Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

Apr 7, 2026

Michaela Hulstyn, Associate Director at Stanford and author of Unselfing, studies 20th–21st century French and Francophone thought. She discusses altered states that reshape selfhood. Conversations cover phenomenology and cognitive approaches, unselfing as loss versus transcendence, multilingual fragmentation, trauma versus hallucination, and the ethical limits of empathy.

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INSIGHT

Four Narrative Shapes Of Unselfing

Unselfing narratives vary: disruption, mutation, fragmentation, destruction are alternatives to conversion.
Hulstyn frames chapters around these narrative shapes to map how different texts give form to self-undoing.

ANECDOTE

Valéry's Insight Versus Delbo's Useless Knowledge

Paul Valéry and Charlotte Delbo both depict unselfing as disruption during pain, but with different meanings.
Valéry sees temporary rupture as illuminating intersubjectivity; Delbo calls similar experiences 'useless knowledge' and finds them disturbing.

ANECDOTE

Michaud's Mescaline Produces Lasting Change

Henri Michaud's mescaline 'lightning that lasts' produces a lasting self-change he calls a new expanse that 'may afterwards be partially filled, but not annulled.'
Hulstyn quotes Michaud to show mutation claims durability after psychedelic experiments.

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Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.

Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss.

Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.
Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.

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