Publié cinq ans après L’Opoponax, Les Guérillères, second livre de Monique Wittig, vient à son heure pour souligner et fortifier notre conviction. Le talent de cet écrivain le porte, j’allais écrire, pour notre plaisir et notre profonde satisfaction, à faire du récit le lieu naturel de la contestation du langage, non pas contestation abrupte et maladroite, mais contestation habile par le biais d’une opération beaucoup plus subtile et toujours séduisante. Il semble, en effet, que mots et phrases soient deux fois présents dans le texte : d’abord comme les mots et les phrases de l’usage traditionnel, ensuite comme éléments actifs de l’autodestruction. La métamorphose est très frappante dans ce nouveau livre. Convaincante aussi, tant est sensible le renouveau des images, et leur force.Notons pour commencer, que les Guérillères (ce curieux féminin de « guérilleros ») ne sont ni les cousines, ni les lointaines descendantes des Amazones auxquelles Hérodote prêta le nom scythe d’Oiorpata, ou tueuses d’hommes. La destruction de l’homme n’est pas l’enjeu du combat que les guérillères ont décidé de mener jusqu’à son therme. Ce qu’elles combattent, c’est l’oppression, ou plutôt sa cause, le langage, celui qu’elles ont reçu des hommes, lesquels les ont, par ce moyen, d’abord nommées, puis soumises et réduites à la merci des mots. Ce qu’elles veulent promouvoir, c’est un monde nouveau où elles retrouveront l’expression de l’indépendance originelle. — André Dalmas, La Quinzaine littéraire (novembre 1969)

"Pour Le Corps lesbien j’étais face à la nécessité d’écrire un livre entièrement lesbien dans sa thématique, son vocabulaire et sa texture, un livre lesbien du début à la fin, de la première à la quatrième de couverture. Je me trouvais par conséquent devant une double béance : celle de la page blanche que doivent affronter tous les écrivains lorsqu’ils commencent un livre, et une autre de nature différente : il n’existait aucun livre de ce genre. Jamais je n’ai relevé un défi aussi radical. Pouvais-je tenter cela ? En étais-je seulement capable ? Et quel serait alors ce livre ? J’ai gardé le manuscrit six mois dans un tiroir avant de le donner à mon éditeur."—Monique Wittig

“The “opoponax” uses neither the language of adults nor that of children; he is neither the novelist nor a narrator. Confronting – in a moving “we” – the “he” and the “I”, he seems to have cancelled them out by the other: this voice which speaks in the present tense of very concrete things, which is gradually strengthening and discovering itself, could it not simply be ours?

My Opoponax is perhaps, indeed it is almost certainly the first modern book ever written about childhood. My Opoponax is the capital execution of ninety per cent of the books that have been written about childhood. It is the end of a certain literature and I thank God for it. It is a book that is both admirable and very important because it is governed by an iron rule, never or almost never broken, that of using only pure descriptive material, and only one tool, pure objective language. The latter takes on its full meaning here. It is the very same language – but brought to the plainsong by the author – that childhood uses to clear out and count its universe. Which is to say that my Opoponax is a masterpiece of writing because it is written in the exact language of the Opoponax.” (Marguerite Duras)

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.  

Printed in 2021.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community.

A collection of political, philosophical, and literary essays from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig. Monique Wittig's first collection of essays centering on women's struggle for liberation from sexism and classism. These nine essays comprise a thoughtful and unique approach to the study of historical materialism and dialectics, and transverse philosophical, political, and literary theory.

Monique Wittig describes this collection as a focus on "lesbian materialism," in which she examines men and women as distinct classes rather than as "essentialist" categories. "Lesbians are not women," writes Monique Wittig, and she presents powerful ideas about how the idea of "woman" is socially constructed and used to convey certain images. It is not enough, she argues, to transform economic oppression because not all oppression is, at the source, economic.

Sexism will continue to exist even in a society where all people have equal economic opportunities. Only by transforming our thought processes, and in turn, our language, can we transform our society into one in which there is no longer the dominant and the dominated: "In other words, this means there cannot any longer be women and men, and that as classes and categories of thought or language they have to disappear, politically, economically, ideologically." Controversial and abstract, these are essays that challenge and provoke on both intellectual and emotional levels.