What exactly Lisa Robertson’s new Anemones: A Simone Weil Project is and where it exists are questions the work resists. The slim, almost zine-like collection loosely assembles an eclectic variety of texts, including letters, augmented translation, extended annotation, essays, and primary documents all excerpted from wide rime, Robertson’s ongoing investigation into medieval troubadour poetics as both praxis and form. In other words, Anemones is a document of community, where authorship is not located in Robertson alone but exists most palpably in movements and spaces of exchange.
Letters between Robertson and artist and researcher Benny Nemer bookend the collection. It’s here where we learn about Robertson’s enlistment of Nemer to perform a series of “floral actions.” In these performances, Nemer crafts delicate and architectural anemone bouquets and delivers them, along with a letter from Robertson, to the seven writers to whom the book is dedicated. Robertson and Nemer’s letters are the only ones made public in the collection. They are personal and lucid reflections on their respective works in progress (at the time of writing, Robertson was at work on her annotations of Simone Weil’s essay and Nemer had delivered just a couple of the seven bouquets). In her letter, Robertson writes, “I realise that most of my work happens in some accessory chamber or other, discovered along the way, mid-conversation.” “As a way to chart a reading path,” she continues, “I began to talk to friends about my new obsession” (11, 13). She then details the trajectory of her research through conversations with friends and fellow thinkers, including Jonathan Skinner, Abigail Lang, and Vincent Broqua.
“Vidas,” the penultimate section, presents an even more exuberant celebration of collectivity. Here, Robertson turns her dedications, normally a mere formality of postscript, into a thorough and lyric account of the writers who’ve emboldened her project—Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Caroline Bergvall, Erín Moure, Denise Riley, Jacques Roubaud, and sabrina soyer. Robertson describes her relationships with these writers, their careers, and their shared commitment to unbordered experimentation. Adamant about locating herself within a greater community of thought, she emphasizes the plurality of her thinking’s authorship.
Translation is another kind of exchange. It is the product of conversations, silent or otherwise, between writers and languages. With an “augmented” translation of troubadour poet Bernart de Ventadorn and variants of translated excerpts from Plato’s Symposium, Robertson accentuates translation’s capacity for the kind of flexible and collaborative thinking that sustains her project. Her translations are a kind of reading, as she both extends and unravels the meaning of the originals. Robertson does not hide in the sometimes-invisibility of the translator; instead, she participates boldly in the conversation by making explicit contributions of her own, expanding, altering, and responding to each work. The meaning of a poem is not fixed or finished, she seems to contend, but is a chance for dialogue.
French leftist intellectual Simone Weil serves as Robertson’s most potent interlocutor, and her translation of Weil’s 1942 essay “What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of” constitutes the collection’s centerpiece. Robertson takes Weil on carefully, approaching her with both deep humility and attentive skepticism to build a portrait as personal as it is intellectual. “So here,” she writes to Nemer, “Weil becomes my guide towards thinking. But I don’t aspire to think like Weil; my desire is more to think near her, to approach her, by preventing my biases from becoming determining limits” (23). One gets a needed whiff of a demythologized Weil, treated more as a partner in conversation than an idol. “I want to welcome intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis as part of the necessity of translation,” Robertson writes (24).
Weil’s essay on the Occitan inspiration first appeared in the Marseilles-based Cahiers du Sud’s special issue on the same topic. The journal, made up of poets and philosophers, was a leftist collective working in the shadow of rising fascism. They emphasized a decentralized intellectual tradition compared to other, Paris-centric journals, and looked to the troubadours as their avant-garde predecessors, who revitalized and radicalized literary and social forms.
Like Weil and her milieu, the troubadours developed innovative practices of writing and thinking within a context of political repression. The Catholic Order and the Nazi Party were similar in their intolerance for ambiguity. Robertson credits her “more recent guide,” Édouard Glissant, with the insight that the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade marked “the beginning of the political construction of the defensive concept of a bordered, exclusive, rationalist and racialised Europe” (14). In the aftermath of the Inquisition and the Crusade, centralized political control depended on a totalizing conception of culture, where obscure and hard-to-define practices were extricated and othered. These new forms of political control indicated a broader will to define by exclusion and an intolerance for indeterminacy and plurality—traits that are also rejected, Robertson suggests, in the current political and economic climate defined by capitalism. The indeterminacy of Robertson’s project—it is multiple things by multiple people happening in multiple places—actively rejects these conditions of definability, and challenges traditional conceptions of borders and boundedness violently administered by forces in power.
