White Ink

Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics

Helene Cixous, Susan Sellers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317492733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing.Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world. As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought.

Part I: Writing the enigma

1. The play of fiction

Interview with Christa Stevens. Translated by Suzanne Dow.

This interview might also be translated as “The fiction-writing game” or “The stakes of fiction”. It originally appeared as “Questions à Hélène Cixous” [Questions for Hélène Cixous], in (en)jeux de la communication romanesque, Suzan van Dijk & Christa Stevens (eds), 321–2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).

CS Hélène Cixous, you have often described your work as a journey or wandering [cheminement] — a journey that has taken you from “the unconscious stage” — that is, from personal and internal texts — to “the History stage”, or the major plays you wrote for the Théâtre du Soleil. These wanderings take you towards the Other, towards others, be they your historical contemporaries, or, in the exploration of the “I”, those others of the I itself. And within that journey lies another that tells the story of the quest of someone making her way in the dark, with her eyes closed, towards the light, in her joys, her suffering, her contradictions, her crimes too. You take great risks along the way, entering territory where you don’t know what you’ll find. And yet, how can one communicate what is, by definition, outside the field of vision, of naming, of representation? How can one convey this darkness, transmit the untransmissable, the as-yet unknown, or what is likely to go unseen?

CIXOUS A humble word like “wandering” really is the right way to put it, since humble is what is close to the earth — humus — and bespeaks the humility of writing. I think that anyone who’s writing in a particular direction, who experiences writing as a search, feels like they are on a journey. That word goes back to Rimbaud, to Kafka, to Heidegger’s Holzwege. It’s a drive, a propensity, towards making ground, but not only towards making ground. It’s a quest. The word “wandering” conveys the slowness, the step-by-step [pas à pas] element, which is really important. For me, it’s the only approach that allows one to move towards truth — not to reach it, because it’s a long way off, but to go towards it, where step-by-step is the only way to move forward. I’m playing here on all the senses of pas in French — namely, “step”, “footprint” and the idea of negation — without skipping any either, because inner, psychic or spiritual exploration can only be achieved with patience, or “pas-science” — or knowing how to set your own pace and knowing your limits, your resistances, when to retrace your steps. If you skip anything — be it a step or a barrier, you’re repressing. But that doesn’t mean you have to go at it at a sprint, or at a snail’s pace either: it is possible to go step-by-step, taking each hurdle as it comes, and quickly too. That’s exactly how writing makes its way: step-by-step, from hurdle to hurdle, and yet extremely fast. That’s its appeal. A sentence, its signifying potential, its signifying energy, can be such that you cover an incredible distance, just like Ariel in The Tempest; you close your eyes and you’re on the other side of the world, and yet every step of the way it was you who covered all that ground.

When diving into something like that, when going right down into the depths, plumbing the depths of the “I”, you’re choosing the mouth as the way into the “I”. That’s your entry point. There is another way, but it’s not via one’s own self, which in any case, deep down, will take you to that sea-bed of a common humanity. It’s other people. It’s them, they, (wo)men... It’s possible to begin a quest by entering humanity via other people — namely, the Other Self. But in the end I’d still be entering the same stage — the stage of the heart — with however many characters there are, and with their various roles, functions, destinies. That’s what allows you to make observations at various degrees of remove, with microscopes or telescopes. From there you can see something tiny or huge, but always human nature playing itself out.

As for the darkness, it’s not that I’ve got a theory of it. It’s just that experience has always shown me domains where there’s a shift [où je me déplace]. When I start writing, I’m feeling my way in the dark. It’s a kind of darkness that’s not altogether black — there are a few indicators, lights to guide me, black stars. But the darkness is the one in charge. It’s the darkness in which all human beings live. It’s there behind the door. As soon as you enter thought, there it is. As a general rule, we don’t live behind thought — by which I mean thought that has already been expressed. We don’t follow along behind discourse. We are always there in the strip-light or half-light of the already-expressed. But the dark part of ourselves — where psychoanalysis has built its kingdom — is there, all the time, behind our every action, every single day. I sometimes think back to chapters of my life that consisted of years at a stretch when I was myself a character in these kinds of plays, which I didn’t view as such at the time, which I couldn’t then see as part of the theatre of human life.

