| Ellen Quigley focuses on Nicole Brossard's Le desert mauve (1987; trans. 1990), Daphne Marlatt's Taken (1996), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996) in the context of other works by these writers and various poststructuralist theories. These lesbian Canadian (Marlatt and Brand) and Quebecoises (Brossard) feminist ficto-theorists enable Quigley to construct a poststructuralist theory of desiring intersubjectivity. She reads the political, linguistic, and theoretical negotiations of fiction and theory in these novels against several existing poststructuralist theories in order to deconstruct the masculinist and heterosexist bias that pervades academically sanctioned poststructuralism while still resisting the originary subject in Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory of a pre-Oedipal chora. Quigley's rhizomatic methodology follows what Pamela Banting calls an "interlanguage." She draws on the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida (philosophic and linguistic), Gayatri Spivak (Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial), Homi Bhabha (postcolonial and cultural), Luce Irigaray and Kelly Oliver (feminist ethics and philosophic), Judith Butler (gender), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Marxist, anti-psychoanalytic, and anti-philosophic) and intercuts Marilyn Farwell's theory of lesbian narratology. Quigley argues that the influence of affirmative postcolonial and French deconstructions in lesbian ficto-theory in Canada and Quebec refuses the decentred death-of-the-subject and creates a "para-centrality" (Spivak) of vital lesbian intersubjects that are not substances, subjects, or representational objects but quantum energies that paralogically spin out of sedentary molecular orbits and categorical locations and decolonize and uncommodify subjectivity, desire, and thought. The contradictory partial signs on the surfaces of corporeality, language, readers/writers, and subjects/objects maintain a specificity of micropolitical issues in a nonfoundational coalition politics. Following a section on her theoretical negotiations, Quigley examines separately the works of Brossard, Marlatt, and Brand. Each section is divided into three parallel chapters that focus on deconstructing originary subjects, a mobile interlanguage that challenges categorical distinctions, and the need for what Deleuze and Guattari call a war machine of analytical violence to demolish the violent categorical constitution of the subject and open subjectivity to quantum probabilities that will enable the affirmative, ethical, and loving connections of a mobile, transgressive, poststructuralist intersubjectivity. |
