“Taking the measure of instability”: An Exchange with Virginie Poitrasson and Michelle Noteboom on The Unlikeness of Things

Clarise Reichley: As I was reading and re-reading The Unlikeness of Things over the past weeks, so many of the themes unraveled across the book have been synchronistically appearing in my own life and the other texts I’m reading. In Unlikeness, the speaker’s attentiveness to things reminded me of Francis Ponge’s poetry and his attempt to write things into language. Hannah Arendt’s writing about objects and their durability in The Human Condition also came to mind when encountering your work. Arendt’s triangulation of poetry, thought, and things also felt apparent throughout Unlikeness, where the interiority of the speaker is articulated through lyrical, first-person statements and is grappling with aftermath, absence, and grief. Now your book is out in the world to a new audience of English-speaking readers and it is even more of a thing.

The writing begins with the body, yet, as the book progresses, the text becomes more disembodied, less imagery-driven, more abstract. The former certainty of the “I” is destabilized and grows more migratory, with the speaker wending from one side of existence to another, making forays into a ghostly realm. Virginie, what was your experience in writing about the body? What role do you see language playing in facilitating embodiment and/or disembodiment?

Virginie Poitrasson: The narrative told in internalized fragments explores how the body unfolds in space, disappears, dissolves or disperses into the elements around it and experiences itself through language. It’s a matter of taking the measure of one’s body, one’s thoughts, one’s presence in the world, even though one feels “out of the picture,” disconnected, both here and not here. I wanted to write an intimate and physical adventure leading to the troubling encounter of the “other of oneself,” because there is something immensely unstable within us, and one of the main challenges of writing is no doubt to invent—in each book—a poetics of this instability of bodies.

CR: If we were to consider the text a body and different languages different forms of embodiment, translation could also be seen as an act of shifted embodiment, different birthing. The book description characterizes Unlikeness as being written in “defamiliarized English.” How do practices of defamiliarization inform your translation process, Michelle?

Michelle Noteboom: Strangely—or not—I have never actually thought about this before. Perhaps because I have lived more than half my life in France, immersed in a language that is not “familiar” in the way a native language is, and grappling with that—and navigating it—has been my daily life for 35 years. Though my perception of things may be automatic, I often find myself struggling to express them in language—or language processes—that are not so spontaneous. We could say that Virginie’s book itself is underpinned by defamiliarization, as the body is constantly thrust into situations that demand—and produce—a different sort of perception, or altered perception. Bringing the book into English was such a pleasure because the language in French is gorgeous. I tried, obviously, to capture that, but also strike a balance between the French syntax and what sounds right in English. In my “day job” as a translator in the audiovisual business, producing voiceover or subtitles, it is all about “massaging the French out” of the English until no traces of it are left. Here, the English remains stained by the French (hopefully in a good way), and that may be what gives it a sense of “defamiliarization.”

CR: Near the beginning of the book, Michelle translates: “Another body, and yet another. How many bodies must I lug about? Some are unidentified. They have erotic potential, but can’t really accomplish a sexual act. They are undocumented, yet aren’t likely to be jailed, since they are invisible.” Of course, reading these sentences in an American context, where “undocumented” and “jailed” echo news headlines about ICE raids and so-called “illegal immigration,” brought me into a reading space that felt political. What was the original French word in this sentence and does it have similar resonances in French as in English? Michelle, what choices did you make when translating this sentence?

MN: The French word is “clandestin,” which, besides its similarity to our English word, is also frequently used to refer to “illegal” immigrants. I should probably mention that the translation pre-dates the current American administration, so the fact that it resonates with recent headlines is purely coincidental. Sadly, the US has no corner on the market when it comes to the sort of hostile behavior and practices ICE has been displaying. Since I moved to France in the early ‘90s, illegal immigration and state policies targeting it have always been in the news, along with coverage relating the plight of immigrants who are “sans papiers” (literally, “without papers”). So “undocumented” seemed like a solid choice for the English adaptation of this sentence. And Virginie and I went over the translation line by line, so she clearly approved, and felt it captured her original meaning.