To cite a literary equivalent, it’s the material that Ibsen or Chekov draw on. What are Ibsen or Chekov doing? They enter a perfectly contemporary, middleclass home. Strindberg as well, but with him there’s something else too. You think you’re going into a house — the home of Mr or Mrs Gabler — and you find yourself in hell. What’s the difference between this hell and Dante’s? The difference is that it’s a hell veiled by social appearances, kinship structures, etc. The characters are ravaged, wracked, by demons. They’re torn apart, tortured, skinned alive, boiled alive, etc., and they can’t even say so. They are in the most horrendous pain but they’re not supposed to scream at the table. That’s precisely why I don’t like that kind of theatre because there’s to be no screaming, such that the whole thing cannot but end with a gunshot.

We are all walking on a volcanic earth. We all of us have a horde of demons hiding behind the bathroom door, in the corridor. Who are these demons? Ourselves. Our countless terrors that we can all foment. They are those absolutely ridiculous things that bind us all, the stuff of comedy. The things that trigger wars are totally absurd details, the stuff of village gossip and taxi-ride chit-chat. And yet they can be enough to kill you. These are the symptoms of the great primitive stage play that none of us got to see, because we were just babes in arms. It’s a great primitive massacre scene, the one the Greeks reconstructed in their mythology or cosmology: Cronus eats his own children, Jupiter kills his father, a bloodbath ensues, there’s incest, hatred, jealousy and so on. We’ve got our Judeo-Christian religion rather than this much clearer genealogy that showed us all our childhoods. And yet we’ve got these Greek genealogies in our cradles. In our cradles there’s Cronus, the Titans, or the drives (to put it in Freudian terms), revolts etc. We live alongside our loved ones, our closest friends, our parents, with our children born of the most hideous tragedies, which are tragic love stories. Where there’s love there’s hatred and fear. What makes all that so hellish is every human being’s terror of the fact that in her or his soul, in the soul of the other, are wild animals, knives, arrows, etc. It’s totally intolerable, something we can’t admit. Which is precisely what our religions, even if we are not religious ourselves, have absolutely forbidden, and which we cannot bring ourselves to deal with. We deal with all that with silence and by blocking it out.

But there’s also another kind of obscurity that’s there for a different reason. Obscure because too dazzling to behold. It’s the lover’s adoration, grand romantic passions. It’s dazzling because that’s where ecstasy and divination are to be found. When dazzled by love we see things: we traverse the body of the other, we see her or him almost entirely (“almost”, that is, because we don’t see everything), and certain things become utterly transparent. And when you’re in that place called love that amazing thing called making love becomes a possibility, and which is really the thing, the time, the moment when human beings are graced with godliness. In moments of grace, of ecstasy, in the dazzling light of seeing the time the place the body the flesh of the passing into the other, the moment of trans is so bright that we cross over onto the other side. As The Book of Revelations says, we see too much: we see a moment in a way that’s absolutely incendiary, just like the way we’d see God. But since God is a seer, we don’t see God; we pass over to the other side. And in that moment we’re in the darkness generated by the excess of light. And yet it’s there — at the two extremes, that is — in the darkest and most dazzling of darknesses — all the mysteries that drive us, that govern us, that carry us, that make up our lives and our destinies. So either you ignore all that, and you’re born like most people, you live until you die and that’s it. You consume and consume yourself and you are finite. Or else you have a genuine passion for creation, genesis, for what we are — creations — and you want to get close to the places from which all this stems and to draw pleasure from them, because these are absolutely inexhaustible, unfathomable treasure troves. But you can only do this under paradoxical conditions, because then you’re heading into territory that is by definition beyond us, eludes us. These are good paradoxes to experience, though. Does that mean that we are always falling short of something? Of course not — it’s just that there’s a gap between what we can perceive in moments of enlightenment, and what we are able to get down on paper. These moments of enlightenment by definition travel faster than we do. A flash of light moves faster than writing. Trying to keep up, not to be definitively held at one remove by the phenomenon of revelation is precisely the conflict that writing has to grapple with [le drame de l’écriture], and at the same time the challenge it has to take up. Because there are such things as revelations. Everyone has had that experience. There’s a dream, and almost every time the dream gets away from us. A dream is borne along by chariots harnessed to ten thousand horses, and in a flash it’s off on the other side of the horizon. But it is possible to capture a dream. It’s a technique. The revelations that come along like dreams in fact put us in the same situation as dreams. The dream must be captured, even though it’s got ten thousand horses to carry it away. It’s not impossible, but you do need a very swift and highly trained team of horses. Writing is also a matter of training: it’s not just a gift, but also a physical, linguistic practice. It’s a kind of sublime sport and one shouldn’t underestimate how much practice and training is involved in the labour of writing. Writing is something we’re given. But it can die if it isn’t constantly worked on, begun again, interrogated, nurtured.

