In the footsteps of Flora Tristan a political biography

meeting some of the expectations of life-writing, then, the Ostinato project also witheringly dismantles every assumption of the genre, replacing teleological narrative with a fragmentary yet always rhetorically elaborate idiom (the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose work Des Forêts helped translate in the mid-1980s is here hard to miss). The paradox of Ostinato, then, following on from what Blanchot in 1963 described as the ‘almost [sic] infinite nihilism’ of Le Bavard, is that, while traversed throughout with an uncompromising sense of the limitations, frailties, and shortcomings of language, it nevertheless carries on: Pas à pas, i.e., step by step, negation by negation, as Des Forêts’s posthumous 2001 title would have it, jusqu’au dernier, i.e., till the very last, albeit a very last that forcibly would forever remain inaccessible. If it is true then that the Ostinato project opens onto ‘ineluctable cosmic void’, as Maclachlan convincingly shows, it nevertheless also remains the case, he judiciously adds, that in Des Forêts’s work ‘persistence in responding to the demands of writing is seen as a manifestation of a life force, even if the latter is inescapably bound up with death’s own relentless approach’. ‘Optimists write badly’, Valéry once put it. ‘But pessimists’, Blanchot rejoined, ‘don’t write at all’. In emphasizing the convergence between Des Forêts’s enterprise and the late work of Derrida (though it is perhaps disappointing that the book doesn’t engage with Yves Bonnefoy’s admiring, lengthy, but discordant 1986 reading of Des Forêts’s œuvre), Maclachlan is able to demonstrate the singular excess of language over its own avowed deficiencies, and provide affirmative evidence, not of the possibility of autobiography, but of its far-reaching, never-ending impossibility.