Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 3: La guerre! À quoi ça sert?

Monique Wittig (1935-2003) 

French feminist philosopher and author of 

Les Guérillères (1969)  

 Let the sun shine / the world is ours!

 

 

I.

 

Monique Wittig published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964 and it won her immediate attention both at home and abroad.  

 

But it's her second book, Les Guérillères (1969) - a landmark text in the lesbian feminist canon - that is our concern here [a]. In particular, the third part of this novel, having previously discussed the first two parts in two earlier posts: click here. This third part recounts the war fought between the two political classes (or 'sexes') that ends with the establishment of a lesbian sovereign state. 

 

For Wittig, as a radical lesbian writer, it's not just men who are the problem: heterosexuality is itself a political regime (and form of normativity) that must be overthrown, thereby dissolving the categories of man and woman. Feminists who failed (or refused) to see this and called for reform were, in her view, simply rearranging the furniture along straight lines.  

 

It all sounds very revolutionary, but I suspect Judith Butler was right to identify a lingering metaphysics of presence in Wittig's thinking - i.e., something that presupposes a pre-discursive and universal human subject (though defenders of Wittig argue that this is a misunderstanding of her work).   

 

 

II.

   

Part three opens with a couple of passages, worth quoting in full and discussing in detail, that certainly make one sit up and take note:

 

"Look at him, this cripple, who hides his calves as best he can. Look at his timid springless gait. In his cities it is easy to do him violence. You lie in wait for him at a street-corner one night. He thinks you are beckoning to him. You profit by this to take him by surprise, he hasnt even the reflex to cry out. Ambushed in his towns you chase him, you lay hands on him, you capture him, you surprise him shouting with all your might."  (60)

 

"The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent." (60)

 

Now, obviously, Wittig is not advocating violence against disabled men [b] or cannibalism (at least I don't think so). The passages are meant, one assumes, as provocative satire, subverting traditional gender roles and critiquing the arrogance and violence of the old carnophallogocentric regime that systematically oppressed women and consumed the flesh of animals.     

 

When Wittig refers to the man as a cripple to be chased and ambushed in city streets, or as something to be captured, cooked, and eaten, she is reversing the historical portrayal of women as weak and vulnerable targets in urban spaces and of animals as merely things to be hunted or factory farmed. She is asking men: How does it feel to be victimised? How does it feel to be preyed upon? 

 

The response to this encapsulates the conceited belief that society cannot function without male authority, labour, and leadership: that man is indispensable. 

 

Wittig thinks this laughable - although it might be noted that the dissident feminist Camille Paglia would absolutely agree that the modern world heavily relies upon men doing much of the most dangerous and dirty work and she would criticise Wittig for ignoring the fact that not only have men constructed the great cities, but the conceptual universe as well [c]. 

 

 

III.

 

I'm glad to discover that Wittig's neo-Amazons keep up the fine tradition of going into battle topless. Upon a given signal, "the women [...] uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts" (61).  

 

Some of them, laughing as they do so, aggressively (and defiantly) thrust their breasts forward. 

 

Now, it should be pointed out that what I describe as a fine tradition is actually an ancient myth rather than historical military practice. Even the original Amazons, as fierce a tribe of female warriors as ever lived, probably wore standard protective clothing and armour and didn't go into battle with their tits out (and nor, for the record, did they remove their right breast in order to handle their weapons more effectively). 

 

I'm sure Wittig would be aware of this. And so, perhaps - being French and of a revolutionary disposition - she was thinking more of Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) ... 

 

 

IV. 

Les guérillères paint their faces and their limbs in bright colours with war paint. They utter cries that are so truly blood-curdling that "many of their adversaries drop their weapons" (63) and run for the hills in great terror and confusion, attempting to block up their ears as they do so.  

 

And run they might: for the women delight in mass slaughter - they even have a death chant that calls upon the vultures to feast on the corpses they have supplied - and when on the rare occasion that they do take male prisoners, they strip them naked and make them parade through the streets so that they can be jeered and spat at. 

 

Having been publicly (and sexually) humiliated, they are then subjected to extreme torture, using the greatest possible violence: "The women stop their ears with wax so as not hear their discordant cries." (68) When dead, the bodies are flayed and the skins are tanned in the usual manner or put on public display in the sun.   

Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword ... the torture chamber and the mass grave [d]. 

 

 

V.

 

Somewhat strangely, considering their love of snakes commented on in part two of this post (fragment xii), Wittig's warrior women dream of the time when they can crush the head of the serpent who encouraged Eve to eat the apple. 

 

Personally, I think the Lawrentian idea of reconciliation is better. 

 

In a discarded passage from The Plumed Serpent (1926), the revolutionary leader Don Ramón instructs Kate Leslie to go tell her fellow Irish women that "the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches [...] the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head" [e].   

 

Like Lawrence, I am of the view that peace needs to be made with the serpent and acknowledged as having its own being. Not crushed or cast out, denigrated or denied [f]. 

 

 

VI. 

 

Readers might be pleased to hear that eventually there is a peace and reconciliation between the sexes - that rather than maintaining a permanent separatist state, the women accept the young men into their new world beneath a honey-coloured sun (although only after they have put to the sword "all those who do not acknowledge their might" (81) and accept the radical dismantling of gender binaries).  

 

They assure the young men that they have been fighting for their future and their freedom too. Gathering at an outdoor celebration of music, food, language, and love, les guérillères say: "let there be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known" (79). 

 

They express their wish that all survivors will "form a lasting alliance that no future dispute can compromise" (79). And that's got to be better, surely, than turning the earth into hell ...? 

 

After all, permanent insurrection - driven by anger and the politics of hate - gets to be a bit of a bore and if it's fun at first to be more barbarous than Attila the Hun, one can't help recalling Lawrence's words in a letter to Aldous Huxley: "if you only palpitate to murder" it ultimately produces inertia and an "atrophy of the feelings" [g].  

 

So - all's well that ends well, then? Not quite. For the New Order is marked by mass book burnings and a Year Zero ideology. I express my concern with these things in part one of this post (fragment xix). 

 

And I can't help wondering just how happy the young men with their smooth round faces really are living in a lesbian utopia, with its permanently mild climate and unchanging seasons, and all dressed (somewhat ironically) in identical little-boy blue clothing ...?

 

We are told that these young men with their shrunken loins and trembling with emotion are "full of grace and beauty" (87), but they have basically been emasculated and feminised. 

 

The war is over! The war is over! cry les guérillères. 

 

Yet one notices that they still dress in militant black and remain armed to the teeth with clubs, knives, rifles, and rocket launchers - and some continue to parade around bare-breasted, just to let the young men know they remain warriors still.  

 

Notes

 

[a] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007).

