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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
See here for Railroad Flat Radio, an assembly
of works for the radio.
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
![]()
I’d make one of canvas and sticks
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
See here for Railroad Flat Radio, an assembly
of works for the radio.
Rehearsal / 26. Monique Todd / ‘What’s in m/y Eye?’
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‘Born out of desire, lesbian speech is creative violence.’ 1
Monique Wittig’s Le corps Lesbien / The Lesbian Body (1973) has a built-in linguistic rule that’s anti-managerial, seen as a slash in the middle of the protagonist’s self-address—“j/e.” Unnamed, except for this torn pronoun, “j/e” guides the reader through the lustful and bloody obliteration enacted upon and received from “tu,” a lover who shares with “j/e” the indefinite capacity to be pillaged and minutely dissected over more than 160 pages (eyes are consumed, lungs are excavated, a plexus is caught… to give an idea). Still, “j/e” as a graphic sign occupies unsayable territory, it takes place in no mouth. Wittig once wrote that her use of the slash signals an excess, betraying its punctuative function as standing in for “or” by providing no coherent number of derivatives. Here, the French writer and philosopher makes a case for misreading the self in articulation and reading the queer(ed) as missed by language. The visual dismemberment in “j/e” is an error alert, distorting and delaying all sayings of it.
![]()
![]()
Left—Monique Wittig, 1966
Right—Monique Wittig, tr. David Le Vay,
The Lesbian Body (New York: William Morrow, 1975)
This slash is taken up as a practice of love, also. “j/e” and “tu” tear, peel, probe, inspect, chew, fuck, excrete and vomit out the cranial vault, blood-vessels, carotids, canines, the cochlea bone, the tympanum, the mastoid, the gallbladder, the vorticella, the protozoan, intestines, ear-passages, the antihelix, spittle, the thorax, the clitoris, arteries, the diaphragm, the duodenum, the labia, brachial plexuses, sacral plexuses. No unit is too small, no membrane serves as a border, all viscera is available microcosmically. The corruptive hunger of the protagonists is inseparable from the pedantic and impersonal nature of categorisation itself, it seems that what they reach out to touch, feel and destroy is only what they can name and thus conceive as available for incorporation. Wittig locates their cannibalism in the specificity of anatomical language, it marks the impossibility of the intimacy they pursue. Their drive for ‘cellular depth,’ 2 metabolised by their fantasy of complete fusion, is both barred and slashed by what appears to be a paradoxical but surely necessary need to assist the separative measures imposed by language and grammar to sustain their desires.
![]()
It’s the parting that the slash creates in “j/e,” figured as an im/material barrier for the protagonist’s lusts, that silences the anthem of the first-person pronoun. It cannot serve as a root or orientation. It cannot simulate an uncorrupted perspective. The bar interjects the sensation of the instance of truth, tearing the status of “je” as a ready-made, neutralised position to speak on and from the “self.” The cut pronouns provisionally name rather than locate the subject/s without identity. As a result, this grammar presents a challenge for an English translation. Whilst the first person possessive and reflexive pronouns easily lend themselves to splitting—“my” becomes “m/y,” “mine” becomes “m/ine,” “myself” becomes “my/self”—the same cannot quite be said for the monosyllabic “I.” Sure, “I” can be printed with a slash bisecting it, an assumable option for David Le Vay, an anatomist and surgeon, who authored the English translation of the text in 1975 (which remains the standard English translation in circulation to date). However, Le Vay decided to translate “j/e” into the italicised “I.” There is not much written to explain this decision, other than the apparent ‘typographical implausibility’ of doing much else. How does this translation dialogue with Wittig’s “j/e”? What are the implications of italicisation, rather than the imposition of a graphic cut? What other translations are possible and what would it mean for the text?
Here is an excerpt from Le Vay’s English translation:
[3]
![]()
Perhaps the most obvious note is the visual likeness of the italicised “I” with the slash. There are discrepancies when differing fonts are employed but the correspondence is clear. Each italicised “I” divides the long, sparingly punctuated sentences into smaller clauses which could be read as direct commands: ‘spread m/y saliva over it,’ ‘lick it,’ ‘take it between my lips,’ ‘squeeze it,’ ‘make it roll entire within m/y mouth.’ The “I” divides the verse and divides itself out of the scope of the spoken or internally sounded. The speaking protagonist subsequently reads as offloading the activity to ‘you,’ who is hailed upon to serve the directions assigned. The withdrawal of the auditory “I” makes even more legible the positionality of the speaking protagonist as the figure of the un-italicised “I.” The vertical, virile, domineering “I” is scripted in the commands themselves, unembellished by the articulation of the pronoun, which is insistent in (all) the text as the ‘arrogant posture’ of speech. 4 Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda think about how punctuation’s role in ‘introducing phrasing into the sentence,’ and thus breath, is closer to the voice than speech and text could ever be. 5 The non-pronunciation of punctuation occupies the mouth’s void as a void, as the nothingness against which language sustains its meanings. The slash, read in place of “I,” and in the possessive and reflexive pronouns “m/ine,” “m/y,” “my/self,” cuts the normally blank spaces that makes words utterable and readable, splitting the logic of the word, a logic that “I” attempts to hold in m/y mouth which “I” must believe holds m/e.
