Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle

Abstract

[There] is moment when Echo traps Narcissus in a certain way. . . . Echo, in her loving and infinite cleverness, arranges it so that in repeating last syllables of words of Narcissus, she speaks in such a way that words become her own - In repeating language of another, she signs her own love. Jacques Derrida, in documentary Derrida, 2004 The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider's web. There is a vampirism in letters, a vampirism that is specifically epistolary. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Feminist Parasites This essay asks how parasitism might articulate itself as an experimental practice as well as a performance model for contemporary feminist politics. My thinking here is drawn from a larger critical project, which argues that by dragging impositions, parodies, and caricatures said to represent feminism, by performing back to itself, a younger generation of feminist artists have already begun to reimage feminism as a critically viable project capable of assimilating irony and equivocality for its tactical gain. By performing parasites, artists Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle model feminist tactics that feed on and destabilize patriarchal forms by seizing upon gendered analogy of correspondence between feminized parasite and her masculinized host. Precisely what is a para- site? asks David Bell of Michel Serres's study The Parasite. It is an opera- tor that interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of host's meal . . . and gives only words ... in return (1981, 886). Chris Kraus and Sophie Calles art book projects explore motif of heterosexual epistolary exchange, read here as literary performance. The role of epistolary in production of sexual abjection, a medium historically associated with courtship, is made explicit; in both projects, love letter represents a state of play by which gendered opponents feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game (recalling a question Judith Butler has posed: Can exchange of speech or writing be occasion for a disruption of social ontology of positionality? [1995, 441-42]). Kraus and Calle are not first artists to mobilize epistolary and diaristic practices, traditionally seen as benign feminine literary forms, to challenge heterosexual romance's complicity in women's abjection. Their works tug on a thread within feminist practices established by works such as Carolee Schneemanns Interior Scroll (1975) or Adrian Piper's Calling Cards (1986), which mobilized questions of racial as well as sexual abjection. The artists step into role of parasite to avenge women's (real and performed) hostility toward men, designated guilty agents of their (real and performed) suffering. In both projects, women's desire to literalize, to put into letters, their social revenge on patriarchy by making surrogate victims out of actual male subjectivities takes on a decidedly literary character, as reading and writing become conditions of possibility for turning the law of father against itself, letter by letter. What is intriguing about parasite for feminism is how it has been overwhelmingly deployed as a pejorative term rooted in misogyny of supposed alien threat of femininity, a destructive and out- of- control dependence on a presumably healthy patriarch. J. Hillis Miller noted this gendering, writing that parasite suggests image of 'the obvious or univocal reading' as mighty, masculine oak or ash rooted in solid ground, endangered by insidious twining around it of ivy. English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing life sap of its host (1977, 440). More compelling is extent to which Western feminist discourses have internalized these anxieties, warnings of parasitism cropping up in canonical texts of often white, U. …