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[b] I have to say, even when understood as symbolism designed to shock readers, using disability as a metaphor for weakness or vulnerability is problematic, relying as it does on harmful, real-world stereotypes about disabled bodies. For many contemporary readers, such imagery is offensive, regardless of the author's intent.

 

[c] In Sexual Personae (1990), Paglia outlines her belief that civilisation is an Apollonian fabrication i.e., a structure of order, geometry, law, and leadership created by men to defend against the chaotic, untamed forces of nature (the Dionysian or chthonic realm). Ever the provocateuse, Paglia famously argued that building civilisation had been left in female hands, we would still be living in mud huts. 

      Somewhat paradoxically, however, Paglia does not believe this is because men are stronger than women; on the contrary, she sees masculinity as fragile and in constant need of social reinforcement. 

      Readers might be interested in an article by Mark J. Perry published on the American Enterprise Institute's website (9 Sept 2018) discussing Paglia's view on the indispensability of men: click here.    

[d] The mutilated bodies of those men either killed in battle or in captivity, are thrown into a mass grave. The bodies of the many women killed are placed side by side in communal graves: "All the bodies have been mummified and treated with care for long preservation." (81)

 

[e] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 547.

 

[f] See the post 'Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake' (17 July 2025), where I develop this theme with reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Lawrence's poem 'Snake' in his 2009 book The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I., trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago University Press). 

 

[g] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. The letter has been dated by the editors as 28 October, 1928.

 

 

Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 2: Fragments of Myth & Memory

Blazing genital / the eternal circle is your symbol [a] 

 

 

Opening Remarks 

 

Having explored part one of Monique Wittig's novel Les Guérillères (1969) [b] in twenty fragments from a lesbian utopia, here we are going to reflect on (and summarise) part two. 

 

Again, let me confess from the outset that as much as I admire this text, it's one that I find difficult to follow at times due to its rejection of a linear structure. But then, of course, it wasn't written for me - lacking as I do a vagina and preferring fact and forgetfulness over myth and memory. 

 

 

Twenty Fragments of Myth & Memory 

 

(i) 

 

Part two opens with a story told by someone called Sophie Ménade - which simply has to be a pseudonym [c]. Her tale is an imaginative retelling of several older myths, including the biblical story found in Genesis of Eve and the serpent, and is designed to subvert ancient wisdom (inherently phallogocentric as it is). 

 

In Sophie's version of events, a naked black woman with a beautiful, glistening body walks through a colourful, vibrant orchard. She possesses a "hortative head of hair" (32) made of thousands of musical snakes that give her advice. 

 

Her favourite snake, Orpheus, does not tempt her toward sin or downfall, instead, he encourages her to eat the fruit in the centre of the garden and persuades her that all things which sparkle are good (even if all that glitters is not gold). 

 

I guess the idea is that we can trust our senses and should judge by the immediate, visceral experience of beauty as it is communicated to us - something that D. H. Lawrence would approve of, even if he speaks of things that glow rather than sparkle [d]. 

 

Sophie Ménade closes her address to the women by promising that, one day, they will have a clear understanding of a solar myth that will instruct them how to walk the earth as sun-women: 

 

"At these words the women begin to dance, stamping the ground with their feet. They begin a round dance, clapping their hands, giving voice to a song from which no coherent phrase emerges." (32) [e] 

 

(ii) 

 

Although they lead quite a hippie-ish lifestyle, the women are first and foremost warriors and live to make war not love and to demonstrate "their strength and their courage" (32) on the battlefield. 

 

The clue, of course, is in the word guérillères. 

 

(iii) 

 

Literacy is something else that matters greatly to these women: not a moment passes without one of them writing something in a great public register, or else reading aloud some passage. Interestingly, this is one of the main differences between Wittig's text and William Burroughs's novel The Wild Boys (1971) [f]. 

 

For although both books function as speculative, mythic fiction that uses experimental prose to narrate the violent overthrow of global heteropatriarchy by armed, gender-segregated combatants - and both authors believe that traditional narrative structures are inherently tied to oppressive systems of thought, meaning that language itself must be fractured - Wittig views language as a contestable area that can be reclaimed and rewritten, whereas Burroughs sees it as an alien virus used by the state to programme human behaviour. 

 

Ultimately, his goal is not to write a queer new language, but to destroy language entirely so as to achieve absolute silent consciousness. 

 

(iv) 

 

One of the women - Phiomèle Sarte [g] - loves to sing while squatting on her heels and swinging her breasts from side to side. When she finally stops singing, she falls face down on the floor, spent with joy and exhaustion, and has to be carried home to her bed. That, or left on the grass to sleep in the sun. 

 

One critic explains that this is a primal, ritualistic act that is all about reclaiming bodily autonomy and experiencing the kind of pleasure that the French call jouissance. The fact that, after she has collapsed, she is cared for shows the sense of community and mutual support among the women. 

 

Of course, that's a reading that insists on the novel as a utopian work of allegorical fiction. More literal-minded readers might worry that the woman is mentally ill and clearly needs medical assistance rather than being left to lie on the grass or dumped back home to sleep it off (they might even call this neglectful behaviour). 

 

(v) 

 

It seems that the glenuri are not the only strange creatures found in Wittig's novel ... 

 

Meet the julep - an animal "without head or tail that [...] spins on itself without uttering a sound" (33), so named because of its "predilection for rosewater" (35). Sometimes it is covered with scales; "at others it is covered with feathers" (33). It can sometimes emit a faint but unpleasant odour (a bit like garlic). 

 

The little girls have tried to tame them: "They put them on a leash to drag them behind them. But even pulling with all their might they cannot succeed in making the juleps budge." (35) 

 

Again, all of this means nothing to me, I'm afraid: I don't even find it particularly whimsical. 

 

However, I've read that some feminist scholars think that the julep is an allegorical symbol for the clitoris: that by representing the latter as an independent creature Wittig isolates it from old ways of thinking and establishes it as an autonomous site of female pleasure [h]. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced by this, but, in the absence of any better theory, I'm happy to accept it. 

 

(vi) 

 

This made me smile: 

 

"The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden Object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. [...] For example they do not [...] say that the vulvas are like black suns in the shining night." (35) 

 

And the reason it made me smile is because this is precisely what they do and say ...! [i] 

 

Obviously, as a novel, Les Guérillères has no index. But if it did, the word vulva would feature at least ten times more than any other term. For as I said in the first part of this post, this is a book of aggressive vulva activism and cunt awareness - a space in which philosophers and insects quickly lose their way. 

 

Having said that, see fragment (x) below. 

 

(vii) 

 

The women are warned: Beware of dispersal! Do not abandon the collectivity! If I were one of their number, it's precisely at this point I would scat like a cat and sever all ties. 

