ABSTRACT
The text is conceived as an 'assemblage' or 'device' – two possible ways of translating the French word agencement often employed by Deleuze and Guattari in their writings – that functions as a kind of trading-place. Its agencing makes available, through reading, forms of subjectivity that, for reasons that are ultimately ideological, may not have direct access to cultural expression, or which that culture, in turn, may not have direct knowledge of. Textual agencing, in that sense, becomes a 'presencing' of otherness through the intersubjective mode known as reading. In Jamaica Kincaid's text the stark sentence, certainly the simplest in the book, 'My brother died', marks this point of suture, at the beginning of the narrative's second section. Although she has known her, unlike Devon, intimately and all her life, 'I know nothing of her', Kincaid confesses. AIDS has caused Devon to cross a certain line separating death from life.
