Passwords. The approach of the twentieth anniversary of his death in 2023, recalls the growing news of the activist and feminist writer. A biography of Emilie Notéris thus precedes manifestations and re -editions.
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The hashtag #Wittig2023 is already launched. Twenty years after his death, fifty years after his book The Lesbian body (midnight, 1973), the followers of the French author intend to make 2023 a real “Wittig year”. On the program: readings, exhibitions, workshops, and an international conference in Berkeley (California) and Geneva (Switzerland). Without forgetting the reissue of the lesbian body in pocket, at Minuit, early January.
The transformation of Monique Wittig (1935-2003) into a feminist and lesbian icon has already been underway for a few years. Not a week without it being brandished in reference by actresses Adèle Haenel and Angèle Metzger, journalist Lauren Bastide or the writer Virginie Despentes, who praises her “relevance”, even stronger according to her than twenty years ago . “Wittig is for me the perfect illustration that creativity can be exercised both in activism as in the literature,” adds the elected ecologist Alice Coffin, interviewed by “Le Monde of books”. In April, Gallimard reissued the endless trip, a lesbian rewriting of Don Quixote. The play, carried out in particular by Adèle Haenel, was applauded in June at the Maison de la Poésie, in Paris. His 1969 novel Les Guérillères (midnight, reissued in pocket in 2019) inspired the Marinette Dozeville company a dance show that runs in France and Belgium. In Brittany, it is a traveling bookstore also called the Guérillères who will open in December, in the Monts d’Arrée. And this month seems, in the “Icons” collection of Les Pérégrines editions, a first biography, signed Emilie Noteuris. This is the “Wittig moment”.
After her exile in the United States, started in 1976, the writer – she was in the masculine – had been a little forgotten in France, relegated among the figures dated from literary history as that of feminism. The book of the American philosopher Judith Butler troubled in the genre (1990; La Découverte, 2005) made it possible to rediscover it. For a new generation of feminists and lesbians, Monique Wittig has become a model of engaged, enraged women, which has moved the lines with its pen. A point of junction between the feminism of Marxist inspiration and the current “queer thought”. “It was a keystone, without which the lesbian-feminist cultural and political building would not hold”, judges the writer Wendy Delorme in a message cited by Emilie Noteuris. Demonstration in four stages.
pronouns
Half a century before controversies on inclusive language and the appearance of formulas like “Iel”, Wittig tries to energize the borders of the genre from its first published novel, Opoponax (Minuit, 1964). This book, hailed by the writers of the new novel and crowned by the Medici Prize, tells a love between two little girls, even if this aspect is “completely passed over in silence” by criticism, as the author will note later. Wittig gives priority to the “ON” to “cancel” temporarily “the social division of the sexes”. In his following fiction, the healers, the epic of a troop of fighters who wants to free himself from oppression, it is the “they” who predominates. Then a disturbing “J/E”, a “I” torn, speaks in the lesbian body. “Personal and impersonal pronouns are the subject, the material of all my books,” she wrote a posteriori.
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