Through their artistic practice, which combines video, performance and literary writing, No Anger questions the modes of expression and presentation of bodies. Building on their academic research, their work seeks to express the experience of marginalised bodies that break away from hegemonic forms of representation—for words and images, otherwise embedded in a shared language and social imaginary, structured by relations of domination, convey a vision of the world that legitimises certain realities over others, establishing hierarchies among bodies. Both on their blog À mon geste défendant and with Ostensible, a research-creation platform co-founded with Lucie Camous and dedicated to Disability and Crip Studies, they conduct intersectional research on ableism. In this text between diary and essay, No Anger guides us through the material and symbolic experience of reading, unfolding the conditions of access to legitimised knowledge.
In my home, there are books. Lots of books. And there always have been. Raised in the lineage of a grandfather who worked in bookmaking, I long considered these objects to be almost sacred. For me, without books there could be no reading, no legitimate knowledge, no serious culture—even if that meant depriving myself of the rhythm of words and the satisfaction of a well‑formulated sentence when my body was in to much pain to read. Without books—and even though there were the internet screen and the voice of audiobooks on cassettes, then children’s audio CDs—I could not consider myself to be reading, nor learning. As a good student, my vision remained fixed on books, as if they were sacred objects.
Beneath my skin, among my muscles, across my bones, a symbolic knot binds books to the sacredness. Pressed against my body, it has clung to me. I was slow to examine it, so well hidden was it, nestled in some unconscious corner, its diffuse, omnipresent nature preventing me from thinking about it and seeing it at work in literary and political undertakings, such as The Bill Prohibiting Women From Learning to Read. Written by Sylvain Maréchal, from the moment it was published in 1801 this text did not sound like an entirely serious endeavour. Yet beneath its facetious tone, the text is grounded in an antifeminist line of argument which, drawing partly on Rousseauist thought, would run throughout the nineteenth century.
Reflecting a degrading definition of female nature, this “bill” carries within it the notions of an intellect set above the lowly matter of the body, of a transcendent knowledge detached from relations of domination, of a genius, divine breath. In its paradoxical ascent to universality, it seems destined to take up residence only in individuals deemed worthy to receive it—individuals without bodies, or at least with as little body as possible. Of course, this elective partition of Knowledge designates men, first and foremost, who in their supposed rationality are not merely their bodies. Women, relegated to the status of matter and nature, are nothing but their bodies, which would hinder the exercise of that genius, but also—and above all—would endanger the social order, because “there is always scandal and discord in a household when a woman knows as much or more than her husband” (Consideration No. 44). This symbolic partition extends to the activity of reading. Placed on the side of the intellect, a certain conception of reading evokes the idea of knowledge, while the book appears as a quasi‑sacralised object.
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14 October. I’m in pain. My back feels like a dried-out coat that I dare not take off, for fear of creasing my skin, tearing a muscle, coming apart at the bones.
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Rooted in the transcendent world of Ideas, the practice of reading effaces the body. True, the reader’s body goes unnoticed, flesh bent over a small volume that is of sole importance, matter silently animated by the flow of words which, though fixed on the page, slip through to reach that indistinct, abstract something contained within each of us.
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15 October. I’m in pain. My left shoulder feels like a rocky crag pierced through and through. Autumn pains: cut leaves, severed flowers, closed window, tamed thoughts, broken thread, short breath. It’s cold outside. The day is panting. I’m listening to In Search of Lost Time. Robert is dead.
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And yet, there it is, the body, tracing the flow of words across the paper with its gaze, turning the pages. Those tiny eyelid movements, the delicate motions of the fingers coming alive to the rhythm of the turning pages, the path of a finger searching for the exact place of a line or a word, the discreet choreography of a body seeking the comfort of a new position. Always there in reading, the body, under the guise of immobility, seems invisible. Just as there are bodies that matter and others that do not, just as there are inaudible noises that become sounds deemed worthy of attention, perhaps there are gestures that are more valid than others?
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16 October. It hurts a little less. A slow crackling of pains. I’ve been reading. Jeanette Winterson. I leaned over for a bit too long. I need to lie down. But at least she loves Louise.
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The stillness of readers is made up of a whole repertoire of gestures. But these are movements we do not notice. We read in an almost complete unawareness of our body, too absorbed by the words before our eyes, by the language unfolding across the white pages of the book.
It makes sense that, in reading, the book should be the centre of attention, not the body. While the book-as-object remains frozen in its sacred aura, which admittedly protects it from fire, destruction and oblivion, the sacredness of an object always seems suspect to me, especially since one of my teachers said in class: “Dare to disrespect books. Annotate them. Don’t respect them to the point of reading them from cover to cover; skip passages, go straight to the sections that interest you. Use them to build your thinking. That’s what books are there for.”
We do not always notice the sacrality of an object: it slips into habits, discomforts, tacit prohibitions. For the first time, the words of my professor shattered the implicit nature of the sacred. I could finally hear it, and at last question it. For, in its intangibility, the sacred remains elusive; in its immutability, it paralyses every movement of thought; and above all, it serves as a pretext to distinguish the elect from the profane. To check the font size is to run the risk of being taken for a lazy reader. Any questioning of the book in its materiality is poorly received. As if the book, the mark of a universal knowledge—a knowledge without a body, or with as little body as possible—could not be treated as a simple, modifiable, adaptable everyday object. As if the book, in its sacred aura, fixed its own form in place.
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18 October. The pain ebbs. The wave has withdrawn. A lull sweeps across the restless surface of my muscles. A silent circulation of sensations. Bent over Winterson, I read Louise’s skin.
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19 October. I’m in pain. My arms feel like two headless hydras. So is the pain. It keeps coming back, it is always there, despite the medication; it disappears, then reappears. It is a flickering monster, the bite of a rodent on my helpless horizon. I’m listening to In Search of Lost Time. Charlus is old.
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Questioning the sacredness of the book-as-object proves all the more important here, since it is not the body that holds the object; it is the object that seizes hold of the body: in this ritualised stillness of the body bent over a book, is there not a discipline that shapes bodies and imaginaries, tracing the furrows of social distinctions and hierarchies?
IN OTHER WORDS,
can unruly bodies read?
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20 October. I’m in pain. A tangle of pain. My lower back is tied up. Lying down. On the screen, I read Wittig. The Trojans wonder: “But what if it were a war machine?”
Translated by Cléo Verstrepen
References
· Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, tome VII : Le Temps retrouvé [In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 7: Time Regained], audiobook read by Michael Lonsdale, Denis Podalydès and André Dussollier (Paris: Éditions Thélème, 2006).
· Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body [1992] (London: Penguin Vintage, 2021).
· Monique Wittig, “The Trojan Horse,” The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).