Understood performatively, Solanas’s act can no longer constitute a singular biographical event, but is instead rendered as a multiple, unstable, and dangerously productive enterprise. By contrast, an avant-garde reading of Solanas refuses to separate manifesto and assault, but inscribes instead the famous shooting of Andy Warhol into Solanas’s project, a project that both exceeds as well as it invokes art, writing, and life. The violence of Solanas’s assault on Warhol is ultimately circumvented in order to prevent it from contaminating the legitimacy of the (already and in itself violent) manifesto and the legacy of Solanas as a feminist icon. The humanist account becomes an attempt to recast Solanas into a position as a feminist icon that aims to (reductively) explain the events in her life and the SCUM Manifesto. While the former insists on a separation between the attempted murder on Warhol and the feminist treaty SCUM Manifesto, the latter argues for a generative interplay between writing and performance, art and violence. I assign to these diverging accounts either a humanist or an avant-garde tendency. In the critical responses to Solanas’s history there is a divergence in terms of how they treat the relationship between text and action. Ever since, the connection between the shots and the manifesto has been discussed.

Solanas’s attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol took place in 1968, the same year that she self-published SCUM Manifesto, constituting a powerful attack on the human male. Reading Solanas as a feminist feeler driven by vision, intuition, and affect can offer an alternative to the binary that emerges from the hegemony of rationality in Western thought and society. These two approaches reveal an underlying binary between madness and normality, wherein madness has little or no agency and the “normal” is sanitized and reduced to select emotions. In both approaches, Solanas’s archive is caught within a dichotomy of forced inclusion or complete exclusion from public discourse. Whether read as a homicidal inpatient, a near-fictional cartoon character, a militant writer, or a groundbreaking revolutionary, Solanas’s entire project has either been dismissed as driven by madness, or defended and in turn recommended for inclusion in mainstream discourse.

ABSTRACT: The archive of Valerie Solanas, an assemblage comprised of her actions, writings, and their circulation and reception, is marked by deep tensions between history, fiction, and critical thought.

Valerie scum manifesto