Tuesday 2nd March 2021, 5:15-6:30pm

Online

Lili Owen Rowlands (University of Cambridge) - 'Je désire donc je suis': From Autofiction to Autotheory in Recent French Life Writing

'Autotheory', the blending of autobiographical and theoretical modes, has been figured as a new, North American generic innovation, with Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) perhaps the best-known example. Yet the genre's proximity to 'autofiction', which enjoys critical purchase in the French context, has been entirely unexplored. In this paper, I follow recent moves in French life writing away from the predominance of autofiction, whose focus on confession, desire and interiority I argue tacitly evince a psychoanalytic theory of the subject, towards 'autotheory', whose theoretical investments convey a more constructivist and materialist account of subjectivity. To do this I trace the imprint of Anglophone queer and feminist theory in two works of autotheory: Anne F. Garréta's Pas un jour (2002) and Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie (2008). These authors, I conclude, refuse the notion that desire is a well of truth marked by sexual difference and instead show how desire is shaped by social violence and exclusion.

David Ewing (University of Cambridge) - Metaphor and its Antitheses in Henri Lefebvre's Postcolonial Imaginary

In the second volume of his Critique de la vie quotidienne, Henri Lefebvre writes that 'la vie quotidienne, selon l'expression énergique de Guy Debord, est littéralement "colonisée".' Lefebvre cagily attributes the idea of the colonization of everyday life to Debord, although the pair had elaborated the concept in tandem and Lefebvre had provided the bulk of the intellectual ballast. What is invoked is not only the phenomenon of colonialism, understood as the conquest and control of overseas territories by a colonial power, but the process and project of colonization; as Lefebvre was only too aware, this term could not but invoke the history of settler colonialism. While metropolitan France underwent considerable demographic, territorial, and environmental transformations after the Liberation, it is not at all apparent how such changes can be understood as an extension of the French state's settler-colonial project in Algeria or of French colonialism tout court. Despite Lefebvre's plea, then, the colonization of everyday life resists literal understanding. Indeed, the concept works through metonymy and metaphor and, in positing everyday life in the metropole as the final frontier, reproduces the spatio-temporal dimensions of those figures of speech. As such, the idea enacts a theory of history in which capitalist modernity radiates outward from Europe, only to fold back on itself in the midst of decolonization. We might nevertheless understand Lefebvre's project as having produced a postcolonial imaginary insofar as it displaces the analytical frame of the Westphalian state in its historicization of everyday life. Attending to his use of his language may bring into focus the contours of possibility for relating the everyday as a level of social reality to the history of colonialism.