Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim Lucas Hollister Annabel L. Kim. Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2018. 263pp. When one thinks of French feminist fiction and thought since Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal works, many of the first names that come to mind are those of writers associated with psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and écriture féminine: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva. In Unbecoming [End Page 339] Language, Annabel L. Kim argues that this differentialist tradition has overshadowed the rich contributions of anti-difference, anti-identitarian, “unbecoming” French feminist writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne F. Garréta. Kim defines “unbecoming” as a relationship with language that breaks down heteropatriarchal identity categories and allows one to experience “subjectivity without subjecthood—where one is fully in oneself but free, fluid, unfixed, potential” (6). Kim’s exploration of the literary strategies angled at such experiences is a significant contribution to scholarship on French feminism and fiction, and should be of broad interest to scholars working across a variety of humanities disciplines. One of the great strengths of Unbecoming Language is the coherence of its corpus and the specificity of its focus. The book is divided into four chapters: three in-depth author studies and a final chapter that synthesizes those studies and provides a concluding reading of each author. While Unbecoming language at first appears to trace a linear narrative of influence—in which Sarraute’s experiments with tropismes set the stage for the pronoun work of Wittig’s radical revolutionary feminist texts, which in turn give way to Garréta’s more elegiac and playful Oulipian fictions—Kim insists on contiguity and proximity rather than linear continuity (82). Indeed, throughout her close readings, Kim always privileges dialogic and relational gestures and never allows one writer—not even Wittig, who supplies so much of Kim’s analytical framework—to occupy a truly central or authoritative position in relation to the others. This mode of reading is perfectly in keeping with Kim’s conviction that language is a radically open and free space, that there are “as many types of relationships to language . . . as there are subjectivities” (232), and hence that there are multiple ways to use language to combat oppressive categories and reductive identities. Clearly, as the book acknowledges (34), instituting the free and fluid subjectivity of unbecoming is a utopian project, one that seeks a “paradise” of words or of “freed language” (100, 114, 122, 123, 191) outside the discursive categories that undergird society as we know it. However, Kim refuses to place unbecoming at a safe remove from the present, as a horizon or ideal that texts could prefigure but not enact. Instead, Kim holds to the idea that unbecoming can be directly and presently experienced through contact with a language that, in distinction to socially imposed “discourse” (120–1), is “vital” (102), “living” (181), “vibrant” (234), “raw” (209), and materially embodied (194, 235). The gambit of Unbecoming Language is thus to posit that the experience of “self-decomposure” (30) is concretely available to readers who engage deeply with a particular kind of fiction. [End Page 340] This line of argument exposes Unbecoming Language to critique from those who, faithful to Derridean and poststructuralist conceptions of literary meaning, reject the premise of language’s self-presence to itself or indeed of any full presence or “plenitude” (34). For those who are receptive to the book’s founding premise, however, Kim’s detailed readings offer ample examples of how writers and readers might construct an “affective and corporeal relationship” with the “embodied and vital entity” that is language (235). As this overview suggests, Unbecoming Language puts forth an ambitious argument about what literary language can do and, just as importantly, undo. Unbecoming Language is a book that points to fruitful new avenues for analyzing unbecoming poetics across a broad spectrum of literary movements, and many aesthetic associations could be envisioned on the basis of Kim’s readings. There are nevertheless places where the book’s singular focus, the pains it takes to “loosen each writer’s anchoring” in groups and literary categories (2), and...