Abstract: Via analysis of a play— Rien d’humain (2004)—and two opera librettos— Une offrande (2014) and Te craindre en ton absence (2014)—this article examines the prevalence of ghosts in NDiaye’s theatre. In addition to ghosts of the dead, I highlight spectral apparitions of the future. To this end I summon philosopher Hannah Arendt’s illuminating propositions on how we might engage with the past, better to shape the future. If time were a “a flow of uninterrupted succession,” says Arendt, it would simply produce “truths”—fixed ideologies inherited from the past and imposed on the future. Instead, Arendt conceives of the present as possibility: it becomes a gap in time where, instead of passing on broken pasts, we might invent a radical politics for the future. In many of NDiaye’s plays, trauma, ennui, and toxic guilt are drawn into an uninterrupted through-line, precluding the possibility of creating a productive space in the present to ask how to know a different life. I suggest that Rien d’humain proposes a fleeting “apparition” of what the future could become. A decade before the current wave of postcolonial ghost plays, NDiaye enabled ghosts to roam, recall, remember, and demand retribution or reparation.
Abstract: In France, the category of “transfuge de classe” represents a thriving literary niche that was recently given new life by the award of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux. Despite a career path marked by significant upward social mobility, writer Marie NDiaye has avoided the sociological frameworks and literary tropes typically associated with this label. Starting from this paradox, and drawing on unpublished interviews with the author, this article attempts a close reading of Le bon Denis (2025), a text that emerges as the site of multiple shifts. In this tombeau to the author’s Senegalese father who died in 2017 without her having a chance to mourn him, the portrayal of social mobility undermines the categories and emotions typical of class-transition narratives. The use of the semantic field of goodness—from religious trinkets to the “good girl” trope— together with the intertextual rewriting of the tales “Cendrillon” and “Issa-longues-jambes au pays des anciens,” allows the text to explore the interplay of class, race, and gender, particularly through its dramatization of generational transmission and the conflicts between parents and daughters.
Abstract: Marie NDiaye’s work is a paradox: tales constituted by absence, lack of clarity, and untold stories. Her fiction is rife with absent fathers, missing husbands, and spectral paternal figures. What lies beyond the stereotype of the volatile African papa, beyond the racist trope of the dead-beat father? This essay explores the figure of the missing father in two of NDiaye’s novels ( Le bon Denis, Trois femmes puissantes ) and one of her plays ( Papa doit manger ). In each, the absent father is the figure at the heart of the narrator’s self-identity journey. Yet, in each, he appears as a specter, an insubstantial subject, an almost horrific trace of existence. A focus on this ever-present absence reveals the social and psychological mechanics that weigh on the father and their ripple effects on his children. Between absence and presence, the African fathers of NDiaye’s characters are left to inhabit the unstable space constricted by the phantomatic, and yet very material, traces of colonial representations.
Abstract: Through a literary analysis of female migration in Marie NDiaye’s Three Strong Women (Prix Goncourt 2009), this article questions mainstream media representations that portray migration as a predominantly male tragic experience. Writing several years before the peak of the European migrant crisis, NDiaye in the third part of her novel stages the predicaments faced by female migrants through the character of Khady Demba. Although the young Senegalese woman embodies the undocumented migrant subject to exploitation and abuse, the narrative emphasizes her emergent agency and power in a journey that proves to be emancipatory. Through close readings, this article argues that Khady’s resistance lies in the refusal of the destiny imposed on her ( le non ) but also in a return to the self through the repetition of the name ( le nom ). This resistance is further manifested in the self-affirmation of the migrant’s suffering body, to which the author gives added resonance through references to Christ’s martyrdom. Finally, resistance is affirmed in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal since, at the close of NDiaye’s story, in a fantastical twist, Khady deploys herself in the form of a bird, thus transcending the rules of migration.
