invocation of
colette peignot

In 2014 the spirit of Colette Peignot, also known as Laure, obsessed me. For a period the force of her presence was a fever. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t sleep, without this restless, insistent remembering of a woman, whose death – before whose life and before whose name – was first divulged to me in Maurice Blanchot’s L’Arrêt de mort (Death sentence). In fact, I knew the men that knew her, Bataille, Leiris, Blanchot, before I ever recall reading her name or her nom de plume, Claude Araxe, or Laure, the name ascribed to the posthumous publication of her writings. And before I sought out the few photographs that testify to the beauty of her vehement existence.

That account by Blanchot had slipped under my skin. I returned to his strange novella a number of times – I held it, I reread it, some passages over and over. ‘I recognised her violence, her secrecy. I saw that she was at liberty to fight even me up to the last second.’ I wondered at the life that had been engulfed by the protracted death it contained. The uneasiness and the curiosity it provoked in me I’d perhaps only experienced in that other enigmatic narrative of a cursed life, a cursed love, Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The two books always seem to share a physical closeness in the bookcase, as if drawn together in erotic sympathy.

As so often when a revelation irrupts, the exact circumstances and time are lost, submerged beneath the contours of a transfigured landscape. It must have been late Summer or Autumn, for on the anniversary of her death I received the copy of her collected writings, which I had tracked down some weeks previously. Her sudden appearance on this day was for me a proof that her life still moved through the words she had committed to paper, though never herself published. An unfinished existence, an existence still evidently flowing.

I began to dance, to encounter her. I called her by her names, imagined the lives she had passed through. Her silences, her nakedness, compelled me. These dances, which first took place in a red room I shared with my lover, a lacquered cinnabar chamber into which our lives, all facets of our lives, was melded; and on the bed, the altar of our love; and in my imaginary, which for all its perverse chimerical lucidity is all flesh and the fire in my flesh. Here I sought glimpses of a life that had once flowered and was devoured by time, but whose passion anoints the revolutionary and the sacred even now. Wounds speak. ‘The blood does not stop flowing.’ It is the river no man can bridge.

Sometimes the face I saw was my own, but changed. The mirror has a volatile surface. It can take you under. Sometimes the river carried other faces, those she’d worn and those lent to her. Sometimes only mutilated figures and hieratic gestures surfaced, and she was faceless, headless, and the waters livid.

I had to dance her out of me, to dance her through me. I had to dance to release her from me – that glowering insistence, that flare that ignifies my blood. To dance her, ‘the steps accomplished in a state of trance,’ to dance her is to bleed with the same blood, to feel my sex coil and contract, vexed by the same desire.

I spent more and more time with her words, in them I found the dance: throughout her writings, the poems, the fragments of thought, and correspondence sent and unsent, a language in motion. I saw her, ‘at the edge of dawn and darkness.’ I found her in a dance at the edge of life and death. ‘I did not live life but death.’ Always, the dance begins on her deathbed, the body transfigured by an erotic dream – for dreaming is a state of sexual arousal, and in the shudder and tremor of the little death the dancer awakens into the mysteria of a life in its most ecstatic and incandescent expression.

Colette Laure Lucienne Peignot. Her second baptismal name, the name Bataille and Leiris published her writings under, evoked the unattainable, beloved muse of Petrarch, Laure de Noves, an ancestress of the divine Marquis. Whilst it was D.A.F. de Sade whose writings inspired much of her thought, it was to Petrarch I turned when I sought the meditatio mortis that would form part of my devotional labores, creating the verdaccio or ‘dead layer’ upon which I would enflesh my vision of Colette in dance. In the first dialogue of the Secretum, Augustine instructs Petrarch,

Every one knows, and the greatest philosophers are of the same opinion, that of all tremendous realities Death is the most tremendous. So true is this, that from ever of old its very name is terrible and dreadful to hear. Yet though so it is, it will not do that we hear that name but lightly, or allow the remembrance of it to slip quickly from our mind. No, we must take time to realise it. We must meditate with attention thereon. We must picture to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily frame, the cold extremities, the breast in the sweat of fever, the side throbbing with pain, the vital spirits running slower and slower as death draws near, the eyes sunken and weeping, every look filled with tears, the forehead pale and drawn, the cheeks hanging and hollow, the teeth staring and discoloured, the nostrils shrunk and sharpened, the lips foaming, the tongue foul and motionless, the palate parched and dry, the languid head and panting breast, the hoarse murmur and sorrowful sigh, the evil smell of the whole body, the horror of seeing the face utterly unlike itself […] For things seen cling closer to our remembrance than things heard.

– Petrarch

The choreography was inscribed on this ground, like a poem with the logic of a dream. In the first section of the dance the movement is compelled from the chiasmic entwining of la petite mort, where the abyss crosses and creates the self anew, and from which ‘she rises up as from death itself with the silent force of two or three images.’ Those images, for me, constellate around the act of sacrifice, and the sacred in its double aspect: the sacré droit and sacré gauche, the orthodox and the transgressive. For Colette, the sacred could exist only in communion with others; in a fragment given to Bataille on her deathbed, she writes,

The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, ‘communication’ experienced as nakedness. – It is self-violation, baring, communication to others of a reason for living, and this reason for living ‘shifts.’

– Colette Peignot