Figures, Monique Wittig
Wednesday 12 Jun 2024 from 6:30pm to 7:45pm
Free upon registration
Talk in french
A gathering to pay tribute to Monique Wittig on the occasion of the publication of her previously unpublished texts, 'Dans l'arène ennemie', with Sara Garbagnoli, Théo Mantion and Émilie Notéris.
There's the story: Monique Wittig, writer, co-founder of the Women's Liberation Movement, revolutionary lesbian, theorist of "straight thinking". But two recent volumes complicate or disrupt the original fable.
'Dans l'arène ennemie,' the collection of texts and interviews compiled by Sara Garbagnoli and Théo Mantion (Les éditions de Minuit, 2024), multiplies the figures of Monique Wittig and diffracts the image we have of her. Icon or figure? This was the question already raised by Émilie Notéris's Wittig (Les Pérégrines, 2022), a 'draft' for a biography in the form of a literary investigation into Wittig's work and life.
The projects of Sara Garbagnoli, Théo Mantion and Émilie Notéris each reflect a desire to biograph without biographing, either by collecting or by scrambling. Their meeting will provide an opportunity to establish the parameters of an 'oblique' portrait.
In his thesis on the political margins of the Nouveau Roman, he focuses on the formalism of minority writers, in particular Monique Wittig and Kateb Yacine. He is the editor, with Sara Garbagnoli, of Dans l'arène ennemie (Minuit, 2024), a collection of writings by Monique Wittig.
With Théo Mantion, she edited 'Dans l'arène ennemie' (Minuit, 2024), a collection of writings by Monique Wittig. With Eva Feole she co-wrote the essay 'Monique Wittig' (DeriveApprodi, 2023) and with Massimo Prearo 'La croisade "anti-gender"' (Textuel, 2017).
She has prefaced anarchists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman (Femmes et anarchistes, 2014) and translated ecofeminists (Reclaim!, 2016; Manifeste xénoféministe), as well as feminist activists Sarah Schulman (La gentrification des esprits, 2018) and Shulamith Firestone (Zones mortes, 2020). In 2020 she published Macronique. Les choses qui n'existent pas existent quand même (Cambourakis, coll. "Sorcières"), a reactionary text written between October 2019 and March 2020 mapping police violence, and Alma Matériau (Paraguay), a feminist history of art.
In 2022, Wittig, brouillon pour une biographie de Monique Wittig was published by Éditions Les Pérégrines.