Hélène Cixous, Rootprints

Memory and Life Writing

Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134731671
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Art
• Categoria: Popular Culture in Art

Helene Cixous is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary thinkers. Published here in English for the first time Helene Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable prespicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide.
Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography. Cixous's creative reflections on the past provide occasion for scintillating forays into the future.
The text includes:
* an extended interview between Cixous and Calle-Gruber, exploring Cixous's creative and intellectual processes
* a revealing collection of photographs taken from Cixous's family album, set against a poetic reflection by the author
* selections from Cixous's private notebooks
* a contribution by Jacques Derrida
* original 'thing-pieces' by Calle-Gruber.

WE ARE ALREADY IN
THE JAWS OF THE BOOK

INTER VIEWS

The windows in the text give
onto Hélène Cixous’s notebooks

one cannot talk about it without

attitudes, positions, dispositions

of the body-(and)-of-the-soul or even mechanisms

Mireille Calle-Gruber: One cannot talk about your work if, from the outset, one ignores the thirty or so books of fiction you have written. What is most true, for you, is poetic writing.

Hélène Cixous: What is most true is poetic. What is most true is naked life. I can only attain this mode of seeing with the aid of poetic writing. I apply myself to ‘seeing’ the world nude, that is, almost to e-nu-merating the world, with the naked, obstinate, defenceless eye of my nearsightedness. And while looking very very closely, I copy. The world written nude is poetic.

How can we see what we no longer see? We can devise ‘tricks’: my grandmother’s room which I looked at through the keyhole; because of the focalization, I had never seen a room that was so much a room. The city of Algiers which I looked at in the bus windows.¹ The person we love made to appear by an aura. Microscopes, telescopes, myopias, magnifying glasses. All this apparatus in us: attention. To think, I knit my brows, I close my eyes, and I look.

What happens: events interiors, snatchthem from the cradle, from the source.

I want to watch watching arrive. I want to watch arrivances. I want tofind the root of needing to eat. Andtaste it: work of sweat

sleep.

What is most true is poetic because it is not stopped-stoppable. All that is stopped, grasped, all that is subjugated, easily transmitted, easily picked up, all that comes under the word concept, which is to say all that is taken, caged, is less true. Has lost what is life itself, which is always in the process of seething, of emitting, of transmitting itself. Each object is in reality a small virtual volcano. There is a continuity in the living; whereas theory entails a discontinuity, a cut, which is altogether the opposite of life. I am not anathematizing all theory. It is indispensable, at times, to make progress, but alone it is false. I resign myself to it as to a dangerous aid. It is a prosthesis. All that advances is aerial, detached, uncatchable. So I am worried when I see certain tendencies in reading: they take the spare wheel for the bird.

M.C-G.: By ‘theory’ you are referring in particular here to a north-American situation of which echoes are returning presently to Europe, and which, under the name of ‘feminist theory’, has excluded your books of fiction, limiting itself to a few essays or articles: The Laugh of the Medusa’, ‘Sorties’, your participation in The Newly Born Woman. To carry out this amputation is unjust to your work which is plural; overflowing; which incessantly questions what it draws. The risk, with writing that is attentive to subtleties, is that laziness, deafness, or surprise should lead people to hear only one voice, to stop at a single aspect. That the reading should reduce and reify because this is easier.

One must wonder how this happens. What happens—or does not happen—when one does so little justice to a body of work. Admittedly, there is misunderstanding about the term ‘theory’: the writing you practise is more like a form of philosophical reflection that you lead through poetry. But the misunderstanding comes also from the fact that, in the very course of the work of fiction, you pursue an effort of lucidity: in the very place of writing’s blindness—of which you are conscious. A kind of work that involves turning back on the sentence, that recycles, that reflects and flexes the flux of writing. Certain people misunderstand; consider it to be a theoretical treatment whereas it is a poetic treatment: incessant fictional practice. It’s in the same linguistic dough, from the same pen, that poetry and philosophical reflexion weave a text. Which does not close itself in conceptualization, even locally. Hearing you speak of the concept which fixes, I thought of Derrida’s sentence on the cover of Circumfession: ‘As soon as it is poached by writing, the concept is done (for).’² It is clearly more than a simple pun. To the letter: at the speed of lightning, your text tries to say the ‘raw’, blood, tears, the body which is a ‘state of meat’. (I am thinking of the self-portrait as a flayed animal in FirstDays of the Year which refers to Rembrandt; and Déluge: ‘She remains alone with her terrible meat’ p. 93.)

H.C.: I planted those essays deliberately, at a very dated, entirely historical moment, to mark off a field; so that we would not lose sight of it entirely—to have done something deliberately: that already tells you what it is! ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and other texts of this type were a conscious, pedagogic, didactic effort on my part to class, to organize certain reflections, to emphasize a minimum of sense. Of common sense.

M.C-G.: You say ‘dated, historical moment’, that is to say, is it not, a political moment? The Newly Bom Woman is a precisely circumstantial text that served as argumentational evidence at a moment in the struggle.

H.C.: I was inspired to write those texts by the urgency of a moment in the general discourse concerning ‘sexual difference’. Which appeared to me to be confused and to be producing repression and loss of life and of sense. I would never have thought, when I began writing, that one day I would find myself making strategic and even military gestures: constructing a camp with lines of defence! It’s a gesture which is foreign to me. I did do it. Because of ideological aggressions, all marked by intolerance—that were not addressed to me personally—all of a sudden I saw myself having an obligation to become engaged to defend a certain number of positions. To do this, I left my own ground.

