“Number and Identity in The Lesbian Body ”

This article attempts to intervene in the scholarly debate about Monique Wittig's status as an "anti-identitarian" thinker by highlighting the ways that mathematics appears throughout her oeuvre as a privileged site of pre-linguistic creativity, wherein a form identification seems to remain possible. Whereas Wittig pointed to language as the semiotic system that allows discourse to smuggle heterosexual and masculinist determination into all the identificatory acts of the speaking and writing subject, the counting and numbering subject seems for her to escape a similar critique. I investigate how this distinction structures her novel The Lesbian Body: I apply concepts drawn from mathematics, focusing especially on the concept of homology, to ask under what conditions we can understand Wittig's lesbian as having, or rather producing through her particular approach to enumeration, an identity. I claim that Wittig gives us an example of how mathematical thinking can bleed into literary thinking in the domain of sex, gender, and identity, without imagining that bleed as dangerous abstraction, a masculinist domination of the affective, or a cheap metaphor. As Wittig's importance as an author and philosopher undergoes reevaluation, my wager is that it would be useful to attend to her interventions in the way that the Western philosophical canon and the history of mathematics have been entwined.