"Slammed into Walls": Violence and the Impersonalized Subject in Danielle Collobert's It Then

Abstract

In Danielle Collobert’s experimental prose-poetry work, It Then, an ambiguous body known only as “it” is engaged in intense physical violence as it attempts – and fails – to communicate with “other voices” in the text. This body is not only genderless; it presents as simultaneous (non) subject and (non) object, demonstrating a plurality of presences while obscuring the source and direction of corporeal violence. Collobert achieves this ambiguity through impersonalization, an obliteration of identity by the removal or refusal of any subject pronoun that would otherwise conventionally define a subject. Collobert’s “it” attempts to use language without taking on an identity, and yet this lack of identity appears to leave it with no agency, a prisoner in a quasi-speechless agony. Is its corporeal suffering a punitive by-product of the desire to speak as an impersonalized pronoun or is it a counter-attack to the violence of an oppressive language? Is the “it” trapped in a vicious cycle of (self) abuse in language? Might the experience of “it” suggest that violence creates language, or destroys it? I argue that impersonalization is not only a violent linguistic technique but also an exposition of violence inherent in language and écriture.