Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader. Nicole Brossard

in the sequence of thought’s events. Words begin to turn round on themselves, inciting reflection, inciting thought toward new approaches to reality. And it is also when words begin to oscillate between derision and vitality, becoming, little by little, indispensable strategies for confronting reality’s two slopes: the actual and the fictive.

      On the other hand, tackling reality the way one takes on a project; so as to take by surprise equations, for they give to the surface of all skin its vitality, its reasoning, if you will. Bathing in the atmosphere of the senses and giving form to enigmas we imagine out of the white, while the certain body¹ refers us back to an implacable geometry: our feverish excitement, a fluidity of text seeking its source. Taking on reality in order that an aerial vision of all realities arises from the body and emotion of thought. Realities which, crossing over each other, form the matrix material of my writing. This text matter, like a fabulous mathematics, relates words to one another. All bodies carry within themselves a project of sensual high technology; writing is its hologram.

       ITHE ORDEAL: THE TESTAND/OR THE PROOF OF MODERNITY

      The text, the notion of text, has been, as we well know, subjected in the past few decades to several transformations; most have been a response to the necessity for politico-sexual subversion. The textual site has become the repository for the body, sex, the city, and rupture, as well as the theory that it generates, which in turn regenerates text. Text has systematically proliferated, profaning the state of mind of both the petit- and the grand-bourgeois. The ordeal of modernity (Rimbaud’s ‘one absolutely must be modern’) as initiation w/rite, has been succeeded by ‘one must be resolutely modern’ as political initiation project. The experience of text, understood as crossing through writing, will be transformed by experimentation, that is, by a strategy bound to disrupt.