CR: Throughout Unlikeness the speaker explores fluidity in relation to borders: a tension that reveals the simultaneous restriction and fertility offered by edges. In writing about edges, the speaker recognizes that the boundedness of the built environment “surround[s] me and help[s] me form my own angles.” The house is one aspect of the built environment limiting the liquidity of the speaker, yet the experiences of the house and the speaker are blurred as the book continues. Put differently: the speaker inhabits the house but the house also inhabits the speaker and they speak from a conjoined mouth. Virginie: is there a specific house that informed your writing?

VP: Initially it was the video work of the wonderful Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila that inspired me, when I visited her exhibition at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris in 2008. In particular, the house shown in her video installation “Talo – The House” (2002) which treats extreme psychosis. A triple-screen installation shows a young woman in her house, and describes her perception of the boundaries of reality as she slips into an increasingly psychotic state. Without manifest emotion, it speaks of the interpenetration of space and time, of the interior and exterior. For “Talo – The House” Ahtila used interviews with women who had experienced psychotic episodes. This video installation strikes a fragile balance as it oscillates between minimalism, a sense of danger, and poetry.

CR: Windows, an integral part of a house, form a motif across the book, in addition to featuring prominently on the cover, with the series of photographs by Jutta Strohmaier. The window, being a thing sometimes open and sometimes closed, is a boundary site that is porous and resists binary designations of inside/outside. Translation is also a boundary site between languages, opening and (fore)closing different possibilities. What opened and what closed during the translation process, Michelle, what was reflected and newly formed?

MN: Translation is always very open as a process. There obviously is no “right” way to translate any text. In this sense, the very act of sitting down to translate is equivalent to opening a window. You let in so many possibilities! Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), at some point, you simply have to choose. You need to close that window and settle on a certain adaptation of what is being said and going on in the “source” language, and decide to live with it in the “target” language. In the end, hopefully the author’s original intent is reflected in the translation, in a newly formed text that works equally as well standing on its own. As its own thing, to go back to what you said earlier.

CR: Virginie, you are also a translator from English into French. How was it to read your work anew, translated by Michelle into English? What new aspects of the text were revealed?

VP: It was a great experience, a very close and inspiring collaboration, since Michelle and I are long-time friends and we know each other well. Our close bond made our exchanges very fluid and it was really enriching to see how Michelle transposed some of my occasionally absurd images with her own creativity and imagination. Her translation made me perceive the obsessions that permeate my writing: the materiality of the body, its inner instability, the tiniest sensations that run through us.

CR: Michelle, how did you collaborate with Virginie during your translation?

MN: Working with Virginie was amazing! As she mentioned, we’ve known each other for years and have a very close friendship. We read a lot of the same authors, enjoy a lot of the same art, go to a lot of shows together… We are really on the same wavelength and “get” each other, artistically. I was already very familiar with this book (and all Virginie’s work) before beginning the translation, which certainly was helpful in bringing a first version into English. After that, we were able to sit down together and go through it line by line – such a luxury! And Virginie could explain exactly what was going on for her in each image and sentence. Sometimes this would allow me to just set the French text aside and “sit with” the image and her words, and come out with a rather different suggestion in English, which she would either validate or reject. If only every translation could happen like that!

CR: The house as a domestic space is not unburdened. In relation to the house and the objects that inhabit it, I see an ambient presence of femininity and the role of women in relation to homemaking. You write: “My body is the shared texture of all things,” which I read as being liberatory and communal—the body is both itself and all the things surrounding it. Later, objects are characterized as “recipients first and foremost. To be filled.” “To be filled” implies that objects are vessels, that the form is empty and open to receive: qualities often assigned to women. Virginie, were you consciously thinking about the relationship between objects, women, and objectification?

