Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr undercuts and disarms the hegemony of the phallocentric signifier; the text destabilizes any fixed, authoritative relationship of exchange between writer and reader. The syntactical fragments of the text parallel the deconstructive activity of the depicted narrator, who explicitly juxtaposes an act of violence with an act of writing; the violence of the narrator symbolizes the rejection of the inarticulate pain of the hysteric, who harms herself to attract attention. Brossard's text demonstrates that linguistic activity has always been intimately connected with man's oppression of women, and any attempt to do violence to such oppression necessarily entails an attempt to do violence to discourse -- language is the site of struggle. Brossard's text focuses on the material corporeality of writing rather than the efficient production of meaning. The lesbian experience defies the control of phallocentric ideology by imbricating the poetic and the erotic -- the narrator breaks the "sentence," the linguistic prison, in order to synthesize the poetic (the body of the text) and the erotic (the text of the body) into a "cortex": a body language resistant to the violent abstractions of masculine discourse.
