Tuesday 24th November 2020, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Rebecca Rosenberg (King's College, London) - Nelly Arcan's Autopathographies

Quebecois writer Nelly Arcan (1973-2009) is known for her first work Putain (2001) in which the autofictional narrator writes of her sex work in addition to her alienation from others due to a patriarchal logic of female competition. She simultaneously participates in this competition of beauty and youth while also criticising it. Subtending her implication in this logic is an increasing sense of alienation while signs of psychological suffering are revealed throughout the text. She also writes of an illness and suicide determinism throughout the text, which is further elaborated in her second autofictional work, Folle (2004), an extended suicide note to an ex-lover before her self-determined suicide date at the age of 30. This determinism that runs through the two texts is retrospectively shadowed by Arcan's suicide at the age of 36. In this paper, I will investigate the extent to which Arcan's two autofictions are autopathographies (patient-authored narratives) and what they autofictionally reveal about psychological suffering.

Joanne Hornsby (King's College, London) - Sex Work and Subjectivity in George Bataille's Madame Edwarda

Georges Bataille is an ambivalent figure; he has exercised an enormous influence over deconstructive theory, been celebrated for his 'transgressive' theory of waste and excess as the fundamental truth of humanity, and his rejection of the 'restricted' utilitarian economy of investment and return (Baudrillard, Hollier, Stoekl). However, he has also been criticised as obsessed with masculinity, dangerously attached still to a masculine ideal which keeps him rooted within a heterosexist hierarchy of value (Carolyn Dean, Susan Sulieman). What I intend to explore in this paper is the connection between these two positions, understood through the deployment of the sex worker as a figure in Bataille's texts, particularly Madame Edwarda. Edwarda herself, who embodies the figure of the mad and nymphomaniacal prostitute, acts as the vector for the 'impossible', excessive experience the narrator of the text seeks; but that experience, which declares itself anti-utilitarian, therefore depends on the utilisation of Edwarda to signify the 'prostitute', on her material labour as a sex worker (she is there because she is being paid) and on the absence of her recognition as an 'autonomous desiring subject' (because she is given a priori as 'mad'). This, I will argue, raises serious problems for the credibility of any deconstructionist understanding of Bataille's work, and must furthermore cause us to ask if deconstruction itself invariably comes at the cost of a certain subjectivity or 'voice consciousness' (Spivak).

This session was recorded for those unable to attend.