The sonic inflection of the italicised “I,” when vocalised as “eye” and performed with the slight elongation ascribed by the italic font, registers in the key of irony, disbelief, suspicion, exaggeration. “I” acquires a style that is quotered by its phrasing, not unlike the cadence of the question mark, that affects pitch and stress. There is a temporal intervention that the italic imposes in this way, one has to conjure the cadence prior to saying “I” and figure how long to linger there. “I” is sceptical about its logic and cannot speak convincingly, “I” questions itself and wonders what “I” disguises. ‘If, in writing je, I adopt his language, this je cannot do so,’ writes Wittig in her author’s note. ‘If I examine m/y specific situation as subject in the language, I am physically incapable of writing ‘I,’ I have no desire to do so.’ 6 The “I” in The Lesbian Body cues the reader to address the speech act that conditions one’s formation, not from outside the infrastructure of articulation, but through the visual interjection on the integrity of the first person pronoun. Like a joker, the italic interjects from within a frame of reference. With the special annotative and parenthetical privilege that pokes the terms that condition such reflection, the italic makes use of intonation to stress what is upheld as order, law, nature, without positing a detachment from those very things—the lean or slant is also a sign of being tethered. For Wittig’s text, the figuration of the “I” tips towards the “you” and “your,” pressing upon their linguistic distinction even as they are renewably devouring and devoured. “I” reaches towards, but can never touch “you” and “your” on the page. “I” also graphs the forward motion of desire, an inclination that is self evacuative in its pursuit of fulfilment or completion. Matteo Bonazi paraphrases Lacan’s onto-graphic thinking on the subject’s constitutive dispossession: ‘The subject as subjected to language is a split, barred, deleted subject [...] who, because he desires in language, does nothing but pass from one signifier to the other. [...] Having lost the supposed originary dimension of being, he is the subject who wants-to-be [manca-a-essere].’ 7 The slash is a mark that transcribes the movement of desire that language facilitates but remains unpronounceable as a fundamental lack.
Other translations of “j/e” could be proposed, some that come to mind include the lowercase “i”, the bold “I,” the dash “—” (the “I” on its side) or the slash itself “/.” “j/e” can simply be translated into “I” without breaching its form. The ‘shadow of the capitalised “I” blurs all the other figures on the page,’ a splitness that arises from its erectness and overbearingness, 9 which Virginia Woolf describes as lifting off the page, dominating all words that are produced by it as shadow. The somewhat sporadic and mysterious translation assigned by Le Vay in response to Wittig’s “j/e” does surface the potentials in scoring of voice where one might assume limited variability, multiplying the voice (or unveiling voices) at the site of the apparently indisputable singular, accumulating activity there. Wittig’s “j/e” and Le Vay’s “I” transcribes the split and the slip in claiming an “I,” but with a hesitative attempt to not exclude the possibility of many speakers where there is assumed to be just one.
I have been thinking recently about another translation of “j/e,” that animates and litters the intramural “I.” I’m working on the “(I)” in brackets, to depress the inner voice into the body, in the way that the bracket’s contents can insist upon a quieter reading, as well as a spatial shift in the thinking / feeling of the words. This translation interprets the bar as a shift rather than a break, acting out a physiological lowering that doesn’t or cannot carry the world of the sentence. (I) is said under the breath, skipped or scanned over, as if it were a footnote for something before it. The “I” in (I) is overrun by graphic clutter, adding to the space the “I” takes up, expanding its domineering shadow and contradicting the meek voice otherwise prompted by brackets. I’m after a grammar that tears, mends, then tears again the autarchic order of the linguistic, just as the protagonists of The Lesbian Body engage in the non-stop horror of love’s push and pull.
