Guillaume Dustan, master of the drive

Kollias, Hector

doi:https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.8.2.113

Kollias, Hector

Journal of Romance Studies (2008), 8, (2), 113–130.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.8.2.113
Language: English
Pages: 18

Abstract

This article aims to present the work of Guillaume Dustan (1965–2005) as exemplary of a contemporary tendency in French queer writing, a double-faced tendency towards autobiographical writing, on the one hand, and on the other, towards the frank recording of lives consumed by sexual compulsion. My reading of Dustan’s ethically and aesthetically challenging texts is influenced by a psychoanalytic understanding of sexual compulsion as stemming from the dictates of the drive, and this informs my presentation of Dustan’s ‘autofiction’ in the first part of the article. In the second part I extend my remarks to Dustan’s little-understood pronouncements and provocations concerning a form of sexual politics that finds its basis, perhaps even its ‘inspiration’, in the dictates of the drive, as well as examining the explosive writerly style that Dustan adopts, which I see as a ‘writing of the drive’.

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