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Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz and Sara Garbagnoli "La Pensée Wittig: Une Introduction" (Payot, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gina Stam, associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama. And today I will be talking to Sara Garbagnoli about the book La Penser, out this year from Payeaux, which she co authored with Natasha Chercuti Osorovitz. A feminist and sociologist. Sarah is an independent scholar with affiliations to the Laboratoire des Tout de Genre de Sexualite, or legs, which brings together researchers from several Paris universities and to the Research center in Politics and Theories of Sexuality or Politesse at the Universitadi Verona. Sarah has Co authored 2023's Monique Fatigue and 2017's La Croisade Anti Gender and co edited Les Revoluzione del Desiderio Non si no chedonna. And most relevant to today's discussion, a volume of uncollected and unpublished essays by Monique Wittig called Dans les Reine Enemies with Theo mention for Minry, which came out last year. Sarah has contributed to numerous academic journals and collective volumes and has translated several key French feminist works into Italian. In 2021, Sarah Garbagnoli was awarded the Emma Goldman Prize by the Flax foundation for her contributions to feminist scholarship. Sarah, thank you so much for being with me today.
- [02:27]
C
Dear Gina, thank you for the invitation to take part to the NBN podcast. I'm very happy and honored, happy and honored to speak about a wonderful, wonderful revolutionary thinker that give us oxygen to better breathe in the violent, sexist, racist, heterosexist world in which we live.
- [02:53]
B
So I guess I'll start with, by asking you what brought you to Monique Wittig's work in general and to this project in particular?
- [02:59]
C
Yes, I discovered Monique Wittig when I was in my 30s. And what brought me to her work was, was a personal experience. My suffering as a lesbian was first, the fact that her writing quite literally gave me oxygen. I came to Wittig after years of, we can say, suffocations, years of being told by family, by school, by society, that lesbianism, that queerness was unspeakable, was shameful, was non existent. And so for me, Witti belongs to the small constellation of thinkers, of writers who allowed minority subjects to survive and to breathe differently, to breathe better. Vitiq gives us oxygens. And her, her radical thought struck me with the force of a new pair of glasses, a new pair of lenses through which I could see the world differently. So what brought me and Natasha to this project specifically was the desire to honor, to honor the effect that she produced in our life and to honor the radicality and also the contemporarity of Wittig's thought. So we can say that more than 20 years after her death, her insistence on denaturalization, on utopia as imagination, remains a sort of lifeline for feminists, for queer and for anti racist struggles.
- [05:02]
B
And can you tell us a little bit about what the significance of the title La Penser is, which can be translated as the Wittig Thought or the Wittig mind, maybe?
- [05:12]
C
Sure, the title in French, La Penser carries, we can say, a double resonance. On the one hand, it designates the thought of Wittique, situating Monique Wittig within the, we can say, intellectual and political landscape of 20th century feminism, but also queer theory. But on the other end, and more importantly for us, it signals the emergence of La Possebotigue as we can consider it a conceptual tool, a conceptual paradigm in its own right. And this paradigm performs a work of denaturalization. It exposes sex, race and the very notion of difference as neither ontological givens nor, nor natural facts, but as historically contingent political categories. So La Penser Wittigue names for us a mode of thought that directly contests what Wittigue herself call La Pensee Strait, that is the essentialist structure of perception that produces men, women, non racialized and racialized subjects as if they were natural groups.
- [06:44]
B
And as you've evoked here, this book is at once a primer on Marique Fatigue's writing and also a historiographical account that situates her within feminist movements of the 1970s to 1990s and their development in France. And can you tell us why this dual approach was necessary for you?
