Survival in the Pessimum: Wording and Worlding in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine

Abstract

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.