The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1: In My Room; I'm Going Out Tonight; Stronger Than Me (Semiotext(E) / Native Agents)

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Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. Il était hors de question d'écrire sur ma vie honteuse, ma vie de rat. Impossible. Si j'ai pu écrire mon premier livre, c'est parce que je pensais que j'allais mourir. Dans un testament on est libre. On déshérite. J'ai déshérité mon père et tous les flics. J'ai dit que je me droguais et que je me faisais mettre. Les deux grands trucs politiquement incorrects [69 ].» Kira Ribeiro, « Des féministes et des virus | Approches féministes sur le VIH/sida», 7 mars 2014 (consulté le 5 novembre 2021)

reading for understanding is problematic: Panagia's Rancière's sentiments', review essay, Theory & Event 21, 4 (2018): 987-992. BH: What is the basic importance of having foot-fisting not be a metaphorical scene of writing (although it can become that) but an exchange actually embodied by the writer? Not that Dustan was the first to be foot-fisted, but that he was the first judge (also filmer, also writer, also fistee/er, also editor) to film himself in the act.Dustan's first three novels, In My Room, I'm Going Out Tonight, and Stronger Than Me, published in France between 1996 and 1998, were re-released in English by Semiotext(e) in 2021. Edited by Thomas Clerc and translated by Daniel Maroun, the novels follow the narrator's sexual journeys in Paris. [7] Guillaume Dustan, tr. by Thomas Clerc, The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1: In My Room; I’m Going Out Tonight; Stronger Than Me Presentation to research workshop on 'The Renaissance of Psychedelic Therapies: Lessons from Switzerland', Fondation Brocher, Geneva, 19-20 June 2024. I n​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the nightclub or the library) that might foreclose some as yet unknown experience. The ad’s prose is also typical of Dustan: blasts of detail; a trashiness underpinned by the desire to describe the world exactly as he lives it; a craving for sex conjured by the trailing ellipses. In this harsh economy of desire, it’s unsurprising that the overwhelming affect of I’m Going Out Tonight is anxiety. (This is also what makes it the most accurate account of clubbing I’ve read.) Dustan worries that at 31 he’s getting too old for this, that nobody fancies him, that his shoes are the wrong size, that he’s going to catch a chill from the air conditioning. He worries about money, having just given up his well-paid job, and frets over the cost of a Corona and a tequila chaser. In the end he just gets the beer, which makes him horribly bloated, ‘belly perpendicular to my pecs’. And then there’s a series of melodramatic toilet sagas: no loo roll, no soap, no free cubicle. ‘I wait, concentrating on my sphincter muscles which can barely hold on, and then something settles inside, and I feel OK.’ (‘Toilets,’ he once said in an interview, ‘are extremely important because they’re a place where you have to think about your body.’)

WK: I think Dustan was very anti-Pléiades, which is a big deal if you’re a French writer: to desire (concretely, not merely metaphorically) to saute ma ville. The importance of the foot-fisting is to show how not merely theoretical his anti-Pléiades stance is. Student presentation task: Is Dans ma chambre a dangerous book? Justify your answer by analysing examples from the text and relevant secondary literature.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004). Seven radio lectures on phenomenology, science and aesthetics, delivered in 1948. WK: The fisting scene is one of those Salò-esque thresholds. Every body of serious work should have such a threshold. A limit-case depiction.