 

(viii) 

 

Considering the women are meant to be happy holding hands, drinking, laughing, playing, etc., an awful amount of weeping goes on in Wittig's book. Particularly in the winter months when they roll in the snow and "sobs rack their bodies" (37). 

 

Sometimes, it is so cold that "the frost solidifies their tears" until they "shine and sparkle on their cheeks" (37). Which is strange, because I thought they were living on tropical islands in the equatorial region, where it would normally snow on the highest mountain peaks. 

 

Or is this a memory of an earlier time and place? I feel a bit lost. And a bit confused. And, to be honest, a bit bored. 

 

(ix) 

 

I don't know why, but the story of Adèle Donge and the meticulous embalming of her corpse (described in some detail), reminded me of the scene in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) when the dead body of Robert Paulson is laid on the table and everyone begins to chant his name (even though in Project Mayhem each member is stripped of their individual identity). 

 

Her name is Adèle Donge ... Her name is Adèle Donge ... 

 

And it's a name heavily layered with historical, literary, and thematic meaning. For her surname is a reference to Marie Donge, the protagonist of Georges Simenon's famous 1942 novel La Vérité sur Bébé Donge. 

 

In the book, Mme. Donge is a desperate housewife who cannot take it anymore and so quietly and meticulously poisons her unfaithful husband with arsenic. By taking the surname and placing it into a setting of free, armed warriors, Wittig liberates the figure of the oppressed wife, transforming her from a domestic victim into a venerated, legendary figure of a sovereign female collective. 

 

As for the first name, Adèle, this derives from the Germanic word for noble. Now, of course, in a traditional patriarchal context, nobility is tied to lineage and male inheritance. But in Les Guérillères, it is earned on the battlefield and comes with death and the quasi-sacred ritual of her embalming. 

 

Her body is preserved like that of an ancient Egyptian queen and revered by her sisters, just as Bob Paulson was turned into a martyr and accorded posthumous status by his brothers-in-arms. In other words, in both Wittig's novel and Fincher's film, we witness the creation of a new sovereign mythology achieved through mourning and remembrance. 

 

(x) 

 

To be fair to the women, they do, at some point, realise that it's just as silly to worship the cunt as it is the phallus and that they must "examine the principle that has guided them" (44) and not exhaust themselves in symbolism or become trapped by their own anatomy. 

 

If you really want to rediscover the body and what it can do, then one must listen to Artaud: lose the organs and reject the metaphysical overcoding and bio-functional organ-isation of the body into the organism [j]. 

 

(xi) 

 

The feminist rejection of the domestic life and of work which has traditionally been regarded as suitable for them is celebrated in a huge bonfire of various objects and machines, including sewing-machines, typewriters, knitting-needles, ironing-boards, saucepans, brooms of every bristle, vacuum cleaners, washing-machines, etc. 

 

"They heap them on to an immense pyre to which they set fire, blowing up everything that will not burn. Then, starting to dance round it, they clap their hands, they shout obscene phrases, they cut their hair or let it down." (45) 

 

While part of me smiles, the problem with this kind of action is that it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater - but then, les guérillères probably don't care too much about that; they want to be Amazons, not mothers, and reject the biological and social reduction of women to mere reproductive vessels. 

 

If they do become pregnant and are obliged to eventually give birth, they view the latter as another kind of bloody battle and see the baby not so much as a bundle of joy but as something that has been captured. 

 

(xii) 

 

Torpedophiles will know that I have had a long interest in the strangely erotic relationship between women and snakes - see the post titled 'Ophidicism' (18 August 2013), for example. 

 

And so, I was happy to discover that some of Wittig's warrior women enjoy coiling snakes around their bodies and engaging in ancient pagan practices that involve putting lips to scales and ritually kissing serpents. 

 

(xiii) 

 

The women decide to produce a new (post-patriarchal) dictionary in which the word hate has been redefined as a form of vital energy. 

 

Now that's something I would support: for like William Hazlitt, I'm of the view that there's a real pleasure to be found in hating things - that hate is more than merely a reactive form of love and that, ultimately, it's hate, not love or truth, that will set you free [k]. 

 

(xiv) 

 

Great gatherings of uniformed women all marching in unison - possibly even more depressing than great gatherings of uniformed men all marching in unison. 

 

I hate great gatherings. I hate uniforms. And I hate the sight of people marching. 

 

And the sight of horses wounded and maimed by war is simply heartbreaking - far more so than the sight of human combatants bleeding or missing limbs. 

 

(xv) 

 

Les guérillères mourn all women who are victims of male violence and who have been hanged, beheaded, or "broken alive on the wheel in a public square" (50). 

 

As far as they are concerned, all these women are daughters of Eve and to the one who asks the nature of their crime they answer: "It was identical with that of the woman of whom it is written that she saw that the tree of the garden was good to eat [...] and that it was the tree requisite for gaining understanding" (50). 

 

(xvi) 

 

Flags are flown and trumpets sounded: let the war against men commence! The women laugh and shout and spit blood in the midst of battle, stepping over the bodies of fallen comrades: 

 

"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning." (52) 

 

They say a lot of things. But I say (after Foucault) that they should beware of the fascism ingrained in their own behaviour and idealism that causes the love of power and violence, the desire for Year Zero. 

 

(xvii) 

 

"They say that it is better to die than to live as slaves." (57) 

 

That's true, some famous figures (and former slaves) including Frederick Douglass, Samuel Sharpe, and Harriet Ann Jacobs have all agreed on this point, arguing that when a person is legally and economically reduced to the status of property or livestock, then the only way they can affirm their humanity is by consciously choosing their own death (the ultimate expression of free will). 

 

But I don't think this should be allowed to pass without at least some resistance. For such idealism - which often seems to equate death with a form of escape and freedom - very often has fatal consequences not just for those who subscribe to it [l]. 

 

Critics of this supposed noble truth - one that is ironically born of slave morality - point out that equating death with freedom is, at best, a logical fallacy and often betrays a religious mindset. For death is not the gateway to the freedom that awaits in the afterlife. Death is the stripping away of all essence and agency; a festive return to the material realm. 

 

Further, many historians point out that staying alive under oppression is its own form of defiance and that survival allows for the possibility of future rebellion, the preservation of culture, and to act as a historical witness. 

 

(xviii) 

 

A stylised performance that mimics combat movements, a war dance was traditionally used to prepare for battle, celebrate victory, or honour spiritual and tribal values. 

 

Wittig's warrior women begin their dance by stepping forward lightly, moving in a circle, holding hands and carefully observing the music. 