[10]
![]()
The illustrations, unless otherwise stated,
are excerpted from Lygia Clark’s 1967 work,
O eu e o tu / The I and the You.
* 1
Costello, Katherine A.
‘The Cis-hetero Mind, or Monique Wittig’s Queer
and Transgender Lesbianism,’
in Yale French Studies, 142 (2024), 80.
** 2
Evans, Elliot,
‘“Your blood dazzles m/e”: Reading blood, sex
and intimacy in Monique Wittig and Patrick Califia,”
in Raw: PrEP, Paedagogy and the Politics of Barebacking,
(ed.) Ricky Varghese (London: Zed Books, 2019), 192.
*** 3
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 75.
**** 4
Cavarero, Adriana,
Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude
(California: Stanford University Press, 2016), 39.
***** 5
Comay, Rebecca
& Frank Ruda,
The Dash—The Other Side of Complete Knowing
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018), 59.
****** 6
‘The dash marks the splitting of the logical atom.’
Comay, Rebecca & Frank Ruda,
The Dash, 59.
******* 7
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 10/11.
If I [j/e] examine m/y specific situation as subject in the language,
I [j/e] am physically incapable of writing ‘I’ [je], I [j/e] have no desire to do so.
******** 8
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 86.
********* 9
Cavarero, Adriana,
Inclinations, 38.
********** 10
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 152.
Monique Todd is a writer and facilitator from London. She has a text-based practice invested in delivery, staging, speech publics, reading and postures of the civic. Her work takes the form of essays, poetry, recordings and workshops.
Monique Wittig’s Le corps Lesbien / The Lesbian Body (1973) has a built-in linguistic rule that’s anti-managerial, seen as a slash in the middle of the protagonist’s self-address—“j/e.” Unnamed, except for this torn pronoun, “j/e” guides the reader through the lustful and bloody obliteration enacted upon and received from “tu,” a lover who shares with “j/e” the indefinite capacity to be pillaged and minutely dissected over more than 160 pages (eyes are consumed, lungs are excavated, a plexus is caught… to give an idea). Still, “j/e” as a graphic sign occupies unsayable territory, it takes place in no mouth. Wittig once wrote that her use of the slash signals an excess, betraying its punctuative function as standing in for “or” by providing no coherent number of derivatives. Here, the French writer and philosopher makes a case for misreading the self in articulation and reading the queer(ed) as missed by language. The visual dismemberment in “j/e” is an error alert, distorting and delaying all sayings of it.
Left—Monique Wittig, 1966
Right—Monique Wittig, tr. David Le Vay,
The Lesbian Body (New York: William Morrow, 1975)
This slash is taken up as a practice of love, also. “j/e” and “tu” tear, peel, probe, inspect, chew, fuck, excrete and vomit out the cranial vault, blood-vessels, carotids, canines, the cochlea bone, the tympanum, the mastoid, the gallbladder, the vorticella, the protozoan, intestines, ear-passages, the antihelix, spittle, the thorax, the clitoris, arteries, the diaphragm, the duodenum, the labia, brachial plexuses, sacral plexuses. No unit is too small, no membrane serves as a border, all viscera is available microcosmically. The corruptive hunger of the protagonists is inseparable from the pedantic and impersonal nature of categorisation itself, it seems that what they reach out to touch, feel and destroy is only what they can name and thus conceive as available for incorporation. Wittig locates their cannibalism in the specificity of anatomical language, it marks the impossibility of the intimacy they pursue. Their drive for ‘cellular depth,’ 2 metabolised by their fantasy of complete fusion, is both barred and slashed by what appears to be a paradoxical but surely necessary need to assist the separative measures imposed by language and grammar to sustain their desires.
Monique Wittig’s Le corps Lesbien / The Lesbian Body
(First Edition, Editions de Minuit, 1973)
(First Edition, Editions de Minuit, 1973)
It’s the parting that the slash creates in “j/e,” figured as an im/material barrier for the protagonist’s lusts, that silences the anthem of the first-person pronoun. It cannot serve as a root or orientation. It cannot simulate an uncorrupted perspective. The bar interjects the sensation of the instance of truth, tearing the status of “je” as a ready-made, neutralised position to speak on and from the “self.” The cut pronouns provisionally name rather than locate the subject/s without identity. As a result, this grammar presents a challenge for an English translation. Whilst the first person possessive and reflexive pronouns easily lend themselves to splitting—“my” becomes “m/y,” “mine” becomes “m/ine,” “myself” becomes “my/self”—the same cannot quite be said for the monosyllabic “I.” Sure, “I” can be printed with a slash bisecting it, an assumable option for David Le Vay, an anatomist and surgeon, who authored the English translation of the text in 1975 (which remains the standard English translation in circulation to date). However, Le Vay decided to translate “j/e” into the italicised “I.” There is not much written to explain this decision, other than the apparent ‘typographical implausibility’ of doing much else. How does this translation dialogue with Wittig’s “j/e”? What are the implications of italicisation, rather than the imposition of a graphic cut? What other translations are possible and what would it mean for the text?
