Derrida & Cixous - From the Word to Life. Dialogue.pdf - Cixous - wrednamarta

From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between

Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous*

[You have agreed to participate in an oral interview: Hélène Cixous has

written about the danger of the “spoken word” with regards to “think-

ing.” The voice also plays a role here: it has an important place in both

of your texts.]

Jacques Derrida: Those who do not read me reproach me at times for

playing writing against the voice, as if to reduce it to silence. In truth, I

proposed a reelaboration and a generalization of the concept of writing,

of text or of trace. Orality is also the inscription [ frayage ] of a trace. But

the serious treatment of these problems requires time, patience, retreat,

writing in the narrow sense. I have difficulty improvising about the

questions which count the most for me. Our three voices are setting out

on a formidable and singular exercise here: to give each other the floor

[ la parole ], to let each other speak in order to trace out an unpredictable

path. Our words should form more than one angle, they should

triangulate, play at interrupting each other even while they are articu-

lated together. Yes, for Hélène and for me, despite an abyssal difference,

writing models itself on voice. Interior or not, the voice always stages

itself, or is always staged. I write “out loud [ à voix haute ]” or “in a low

voice [ à voix basse ].” For my seminar as well as for texts which are not

meant to be pronounced. For more than forty years I have written what

I teach from the first word to the last; I try out in advance the rhythm

and the tonality of what, pretending to improvise, I will “vocalize” in the

lecture theater. I never write in silence, I listen to myself, or I listen to

the dictation of another voice, of more than one voice: staging,

therefore, dance, scenography of terms, of breath and of “changes in

tone.” The preparation of a seminar is like a path of freedom [ chemin de

la liberté ]: I can let myself speak, take all the time which is given to me in

writing. For publication, as it involves texts of very different genres, each

time the register of the voice changes.

Hélène Cixous: We both have several writing practices. One that uses

what is called the speaking voice [ la voix qu’on dit haute ], but which for

* Aliette Armel interview with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, “Du mot à la vie: un

dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous,” Magazine littéraire (2004): 22–29

New Literary History , 2005, 37: 1–13

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

me is meager and unequivocal, which is on the order of teaching;

another that silently gets deeper and deeper with the degrees of writing,

which seems to be without voice, whereas in a single voice it makes a

chorus of voices be heard. When you write your seminars you foresee

[ pré-voix ], your voice is a pre-voice, you write a text in order to respeak it.

This respeaking is a theatricalization of what is already a staging. You

double the theatrical stakes. You are the actor performing what you

write as an author. You double yourself—in all ways. I don’t write my

seminars. For days I travel through a region of multiple texts by

ramifications crossings grafts until I can think them through by heart.

Then I improvise for four or five hours with two pages of notes serving

as a seedbed. I have this need to let myself be haunted by voices coming

from my elsewheres that resonate through me. I want to have voices. As

a result I am at the mercy of their inspiration [ insufflement ]. They can fail

me. I master nothing, I submit to the oracles. This risk is the condition

of my creative energy and of my discoveries. It can happen that I run out

of breath [ souffle ], that something loses steam [ s’essouffle ]. I saw myself

clearly in your incredible text on Artaud, La parole soufflé , in this

bivalence of the soufflé : a word whispered/given by someone else, and a

word stolen, whisked away. 1 We both let the word take its flight: 2 this

release of the word like the release of a bird or a breath: let go

something that will have made a crossing. Choreographilosopher,

coryphaeus, choir, you make the text dance, waltz, turn, go out of

control, even rap [ déraper même rapper ] along with your supremely

precise and improvisational thought. A flight of texts. I have rather the

feeling of song, of music. Where does it come to me from? Beautiful

ancient voices lead me, those of my ancestors?

