Preliminary Materials for a Theory 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 Theoryof the Young-Girl

First published in France in 1999,Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibilityof 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 WitoldGombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of "living currency"and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girldiagnoses -- and makes visible -- a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have becometransparent.

In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worldsof fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond thecomparatively 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 exchangesof "personalities" within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumersociety's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's "freedom" (inmagazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitiveand psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.

Tiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. The group published two journal volumes in 1999 and 2001 (in which the collective author " The Invisible Committee" first appeared) as well as the books Introduction to Civil War and This Is Not a Program (both published by Semitext(e)).