WK: One of the odd inner dramas that occupies a viewer while watching the Vera Baxter–esque “real time” films is that of turning one’s body into a Richter scale for measuring clean or filthy, shaved or unshaved, appetizing or unappetizing. A shot of all-too-runny scrambled eggs and greasy bacon. Mini-croissants (formerly frozen?) that look like buns for Vienna sausages from a jar. Gary Fisher and Dustan are connected—and Samuel R. Delany— Freedom and the Subject of Theory: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, co-edited with Colin Davis (Oxford: Legenda, 2019).

It’s difficult not to read into these contradictions much of Dustan’s own self-divisions. Born William Baranes into a middle-class Jewish family, he spent most of his adult life working as that most hallowed, bourgeois of professions — an administrative judge. Appearing at war with the outside world, with his tossed-off provocations and devil-may-care insouciance, the battle really seemed to lie within: the pragmatic paragon of the law versus the adolescent anarchist seeking to overturn received morality and rip up ethical codes. Janus-like, his self-constructed persona of Guillaume Dustan left him stranded within his own paradox. fr) « DUSTAN Guillaume (William Baranès: 1965-2005)», sur Cimetières de France et d'ailleurs (consulté le 19 juillet 2011). The Anti-Police of Mai '68 Fifty Years On, a special issue of Modern & Contemporary France 26, 2 (May 2018). Read the free-to-access introduction here. Angot, comme Dustan, ne peut envisager qu’une écriture de soi qui ne soit pas de l’invention romanesque, mais qui ne soit pas non plus de l’autobiographie. Dans Quitter la ville elle expose son projet: «La réalité et la fiction; au milieu, un mur. Être incapable d’inventer n’est pas de l’impuissance, c’est un principe». Elle serait donc du côté de l’autobiographie, mais elle en dénonce toutes les impasses. La plupart de ses livres sont intitulés roman. Elle serait donc en principe pour l’autofiction [62 ]. Elle fait la même connexion que Dustan entre écriture du Je, autofiction et politique. La question politique est dès lors présente, associant enjeu politique et écriture du Je. C’est ce qu’on a appelé l’enje Dustan [63 ]. Guillaume Dustan (1965-2005): «Parce que je suis: libre», émission Toute une vie, France Culture, 15 février 2020 [88 ].Des personnalités lui rendent hommage. Thomas Clerc, universitaire, publie dans le journal Libération un article intitulé «Mon cœur est mort (pour Guillaume Dustan)» dans lequel il déclare que «Guillaume Dustan était l'un des écrivains les plus forts de la littérature contemporaine, celle qui prend des risques parce qu'elle n'est pas formatée.» Il voit en Dustan un écrivain qui «a posé quelques jalons décisifs pour saisir l'esprit d'une époque et qui restera donc dans les têtes comme les tubes qu'il aimait tant. Il a lié le monde et la littérature parce qu'il ne faisait pas de différence entre l'art et la vie. Avec une sorte d'innocence superbe, il écrivait pour aujourd'hui. Il est mort, mais ses textes dansent» [39 ]. Dustan's first novel, Dans ma chambre (In My Room) (1996), brought him immense fame in France for his ambitious portrayal of gay life in a Paris celebrated for its sensual pleasures and haunted by the AIDS crisis. [5] He also edited Le Rayon Gay, a collection of books, for Balland. [5] Review essay: Luca Provenzano, 'Beyond the Matraque: State Violence and Its Representation during the Parisian 1968 Events', H-Diplo Article Review 916. Yet now the dust has settled on this rabble-rousing life, what has become of Dustan’s legacy? Given the hyper-speed of our digital age, there has been a renewed interest in the ‘90s years of ACT UP, AIDS activism and a burgeoning politics of queer identity. (Notably, 120 B.P.M: Robin Campillo’s 2017 cinematic hymn to the era.) Indeed, given the creeping, conservative temperature of our own times, the embattled, bigoted ‘80s seems less like modern history than a troubling parallel to our own news cycle.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator’s bedroom. The middle volume, I’m Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me (1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.Dustan's writing has been compared to Renaud Camus, Marguerite Duras, Hervé Guibert, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and Bret Easton Ellis. [5] Critic Bruce Hainley writes that Dustan celebrated Duras for her liberating sense of abjection and "alcoholizations of the first person," including her “bad French, her badly written books of the ’eighties and ’nineties.” [6] Risk, Experimentation and Democratic Disputatiousness in Michel Foucault’s Ideal of Frank Speech', part of a panel of papers ('Risk and Experimentation in Modern and Contemporary French Thought') for the Society for French Studies annual conference, Stirling, 1-3 July 2024. At night, you don’t talk about obvious things.” In Guillaume Dustan’s 1997 novel I’m Going Out Tonight —an account of a single evening at Gay Tea Dance, a nineties party hosted at Parisian nightclub La Loco—what is spoken of is, if not limited, then vastly simplified. At the nightclub, “you don’t talk about work, or money, or books, or records, or films,” says Dustan’s protagonist, who shares his name with the author. “You only act. Speech is action. Always on the lookout. Gestures charged with meaning.”