Jacques Derrida: The parole soufflée is also the dictation of more than one

voice (masculine and feminine). They weave together, intertwine,

replace each other. Always more than one voice that I let resonate with

differences in pitch, timbre, and tone: so many others, men or women,

who speak in me. Who speak (to) me. As if I ventured to take

responsibility for a sort of choir to which I should nonetheless render

justice. In countersigning, to confirm, going with or against the other,

that which comes to me from more than one other (masculine or

feminine). Other unconsciouses also intervene, or the silhouettes of

known or unknown addressees, for whom I speak and who let me speak

[ me donnent la parole ], who give me their word [ me donnent leur parole ].

First Encounter

[This dialogue between the two of you has lasted for forty years. Did

your first meeting at the brasserie Le Balzar, in 1963, leave traces,

sediments of voice?]

DIALOGUE BETWEEN DERRIDA AND CIXOUS

Jacques Derrida: It would be difficult for me to evoke here, in improvis-

ing, the concrete and living traces of my encounter with Hélène. There

was her first card after reading Force et signification , the first face-to-face at

the Balzar, yes. But I am not sure that the effect of these experiences

survives intact. I remember the first manuscript Hélène confided in me

( Le prénom de Dieu ). It arrived like a meteor in my garden. The cultural

or socioeditorial field, the “readership” of the time was not ready, it

seemed to me (was I mistaken?), to receive and to measure what was

beginning there. So I feared for her in the course of the reading, with

this double feeling: dazzlement and anxiety.

Hélène Cixous: Around the same scenes, my feelings were slightly

different. Everything was put in place for me when I nonsaw him the

first of the first times. What was inscribed in what came to be a sort of

legend for me—that is, something legible—is that I nonsaw him: I only

heard him. It was an extraordinary accident. I was eighteen years old. It

was at the Sorbonne, he was taking his agrégation , 3 I was way in the back

of the lecture theater, I “saw” only his back. I saw only his voice. He was

speaking of that which has eternally interested me: the question of

death. I was seized by nothing other than his absolutely other language,

so powerfully alive, thinking the question of death. It was for me the

opening of thought and literature. Years later I wrote him after having

read his first texts. Thereafter, each time it was the same: I nonsaw him.

It was a sort of prophetic phantasm where he was the prophet. I wrote

this in Quelle heure est-il? : 4 I saw not his person but his being walking on

the crest of a mountain. At our first encounter, at the Balzar, we spoke

for a long time and about Joyce. We progressed step by step around a

limit-work, we were at the limit, each coming from our own edge trying

to think “the thing.” My way of nonseeing was visionary: one nonsees

what one has to see otherwise. In describing in Spectres of Marx the visor

effect, he makes his own self-portrait. He has a helmet [ heaume ] (what

word of words: home homme heaume, om), a natural visor, he looks

without being seen. Unheimlich . The being, this man, stays back and

looks at you. All you have is the letter. From the beginning, what I have

seen is his language, in which I knew my thought could wander. I have

never stopped reading him meticulously and each time it is as if I was

seeing what he thinks. The person that he is, which has an appearance

and is part of my life, is the incarnation of his thought in his language,

“Derridian.” He is the speech of this language. This Derridianized

French language, he ransoms it, unmakes it, scours it, plays out its

idiomatic potential, awakens the words buried under forgetfulness. He

resuscitates it. When I heard him I found the liberty I needed: of course

this liberty existed in Rimbaud, but with Jacques Derrida poetry began

to gallop philosophy.

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Jacques Derrida: From a certain point of view, that of writing itself , if I

may put it that way, Hélène reads me in an incomparable manner. She

immediately finds the best access, the most secret, to the forge and to

the form, to the meaning and unconscious body of what I write. My

gratitude for this is boundless.

Writers, Jews, from Algeria

[In Monolingualism of the Other , Jacques Derrida explains that this language

that unites you was forged in shared origins. You are both “Writers, Jews,

from Algeria.”]