- [07:01]
C
For us, this approach was necessary to for an historiographical reason, but also for a conceptual reason. The historical anchoring is indispensable to grasp the genesis of Wittig's project and the concrete antagonisms that she faced. Situating her within the French materialist feminist milieu shows how her specifically lesbian materialist intervention emerges against and within all these feminist struggles. Only by restoring these contexts do key theses regain their forces. Heterosexuality as a total political regime, La Pence Strait as an essentialist perceptual order, and the corollary that categories such as men, women, white and black are socially fabricated rather than natural. But second, for us, the book needed also to counter specific historiographical distortions. The deracination of Wittique from the materialist paradigm, or the artificial separation of her theory from her literary practice, and more broadly, a form of neutralization of a stated aim, the destruction of the heterosexual regime into a generic queer film.
- [08:40]
B
Thanks. And the title of your introduction is Les Vasions Transformatrice or Transformative Escape. What is the escape you are referring to and why does it take such a primary position for you?
- [08:52]
C
Well, the escape refers to the possibility, imagined and theorized by Monique Wittig, of fleeing the totalitarian dimension of heterosexuality. For Wittig, heterosexuality is not a sexual orientation, but a regime, but a political regime, but a totalitarian political regime. It is inscribed in bodies, in institution, in language, in consciousness. It shapes the very conditions of existence. In this sense, it appears as inescapable, as omnipresent, as natural. And yet Wittig insists that freedom is possible, and to become conscious of constraint is for her the way to open a margin of manoeuvre. And so escape is not understood as a naive evasion, as a denial of reality, but as a transformative practice, a form of displayment that reveals the artificiality of the categories men and women, and imagines forms of life and forms of social relationship beyond them.
- [10:23]
B
So you've already talked about how Monique Wittig was part of the materialist feminist tradition, and the four chapters of your book are constructed around four focal points. Materialism heterosexuality, lesbianism and writing. Could you explain for the listeners exactly what materialist feminism means and how it's distinct from other strains of feminism?
- [10:44]
C
It's not easy, but I will try. Materialist feminism, as it emerged in France in the early 70s, is a current of thought that radically redefined the terms of feminist theory by applying and transforming Marxist categories to account for women's oppression. Its central tenet is that women are not a natural group defined by biology or by sexual different, but a social class produced through specific relation of power, specific relations of appropriation by men. In this perspective, sex is not a biological destiny, but a political category. Sex names the structure, relation of domination that creates and sustains the group's men and women. Telling that shows that this approach is distinct from other feminist currents in at least two ways. First, unlike differentialist feminism, materialist feminism rejects the notion of sexual difference. For materialist feminists such as Wittique, but also Christine Delphine, Nicole, Claude Mathieu, Collette Guillaume, sexual difference is not a given, but the ideological tool, the ideological mechanism that conceals relations of exploitation and concealing them legitimizing the domination. But also unlike liberal or reformist feminisms, materialist feminism does not seek a sort of accommodation with the world, a sort of accommodation with existing institutions. It demands the abolition of the sex class system itself, just as Marxism demanded the abolition of class society.
- [12:55]
B
So then, in chapter two, you discuss heterosexuality as a political regime, which is something that you've already talked about and which you just evoked, again with your references to Marxist theory. How so? You've just talked about how it is a political regime. But how did Wittig see this as a blind spot in feminist theory.
- [13:18]
C
Identify this as a blind spot? In much feminist thought, even radical analysis, including those influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, often took heterosexuality for granted as the inevitable framework of social life. While behavior argued that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, she left intact the assumption that heterosexuality grounds the social order. And for Wittig, this failure to interrogate heterosexuality as a political system meant reproducing its naturalization. Women were still assumed to exist as a natural group, as a group outside of and prior to their subordination. So Wittique's intervention was to insist that woman does not exist apart from heterosexuality, and it is precisely heterosexual appropriation that produces the sex plus women in the first place.
- [14:31]
B
And how did Wittig understand the relationship between heterosexuality and Rousseau's concept of the social contract?
