The Hélène Cixous Reader This is the first truly representative selection of texts by Hélène Cixous. The substantial pieces range broadly across her entire oeuvre, and include essays, works of fiction, lectures and drama. Arranged helpfully in chronological order, the extracts span twenty years of intellectual thought and demonstrate clearly the development of one of the most creative and brilliant minds of the twentieth century. The editor’s introductions to each piece will be especially helpful to readers new to the writings of Hélène Cixous. With a foreword by Jacques Derrida, a preface by Cixous herself, and first-class editorial material by Susan Sellers, The Hélène Cixous Reader is destined to become a key text of feminist writing. Susan Sellers studied at the Universities of London and the Sorbonne and has taught in the Ecole Normale Supérieure, near Paris, and the University of Paris VIII. She has written extensively on the subject of feminist thought. The Hélène Cixous Reader Edited by Susan Sellers With a preface by Hélène Cixous and foreword by Jacques Derrida First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Routledge, the collection as a whole © 1994 Hélène Cixous, the translations © 1994 Susan Sellers, editorial matter All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cixous, Hélène [Selections. English. 1994] The Hélène Cixous reader/edited by Susan Sellers: with a preface by Hélène Cixous and foreword by Jacques Derrida. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Sellers, Susan. II. Title. PQ2663.I9A6 1994 93–41292 848’.91409–dc20 ISBN 0-203-40848-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-71672-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-04929-6 (Print Edition) 0-415-04930-X (pbk) CONTENTS Foreword by Jacques Derrida vii Preface by Hélène Cixous xv Acknowledgements xxiv Introduction xxvi Neutral 1 Inside 17 First Names of No One 25 The Newly Born Woman 35 Breaths 47 La—The (Feminine) 57 Angst 69 To Live the Orange 81 (With) Or the Art of Innocence 93 Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite 105 The Book of Promethea 119 Extreme Fidelity 129 The Terrible But Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk King of Cambodia 139 The Place of Crime, The Place of Forgiveness 149 Indiada or the India of Their Dreams 157 Manna to the Mandelstams to the Mandelas 163 FirstDays of the Year 181 Deluge 189 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing 197 Afterword by Mireille Calle-Gruber 207 Select Bibliography 221 Index 230 v FOREWORD1 Jacques Derrida In the chapter of Hélène Cixous’ “FirstDays of the Year” entitled “Self- portraits of a blind woman”, a certain “Story of Contretemps” begins with a bench.2 It begins on a bench—and it’s also a scene of reading, a reading of sexual difference: between separation and reparation, the in-between between Separation and Reparation. Each one of the two words, Reparation and Separation, remains all alone. Each one all alone is a sentence, but that sentence is a question (“Reparation? Separation?”). Each one stands in its solitude—and, between the two, there is the between. But the between which opens in the instant someone enters, some “one,” Onegin. I’ll read a passage, it’s better to read, always: Because this Story of Contretemps begins with a bench (…) What I love: the race, what Marina loves: the bench. Each one reads in her own book. The author: hesitates. In Marina’s: a bench. A bench. On the bench Tatiana. Enter Onegin. He doesn’t sit down. Everything is already broken off. It’s she who gets up. Reparation? They remain standing, the two of them. Separation? All two of them.3 “All two of them”: “tous les deux” is one of the most singular works of French grammar. Hélène has a genius for making the language speak, down to the most familiar idiom, the place where it seems to be crawling with secrets which give way to thought. She knows how to make it say what it keeps in reserve, which in the process also makes it come out of its reserve. Thus: “tous les deux” can always be heard as all the “twos,” all the couples, the duals, the duos, the differences, all the dyads in the world: each time there’s two in the world. The singular name of this plural which nonetheless regroups couples and dual unities, “tous les deux” thus becomes the subject or the origin of a fable, history and morality included. The fable says everything that can happen to sexual difference or from sexual difference. Here, in the more narrowly delimited sequence of this Story of Contretemps, it remains impossible to decide if this “tous les deux,” which repeats the earlier “tous les deux” (I reread: “Reparation? They remain standing, the two of them. Separation? All two of them. But it’s only he who speaks. He speaks for a long time. All the time. She, she vii viii FOREWORD doesn’t say a word.”), means both of them, him and her, in the most ordinary and obvious sense (when “tous les deux” means the one and the other, both together, in chorus, equally, indissociably, of common accord, all two of them as one, in this inseparable) or “all the twos,” “reparation” and “separation,” the one and the other, the reparation which doesn’t separate