Читать книгу Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader - Nicole Brossard - Страница 8

The range and scope of Brossard’s work is staggering. We joked that we continually needed to revise this introduction to account for the arrival of new texts and translations! What is staggering is this: Brossard has been insisting on the necessity of pleasure for half a century. Moreover, she has insisted on the humanity of queer pleasure, of lesbian pleasure. Of the pleasure of women. She has insisted on her own pleasure. If it is laudable for us to recognize the importance of pleasure in 2020, imagine the subversiveness and danger of insisting on queer pleasure fifty years ago. This book, and especially this first section, works to pay homage to Brossard’s celebration of pleasure which, we believe, hinges around the seductive force of desire in its multiple iterations.

This first section of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader opens with translations by Jennifer Moxley, Barbara Godard, and Pierre Joris. These poems attend to the multi-faceted nature of the force in Brossard’s work. In grammar and syntax, it stretches meaning and makes space for the reality of women loving women. It is rendered as colour; mauve is a homonym that indicates space, possibility, and futurity. Here, we have selected texts that track some of the ways desire has changed in the writer’s lifetime. The reader opens with a selection from Logical Suite (1970) in which the temporality of desire is already made plural in so far as it is in transit between subjects and bodies.

And what happens when we reject what is considered inevitable? Fixed? Let us allow Brossard to introduce you to Monique Wittig, whose thinking in Les Guérillères also courses through these texts: ‘Since the day when the lesbian peoples renounced the idea that it was absolutely necessary to die, no one has. The whole process of death has ceased to be a custom’ (Lovhers). The works in this section renounce heteropatriarchal imperatives in favour of desiring and of pleasure. Desire is ubiquitous. It is fluid. At its best, we want to say, it is creator of worlds.