The margin then becomes an appropriate place to take up arms, as the weight of the text of Anemones gets displaced from the center of the page. This happens in two ways. First, the body of the text sits toward the gutter of the book in shortened lines that resemble verse. Second are the scrolls of essayistic annotations that line the sides of Weil’s essay in a gradient of ecstatic red ink. Robertson populates the margin with intellectual rigor and style, and in so doing not only reanimates it as a space of value and richness but declines the very notion of the margin—literary, cultural, or political—as a place of lesserness. She’s not alone in this project. The margin has been a critical playing field for decades, as writers like Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, John Keene, and Jane Gregory have attempted a reclamation of text excluded from a work’s “main body,” and in so doing sought to disrupt assumptions of textual, social, and political marginality.
Robertson is adamant about language’s capacity for political action and resistance. The troubadours were the first to write in vernacular languages and to structure their poetry with repeated rhymes and refrains, which archived the radical ethics of the Occitan culture largely stamped out by the Crusade and Inquisition. Writing in a vernacular language echoed the culture of inclusivity, accessibility, and popular exchange fostered by the Occitans. The rhyming, in turn, embodied the Occitan practice of love—specifically, the practice of consent integral to it—as sonic elements complied, collaborated, and built together. Robertson suggests that it’s in this way the troubadour poem “vividly performs a philosophical and political task” (22).
Robertson again emphasizes language’s power to act when she writes of her desire to “trace the ways that the medieval Occitan culture acts and performs a political task in the present tense” of Weil’s thinking (61, note 3). In fact, the collection as a whole—published by performance-focused organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution—is intimately concerned with the question of “doing.” That is, it is concerned with how thinking, particularly in the form of aesthetic and critical experiment, does, and with how doing thinks. Robertson quotes French philosopher Pierre Hadot, who blurred the distinction between the two when he wrote, “‘I’ve always believed that philosophy was a concrete act.’”[1] For Weil, too, Robertson tells us, philosophy “was not separate from or different than her general conduct of living in the world” (38).
Two kinds of doing emerge as essential terms: performance and practice. For Robertson, language is a performer in the works of Weil, the troubadours, and others as it executes a political action through the manipulation of form. Although unwitnessed, Nemer’s “floral actions” are perhaps the most explicit way the collection approaches performance: the body carries out a specific action or task. Performance is eventful. Its execution is discrete, explicit, and named; it anticipates an audience. Presumably, it is the result of practice, the product of a process.
Practice emerges more gradually and implicitly as a touchpoint in the text. Practices accumulate: Weil’s practice of attention, the practice of friendship, of life, and most significantly, of love. For medieval Occitan poets, love is not defined or declared once and then enacted into permanence. Neither is love ever achieved or performed. As a practice, love exists in its ongoingness and in its capacity for renewal and redefinition. Whereas a performance is singular and defined, a practice continues in pursuit of its own becoming. In this way, practice is a fitting model for the kind of pluralist ethic that Anemones both describes and embodies.
Still, we must note some ambivalence about doing in the text. Anemones draws its title from the Grimm tale Weil used in her early theorizations on passivity. When six brothers are turned into swans, their sister must stitch six shirts from anemones in order to save them. The task takes six years and is so delicate and consuming that the girl can do absolutely nothing else. Weil uses the story as a centerpiece in her argument against action, commenting, “‘To act is never difficult: we always act too much and scatter ourselves ceaselessly in disorderly deeds. To make six shirts from anemones and to keep silent: this is our only way of acquiring power.’”[2]
While her predecessors believed in a willful pursuit of understanding, Weil believed clarity was to be found in the “detailed practice of contemplative withdrawal” epitomized by the girl’s labor (35). Certainly, Robertson picks up on the title not only for her long-standing interest in textiles and material but for the principle as well. In her opening letter to Nemer, she writes that to “nurture and fulfill the complexity of an immanent ability, we sometimes need to withdraw from perceivable action and discourse” (17). Robertson makes an important distinction with the qualifying “perceivable”—one remembers Nemer’s private deliveries. It is not action itself that Weil and Robertson take issue with as detrimental to personal, creative, or intellectual development: the girl is not idle. It is rather action produced for the consumption of others that threatens the work.
When Robertson talks about withdrawal, both in her own terms and in Weil’s, she’s talking about a return to practice, where one moves away from talking about their work, showing or performing it to the privacy and indeterminacy of being and becoming with it. Performance remains a valuable tool of political resistance, though it is perhaps more easily disposed toward a capitalist agenda than practice. However, Nemer’s floral actions, in their privacy and unfinishedness, are a good example of the way performance can resist the demand for public consumption and legibility.
In Anemones, Robertson reminds us that one must, at times, turn inward. One must withdraw not from one’s community but from one’s audience, and resist the capitalist compulsion to produce rather than practice.
Notes:
[1] Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995), 279. Quoted in Robertson, Anemones, 40.
[2] This remark by Weil is taken from Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 31–33. Quoted in Robertson, Anemones, 31.