Here is an excerpt from Le Vay’s English translation:
[...]
I touch the part of your eyeball which is normally hidden, I spread m/y saliva over it, I lick it I take it between my lips, I squeeze it, I make it roll entire within my mouth, I suck it, I suckle at it, I swallow it I find myself connected with your optic nerve by suction, I apply my/self to the orbital aperture like a cupping-glass, I am absorbed, I introduce myself into the motor centres behind your eye, I insert myself my mouth my tongue my fingers, I pass behind your mirror, I spread out, I embed myself, finally I reach the left hemisphere of your brain, you repel me with all your will-power, now I cling on with both hands under my frantic pressure your head becomes detached at the level of the cervical vertebrae, it is immediately swept away by a gust of wind, I do not let go of you.
[3]
Perhaps the most obvious note is the visual likeness of the italicised “I” with the slash. There are discrepancies when differing fonts are employed but the correspondence is clear. Each italicised “I” divides the long, sparingly punctuated sentences into smaller clauses which could be read as direct commands: ‘spread m/y saliva over it,’ ‘lick it,’ ‘take it between my lips,’ ‘squeeze it,’ ‘make it roll entire within m/y mouth.’ The “I” divides the verse and divides itself out of the scope of the spoken or internally sounded. The speaking protagonist subsequently reads as offloading the activity to ‘you,’ who is hailed upon to serve the directions assigned. The withdrawal of the auditory “I” makes even more legible the positionality of the speaking protagonist as the figure of the un-italicised “I.” The vertical, virile, domineering “I” is scripted in the commands themselves, unembellished by the articulation of the pronoun, which is insistent in (all) the text as the ‘arrogant posture’ of speech. 4 Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda think about how punctuation’s role in ‘introducing phrasing into the sentence,’ and thus breath, is closer to the voice than speech and text could ever be. 5 The non-pronunciation of punctuation occupies the mouth’s void as a void, as the nothingness against which language sustains its meanings. The slash, read in place of “I,” and in the possessive and reflexive pronouns “m/ine,” “m/y,” “my/self,” cuts the normally blank spaces that makes words utterable and readable, splitting the logic of the word, a logic that “I” attempts to hold in m/y mouth which “I” must believe holds m/e.
The sonic inflection of the italicised “I,” when vocalised as “eye” and performed with the slight elongation ascribed by the italic font, registers in the key of irony, disbelief, suspicion, exaggeration. “I” acquires a style that is quotered by its phrasing, not unlike the cadence of the question mark, that affects pitch and stress. There is a temporal intervention that the italic imposes in this way, one has to conjure the cadence prior to saying “I” and figure how long to linger there. “I” is sceptical about its logic and cannot speak convincingly, “I” questions itself and wonders what “I” disguises. ‘If, in writing je, I adopt his language, this je cannot do so,’ writes Wittig in her author’s note. ‘If I examine m/y specific situation as subject in the language, I am physically incapable of writing ‘I,’ I have no desire to do so.’ 6 The “I” in The Lesbian Body cues the reader to address the speech act that conditions one’s formation, not from outside the infrastructure of articulation, but through the visual interjection on the integrity of the first person pronoun. Like a joker, the italic interjects from within a frame of reference. With the special annotative and parenthetical privilege that pokes the terms that condition such reflection, the italic makes use of intonation to stress what is upheld as order, law, nature, without positing a detachment from those very things—the lean or slant is also a sign of being tethered. For Wittig’s text, the figuration of the “I” tips towards the “you” and “your,” pressing upon their linguistic distinction even as they are renewably devouring and devoured. “I” reaches towards, but can never touch “you” and “your” on the page. “I” also graphs the forward motion of desire, an inclination that is self evacuative in its pursuit of fulfilment or completion. Matteo Bonazi paraphrases Lacan’s onto-graphic thinking on the subject’s constitutive dispossession: ‘The subject as subjected to language is a split, barred, deleted subject [...] who, because he desires in language, does nothing but pass from one signifier to the other. [...] Having lost the supposed originary dimension of being, he is the subject who wants-to-be [manca-a-essere].’ 7 The slash is a mark that transcribes the movement of desire that language facilitates but remains unpronounceable as a fundamental lack.
