bouraoui is half-French and half-Algerian […] this book proposes a deliberate grouping of a multicultural corpus within the context of an increasingly globalized world to think about how women’s concerns might be shared and contested in different, though perhaps overlapping, cultural environments.
The individual chapters are each quite distinct in their concerns. In discussing Nothomb, Amaleena offers an extraordinary engagement with her writings about hunger, reorienting ideas about anorexia: ‘it is writing, finally, as a creative, physical act that opens out the productive flux of desire that corresponds to Amélie’s superhunger’. In her work on Devi, Devi whom I should say I encountered first through working with Amaleena, she offers a different attention to a desiring relation between women, mediated physically as well as through writing, and in modes that allow new forms of becoming: ‘If […] the fecundity of the caress takes place at an embodied level through the affectivity and tactility of [the women’s] relations, their encounter also sets in motion a sense of becoming otherwise and mutual engenderment on a creative level’. This sense of polyvalence emerges beautifully in her writing on Darrieussecq, perhaps the most revelatory parts of the volume, and in her lovely tracking of nomadic vitalities in Bouraoui.
Amaleena says at the close that the book was motivated by the idea of ‘unleashing thought’. This is exactly what she does here in a book that is infinitely sensitive, engaged, passionate and fearless.