 

But, as they become more ecstatic, they leap about like young horses, stamping the ground and beating out the rhythm of a dance dedicated to the goddess Minerva: "Their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with bravura. No one can restrain them." (61)

 

(xix) 

 

This is the sort of paragraph that one might have expected to see Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood used on a shirt design for SEX or Seditionaries, or that Jamie Reid might have incorporated into a piece of artwork for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, describing the Sex Pistols: 

 

"They say that they foster disorder in all its forms. Confusion troubles violent debates disarray upsets disturbances incoherences irregularities divergences complications disagreements discords clashes polemics discussions contentions brawls disputes conflicts routs débâcles cataclysms disturbances quarrels agitation turbulence conflagrations chaos anarchy." (57) 

 

(xx) 

 

I'm not a pacifist. But I don't like those who glorify modern warfare and thrill to the thought of exterminating their enemy. And so, I don't much care for this from the very end of part two of Les Guérillères: 

 

"Their favourite weapons are portable. [...] There is every kind of rifle. There are machine guns and rocket-launchers. [...] The objective is not to gain ground but to destroy the greatest number of the enemy [...]" (58) 

 

I refer readers to the end of section (xvi) above re fascism and would remind them also of what Nietzsche says about honouring one's adversary - not seeking their annihilation. 

 

Having a worthy enemy should be a point of pride; their strength forces you to raise your own game and overcome your own weaknesses. Ultimately, it might be the case that not only does one find one's best enemy in one's best friend, but one locates one's best friend in one's best enemy. 

 

The true warrior does not seek to humiliate or crush an opponent, but happily engage in struggle with them. Unfortunately, it seems that in war as in love, woman is more barbarous than man ... [m] 

 

 

Notes 

 

[a] In her 1969 novel Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig uses the recurring letter 'O' as a powerful graphic and poetic device to primarily symbolise three things: female anatomy and sexuality (the vulval ring); a new point of origin free from old values that enables women to completely reinvent language, culture, and society (the mathematical zero); the unity of the lesbian sisterhood and community of warrior women (the circle of trust). 

 

[b] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007). 

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[c] I say this because the name 'Sophie Ménade' is simply too good (too convenient) to be true; the forename being the French spelling of the Greek word for wisdom [σοφία] and the surname meaning a wildly excited (possibly violent) woman who is either divinely inspired or a little bit crazy. It comes from the Greek term μαίνομαι (maínomai), which is where the female followers of Dionysus took their name from. 

 

[d] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 192, where he rejects the folk wisdom of base-born proverbs that denigrate beauty and cause us to doubt our own senses. "If you can't trust the impression which things make on you", he writes, "you are a fool." 

      See also the article 'Sex Appeal' in the same volume, pp. 143-148, in which he writes of beauty as an experience. 

 

[e] Again, one can't help but be reminded of Lawrence who also speaks of women in a time to come who belong neither to men nor their children nor even themselves, but to the sun. See D. H. Lawrence. 'Sun-women', in The Poems Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. 

 

[f] I recently wrote a post titled 'Dancing in the Rain' (3 Sept 2016) which discusses Burroughs's Wild Boys novel in relation to the song by Duran Duran. 

      One day, I will write the comparative study I promised on Wittig's novel and Burroughs's book. While their violent revolutionary fantasies share much in common and both works read like ancient epic poetry or future tribal histories rather than traditional novels, their ultimate political destinations represent two entirely different poles of radical separatism. 

      In brief, Wittig celebrates the total destruction of phallocracy to liberate the female body and construct a world based on collective sisterhood (which eventually incorporates men who surrender their patriarchal power). Burroughs's utopia, on the other hand, is an exclusively male, homoerotic universe that eliminates women completely (his future world relies on cloning, not sexual reproduction). She wants an egalitarian society free of sex and class dynamics; Burroughs envisions his wild boys one day abandoning the Earth and mutating into alien space beings. 

 

[g] A name that playfully suggests this woman is a lover of songs with existential meaning. In Greek mythology, Philomela is an Athenian princess who after some great tragedy befalls her is transformed by the gods into a nightingale. And Sarte ... well, I probably don't need to explain the cultural and philosophical resonances of this name (even when missing an 'r'). 

 

[h] Feminist theorists have been keen to posit the clitoris as a highly sensitive and complex organ that challenges religious, social, medical, and literary frameworks that have traditionally ignored, denied, or downplayed female pleasure. 

      One might recall Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, raging about the clitoris (or what he calls the beak). In his phallocentric view, a mature woman should only achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration by the penis. Clitoral stimulation is, in his opinion, an immature, inferior, and even unnatural way for a woman to derive pleasure. See chapter 14 of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

[i] This claim that the women do not "say that vulvas with their elliptical shape are to be compared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies" or that the cunt "is the primal form which as such describes the world in all its extent, in all its movement" is repeated on p. 37. But despite this insistence, I still think that this is what many of the women believe. 

 

[j] See Antonin Artaud's 1947 text (performed as a radio play) Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God), in which he declares that there is 'nothing more useless than an organ' - even our sex organs. See also Deleuze and Guattari's development of Artaud's thinking in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). 

 

[k] See the post 'And Hate Shall Set You Free' (15 Aug 2025). And see also the much earlier post 'Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything' (15 Nov 2014). 

 

[l] Indeed, it might be argued that this is often a luxury belief; that romanticising death over slavery is often an attitude held by those who are not actually facing the immediate reality of being killed. 

      The American Founding Father, Patrick Henry, for example, did not die violently, nor did he ever have to choose between literal death or slavery. Instead, he lived a relatively long and prosperous life and died peacefully at home. When he delivered his famous 'Give me liberty, or give me death!' speech at the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775, he was speaking rhetorically and using slavery as a political metaphor (his actual objection was to British rule and the imposition of taxes by the Crown - and it might also be noted by those who appreciate a little irony that he himself was a major slaveholder). 

 

[m] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche's line from Beyond Good and Evil (1886): "In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man." Trans. from the German by R. J. Hollingdale in the Penguin edition (1990), IV. 139, p. 101.

 

 

To read the third and final part of this post, please click here. 

 

 

Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 1: Fragments from a Lesbian Utopia

Cover of the first English edition 

(Peter Owen, London, 1971) [a]

 

Opening Remarks

 

I wouldn't go as far as Larry David and call myself a friend o' lesbians [b], but I certainly have no animosity against them and still find the murderous hatred expressed by Oliver Mellors one of the most shocking aspects of Lawrence's final novel [c].   

 

Further, I have read quite a lot of lesbian fiction and queer theory - from Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness (1928) to Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), via Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967) and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). 

 

However, one of the books I have only very recently finished reading is Monique Wittig's novel Les Guérillères (1969) [d], and it's this work I wish to reflect on (and summarise) here. That is to say, offer a vaguely philosophical consideration of a work that I admire for its poetic feel and fragmentary structure [e], rather than write a straightforward commentary or review. 

