På spaning efter den kropp som flyr : mellan kön och text i Nina Bouraouis Mina onda tankar

This is a study of the novel Mes mauvaises pensées (2005) by the French writer Nina Bouraoui. I use an intertextual comparative method, where I read the novel against three intertexts: Marie Cardinal Les mots pour le dire (1975), the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive (2001) and novels and photographies by Hervé Guibert. Main focus is on the relation between body and language. Using the psychoanalytic theories by Julia Kristeva I examine the melancholy of the narrator in Mes mauvaises pensées. The melancholic subject mourns a Thing which is the unrepresentable archaic mother. Melancholy is connected to the notion of exile; the subject belongs to a lost place in the past which it is still holding on to. The narrator of Mes mauvaises pensées is still living in her childhood, even though she is a grown up woman. I show how the place from where she speaks is the child. The female body and the female sexuality are not represented in the text, there is a missing link between the female body and it’s representation in language – in the symbolic order. According to Kristeva the melancholic denies the loss of the Thing – in the end the mother – and clings to the unrepresentable void. By realizing and acknowledging the loss one can reconstruct the bond to the archaic mother in language. Bouraoui’s failure in writing the feminine into the text is interesting because it puts lights on the conditions of writing the body for women. The theory of l’écriture féminine is an inspiration for the analyses and I contrast it to Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. There is a conflict in what constitutes gender and sex between psychoanalysis and queer theory, which is also found in the narrator in Bouraoui’s novel – trying to create herself through pure performativity she never succeeds to act independently of the mother and the female body