- [14:39]
C
Yes, it was quite striking to discover how she used Rousseau. Wittig reinterprets Rousseau's concept of the social contract. And she did it in order to expose the hidden foundation of heterosexual domination. For Rousseau, the social contract is a voluntary pact through which individuals enter collective life, renouncing certain freedoms in exchange for mutual recognition and protection. Wittig's intervention is to show that this fiction collapses when viewed from the perspective of sex. The so called contract is built on the exclusion, appropriation and. And subordination of women. And she names this arrangement a heterosexual contract. Unlike Rousseau's idealized contract, it is not a pact among equals, but what she calls a baster contract, in which one part, one class, the class of men, appropriates another, the class of women, while naturalizing this relation through the ideology of sexual difference.
- [16:10]
B
And since you've, as you've just evoked, it isn't a contract between equals, the notion of consent actually has a somewhat unexpected place within Wittik's thought. And can you tell us a little bit about how consent is a troubled notion within the Wittik's vision of heterosexuality as a political regime?
- [16:29]
C
Absolutely. For vt, consent is a troubled notion, is a deeply troubled notion because it presupposes the very voluntarism that the heterosexual regime denies. If heterosexuality were simply a matter of individual choice, then refusal, then resistance would be imaginable within its own terms. But Wittig insists that heterosexuality operates not as an opinion, but. But a regime, a totalizing social system that precedes and shapes subjectivities themselves. It is inscribed, as I said, law in education, but even in corporeality. And in such a system, consent cannot serve as a meaningful marker of freedom, since the conditions for autonomy are structured by. By oppression, by coercion. To speak of consent within heterosexuality is to conceal the fact that women as a sex class are appropriated in advance.
- [17:38]
B
So how do lesbians and gays escape this regime if consent isn't necessary for it to function?
- [17:44]
C
Lesbian gays are capable to escape, in a sense, if they reject heterosexuality. If they break the contract, they enact in lived form the possibility of different social relation, of different social relation going beyond the heterosexual contract. And for Wittique, they see the transformative escape to recognize that freedom cannot be grounded in consent to domination, but must be sought in the denaturalization and in the destruction of heterosexuality that makes domination appear as. And nature.
- [18:44]
B
So what is the relationship between lesbianism as a concept which you've just discussed a little bit in a political position within Wittig's writing? And her work on pronouns, especially in her fiction.
- [18:58]
C
For Wittig, lesbianism, as I said, is a political position, and to declare oneself a lesbian, for Wittig, is to break the contract, as I said, that constitutes women as a class. Lesbianism function as an escape from this system, revealing its contingency and opening new forms of subjectivity. But Wittig is a writer, not only a thinker, and her literary experimentation with pronouns can and must be understood as the linguistic and literary counterpart of her theoretical move, because the heterosexual regime is reproduced not only through material practices but also through language. And language incessantly enforces the binary or the binary of he and she. And through literature. Wittig tried to dismantle sex as a political category, and she tries to put forward transformation of the linguistic order itself. Wittig's fiction enacts this transformation. We can think about Le poponax. The narrative voice is carried by the indefinite pronoun, one, which in a sense suspends sex and gender identification. In the Guerriere, the collective pronouns elle, the feminine plural, they is universalized, becoming the vector, the vehicle for an utopian subjectivity. And in Le Core lesbien, Wittig invents a fractal pronoun, je graphically splitting the I to capture the specific violent condition of the minoritarian subject who can only speak within a language, then denies her existence as an absolute subject. So all these innovations are not stylistic ornaments, but they are integral to Wittig's theoretical and political project.
- [21:52]
B
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- [22:38]
C
Yes, sure. This project, called by Wittig a project of a book on homosexuality Feminine lesbianism, occupies a singular place within her work because it makes explicit line of inquiry that runs throughout Wittig's theoretical and literary production. The conceptualization of lesbianism as a position of rapture, of radical rupture with the heterosexual regime. And the traces of this project survive, as you said, in different interviews conducted between the late 70s and early 80s. Together, these texts offer a glimpse into Wittig's way and plan for a sociological and historical treatise on lesbianism as a political paradigma to analyze heterosexuality. Wittig sketches the architecture of the book that would have elaborated lesbianism as a category of analysis. Her aim was both to describe lesbian identity in sociological terms, but also to articulate lesbianism as the privileged standpoint that reveals heterosexuality as a political regime. We can also say that this project materialized in a different form in the book called Lesbian People Material for Dictionary co author with a sanded zeig. And rather than a linear A sociological treatise on lesbianism, the book took the shape of a beautiful utopia, a beautiful utopian lexicon, playfully reconstructing lesbian history, myth and culture in defiance of the systematic erasure.
