Lisa Robertson: 'Theory is our city'

Lemon Hound has graciously posted Lisa Robertson's introduction to Theory, A Sunday (Belladonna* 2014), in anticipation of Robertson, Nicole Brossard, Rachel Levitsky, and Gail Scott reading and discussing the important book in Montreal in October. "Theory, a City," as Robertson has it, emphasizes the cross-cultural and cross-country impact that Montreal's 1980s feminist consciousness and theoretical praxis had, particularly in regard to Vancouver poetics:

For the young feminist writers of 1980s Vancouver, where I then lived, the Montréal women’s writing scene was mythic and galvanizing. Reading the translated Québécoise texts emerging from The Women’s Press and Coach House Books, and in journals such as Writing, Raddle Moon, Room of One’s Own and Tessera, we relished the presence of a vigorous, complex, avant-garde feminist context. We didn’t need to invent feminist writing entirely on our own — it was already happening, and it was welcoming our desires, our political passions, our experiments and our transformations.

For Robertson, it was also a different thing to encounter French philosophy from a Francophone POV, as opposed to the academic climate the work mostly fell to in the States.

But the Québécois had a different cultural and linguistic access to European French theory, a differently mediated relationship to the texts whose readings have, in the Anglophone world, been largely removed from the social and political movements that inflected French writing in the 60s and 70s. In France, we can identify the radical presence of Occupation Resistance politics, the war in Algeria and the accompanying militarization of French Algerian life within France, the French war in Indo-China, and the events of the May ’68 student and worker uprising as being crucial to the discursive decentering and politicization of philosophy and criticism. As these events unfolded in France, parallel yet independent social and political transformations were taking place in Québec.

[...]

In the context of the publication of Theory, A Sunday in the USA, it seems essential to indicate the political history specific to Québec, a history which both conditioned and surrounded the feminist community in Montréal, and served to politicize many of us elsewhere in Canada. That this Québécois political history is under-represented in the North American Anglophone context is undeniable. But I also want to indicate the relationship of Québec’s political history to that of France, in order to suggest that the reception of French theoretical texts in Québec, as well as their influence by Québec, bore a meaning utterly different than it did in broader North American contexts. In France and in Québec, theory was not only an institutional discourse but a manual and testing ground for political revolution. It responded to conditions in real time. For example, Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, a text that so cogently articulated the political positioning of minor or colonized languages, showing such languages to be rife with covert agency and transformational potential, essentially describes the long-existent complex situation of Québécois writing and language. Québécois French, an isolated language community within the dominant Anglophone political economy of Canada and the USA, a minor, under-recognized, and often patronized language in relation to European French linguistic and cultural history, a language always under assault by the tedious and ubiquitous hegemonies and entertainment products of capital, has had to find and organize within itself a strong current of resistance, by means of which its identity has been consolidated, and its agency radicalized. (Here I will indicate in passing the important presence of historical micro-communities of French speakers across Canada — in Northern Ontario, for example, in the Métis communities of Manitoba, in the Acadian areas of the Maritime provinces, and in northern Alberta.) The writers of Theory, A Sunday are, in this sense, multiply marginalized as writers who are Québécois French speaking and feminist. That their recourse to French theory, from de Beauvoir to Lacan to Irigaray to Wittig to Barthes to Meschonnic, has been one of the tactics towards survival, rather than an embellishment or diversification of the vocabularies of academic speech, is central to their vision of what theory is, what theory performs.

Robertson goes on to discuss the actual Sunday reading, so check the rest out at Lemon Hound--or better yet, buy the book! They are still at a discounted rate for those interested in holding their own discussion groups. And, as we pointed out recently, LH is also collecting responses to the book for possible publication until October. More info here.