You turn m/e inside out, I am a glove in your hands, gently firmly inexorably holding m/y throat in your palm, I struggle, I am frantic, I enjoy fear, you count the veins and the arteries, you retract them to one side, you reach the vital organs, you breathe into m/y lungs through m/y mouth, I stifle, you hold long tubes of the viscera, you unfold them, you uncoil them, you slide them around your neck.
[8]
Other translations of “j/e” could be proposed, some that come to mind include the lowercase “i”, the bold “I,” the dash “—” (the “I” on its side) or the slash itself “/.” “j/e” can simply be translated into “I” without breaching its form. The ‘shadow of the capitalised “I” blurs all the other figures on the page,’ a splitness that arises from its erectness and overbearingness, 9 which Virginia Woolf describes as lifting off the page, dominating all words that are produced by it as shadow. The somewhat sporadic and mysterious translation assigned by Le Vay in response to Wittig’s “j/e” does surface the potentials in scoring of voice where one might assume limited variability, multiplying the voice (or unveiling voices) at the site of the apparently indisputable singular, accumulating activity there. Wittig’s “j/e” and Le Vay’s “I” transcribes the split and the slip in claiming an “I,” but with a hesitative attempt to not exclude the possibility of many speakers where there is assumed to be just one.
I have been thinking recently about another translation of “j/e,” that animates and litters the intramural “I.” I’m working on the “(I)” in brackets, to depress the inner voice into the body, in the way that the bracket’s contents can insist upon a quieter reading, as well as a spatial shift in the thinking / feeling of the words. This translation interprets the bar as a shift rather than a break, acting out a physiological lowering that doesn’t or cannot carry the world of the sentence. (I) is said under the breath, skipped or scanned over, as if it were a footnote for something before it. The “I” in (I) is overrun by graphic clutter, adding to the space the “I” takes up, expanding its domineering shadow and contradicting the meek voice otherwise prompted by brackets. I’m after a grammar that tears, mends, then tears again the autarchic order of the linguistic, just as the protagonists of The Lesbian Body engage in the non-stop horror of love’s push and pull.
[...]
Through the facets of (my) eyes (I) have no unitary vision of your body, you are diversified, you are different, (I) suddenly embody signals from your arms fragments of your belly part of a shoulder one of your labia, (I) see you everywhere at once, an intoxication grips (me), (I) apprehend you in innumerable morsels, (I) lose (myself) in your geography, (my) trunk palpates you searchingly, clinging to you thus by (my) six feet (I) begin (my) delectable one to flap (my) wings against your back, a fine powder of a dazzling blue spreads over your shoulders into your hair, (my) movement gains effect, (I) disengage you from the ground, (l) lift you up, (I) tear you away, (I) carry you off flying sound asleep above the sea.
[10]
The illustrations, unless otherwise stated,
are excerpted from Lygia Clark’s 1967 work,
O eu e o tu / The I and the You.
* 1
Costello, Katherine A.
‘The Cis-hetero Mind, or Monique Wittig’s Queer
and Transgender Lesbianism,’
in Yale French Studies, 142 (2024), 80.
** 2
Evans, Elliot,
‘“Your blood dazzles m/e”: Reading blood, sex
and intimacy in Monique Wittig and Patrick Califia,”
in Raw: PrEP, Paedagogy and the Politics of Barebacking,
(ed.) Ricky Varghese (London: Zed Books, 2019), 192.
*** 3
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 75.
**** 4
Cavarero, Adriana,
Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude
(California: Stanford University Press, 2016), 39.
***** 5
Comay, Rebecca
& Frank Ruda,
The Dash—The Other Side of Complete Knowing
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018), 59.
****** 6
‘The dash marks the splitting of the logical atom.’
Comay, Rebecca & Frank Ruda,
The Dash, 59.
******* 7
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 10/11.
If I [j/e] examine m/y specific situation as subject in the language,
I [j/e] am physically incapable of writing ‘I’ [je], I [j/e] have no desire to do so.
******** 8
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 86.
********* 9
Cavarero, Adriana,
Inclinations, 38.
********** 10
Wittig, Monique,
The Lesbian Body, 152.
Monique Todd is a writer and facilitator from London. She has a text-based practice invested in delivery, staging, speech publics, reading and postures of the civic. Her work takes the form of essays, poetry, recordings and workshops.