Jacques Derrida: In the beginning (it was however just after the

“Algerian War”), our shared origins were not very present in our

exchanges. Later, in an increasingly acute manner, we became aware of

this. I began to write on “my” Algeria, on my childhood, Judaism, etc.,

with The Postcard, Monolingualism of the Other, Circumfession , etc. Beyond

all that we share in this sense, it is only too obvious that we write texts as

dissimilar as could be. Our altercations with the French language are

also different. We don’t have the same training. Although my taste for

literature came first, I am a “philosopher.” I began by trying to have my

philosophical work be legitimized by the academic institution. Before

taking a certain number of liberties with writing, it was necessary that I

first be accorded a certain amount of credit. Before this, I betrayed the

norms only in a prudent, cunning, and quasi-clandestine manner.

Though this didn’t escape everyone. My strange and stormy passion for

the French language freed itself bit by bit. I remain obstinately monolin-

gual, without any natural access to another language. I read German, I

can teach in English, but my attachment to French is absolute. Inflex-

ible. Whereas through her origins, which are not only Sephardic but

also, by her mother, Ashkenazi, Hélène has a native relationship to

German. And reads many other languages.

Hélène Cixous: When we met, we were each in our own way busy trying

to approach the shimmering heart of the French language, to speak to

it intimately [ à la tutoyer ]. For me, also coming from my other languages.

We are each foreign otherwise. And this foreignness also presided over

our first encounter: he perceived me as foreign, even to his world, for

this part of me which he calls Ashkenazi and which for me is German.

What brings together our dissimilarities is a thematized experience of

the inside of the outside. My imagination was marked by the first

DIALOGUE BETWEEN DERRIDA AND CIXOUS

experience of my childhood, the event he would say. I was two-and-a-half

years old and suddenly my father was a lieutenant-doctor, in 1939: I had

the right to enter this place of admission and exclusion that in Oran was

called the Cercle Militaire. I enter into this garden: and I was not inside.

I had the Experience: one can be inside without being inside, there is an

inside in the inside, an outside in the inside and this goes on infinitely.

In this place which had appeared to me like paradise, hell gaped: I was

not able to enter into that into which I had been admitted; I was

excluded because of my Jewish origins. And everything is inextricable . I

did not understand it until the other children spit the message of

rejection on me. I have never stopped living the exclusion, without it

bothering me or becoming a home. The passage between the inside and

the outside is found in everything I write, as in all of Jacques Derrida’s

thought. I did not know that he had in the beginning been concerned

with legitimizing his presence in philosophy. The secret alien that he is

inscribed something else in his texts. In any case, I had the impression of

slipping into The Origin of Geometry, The Voice and the Phenomenon through

secret cracks, through literature, benefiting from explosions that were

illuminations and destinies for me. One of these books was placed under

the epigraph of Edgar Allen Poe. In the other, Jacques Derrida slipped

Joyce into the middle of Husserl. Through literature he gave me access

to philosophy, showing me its arrow slits and draw-bridges; I slipped

through underground passages. The question of the presence of the

present, of the present of presence, of survival, was already at work. And

even of the henceforth . We had experienced expulsion by Vichy. I was

three years old when I watched my father unscrew his doctor’s sign-

board. We share what I have called nosblessures , “ournoblewounds”:

wounds [ blessures ], but ours [ nos ] and they become our title to nobility

[ noblesse ]. We have been able to understand each other to the tenth of a

word, because the work of stigmatization, of the scar, was originarily

inscribed in the life-book of both of us.

[When Hélène Cixous writes, in Rootprints , “We are from the same garden,”

are you alluding to the garden of the Cercle militaire?]

Jacques Derrida: “We are from the same garden” could open onto all

the world’s gardens. But the literal reference is first the Jardin d’Essai, a

botanical park, in Algiers, with tropical trees, next to a soccer stadium

where I often played. This Garden still exists. We have never been there

together, but it represents a sort of paradise lost. In H.C. for life , the word

essai (trial, attempt, essay) overwrites itself, imposing its letters and its

syntax at a crossroads of sentences and “logics.”

Derrida & Cixous - From the Word to Life. Dialogue.pdf

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