 

I have to confess that I found the book difficult to follow at times due to its rejection of a standard chronological plot in favour of looping and shifting back and forth in time. That said, it's conveniently divided in three parts (like this post): part one appears to explore the lesbian utopia that follows victory in the war against men detailed in part three. The middle part deals with myth and memory.  

 

The fact that the novel has no single protagonist and instead relies on a collective voice - Wittig uses the feminine plural pronoun elles ('they') - is also something one has to get used to (even in an age in which pronoun use has become a regular topic of discussion) [f].   

 

 

Fragments from a Lesbian Utopia

 

(i) 

 

The novel opens in a lesbian utopia: a golden space of pissing in public, laughter, and lacunae in which fragrant females frolic amidst the foliage. Some of the women swim in the sea, but this doesn't sound much fun as it induces vomiting. Some of the women hunt. Some like to play hide and seek.

 

There are gardens and fields and a market with stalls selling all kinds of fruit that attract the wasps. No one seems bothered if the insects land on their bare arms, partly because they are too busy thinking about their own genitalia: the women seem to navigate through daily life thanks to their vulva and they like to expose their sex to the sun, capturing its brilliance.  

 

In this way they feel themselves illuminated. Were D. H. Lawrence telling their story, he would doubtless write of cunt awareness.

 

(ii) 

 

Interestingly, the women carry small books which they call feminaries [g]. 

 

These essentially consist of a few pages printed with fragments of myth, capitalised words, and biology lessons on the size, shape, and function of the clitoris. There are also a number of blank pages in which to write and experiment with (non-patriarchal) language - only don't call this écriture féminine [h].     

 

(iii) 

 

Each morning, after the sun has risen, they anoint their flesh with aromatic oils until their limbs are glistening and their naked bodies gleam. Sometimes they massage one another. 

 

If it's raining the women prefer to stay indoors. On particularly overcast days they shed warm tears.   

 

(iv)

 

The only thing that smells worse than the sea are the vapours given off by the peat bogs above the hills. And perhaps the mummified body kept by the gipsy women which they carry outside and expose to the sun. 

 

Sometimes the river floods - and that too stinks of putrescence, but that doesn't stop the women swimming in it and making the flying-fish leap into the air before falling back with a splash. 

 

(v)

 

The little girls are particularly fond of birds and search in the bushes and trees for goldfinches and green canaries, which they can catch and cover with kisses and cherish until they accidently hold the little birds too tightly and they die. 

 

(vi)

 

Of course, even in paradise, there is still work to be done: though this mostly seems to consist in gathering fruit from the trees. And construction work on a dam which may or may not have been sited in the wrong location (too far upstream). 

 

Cherry picking is so much easier than engineering!    

 

(vii)

 

In the evening, when the full moon has risen, a drum is sounded in the main square and the women drink until they fall dead-drunk or lose self-control. So not that different from a Friday night out on the Toon, no matter how lyrically described.      

 

(viii)

 

Are there any readers out there who know what glenuri are? I have to confess, I didn't. 

 

They seem to be imaginary creatures that the women like to keep as pets and take for walks: 

 

"Their long filiform bodies are supported on thousands of feet. [...] Their innumerable eyes are grouped round an enormous orifice that serves them as a mouth as well as taking the place of a head. It is filled by a soft extensile membrane that can become taut or relaxed, each of its movements producing a different sound. The harmony of the glenuri may be compared to [...] the croaking of toads the miaowing of rutting cats the sharp sound of a flute." (12) 

 

Unfortunately, the excursions with the glenuri on their leashes are not without difficulty, because they "constantly endeavour to move away to some place other than where they are" (12) and often get trapped in openings that afford passage to their bodies but not their large heads. 

 

When this happens, "they begin to utter frightful shrieks" (14) and have to be freed. 

 

Surely it would be easier to get a dog - though I can see why the descriptor man's best friend might be problematic in a feminist utopia.    

 

(ix)

 

As well as a sun-goddess who illuminates the sky, the women also worship a pin-headed goddess with yellow eyes and an ancient Greek name - Eristikos [ἐριστικός] - she who is argumentative and fond of discord [i].  

 

They also have a machine used to record divergences or disagreements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in constant use 

 

(x)

 

Little birds and glenuri are not the only animals dear to les Guérillères - they also like to breast-feed baboons. 

 

Once they have finished suckling, the women throw the dog-faced monkeys to the ground and chase them back into the forest "until they have disappeared in the trees" (17). 

 

I guess this striking and surreal idea is intended to be a subversion of the so-called natural order which all too often reinforces and reflects the patriarchal order. By choosing to breastfeed baboons rather than human babies, Wittig's warrior women decouple the lactating female body from its role within the traditional family. 

 

In other words, it transforms an act traditionally associated with domesticity and passive motherhood into an act of radical autonomy. 

 

(xi)

 

Apart from breast-feeding baboons, the women share several tales involving animals: frogs, cats, and wolves, for example. They seem to suggest that women should stop interpreting themselves in terms of a mythical (and allegorical) model of nature that has been written by men. 

 

Such a model not only denigrates the animal, but it has nothing to do with the reality of lesbian identity existing not merely beyond the phallocratic (and heteronormative) order, but womanhood which, for Wittig, only exists in binary opposition to manhood - i.e., is a political and linguistic category, not a natural fact [j].

(xii)

 

It seems that in a lesbian utopia you have to make your own shampoo, using walnut oil, poppy seeds, and the crushed petals of macerated flowers. 

 

When they have enough of this home-made concoction, the women let down their hair and soak it in aromatic baths: "Their hands and arms glisten, their breasts are bare." (22)

 

(xiii)

 

Some of the women like to look at coloured engravings of women in royal blue uniforms marching.  

 

They also enjoy looking at photographs from the old times: particularly pictures of women taking industrial action - there's nothing sexier than striking textile workers on a picket line, or leading a street demo: "The faces are remarkable for their beauty." (24)   

(xiv)

 

Some of the women remember an old joke that had a punchline about the bird of Venus taking flight towards evening. Unfortunately, they can't quite remember the rest of it - only that it had something to do with the lips of the vulva (labia apparently resembling the wings of a dove).    

 

(xv)

 

According to Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece is the magical wool of a winged, golden-haired ram (named Chrysomallos) that became a supreme symbol of authority and kingship. 

 

But Wittig's warrior women claim to know nothing about this patriarchal myth and use the term to refer to their pubic hair (suggesting that they are all natural blondes - or perhaps I'm being overly literal in my reading here). 

  

(xvi)

 

The feminaries give pride of place "to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero" (27). The women seem to relate this to the Holy Grail (i.e., the sacred chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper). 

