With Voir clair avec Monique Wittig, the collective Damechevaliers—actress Adèle Haenel and musician Caro Geryl, in collaboration with director Gisèle Vienne—gathers audiences for a vigil-like performance blending reading, music and live performance around the thought of one of the twentieth century’s major voices.

The work of Monique Wittig—writer, essayist, philosopher and activist—constitutes a decisive turning point in the intellectual and political evolution of feminism. In both her essays and her unclassifiable texts situated between fiction and poetry, she transforms language itself into a battlefield where gendered power relations can be subverted, anticipating by nearly two decades, through her formal experimentation and theoretical reflections, the emergence of gender studies in the United States.

In the half-light of a forest edge, just beyond the noise of the world, gathered around a fire placed at the centre of the stage, Adèle Haenel and Caro Geryl read La Pensée straight, an essay published in 1978 in which Wittig describes heterosexuality as a political regime structuring the opposition between men and women. Haenel shares with the audience the profound impact this text had on her own life, offering the thought of Monique Wittig, alongside that of several other women writers, as a tool capable of illuminating systems of domination and the political assignment of social roles through gender, in order to resist them and, perhaps one day, bring them to an end.