On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays. On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays. Edited by N <scp>amascar</scp> S <scp>haktini</scp> . Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2005. xvi + 230 pp. Hb £36.95.

Abstract

Namascar Shaktini's edited volume of essays on Monique Wittig has the function of a kind of posthumous Festschrift, appearing as it does two years after Wittig's death. The book begins with the 1970 essay ‘For a Women's Liberation Movement’, co-written by Wittig, her sister Gille, Shaktini (Margaret Stephenson) and Marcia Rothenburg, which is published in English here for the first time. It puts revealing emphasis on the remains of feudalism evident in women's unpaid work as mothers and in the home, as well as their collective status as a class. Two texts by Wittig on her own fictions Les Guérillères and Le Corps lesbien follow, also both published here for the first time in English. By far the most worthwhile section of the book, however, is the ‘Critical Approaches’ section that includes essays by Teresa de Lauretis and Diane Griffin Chowder. Both writers convincingly criticize Judith Butler's Gender Trouble for consigning Wittig to ‘a problematic humanism based in a problematic metaphysics of presence’, and set out the epistemological and materialist specificity of lesbianism theorized by Wittig, according to which the symbolic order is a materialist force and a fundamental political category, and literary work by a minor writer must universalize its particular, historically determined point of view. The essays that follow — a philosophical reading by Linda M. G. Zerilli, a rather unoriginal close textual reading by Erika Ostrovsky, and an account of Wittig's only stage play by Jeanelle Laillou Savona that largely reprises an earlier article — are written from diverse perspectives, but a remarkable type of consensus emerges that grants Wittig a place in contemporary queer theory earned on the basis of texts written in the 1960s and 1970s, before ‘queer theory’ as such existed. According to this, the ‘lesbian body’ Wittig writes about has no essence and is not a referent: lesbianism is ‘a long-range process of change that entails belief in community, both past and future, and personal transformation through erotic and political interaction with others’ (p. 142). Rather than naming sexual orientation, lesbian subjectivity describes an ‘eccentric’ and constantly self-displacing movement of sexualized political change. Shaktini's own essay brings out this queer desire and subjectivity, which may have a different identity in each instance of occurrence, by developing Wittig's own description of Le Corps lesbien as ‘a reverie about the beautiful analysis of the pronouns je and tu by the linguist Emile Benveniste’ (p. 150). Three interesting essays translated from French close the volume, of which the last, an account of the politics of feminism and publishing in France and the USA between 1968 and the 1980s, is entertainingly cast as a fictional meeting between the author and Manastabal, the narrator of Wittig's 1985 Virgile, non. The volume includes a full bibliography of works by Wittig, and an extensive (if ‘select’) bibliography of criticism on her. Overall, it constitutes an essential addition to critical writing on Wittig, and an important addition to feminist and queer theory today.