 

For Nick Land, however, zero marks the ultimate thermodynamic and ontological destination of human history - but perhaps that's just saying the same thing?   

 

(xvii)

 

If I'm not mistaken, Prometheus hid the stolen fire inside the hollow stalk of a giant fennel plant (with their dry, slow-burning, pithy interiors, fennel stalks are ideal for this).

 

But les Guérillères seem to believe that it was a woman who stole fire from the gods - and hid it inside her vagina (which, I would imagine, is just about one of the least suitable places, being lined with extremely sensitive - and naturally moist - mucous membrane). 

(xviii)

 

The warrior women scorn Sleeping Beauty and regard her comatose condition as ugly passivity. 

 

Snow-White they have a slightly more favourable opinion of, but only after having reframed her story so that she becomes an active agent of female rebellion (rather more like her energetic and outgoing sister Rose-Red).

 

What they don't see - rather surprisingly - is that to value aggressive activity over gentle passivity is to fall back into a classical form of patriarchal thinking. 

 

One assumes that Wittig was aware of the problem here: that she is merely flipping terms in a binary, whilst still leaving the structure in place (i.e., only fulfilling the first - but absolutely necessary - step in a more radical deconstruction).     

 

(xix)

 

As a rule, I'm not in favour of book burning as the words of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine still resonate in my imagination: 'Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.' [k]

 

So, this passage towards the end of part one of Les Guérillères rather surprised me: 

 

"The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. [...] They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations." (30)

 

I know that defenders of the novel and of revolutionary utopias will tell me that while, yes, books are being burnt this is not advocating such a practice in the real world - that it must be understood as a symbolic act contained in a work of fiction, blah, blah, blah. 

 

But, even so, it troubles me and I'm not convinced that in order to create a genuinely free society or a brand-new world one must destroy the old ways of thinking and knowing and speaking - the myth of Year Zero only ever ends in tears and genocide, does it not?   

 

(xx) 

 

The name of where the women live is never mentioned. 

 

But we do know they live on a series of islands situated in the equatorial region, so it's hot and wet and not great for the lungs. 

 

And we know that there are sharks swimming in the tropical blue seas that surround the islands.   

 

And we know that sometimes the women like to leap about in the manner of kangaroos and sleep in the trees.    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères, by Monique Wittig, was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007). 

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. For those who are interested, see the guest post by Simon Solomon on Goldsmith (14 Dec 2016), titled 'Magical Realism Without the Magic'  - the first part of a three-part series of posts by Solomon on the (displaced) task of the translator. 

 

[b] Curb Your Enthusiasm [S5/E2]: 'The Bowtie' (dir. Larry Charles, 2005). To watch the scene in which Larry explains to Jeff why lesbians love him and he has been completely embraced by the lesbian community, click the link provided. 

 

[c] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 205. I discuss Mellors's hatred of lesbians in the post titled 'Lesbophobia' (30 June 2013). 

 

[d] I was inspired to do so after discussing Nick Land's reading of this work in his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity' (1988), which can be found in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 55-80. 

      Wittig clearly had an important influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. See my post on this titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026).

 

[e] Les Guérillères is divided into three parts consisting of seven sections (I'm not quite sure we can call them chapters). Each part is opened by a thick black circle printed in the centre of a blank page: a symbol which - like all true symbols - suggests many different things at once - a full moon, eternal recurrence, the female sex, or the mathematical value of zero. It might also make some readers think of Pauline Réage's Histoire d'O (1954). 

 

[f] In Les Guérillères, Wittig uses the collective feminine pronoun elles as the absolute universal subject. In other words, she used it to represent all of humanity - including men - thereby stripping the masculine pronoun of its claim to the universal.

 

[g] Wittig invented the literary concept of un féminaire to mean a small book or journal carried by women. In Les Guérillères, it is carried by warrior women in their lesbian utopia and contains a mix of historical fragments, private symbols, and entirely blank pages where the women can periodically write and record their own lives, thereby reclaiming language and narrative outside of patriarchal structures. 

      The term became so influential that a real-world second-wave radical feminist publication in the United States officially renamed itself Feminary: A Feminist Journal in 1974 to pay homage to Wittig’s novel. 

 

[h] Wittig rejected the concept of écriture féminine because she viewed it as rooted in a form of biological essentialism that trapped women within the very patriarchal categories (and binary system) they sought to escape. Instead, Wittig seeks to construct a post-patriarchal language instead that did away with grammatical structures that enforce gender and heterosexuality.

 

[i] Having said that, Wittig's warrior women also claim that, ultimately, they have no need for deities, myths, or religious symbols. It could be that they initially utilise goddess myths as a necessary fiction and tool for liberation, but abandon such once the war against men has been won. 

      However, I'm more than a little sceptical about their atheism: their whole way of life has a quasi-spiritual feel to it, even if what they choose to worship is their own genitalia - the cunt "regarded as the emblem of fecundity and the reproductive force in nature" (19) - and even if they reject the hierarchical structures that most religiously-minded people like to erect. 

 

[j] Although Wittig still holds to a socio-political (but non-essential) concept of woman in Les Guérillères, in her later theoretical writings she will insist that lesbians are not women. 

      Wittig first publicly asserted this in 1978 at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in New York, during her delivery of the paper 'The Straight Mind', which can be found in her 1992 essay collection The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992). 

 

[k] Heine wrote the line in his tragic play Almansor (1823). The original German line (in full) reads: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." 

      Heine was prophetically referring to the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition, though the line tragically foreshadowed the Nazi book burnings in Germany over a century later. 

 

 

To read part two of this post - Fragments of Myth & Memory (15 Sept 2026) - click on the link.  

 

To read part three of this post - La guerre! À quoi ça sert? (17 Sept 2026)- click on the link. 

 

 

Dancing in the Rain: Notes on The Wild Boys

Simon, John, Andy, Nick, and Roger - 

the (not so) Wild Boys of Duran Duran 

Photo by Mike Owen (1984)

 

I.

 

Just to be clear: I don't much like - and have never much cared for - Duran Duran [1].

 

Having said that, their single 'The Wild Boys', released in October 1984 [2], intrigues because of its controversial point of literary reference: namely, the novel of that title by cult American author William S. Burroughs.

  

 

II. 

 

The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Grove Press, 1971) tells the story of a group of youths who, in a dystopian near-future, revolt against civilisation and embrace a life of savage violence, drug-fuelled hedonism, and sadistic homosexuality. 

 

As a piece of fiction, it isn't really my cup of tea: too experimental for my tastes [3].