- [24:54]
B
So, circling back around to their question of escape, which comes up again in this chapter. Two of Wittig's later texts, the Constant Journey and Across the Acheron or Louvois, Sansfin and Virgil Nantes, they stage solitary journeys of their protagonists and guides. But in your book you characterize these texts as solitary flight or solidary escape. So what kind of action is proposed in these texts?
- [25:24]
C
In these two works, the Constant Journey and Across the Akron that Wittique Published in 1985, the journeys undertaken by the protagonists, by the lesbian protagonists, are at once solitary and profoundly relational, political. While the narrative stage figures moving through infernal landscape reworkings of Cervantes and Dante, they are not only tales of isolated exile. They dramatize what we may call solidary flight, an escape that does not end, that does not culminate in withdrawal from the social, but instead affirms the possibility of transformation. So these journeys figure the act of leaving behind the categories imposed by the heterosexual regime, but also propose that such departure is never undertaken just for oneself. In Wittique's vision, even solitary wanderings resonate as acts of political solidarity, forging the outlines of a new community in the very act of breaking with the old.
- [26:55]
B
And another one of these sort of contradictory or oxymoronic expressions. In addition to the solidary, solitary issue is also the idea of active passion, which is something that you emphasize was important for Wittig. What does this mean?
- [27:13]
C
So in the context of her later works, the Constant Journey and Across the Acheron places a particular emphasis on what she calls active passion, la passion active. And for her, passion is not reduced, reducible to something passive, to private effect. It is also a force of transformation, directed outward toward the remaking of the world. To speak of active passion is to refuse the passivity historically assigned to minority subjects and to reconceptualize it as a site of agency. Passion becomes active when it is mobilized as a form of resistance, but also as a form of creation, as a power to dismantle existing relation and to forge others. So it is both effective and political. The effective drive that animates the impulse, that utopian impulse in Wittig's fiction makes possible to imagine a new, new world.
- [28:58]
B
So, coming onto the final chapter, which focuses on political writing, as you refer to it, how does Wittig see languages operating on reality? You've spoken a little bit about this already in terms of the pronouns.
- [29:11]
C
Yes. She considers literature as a site of action, a terrain where writing is not neutral. And so literature is a terrain where the dominant order inscribed itself. And minoritarian writer can operate, then, in working on the forms of language and on the literary canon. The canon with its genre, with its pronounce, with its narrative forms, is one of the primary vehicles through which the straight mind reproduces itself. So what Wittig called a minoritarian writer has to enter this canon, to enter the enemy arena and to destroy the form and the structure that regulate this arena.
- [30:32]
B
And as you say, Wittig focuses on writing as work. And this is in contrast to seeing writing as a kind of secretion, which would be proposed by someone like Helene Cic? Su with feminine writing. So can you give us some concrete examples of Wittig's own literary work?