I do not regret it. To ‘defend’ is sometimes a necessity. But it is an ambiguous gesture: whoever defends him—or herself forbids [qui se défend défend], i.e. interdicts. And I do not like the regions where people lay down the law. In addition, this secondary gesture screens the principal act.

My vocation, I must say, is not political, even if I am quite conscious that all expression is always indirectly political. The ethical question of politics, or of responsibility has always haunted me, as I imagine it haunts all the fireflies irresistibly attracted by the flame of the art-candle. (You will recognize in the candle an image of Kafka.) I am at once always on the alert (this began when I was three years old, in the streets of Oran, I remember clearly), always tormented by the injustices, the violences, the real and symbolic murders—and at the same time very menaced, too menaced in truth by the excesses of reality. I have always known that I could not have been a doctor (the true doctor, the doctor of compassion) without succumbing, like my father, to human pain. That’s how it is. And in the same way, I could never have ventured onto the scene of political combat, which nonetheless is decisive for almost the totality of our destiny. This is why I felt a little bit ‘saved’—in any case relieved, and greatly spared—when I met Antoinette Fouque, it was already late, in 1975. I had created the Centre d’Études Féminines in 1974. And I had forced myself into those armed gestures in ’74–’75. Then I discover that there is an entirely exceptional woman, a genius of political thought, in action, whose vocation is to think through the fate of women today and for the future. A woman given over body and soul to the most demanding of causes. Since then I have always said to myself, each time I see the monstrous blades of socio-political reality rise like mountains before me (that is to say almost every day): thank goodness there is Antoinette. I know that she keeps watch, that she acts, that she represents a vast part of humankind also, which she protects. That presence has always appeased a part of my politicalcultural worries. You will tell me that I delegate. But one always delegates. The hardship is to be unable to do it. Others delegate to me the responsibility of keeping watch to ensure that a poetic imagination does not fall into dust.

* I am not page I

1) I am the black kid

2) I am

—States of shadow

3) I am mother Achilles, Achilles the sacred cow.

M.C-G.: I am always surprised that there is so little space, in the woman’s movement, for the right to literary creativity. I am surprised also that people generally name Cixous-lrigaray-Kristeva together, amalgamating works between which I see mostly differences. Particularly: literary difference. Irigaray and Kristeva are theoreticians, they do not produce writer’s works. However, it is the writer that I touch on in you. Where I touch down. One must recall that your field of action, indeed your combat, takes place in poetic writing, language, fiction.

H.C.: This happens because the texts of mine that are put into circulation are often texts that can easily be circulated and appropriated. They were made for this, by the way. The others are not read.

M.C-G.: Those other texts do not require the same threshold of readability. Nor the same kind of work.

H.C.: Exactly, but the situation then produces errors in evaluation: because to have an upright position, analogous to that of a theoretician, is not my intention.

M.C-G.: Are we in the process of saying that it is more difficult for a woman to be taken as a writer than as a theoretician?

H.C.: I must give several responses: it is easier for a woman to be accepted as a theoretician, that is to say, as less woman. And then, one cannot generalize your statement without caution because: as a woman, to be accepted as a writer…well…it depends a lot on the women…

M.C-G.:…it depends on the writer…

H.C.: Of course, it depends on what she offers to the reader. In any case it’s determined by the degree to which it can be appropriated. If you give a text that can be appropriated, you are acceptable. When the text runs far ahead of the reader and ahead of the author, or when the text simply runs, and requires the reader to run, and when the reader wishes to remain sitting, then the text is less well received.

M.C-G.: It does not all come from the fact of being a female or male writer, but from the way reading is most often considered in terms of appropriation.

H.C.: Unfortunately. While the reading that makes us happy is on the contrary reading that transports, with which we go off on a voyage, not knowing where. However, in my theoretical texts I use a ‘form’ of writing; but from time to time I resume. This is what happens in theoretical texts: there are moments when you sit down. And it is these moments, where you can sit down, where you can take, the moments of stopping, that make these texts more visible than others, those which dash off continually without stopping.

M.C-G.: Writing that refuses an assignable position is disturbing. Writing that chooses the interval space, the between, the in-between, the entredeux,³ and that works in the place of otherness. Of relationship—or of non-relationship. We are here at a crucial point: namely the staging of otherness and alteration that constitutes, for me, one of the essential aspects of your fictional universe. An entire process through which you tear up conventions of writing; you tear up conventional literary images, ways of seeing-and-saying. You tear your reader, who finds himself or herself torn between recieved ideas/feelings that are dismembered by each word.

I asked myself about what provoked my interest as a reader. When I met you in your texts, you had been making your way for a long time, and that road was full of books already, full of points of view, of encounters which, often, were not to be found in my bookcase. I came from elsewhere. Yet when I read your work, it was not a departure, a beginning, it was a bit as if you were giving me a known-unknown, continuous-discontinuous thread. There was a sort of familiarity. You gave me a means of recognition, perhaps. And I suppose that this is what makes it my affair too: that endlessly restaged otherness; the fact that I am incessantly thwarted (in my habits) by the other. What every reader tends to repress because it is more comfortable being in an illusion of sameness. Such that I (reader) find my bearings where I have no bearings; I find my bearings where I become lost. There is a sort of irremediable, never finished cutting into pieces of l-me. This is what holds me back at first; it is what I would say about your books: they reco...

Indice dei contenuti

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• WE ARE ALREADY IN THE JAWS OF THE BOOK INTER VIEWS
• APPENDICES
• PORTRAIT OF THE WRITING
• ALBUMS AND LEGENDS
• CHRONICLE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• AFTERMATHS