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

Apr 7, 2026

Michaela Hulstyn, Associate Director at Stanford who studies phenomenology and French/Francophone literature. She talks about altered states that unsettle selfhood. Discussion covers global French perspectives, loss versus transcendence of the self, narrative choices for portraying unselfing, ethical stakes around empathy, and multilingual and traumatic transformations.

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INSIGHT

Unselfing Means Loss Or Transcendence

Unselfing is the loss or transcendence of ordinary self-experience, and writers treat it either as an ethical accomplishment or as alienating loss.
Hulstyn contrasts Iris Murdoch's kestrel example of clearing selfish care with Nietzsche's view of depersonalization as troubling.

INSIGHT

Four Narrative Types For Unselfing

Hulstyn outlines four narrative types for unselfing: disruption, mutation, fragmentation, and destruction, offering alternatives to the conversion story.
Disruption captures temporary breakdowns in selfhood, exemplified by Paul Valéry's Monsieur Test and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz testimonies.

ANECDOTE

Delbo Mistakes Herself For Another Screaming Prisoner

Charlotte Delbo recounts traumatic confusion at Auschwitz where she sometimes mistakes herself for another screaming prisoner.
Paul Valéry’s pain episode produces hope for shared consciousness, but Delbo calls such knowledge 'useless' and deeply disturbing.

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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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