法國女性主義健將Monique Wittig過逝
以下新聞轉貼自英國衛報
http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4598718,00.html
Monique Wittig
Radical French writer at the cutting edge of feminist philosophy
Margaret Reynolds
Wednesday February 5, 2003
The Guardian
Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was a radical philosopher, lesbian
theorist, feminist practitioner and avant-garde writer. Her move to spend
the last decade or so of her life at the University of Arizona - in the
heart of the wild west - was only one of many radical translations that
characterised her extraordinary career.
She was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France. After her parents,
who opposed the Nazis, fled to Rouergue, in the French Aveyron, she grew up
in country surroundings, before her family moved on to Paris, where she
attended university.
The 1960s were made for Wittig. She became a founder member of the Mouvement
de la Liberation Feminine, helped organise a separatist group called the
Feministes Revolutionnaires and, with a group of other women, marched on
the Arc de Triomphe to lay a wreath dedicated to The Wife Of The Unknown
Soldier. She knew the older generation of feminist philosopher politicians
- Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras - but she had her
own ideas.
She received a number of rejection slips before her work was noticed by
Jerome Lindon at Editions de Minuit, a revolutionary publishing house best
known as the champion of the nouveau roman, and the publisher of Alain
Robbe-Grillet. He turned down La Mechanique (Mechanics), but took her next
novel L'Opoponax. It won the Prix Medicis in 1964.
Wittig published Les Guerilleres in 1969, Le Corps Lesbien in 1973, and Virgile,
Non in 1985 - all with Editions de Minuit. These works are part fiction,
part argument, part literary experiment. Les Guerilleres (The Women Guerrillas)
features nothing but a large mysterious "0" on some pages. Others consist
of lists of names set out like poetry - "Calypso, Judith, Anne" - while still
more tell the strange beauty of some encampment, ritual or coupling. But
every page is a call to arms: "The women affirming triumph that all action is
overthrow".
In her novel L'Opoponax, the two girls refer to themselves in the third person
as "on" ("one"). In Le Corps Lesbien, the distinction between "you" and "I"
is elided. "J/e", in the French, becomes "m/e" and "m/y" in the English
translation by David LeVay (1986). The protagonists ex plore each other,
body and spirit, becoming each other, just as the formal qualities of the
text are designed to blend. Wittig created in her writing a politics of
collaboration and integration.
Eventually, Wittig broke from the Mouvement and went to the United States.
Her problem was this: she did not believe in the concept of "woman" - as in
women's studies, the women's movement, or even in the theoretical style of
writing ecriture feminine, identified by her compatriots Helene Cixous and
Catherine Clement.
When she took up her last job in women's studies at Tucson, Wittig was
resigned to the paradox. Her work shares the political concerns and seriously
teasing allusiveness of writer-philosophers like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
and, in Canada, Nicole Brossard.
But there was a difference. Wittig's point of view was not separatist.
The term "woman", she argued, had to be rejected as secondary - contaminated
by its second-class relation to the term "man", and governed by the dictates
of conventional heterosexuality. "Lesbians," she said, "are not women." To
break down definitions was her mission.
In spite of her reluctance to perform, she became a celebrity in the
American women's movement. Her collection of essays, The Straight Mind (1992),
is witty, imaginative and, as ever, experimental. It is her imaginative use
of style-as-politics that will be her lasting legacy, influencing writers as
diverse as Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson.
She published Lesbian Peoples: Material For A Dictionary (1976) in
collaboration with Sande Zeig, with whom she also worked on a film,
The Girl. She may have ended her life in the mainstream, as a professor
of French (1990-2003), and of women's studies (1997-2003), but she
remained a pioneer.
· Monique Wittig, writer and academic, born July 13 1935; died January 3 2003
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