- [30:50]
C
Yes. L' criteur Politique for Wittigue stands apart from the so called ecritur feminine, presenting literature as a sort of secretion of feminine bodies. But also it diverges from the model of commitment literature, which was theorized by Jean Paul Sarc and Simone de Beauvoir. Wittigue invented new pronouns, as I said, Wittig invented new words. But Wittig also uses specific techniques to make existing new relationships. For instance, there are innovative devices to destabilize the language, like enumeration, for instance, is composed by different fragments, textual fragments, which are punctuated by a series of first name without surnames. And these, enumeration are very important because Wittig wrote that in the straight word, naming constitute the initial act of racializations. And now in La Guerriere, she tries through this enumeration to create a pathway for the emergence of new subjectivity emancipated by. By the heterosexual regime. We can find enumeration also in Le Corps Lesbien. Enumeration reappears in the form of blocks in capital letters that interrupt the fragments. And these listings encompass women's body parts, actions and emotion, producing what Witted calls a radiographic vision of the body. Another form of enumeration appears in the Bruillant pour indictionnaire des Aments in the bibliography. Here, Wittigue and Sae invent another form of bibliographic convention. There is a long list of books which just opposes feminized canonical figure. For instance, Pascal becomes Pascal with a E at the end, with, with invented, with fictional names or contemporary feminist or lesbian references. Enumeration does more than catalog. We can say that it draws attention to gaps. What is absent, la lacuna, what is absent between the entries and these recourse to the lacuna, to the draft, to the blank space, to the missing, is aesthetically and politically central to Wutig's poetics. It signals the erasure of minoritarian subjects, but also the anticipation of what does not exist yet.
- [35:15]
B
And in terms of her literary work that's presenting something that doesn't exist yet. She refers to her own work as a Trojan horse. Could you tell us what she means by that?
- [35:28]
C
The metaphor of the Trojan horse is very important for Wittig is central for her literary politics. The Trojan horse designates writings as a practice of infiltration and a practice of transformation of the literary field. Literature, for Wittig, does not stand outside the ideological apparatus of the heterosexual regime. So it is necessary to enter the enemy arena like a Trojan horse. This is a conceptual tool that captures Wittig's conviction that the heterosexual regime is totalizing. But the transformation is possible and must operate from within the language.
- [36:48]
B
And in terms of that transformation that operates through the minoritarian voice. Why is the presence of a minoritarian voice considered dangerous to the dominant culture?
- [36:59]
C
It's not an easy question, but maybe we can say that it is because the minoritarian voice exposes the contingent and the constructed character of categories that the dominant order presents as universal and as immutable. The dominant culture derives its stability from its capacity to render its own standpoint invisible, to universalize itself, while relegating others to the position of different, of particular. So for Wittig, when a minoritarian voice speaks, it disrupts this illusion of universality, and it reveals the existence of subjects, of experiences that do not conform this dominant definition of universality. So the mini utilitarian voice is dangerous because it carries with critique and invention critique in the sense that it unmasks domination disguised as nature and invention, because it articulates new imaginaries that undermine the universality of the dominant.
- [38:52]
B
Thank you. And so, as we come to an end of our time here, I'd just like to ask who you envision as the target audience for this book and what you hope that they can take away from it.
- [39:03]
C
The primary audience we envision are minoritarian subjects. Those whose lives are marked are constrained by oppression, by domination, by categories and norm of the heterosexual, patriarchal and racist order. These are the readers who struggle to breathe with instructors that naturalize their subordination, who feels the suffocating weight of categories such as women, men, racialized, other, etc. So for me and Natasha, for them, Wittig's thought can provide oxygen the intellectual and imaginative resources necessary to survive, to resist and to begin to reconfigure and to transform the world.
- [40:22]
B
Thank you so much. Before we go, do you have any current projects that you would like to tell the listeners about?
- [40:30]
C
Maybe. I'm not. I'm not sure, but I'm currently working on a on a book about Colette Guillemann which is so important for Monique Wittig and another small project on the anti woke crusade, which I would like to analyze through Guillaume's and Wittig theoretical lens. These projects for me are not just academic, they are about our present and I hope to give tools to show how Guillaume's work, but also Wittig work help us to understand that if domination can be naturalized by dominant, it can also be denaturalized by minority groups. And that means that a change is always possible, that a radical, revolutionary change is always possible.
- [41:50]
B
Well, I'm sure that we will all look forward to seeing those projects come to fruition. Thank you once again. Sarah Bundle and Safe With Expedia you.
- [42:12]
C
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- [42:18]
B
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- [42:23]
C
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