Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on September 2, 2024. It was translated from French into English by the Observatory and subsequently edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
Ms. Réjane Sénac holds a doctorate in political science from the IEP of Paris, specializing in “political thought.” She holds a Master 2 in law and a Master 1 in philosophy from the University of Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne. She is also a member of the steering committee for gender knowledge, PRESAGE, and of the Scientific Council of the Cité du genre, USPC. Very influential within Sciences Po, where it is said that she could become a director, she has just enrolled a new student in a doctoral thesis on “self-narrative” and “queer-feminist” movements.
For those who might wonder about the obvious link between “Political Science” and “queer-feminist self-narrative,” we will answer that we don’t know.
However, like any research work, this one was the subject of reflection in advance and a presentation before the doctoral school. This thesis will, therefore, focus on “committed queer-feminist writing and its role in contemporary social movements” (sic). Let’s bet that this thesis will soon find its place in the second volume of analysis of “committed writings.”
The project’s stated goal revolves around what its author calls “experience narratives.” Following this fashion that has made Stendhal-style egotism and autobiographical narrative the center of gravity of all intelligence—allowing any narrative to access the status of a work of art on an equal footing with Montaigne—the researcher proposes to cross methods in comparative literature and political theory to “investigate the affirmation of a fluid political subject, that is, anti-identity, that appears in contemporary queer-feminist mobilizations through the autotheoretical aesthetic form.”
[RELATED: The Feminist Mission to Undermine Heterosexuality]
Let’s move on.
Comparative literature, let us recall, which once had the aim of working towards the emergence of legendary prototypes through the comparison—in original languages—of various works of literature, is exhausted in vain here in the service of an investigation that postulates that all narrative is literary. Confusing literature and memory, archive and style, the central notion is “the personal narrative.” Its corpus seems to be an accumulation of testimonies and investigations of people active in political movements. What can emerge from this umpteenth study on gender activism? The conclusion is in the description:
Our goal will be to identify the role of personal narrative in its so-called ‘autotheoretical’ form in the construction of a queer-feminist subjectivity. Does it participate in what the philosopher Wendy Brown calls ‘the politics of identity,’ based on the narration of individual injury? Is the narrative of the self, carried by a collective and plural voice, on the contrary a technique of queer disidentification, a way of claiming a fluid subjectivity characterized by collective action?
All the markers of political correctness are aligned. Are we questioning the “self-narrative?” Are we considering for a moment what Philippe Lejeune himself called the “autobiographical pact?” Is it permissible to recall that the said “pact” is based on literary lies and on the unavoidable part of lies that the simple fact of choosing a word for oneself, and about oneself, entails? Is it permissible to recall the part of fiction that all “auto-fiction” entails? Is it possible that these stories can be “insincere”? Can we push the analysis to the point of suspecting the people surveyed of “insincerity?” We suspect not, because the very idea of appealing to the notion of “personal narrative” implies sincere speech. There is no question of the poetics of the self. All the literary advances that made the golden age of structuralism are evacuated in favor of a research that we see on the contrary that it postulates the sincerity of the story, “sincere testimony” of a “sincere” and “fluid” commitment within the neo-progressive activist movements. The fable, the legend, and the myth will only be evoked to confirm the proofs of sincerity of the “political theory.” This is because gender theory, which is only a pre-constructed reading grid, seeks to apply itself everywhere. It finds in the part of the story a ready-made ground of predation. “Tell me about myself, my life, my work”: this injunction will always find a large number of answers whose variations can be collected endlessly.
Literature is a discipline that requires perspective. I once wrote an article in these columns entitled: “We (the literary) are the lawyers of the dead.” I defended the idea that literature is the science of the discourse of the dead and the study of questions left hanging for eternity by great men whose stories, which are not necessarily personal, persist in culture to the point of defining it. Literature is not a collection of discourses. Political theory is not a collection of discourses. By wanting to make theories of the genre the alpha and omega of political science, Sciences Po’ will end up demonstrating what we have all known for a long time: this type of work is a pure exercise in application, an exercise in ideological conformity. But, ultimately, is this perhaps how the people at Sciences Po’ define “political theory?” An exercise in ideological conformity.
The question remains: who within the institution gives the directions, financiers, or researchers?
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Image: “Sciences Po Paris, 28 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris 7e” by Celette on Wikimedia Commons