CS Your oeuvre now comprises over forty works — you must publish at the rate of a book and a half per year. And you also work in numerous genres: novels, fiction, essays, theatre, interviews, film, translation. Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, in an introduction to your work, links the volume and richness of your writing to the conditions of its production: “for Hélène Cixous, writing emerges from the living, flows from living sources. It’s part of an economy of expenditure and gift: the writer does not hold back, be it from within herself or otherwise.”¹ Where does this fecundity come from?

CIXOUS Oddly enough, I notice that fecundity is often a cause for reproach. I’ve always found it extraordinary that fecundity or fertility is often something critics accuse certain people of. It’s a real paradox: on the one hand, women are urged to be fertile in reality within society — to have a lot of children, that is — so as to destroy them, to reduce them to baby-making machines; and on the other, they are despised for symbolic procreation of any kind. What to make of this antipathy towards productivity? Your average critic carries on almost as if the real success stories are the people who’ve only written three books. The less you write the better. This is rationalized by the equation of writing a lot with writing badly, as if when you wrote three books it took you twenty years to get each one out, whereas in actual fact: (1) people who write three books write at exactly the same pace as those who write thirty, except that they have a block between the three; and, (2) each book uses the same time as life as a whole.

Fecundity is the creative person’s natural state. The more pertinent question is that of what inhibits it. Why does one get periods of broken productivity? What causes these interruptions? Productivity, it has to be said, has no reason to be broken except through adverse, exterior circumstances. Why any given society’s fight against creative people? Because what’s at stake is castration. Sterility does everything in its power to block fertility’s natural flow. But there are also private accidents, internal dramas, personal tragedies. We could put this to all the writers of the twentieth century, and ask them what it was that made them able, or unable, to write when they had the desire to. The possibility of publication is a major factor. I realize that I’m quite sheltered when it comes to that, given that I have a generous publisher who publishes my work unconditionally. That means that I don’t have that suffocating influence on thought that says “what’s the point in writing when it won’t be published?” I’m privileged. My fictional texts are published regularly. And as for theatre, I’ve never written anything without there being a stage there asking me to write for it. It’s hard to write for your bottom drawer. But we shouldn’t think of writing as superhuman, though. Did anyone ever accuse Balzac of fecundity? It was fabulou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editor's note
• Preface: On being interviewed
• Part I: Writing the enigma
• Part II: Writing the feminine
• Part III: Writing and politics
• Part IV: Writing and theatre
• Part V: Writing roots
• Part VI: On painting, music and nature
• Part VII: Dialogues
• Envoi: But the Earth still turns, and not as badly as all that
• Bibliography of Hélène Cixous's works
• Index