VP: Yes, absolutely. Each of my books is underpinned in some way by an aspect of objectification as defined by feminist theory. For example, in “Demi-valeurs” [Half-values], there’s a question of instrumentalization; in “Il fauttoujours garder en tête une formule magique” [You must always keep a magic formula in mind], it’s violability, and being reduced to an appearance; while in The Unlikeness of Things it’s about permeability and interchangeability, and being reduced to a body.

What I do know is that from the start, a woman was going to be the protagonist of the fragmented narrative, because fragmentation is an aspect that is essentially attributed to women. For instance, a woman’s porosity to the world around her, and her ability to “put herself in the other’s place”—in an other’s place. Also, in terms of domestic tasks, which are still—for the most part—performed by women, who are historically assigned to the interior space. Because as a protagonist in my previous book (“…formule magique”)—says:

I want to be your housewife with a diamond ring, to cook your food, to sweep your floor.
And presto! It has to shine.
But remains well confined.
Interior woman.
It’s almost a cliché.
[…]
I stay tangy and sweet,
all silk without me.
Well confined, yes, good,
In the middle of the furniture.

I wanted to dig deep into this cliché: the idea of woman as an empty shell, an empty container, like an object. For me, the female body is intrinsically linked to the objects surrounding it: it refers to them, takes hold of them, fills itself with them.

CR: At the end of the book, you acknowledge Simone de Beauvoir among a slew of other writers and thinkers who are quoted throughout Unlikeness. What role does reading and citation play in your writing practice, Virginie? I found it difficult to distinguish when text was being quoted and when it was your own writing. Was this nestling of different voices intentional, and if so, what effect did you hope it would create?

VP: I always take notes while reading; I travel within texts. It’s a living journey—even though motionless—that appeases my avid curiosity. I don’t read passively—it’s like a dialogue, where I find an opening in another’s writing, a questioning, an acceptance and reciprocity with moments of effusion and extreme coincidences. It feeds me enormously. The practice—like a ritual—of quoting other writers is like a way of reassuring the writing that is to come, the way the words are (re)written and formulated, and gestures (re)iterated. The process of reading and writing is enmeshed, there’s a slowness to it. Like what Roland Barthes called a “mystical exercise.”

My writing finds its singularity by circulating through and among the writing and voices of others. It converses with quotations, through very careful listening and intense new encounters. The highlighted quotes are echo chambers in the middle of the text that flows around it.

CR: The title phrase of the book appears on page 41, where you write: “But I’m in the howling of the world. It’s the howling aspect, naked, the unlikeness of things.” What came first: the phrase or the title? And what aspects of the phrase “the unlikeness of things” made it feel apt to be the title? An earlier version of the title was “The Uncanniness of Things.” How did you settle on “The Unlikeness of Things” and, Michelle, how did difficulties of translation play out in choosing the title?

MN: This is kind of a question for Virginie, too, since I merely echoed the phrase/title from French in the English version. The French title—“Le Pas-comme-si des choses”— is taken from (or given to) the sentence in the book that you cite. Literally, it means the “not-like-that of things.” And to hear Virginie describe it, it refers to the aspect of objects that, despite appearances, are not actually the way they may look. She could probably describe it better than that. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure we came up with the title together, brainstorming the idea out of French toward English. But for sure, “The Unlikeness of Things” was our original title. Then in January 2024, we were talking about the book with Stéphane Bouquet, and he mentioned Freud’s idea of the Uncanny in relation to Virginie’s book, and we kind of latched onto that with newfound enthusiasm. But then a few months later, the Litmus crew astutely guided us back toward “Unlikeness,” which definitely has fewer psychoanalytic connotations and more of a newness flavor to it. Which is 100% appropriate for Virginie’s book.

CR: There is an ecology throughout The Unlikeness of Things, an ecology of the natural environment and the built environment, both of which the speaker leaks into. Such a view of the self as being both distinct and disembodied liquid is a radical imperative in a time characterized by simultaneous political rigidity and dissolution of binary identity.

This interview was conducted over email exchange between Virginie Poitrasson, Michelle Noteboom, and Litmus intern Clarise Reichley in August 2025.