 

Nevertheless, if one reads it as a work of radical (anti-assimilationist) queer theory akin to Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) [4], then it certainly has philosophical interest and it remains a favourite book among those who align themselves to the counterculture and wish to challenge heteronormative ideas and values.

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, the idea for the song came from the Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who wanted to make a full-length feature film based on Burroughs's surreal and sexually explicit novel. 

 

Mulcahy asked the band to produce a soundtrack and, excited by the proposal, Simon Le Bon immediately began writing some lyrics for a title track based on Mulcahy's brief synopsis of the book [5].  

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the group set about writing the music, taking inspiration less from Burroughs and more from Frankie Goes to Hollywood who had hit the number one spot in the UK charts earlier that year with their phenomenal debut single 'Relax' [6].    

 

'The Wild Boys' became one of the band's highest-charting singles, peaking at number two in the charts in both the UK and US. Naturally, Mulcahy directed the accompanying video which was filmed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios and cost an outrageous sum for the time (over a million pounds).  

 

 

IV.  

 

Mulcahy originally intended his award-winning music video to act as a teaser for his proposed cinematic adaptation of Burroughs's novel. Unfortunately, however, this ambitious film project never came to fruition [7]. 

 

Well, I say unfortunately, but perhaps it's just as well ... 

 

For I worry, having seen how the Duran Duran video gives Burroughs's deliriously homoerotic vision a boring, hetero-masculine, Mad Max-style makeover, what else Mulcahy - despite being gay - would have done to straightwash [8] and tame the story of The Wild Boys.

 

Ultimately, despite his vulgar auteur tag, Mulcahy is very much a mainstream commercial director rather than an underground filmmaker and should probably be prevented from even considering certain projects. 

 

Any adaptation of The Wild Boys that stays even halfway true to the book is never going to be given the greenlight by a major studio, open in cinemas across the land, or find a wide audience - not even among Durannies and members of the MTV generation.      

Notes 

 

[1] When my girlfriend Gillian bought a copy of the Duran Duran single 'Save a Prayer' in August 1982 (taken from the album Rio) it caused a huge row. I regarded it as both a betrayal of everything punk stood for and a compromise with everything punk had sought to destroy. The fact that she was defended in her actions by my friend Kirk Field at the time - as he also liked this new wave ballad - is something I still haven't forgotten or quite forgiven to this day. 

 

[2] 'The Wild Boys' was the only studio track on the Duran Duran live album Arena (Parlophone, 1984), and was produced by Nile Rodgers, who gave it the same kind of energy as he had given 'The Reflex' - the number one single released by Duran Duran in April 1984, from the album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI, 1984).   

 

[3] This is not to deny the writer's genius or the book's greatness. For an insightful (and appreciative) review of The Wild Boys by Alfred Kazin in The New York Times (12 Dec 1971), please click here. 

 

[4] For a discussion of Wittig's novel (and its influence on the thinking of Nick Land), see my post titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026). 

      I'm aware that Burroughs wrote from a very different perspective to Wittig, but I think there's a similar political logic and an aesthetics of negation at play in their writings. For example, both authors reject notions of reform, explicitly calling for total revolution and the destruction of bourgeois institutions such as the family. They also both believe that this revolution against the straight mindset is something that must be fought at all levels - including (and not least of all) the level of language. 

 

[5] It might be noted at this point that Russell Mulcahy and the boys from Duran Duran weren't the first to be inspired by Burroughs's novel. Malcolm McLaren, for example, was a huge William Burroughs fan and before settling on the name Bow Wow Wow for the band he assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols, he considered calling them the Sex Gang Children - a phrase he coined based upon his reading of The Wild Boys. 

      And - predictably - David Bowie also credited The Wild Boys with aesthetically influencing the creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona, for which he thanked Burroughs when they met in person at an event in November 1973. This successful encounter, which was featured in Rolling Stone in February 1974, is recalled by Jon Savage in 'When Bowie met Burroughs', The Guardian (9 Mar 2013). 

 

[6] 'Relax', by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was produced by Trevor Horn and released on ZTT Records in October 1983. It reached number one in the charts at the end of January 1984 and was one of the decade's most controversial records - far more so than Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys' - it was even subject to a BBC ban owing to the sexually explicit nature of the lyrics (and Mike Read's distaste for such). A different version of the song features on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT, 1984). 

      The band were marketed by ZTT co-founder Paul Morley in direct opposition to their pop rivals; a quarter-page ad for the single appeared in the music press declaring that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were going to make Duran Duran 'lick the shit off their shoes'. 

      The original video for the song, directed by Bernard Rose, was set in an S&M themed gay nightclub and featured the band members interacting with several characters of the kind that one might expect to encounter in such a venue. Not surprisingly, this too was banned by both the BBC and MTV. I provide a link to it so that readers can compare and contrast it with the Wild Boys video made by Mulcahy (I think I know which Burroughs would have preferred). 

 

[7] Speaking of projects that never came to fruition ... Burroughs himself had, in fact, written a screenplay based on his novel, which he hoped to have produced as a low-budget, hardcore gay porn film. However, after negotiations with the notorious Fred Halsted came to nothing, Burroughs abandoned the idea. 

      On a happier note, in 2017 The Wild Boys was finally adapted into a full-length feature film titled Les garçons sauvages, directed by Bertrand Mandico. It's not what one would call a faithful adaptation - more a clever reimagining. Thus, while it adopts certain ideas and carries over a transgressive spirit from the novel, the film replaces Burroughs's fragmented, non-linear narrative with a continuous plot and introduces supernatural elements to do with gender metamorphosis that are entirely absent from the original work. However, while moving away from the sadistic cisgender male homosexual experience, it remains defiantly a queer, anti-heteronormative movie - just all a bit more dreamlike. Click on the link provided to watch the trailer.  

 

[8] Straightwashing refers to the manner in which fictional gay and queer characters are portrayed as straight in order to make their representation comply with heteronormativity. A common justification for such queer erasure includes a concern with mainstream audience reaction. 

 

 

Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons

Nick Land and Die Nacht der Amazonen [a]

'We are the Amazons. We are the killers of beasts and men. 

Wild ourselves, we inhabit the wild places. Freedom courses in our blood, 

and death whispers at the tip of our arrows. 

We fear nothing, fear runs from us. Try to stop us, and you will feel our rage.' [b]

                                                          

 

I. 

 

For a thinker who once dismissed politics as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [c], Land spends an awful amount of time addressing political issues and discussing modern philosophy in relation to capitalism. 

 

And although he was never a traditional leftist even in his early writings, it's amusing to note just how deeply rooted in Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory, radical feminism, and femdom fantasy his thinking was in the late-1980s.   

