A Tribute to Nelly Arcan, or the Perils of Publicly Philosophising

In September 2007, Canadian author Nelly Arcan appeared on an episode of the popular Quebecois chat show, Tout le monde en parle (Everyone’s talking about it). Arcan was there to promote her third book, À ciel ouvert (Open Air), which, through the story of a love triangle, reflects upon the tyranny of Western beauty standards. Arcan herself was conventionally beautiful, blonde, and partial to plastic surgery. Her first book, Putain (Whore, 2001), is an account of her experience as a sex worker while studying at the University of Quebec in Montreal; her second, Folle (Madwoman, 2004), is a similarly autofictional account of love, abortion and suicidal ideation. But none of this was of interest to Guy Lepage, the host of Tout le monde en parle, nor to his posse of male panellists. As Arcan later put it, she had walked quite unknowingly ‘into the lion’s den’. (1)

1. ‘dans la gueule du loup’. Arcan, 2011: 96.

When Arcan first appears onscreen in the episode, a song by the Canadian artist Francis Martin is pointedly played: ‘when you give yourself…’ he croons, ‘to an experienced woman…’ (2) Initially undeterred, Arcan speaks eloquently about the sexualisation of women’s bodies and the self-hatred this can breed. She is deeply philosophical and articulate, but she is interrupted incessantly by Lepage and Dany Turcotte, one of the panellists. Lepage asks Arcan about something she had said once about wanting to feel men’s eyes on her when she is in a bar. The question is accusatory and irrelevant. But Arcan is more than equipped to answer: this needs nuancing, she asserts. She is interested in the male gaze, obsessed by it, even – just as all writers have obsessions. Here, she tries to steer the conversation back to her work, but no such luck: it turns to the subject of her dress, a sleek, black number, and Turcotte goes on the attack. You can critique the sexualisation of women, he shrugs, but tomorrow, little girls might say that they want a dress like Nelly Arcan’s. She laughs uncomfortably, and replies: but it’s a classic dress! Frankly, he scoffs, I’m struggling to keep my eyes on your face. Cue laughter and applause.

2. ‘Quand on se donne / À une femme d’expérience’. Martin, 1992.

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Arcan had been born Isabelle Fortier in 1973. By all accounts, she was a calm and intelligent child, but she struggled with the onset of adolescence and experienced mental health problems into adult life. Tragically, Arcan committed suicide in September 2009, two years after her appearance on Tout le monde en parle. In 2011, an autobiographical short story called La Honte (Shame) was posthumously published, in which Arcan provides an account of the degradation she felt she had undergone on the chat show. In writing La Honte, Arcan had taken the only course of action available to her: putting her pen to paper, and transforming her burning humiliation into written word.

I hesitate to write about an experience that caused Arcan so much pain. The episode of Tout le monde en parle is deeply troubling viewing, and Arcan could not bear the thought of how many people had witnessed her obvious discomfort. As she wrote in La Honte (in which she refers to herself in the third person): ‘The hatred contained in the questions posed unravelled her face, which opened like a book, exposing her soul for all to see’ (3). But I revisit this affair as a tribute to Arcan, and to all the women who have dared philosophise publicly, only to have their personal choices scrutinised for trace of hypocrisy. Public philosophy can indeed amount to an exposure of the soul, whether or not it is intended that way. Women, and people from all marginalised communities, when speaking out, risk being made a spokesperson and thus being held to a higher standard than those who remain silent. In La Honte, Arcan feels the weight of patriarchy not on her shoulders, but between her breasts: ‘It was as if, in the crease of her corseted cleavage, lay women’s oldest history, that of the inspection of their bodies, and thus of their shame.’ (4)

3. ‘La haine contenue dans ces questions lui entama le visage qui s’ouvrit comme un livre où son âme s’était donnée à lire’. Arcan, 2011: 102.

4. ‘C’était comme si, au creux de ses seins corsetés, s’était logée la plus vieille histoire des femmes, celle de l’examen de leur corps, celle donc de leur honte.’ Arcan, 2011: 93.

The reception of Arcan’s writing was consistently filtered through her bodily appearance. Her books were read, and are read, in light of her gender expression and life choices. Arcan was, of course, aware of this, and as the writer Nancy Huston has argued, she knowingly played on the incongruity of her position as a beautiful, feminine woman critiquing norms of beauty and femininity (5). Yet on a public stage, women are not allowed to embrace incongruity or inconsistency. In response to Arcan’s critique of Western beauty standards, Dany Turcotte complained: ‘you denounce them, but at the same time you uphold them’ (6). Turcotte could not comprehend that a woman might do both; Arcan’s defiance of straightforward understanding inspired vitriol.

5. Huston, 2011: 7.

6. ‘Vous le[s] dénoncez, mais en même temps vous l[es] entretenez’. Tout le monde en parle: 2007.

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that an overly cohesive, hegemonic norm of femininity shapes women’s lives in ‘cruel and fatal’ ways. (7). We flatten women as we seek to understand them as either one thing or another, and when women fail to meet this model, they are met with contempt. Arcan hints at this cruelty in her book Folle, whose narrator accuses a lover of seeing women as two-dimensional: for him, women lack ‘the thickness of life.’ (8) Men have sought to deny women like Arcan the thickness, depth and complexity of real life. But it is possible for women to be more than one thing at once. It is possible to both court and critique the male gaze, to be simultaneously obsessed and repulsed by it. We must allow women the freedom to be contradictory, unstraightforward and yet whole. Arcan’s life and work echoes Walt Whitman in this respect:

7. Butler, 2011 [original 1993]: 115.

8. ‘l’épaisseur de la vie.’ Arcan, 2004: 99.

9. Whitman, 2008 [original 1855]: 6-8.

The panellists of Tout le monde en parle saw Arcan’s appearance and way of life as undermining her work, but in reality, her life experience made her perfectly placed to philosophise about sexualisation and beauty standards. As Huston points out, in the bedroom where Arcan carried out sex work, she drew upon ‘the same intelligence that she used to write her thesis. The same.’ (10) It was through this multifaceted unity of being, through the Whitmanian multitudes contained within her subjectivity, that Arcan was able to turn her experience into literature and into philosophy. For she was surely a philosopher, although we remain hesitant to apply such a word to women – let alone young, feminine former sex workers. If Arcan was a philosopher, though, this does not mean that she should have had all the answers. She is not a hypocrite for wanting to be desired, or for wanting to wear a nice dress on TV. Why should she not seek pleasure in her gender presentation? We do not always have to be noble, nor straightforward, nor unambiguously good.

10. ‘la même intelligence dont elle se sert pour rédiger sa thèse. La même.’ Huston, 2011: 12.

But for her ambiguity, Arcan was challenged and dismissed. This is surely the peril of publicly philosophising as a woman: you expose your ‘flattenable nature’ and attract ‘attacks, always coming from above.’ (11) In tribute to Arcan, I ask that we do better. That we resist such attacks. That we stop asking women, ‘How can you be a feminist and…?’ That we appreciate that contradictions can make space for philosophical production, and for pleasure. Above all, I ask that we extend kindness to those negotiating the relationship between their mind, their philosophy, their body and their gender. As Arcan puts it: ‘Kindness, that was all she asked of the world.’ (12)

11. ‘nature écrasable’, ‘les coups, lesquels venaient toujours d’en haut.’ Arcan, 2011: 124.

12. ‘De la gentillesse, c’était tout ce qu’elle demandait au monde.’ Arcan, 2011: 100.