Abstract: This article offers a critical reading of Alice Diop’s film Saint Omer , co-written by Marie NDiaye, through André Green’s concept of the dead mother , arguing that the film critically reconfigures psychoanalytic and juridical models grounded in causal and universalist logic. Through close analysis of key spaces—the kitchen, the lecture hall, and the courtroom— and the film’s fragmented flashback structure, the article shows how Saint Omer shifts attention from individual pathology to the social, historical, and racialized conditions shaping maternal silence. The article interprets the figure of Medea as a form of false universal recognition that renders violence intelligible only by abstracting it from its material conditions, while alternative explanatory frameworks such as maraboutage are simultaneously mobilized and disqualified. The article situates Saint Omer within NDiaye’s broader engagement with Medea and concludes by reading the film’s ending as a fragile, individual reconfiguration of intergenerational relations that leaves the structural blind spots of universalism intact.
Abstract: This essay examines the proliferation of nonverbal signs and bodily manifestations in some of NDiaye’s stories, as they connect to the major themes of her work, including the “blankness” theorized by Andrew Asibong in his seminal work Blankness and Recognition (2013). The analysis draws on three novels published between 2001 and 2009: Rosie Carpe , Mon cœur à l’étroit , and Trois femmes puissantes , as well as the 2004 short story collection Tous mes amis . The essay contrasts the motif of sweat which indexes the characteristic disarray of NDiaye’s characters, with the less transparent recurrence of smiles—whether manipulated or spontaneous—in fraught interpersonal relationships, including friendship.
Abstract: There is an unfamiliarity with Marie NDiaye’s works on Asia. This article examines two of NDiaye’s lesser-known short stories, “En Chine I” and “En Chine II” (1997). It argues that NDiaye’s strange China is a face-tious critique of French universalism’s racial blindness when faced with the Orient. Derived from the French facétie , the word “facetious” holds within itself face and facette , making it an apt descriptor of NDiaye’s Asia in which knowledge of the Other cannot be determined with certainty through Eurocentric modes of visibility. By inventing a China in which the French find themselves the victims of exotification and assimilation, NDiaye entertains the furthest consequences of universalism’s reduction of identity into distinct, yet featureless categories of “Asian” or “French.” Linking the question of comment savoir? to that of comment voir? , NDiaye’s writing invites readers to reflect on what truly is Asianness beyond its creation by the West, and if one could ever “know” all its faces and facets. This article also explores the impact of NDiaye’s works on the perception of Asia and Asianness in contemporary French society, with a discussion of the French treatment of difference and the model minority myth.
Abstract: Supermarkets and fast-food restaurants are often understood as transitory spaces (defined by Marc Augé as “ non-lieux ”) in which one can be anonymous, blend with the crowd, and perhaps thus remain relatively safe. In Marie NDiaye’s En famille (1990), however, these spaces become sites of failed or somewhat violent encounters. This article explores how the author shapes the supermarket as a monstruous space that reaches far beyond its walls; for some protagonists, it seems to provide entertainment, comfort, and even meaning while to others it is a means of survival and a space of subjugation. Focusing particularly on the checkout, the passage à la caisse , a liminal space in which interaction between cashier and client is mandated, it shows how, unlike in other contemporary representations, confrontation in NDiaye is always deferred and accounts never fully settled.
Abstract: This article examines the artist/creator and subject/performer in Marie NDiaye’s “museum novellas,” La Naufragée (1999) and Un pas de chat sauvage (2019). Un pas de chat sauvage is a critical response to the exhibition for which it was written (the Musée d’Orsay’s “Le Modèle Noir, de Géricault à Matisse,” 2019); La Naufragée uses visual art to demonstrate limits to language and representation. Both novellas are instructive for the larger project of reading Marie NDiaye, whose work is interested in absence and the search for an end or answer that does not exist. The use of the model problematizes the text’s relationships to the vulnerable “other,” and the reader’s and author’s relationship to the subject. La Naufragée and Un pas de chat sauvage suggest that a novel’s achievement can be found in impossibility: the inability of the reader to wholly know, and the inability of the author to intimately depict, the subject.
Abstract: Asked about her poetics of vagueness in a 2023 interview, Marie NDiaye compared her literary universe to ouate . The French word stands out in an English-speaking context ( what ), but it also points to a network of sounds and textures that this article sets out to explore. Building on the work of Roland Barthes on the neutral, Jean-Pierre Richard on substances, and Dominique Rabaté on sounds and knowledge, I examine how wad-ding provides food for thought, literally “matter for thought” in French. The following pages trace the chronology of cotton wool’s occurrences in NDiaye’s works—first as a sound ( brouhaha ) then as an atmosphere ( brouil-lard )—before extending the analysis to other fibers (wool, silk, felt) and related words in which we find the sound “oua.” By focusing on the first name Souhar and the city of Ouagadougou, I show that ouate , as insulation and signifier, is made of the same stuff than what characters seek to keep at bay.
