Undoing Subjectivity: Sensual Politics, Semioethics, Agency, and Affect in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx

Abstract

This thesis investigates subjectivity in the context of four main interconnecting themes: sensual politics, agency, affect, and semioethics. While ‘undoing’ subjectivity in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, I pursue a dialectical and intersectional approach to subjectivity that reveals how the text’s grammars each take dialectical turns of privilege to articulate different ontologies and ways of thinking and perceiving. I argue that Sphinx’s formal constraint encourages a (distributed) ontological reading experience, and that in order to ‘undo’ or ‘rethink’ subjectivity afresh in Sphinx, one also ought to interpret and imagine distributively. I further contend that Sphinx’s subtle yet powerful shifts in language prompts a shift in affect, and I argue that the text – though not always ethical – queers dominant discourse while it re-writes supposedly stable critical identitarian tendencies. In Chapter One, I implement Susan Petrilli’s concept of semioethics, for such theorisations seek to detotalise global communication systems; they encourage us to rethink how subjectivity is experienced and felt, and they encourage enquiry toward how language shapes our subjectivities and their permissible expressions. In Chapter Two I derive two hermeneutic frameworks from the work of Lisa Samuels - termed Deformance and ‘distributed centrality.’ I use these theories in a bid to undo dominant discourses, critical interpretations and modalities of thinking about normative ontologies concerning subjectivity. I argue that the text performs a poetic ‘sensual politics’ which resists ideas of static subjectivity and identity.