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest' (1988), Land is at pains to argue that the Sage of Königsberg's philosophy cunningly disguised the violent, exclusionary realities of free-market capitalism, such as racism, by hiding them behind abstract, universal moral ideals:  

 

"Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian [...] and identified universality with ideality rather than with power." [d] 

 

Western modernity may portray itself as enlightened and speak of freedom and equality, but it's structurally dependent on class and racial hierarchies in order to exploit labour and foreign resources. Liberals want to reap the benefits of the bourgeois order, but they want to do so without feeling morally compromised by its more brutal aspects and Kant provides them with a way to wriggle off the hook and evade their guilt.      

 

That makes Kant not just a crypto-theologian, but also an apologist for capitalism; someone who enables the liberal elite to preach universal human rights whilst, at the same time, build a global economic system that is radically inhuman and which will eventually do away with mankind altogether.   

 

 

III. 

 

Not that Land objects to the death of man, of course. 

 

In fact, he wishes to accelerate the forces that capitalism itself unleashes by dissolving all borders and boundaries, all structures and identities (particularly national structures and identities). Ultimately, Nick's objection to the bourgeois order is that it never goes far or fast enough toward its own external limit. 

 

Similarly, his objection to old school socialism is that it isn't revolutionary enough; being as it is all too male, pale, and stale it doesn't offer the unrestrained programme born of the "theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality" (77) that he longs for. 

 

And so, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, at the end of 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Land turns to militant feminists, such as Monique Wittig, for support ...   

 

 

IV.

 

Wittig - a French philosopher and lesbian theorist - is also known for her fictional writings, including the hugely influential novel Les Guérillères (1969) [e].  

 

This term, a neologism, is sometimes translated into English as 'warrior women', but Land has a penchant for the idea of new Amazons, who, in his view, are alone capable of destroying the patriarchal and nationalistic structures that act as brakes on global capitalism, finally unleashing the market's unrestricted flow of desire.

 

Land writes:

 

"The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation [...] It is because women are the historical realisation of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands." (78)

 

Whilst praising Luce Irigaray's meticulous analysis of patriarchal power, Land says the political solutions she suggests "are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic" (78). It is only Wittig who has "adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism" (79). 

 

Land argues that liberating women from an ethno-geographical identity will result in a revolutionary subversion of the state.  He dismisses liberal feminism and reformism as co-opted mechanisms that simply give women access to wealth while leaving the brutal patriarchal-capitalist system intact.

 

But Land also insists that uprooting the patriarchal endogamy requires a fierce willingness to fight the modern state and he posits feminist violence as crucial. His new Amazons, as schizonomadic agents of feminist chaos, will end the bourgeois order (or Human Security System) not with love and kisses, but bullets and bombs. 

  

He finds it dispiriting that women have historically shown "enormous reluctance [...] to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression [...] feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian [sic] ideologies" (79).  

 

Land calls this reluctance idealistic recoil and insists that terror and atrocity are "the very motor" (79) of politics and that a "revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell" (79). 

 

This is what Land terms a harsh truth ... 

 

He ends by relating this call to "escalate the cycle of violence without limit" (79) in the name of overthrowing "the contemporary world order " (80), back to Kant, whose philosophy remains for Land at the heart of the problem:

 

"With the abolition [...] of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away [...] But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst." (80) [f] 

 

 

V.

 

So, what are we to make of all this? 

 

Well, if you're a Nick Land fanboy or happen to fantasise about dominant women, then I suppose you'll say he's speaking here with the voice of a "revolutionary and a feminist male who has shifted into hyperaccelerationist mode" and cheer him on as he sides with futural amazons fighting a guerrilla war that "displaces five thousand years of patriarchal endogamy and the rule of androcracies" [g].

  

But if, like me, you wrote your PhD on various post-Nietzschean forms of politics (including the politics of desire, cruelty, and evil), then you might have certain reservations about those who speak in favour of revolutionary violence and justify even the most atrocious acts and echo Deleuze and Guattari's call for caution at all times [h].  

It seems to me that Nietzsche was right to say that whilst revolutionary violence can be a source of stimulation via the resurrection of the "most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [i], it can do no more than this. For change of a truly profound nature, it requires something else. Not something noisier or more brutal in character, but, on the contrary, something that administers small doses of change "unremittingly over long periods of time" [j].  

 

In other words, the revaluation of all values involves patience. 

 

Unfortunately, that's probably not a Landian virtue and it might explain why Land fails to give his own philosophy a plausible political identity (although I'm sure he would say that was not something he ever wanted to do). 

 

It might also help to explain how it is Land goes from expressing a desire to escape from all fatherlands to promoting a neoreactionary philosophy based on corporate techno-feudalism and ends up living in Shanghai - which is ironic when one recalls that Nietzsche often characterised Kant as Chinese [k].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] While the Amazon shown here is an illustration for the 1937 programme for Die Nacht der Amazonen by Albert Reich, this is not to imply that Land would have been anything other than horrified by the open-air Nazi propaganda and variety event held annually in Munich during the period 1936-39. 

      It may have delighted thousands of German spectators with its mix of mythology, racial ideology, and near-naked showgirls dancing or parading on horseback, but I can't imagine it would have been Nick's cup of tea and, as we will see in this post, his Amazons are of a very different kind to those lusted after by the leaders of the Third Reich. 

 

[b] Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine Books, 2014), p. 3. 

 

[c] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197.

 

[d] Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 72. 

      Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.

 

[e] Les Guérillères is today considered a pivotal text for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. It was first translated into English by David Le Vey in 1971 and published in a recent edition by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wittig clearly had an influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. 

 

[f] This invoking of new Amazons is similar to Nietzsche's calling upon a new breed of barbarians who come from the heights and combine spiritual superiority with an excess of physical well-being. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), IV. 899-900, pp. 478-479. 

 

[g] S. C. Hickman, 'Nick Land: Amazons and the Post-Capitalist World', The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts (16 December 2016): click here. 

 

[h] In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "Staying stratified - organised, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." See ATP, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 161. 

      Land of course violently repudiates Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against the dangers of going too far, too fast and the need to exercise caution. In Land's eyes, this is "a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they [D&G] had previously so effectively challenged". - Mackay and Brassier writing in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena ... p. 30.

 

[i] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169. 

      Admittedly, this is Nietzsche writing in one of his calmer periods and one can find plenty of examples - even in the same work - of him offering support for grand politics and "the greatest and most terrible wars" - HAH, I. 8. 477, p. 176.  

 

[j] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), V. 534, p. 211.

 

[k] Nietzsche called Kant the 'Chinaman of Königsberg' because of the latter's rigid, dogmatic, bureaucratic moralism. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil § 210 and The Anti-Christ § 11. 

 

 

For the first post in this series of posts on Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena (2011), please click here .