Abstract: In NDiaye’s textual world, language accrues the authority to confound what something is said to be with what something actually is . Drawing on theories of racialization, this essay argues that the immanent and imminent psycho-physical disintegration of characters in Ladivine (2013) is caused by an unspoken recognition that the threshold distinguishing between the word and the world, which is supposed to hold, has given way. The essay reads this collapse of word and world as resulting from the intertwined nature of poetics and the metaphysics of race in the novel. It proposes that NDiaye’s text experiments with what one might call a pessimum , or a world of the least favorable ontologico-poetic conditions under which a (raced) human can survive. By analyzing a series of sublime and horrific “threshold events” in Ladivine , it illuminates the novel’s dialectic of psycho-poetic survival and its reflections on the risks involved in developing a poetics of relation, especially one involving race.
In their 1930 essay on Rilke's Duino Elegies, Hannah Arendt and G & uuml;nther Stern pick up on the poet's thought that conditions of modernity have led to a paradoxical topological condition: the withdrawal of the Outside. The essay finds in the last chapter of Arendt's The Human Condition, a text deeply influenced by her reading of Heidegger's Holzwege, a philosophical account of what this might mean.
This essay interrogates the dark "neighborhood" of relations evoked by Heidegger in his reflections on poetry by engaging with a German-language poet whose work held special significance for Heidegger: Rilke. Rilke's poetry helps us to consider a special kind of darkness that, within the vicinity of the poem, always stands in need of understanding, while also propelling us to consider the vexed relation or non-relation between the poem and the act of thinking anew. Our situatedness in the world is always already modulated in significant and potentially disclosive ways by a darkness-not a random or indifferent darkness but, as Rilke puts it, the very "darkness from which I derive"-a darkness that also, in its own enigmatic figurations, is salubrious. If the poem's darkness resists the force of a sheer hermeneutic will in its interpretive quest for transparent and determined meaning, it is because this darkness itself constitutes an uncharted region in which the two strange neighbors, poetry and philosophy, may encounter one another in the uncontainable and unpredictable vagaries of language itself.
Abstract: This article investigates the ideological influence of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) on certain Brazilian hardcore punk bands active in the 1990s and 2000s. By analyzing songs by Abuso Sonoro, Guerra de Classes, Point of No Return, and Dead Fish, it seeks to create theoretical and historical bridges between the social movement and the musical scene and to consider punk as a producer of social thought about and within Brazil. Moreover, the punk squats and MST assentamentos (settlements) are seen vis-à-vis, and the presence of MST political slogans in hardcore songs is discussed. This article proposes visualizing MST acampamentos (camps) as a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) as well. Finally, the issue of historical memory is examined, also bringing to the discussion the lyrics of a song by I Shot Cyrus and another one released in the 2010s by the thrash metal band Violator, broadening the horizon in terms of both timeframe and music style.
Abstract: This essay analyzes how María de Zayas's treatment of enslaved women in "La esclava de su amante" complicates her unqualified status as a proto-feminist or feminist author. It details the four ways in which she manipulates the slave of love trope and how she complements that manipulation with the severe objectification of her literally enslaved characters in a classist and, in the case of her Black enslaved female character, racist fashion. Her use of literally enslaved characters to signify exclusively in terms of the mistakes made by the White nobility betrays her exclusionary interest in members of her own class and race.
A core issue in research on Rilke is his investment in vision, the exploration of artistic seeing in particular. This essay explores the scenario-the arrangement of subject, object viewed, and circumambient conditions-of such intense experiences of visual apprehension in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. My claim is that the scenario Rilke fictionally constructs stages the first-personal experience of mortality. The visual field is invaded by an otherness. The affective dimension of this scenario is terror (Schrecken), a dispossession of subjective self-certainty. The essay concludes with a glance at the DuineserElegien and the letters on Cezanne.