itself from the separation, that is from the irreparable separation, the irreparable separation of the pair disparate in its very appearance. In this second hearing, what makes tous les deux inseparable includes also the separation which unites them, the experience of distancing or inaccessibility which conjoins them still. But it’s only he who speaks. He speaks for a long time. All the time. She, she does not say a word. Between them, speech does not give the word [les paroles ne donnent pas le mot].4 Not to give the word, for speech, is strange. This complicates the questions of what it means to give the floor [donner la parole], to give one’s word [donner sa parole], which gives still something else, to give a thing and to give the word, to give in general, to give the given. So it happens now that wordless speech comes to us, in any case speech which, if it has the word, and maybe the closing word or the password, does not give it. Is speech which does not give the word the same thing as speech which does not give the floor? Not to give the floor to the other, to interdict the other or to deprive the other of the right to respond, and certain people who are also orators or rhetoricians know how, it is always in speaking that this operation takes place. But maybe we need to distinguish here between, on the one hand, “donner le mot” which can mean to unveil the password or the closing word, to turn over the secret or the key of a reading, for example of sexual difference and, on the other hand, something else entirely, “se donner le mot” [to give oneself or one another the word] (that is, just what we haven’t done, Hélène and I, today: se donner le mot is to agree together as accomplices to stage an operation, to plot, to sketch the “plot” of an intrigue; unless absolute conspirators, those who haven’t had to decide on their conspiracy with a contract, don’t even need to give the word to find themselves at the appointment, with or without contretemps, my other hypothesis being that there are no appointments without the space of the contretemps, without the spacing of the contretemps, and there is no contretemps without sexual difference, as if sexual difference were contretemps itself, a Story of Contretemps.) (…) I’ll resume my reading of FirstDays of the Year repeating a bit for memory: FOREWORD ix Everything is already broken off. It’s she who gets up. Reparation? They remain standing, the two of them. Separation? All two of them. But it’s only he who speaks. He speaks for a long time. All the time. She, she doesn’t say a word. Between them, speech does not give the word. Has entered: Time, long time, distancing: with large strokes between the two of them he digs and digs (…)5 How can time enter? How can we say of time that he arrives, that he enters in a stroke, “with large strokes”? One must be two, in two, “all the twos” for that, maybe, on the verge of giving each other the floor, if not the word. In the preceding paragraph, a sentence began with this inversion of the subject: “Enter Onegin.” Onegin speaks “a long time. All the time.” Hélène says “all” [“tout”]. After the singular “tous” of “tous les deux,” we have here the no less singular “tout” of “tout le temps.” How can one “all the time”? give, give oneself or take all the time? What then remains? This gives all the more for meditation: from one totality to the other, is not the most common trait precisely the impossibility of totalizing? The two idiomatic occurrences of “tous” and “tout,” have to do with fracture, with infinite separation or interrupting distance: difference itself. So beautiful and so mysterious an invention, so impossible, as beautiful and as impossible as “tous les deux,” this “tout le temps” with no remains is clearly the most enigmatic subject of that difference between him and her. We’re going back in time, we’re recounting it backwards to precede it with its fable. We hear “tout le temps” as for the first time from a poem and as if the internal and intense versification of this “tout le temps” came down to saying the time of time, the staggering origin of temporality itself, there where time in a stroke enters on stage. One must be two, “all two of them,” for this anabasis of time to have a chance of happening, “between the two of them.” Has entered Time, long time, distancing: with large strokes between the two of them he digs and digs: “I was not born [born (né) is masculine in the reading: it’s he who speaks] for happiness, my soul is foreign to it. Marriage would kill us. Loving you from too close very quickly I would grow accustomed, and the love would end. If I were to love, it would be from afar, from time to time, separately.”6 “Separately” comes all alone, this time. The word advances all alone, separately. The word “separately” proceeds in solitude, separated after a comma, at the end of the sentence and the end of the citation, his citation, before the quotes. It is very powerful. He says that if he were to love, it would be “separately.” How can one love “separately”? But how else can one love than “separately”? Each one the other, but each time each one for him or herself, each one in secret, each one secretly, in the throes of