ABSTRACT
Danielle Collobert is the author of haunting books of prose and prose-like poetry which the Parisian publisher P.O.L. brought back from oblivion in 2004. Collobert explores the very slight possibilities of love, the alluring ambiguities of gender, perhaps also schizophrenia, in any case "impersonalization," and above all death as the source, foundation and destination of all living. Collobert's books form a single "black diamond," Francoise Morvan remarks aptly. Collobert's project fascinates because it pursues this redoubtable contradiction—bodiless speech, speechless bodies—to perilous limits, all the while presenting this speech-body split as an incontrovertible element of all human experience. For Collobert, everything that is mortal begins with the "I". Her writing grapples from the beginning with subjectivity; she seeks an "exit" from its grip. Interestingly, Collobert's attempt to impersonalize her own "I"—dismissed as meaningless chronological filler, a negligible "time of what" by the final text of Survival—was initially political.
