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The Force of Desire: A Deleuzian Reading of Sexuality in the Writings of René Depestre and Maryse Condé

This article offers a reexamination of the role of sexuality in French Caribbean literature by looking at the writings of two expatriate authors, René Depestre from Haiti and Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe. These authors, it is argued, explore a radically affirmative sexuality that transgresses national, cultural, and identitarian boundaries. The focus is placed on Depestre’s poems in Journal d’un animal marin (1964) and Condé’s novel Célanire, cou coupé (2000), which allows for questioning the limitations and possibilities of such radical sexuality from different gender perspectives. In these texts, sexuality is presented as a productive force, which resists categorization and needs to be analyzed in terms of a response to a reductive conception of the Caribbean experience as determined by a feeling of loss and lack. In using the theories of desire as developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and reconceptualizing them in a (French) Caribbean discursive context, I show that Condé and Depestre turn sexual activity into a laboratory for the elaboration of a subjectivity that is not determined by lack but emerges in relation to alterity.