A theoretical dissection of capitalism's ultimate form of merchandise:
the living spectacle of the Young-Girl.
The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not
even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating
social totality.
--from Theory of the Young-Girl
First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory
of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The
Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen:
whatever "type" of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or
concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with
the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of
Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold
Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of
"living currency" and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a
Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses--and makes visible--a phenomenon
that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.
In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of
fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating
disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper
magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the
Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and
social media exchanges of "personalities" within the impersonal realm of
the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and
sexuality through the Young-Girl's "freedom" (in magazine terms) to do
whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously
competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.
