Download DERRIDA/CIXOUS, CIXOUS/DERRIDA Prof. Claire Colebrook

:SEDUCTION, GENDER AND GENRE: DERRIDA/CIXOUS, CIXOUS/DERRIDA
Prof. Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh
Paper presented at the symposium: “Engaging with the Humanities”
Utrecht University, March 27-28, 2008.
Philosophy’s relation to friends and friendship is central both to Deleuze and
Guattari’s What is Philosophy? and Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, both of
which in turn are indebted to a history of meditation on the relation between thought
and fraternity that runs from Aristotle to Blanchot. Both Deleuze and Derrida take up
this tradition by suggesting that friendship is, at least potentially, distinct from a
relation of recognition. For Derrida it is the cry of Aristotle, ‘Oh my friends there are
no friends,’ and the command from William Blake, ‘Do be my enemy for friendship’s
sake,’ that suggest that friendship is tied to an allergic resistance to coupling and
recognition. It was also William Blake who, referring to his patron William Halley,
declared that ‘Opposition is True Friendship.’ It is perhaps not surprising that
Derrida, who confessed to being ‘at war with himself,’ and who created the concept of
auto-immunity aligns himself with this tradition that distinguishes between the
exchangeable and quantifiable friend of the polity (where one is a self only by
subjecting oneself to common measure), and a hyperbolic friendship.
That latter mode of relation is tied to an irreducible non-relation, and a whole
structure of contradiction and paradox. A friend is only a friend if he is one with
whom one can be hostile. Indeed, if you are to be my friend, if you are to regard me
as a worthy other, then I need to be more than a helpful, recognised and fellow
human; there must be that in me which resists appropriation. Thus Derrida’s cited
phrases (‘Do be my enemy for friendship’s sake’ and ‘Oh my friends there is no
friend) bring into play a certain temporality of war: either we engage in hostility now,
because in general we recognise a terrain of conflict that is ultimately human and
oriented to a more universal peace; or, we establish détente now because we know
that were there not to be some social or political bond we would fall into the war of all
against all. What this suggests is that within the very opening of fraternity, of the
brothers who must call to each other in the absence of any secure bond, and within the
very notion of philosophy as politics or the creation of discursive relations, there is
also a certain violence or suicide upon the very medium through which such pure
relationality is inaugurated. Such a notion is perhaps made more explicit in Deleuze
for whom thinking only occurs through violence, tearing itself away from the
common sense and recognition that would assume both a shared style of thought
among men, and a shared terrain across which disputation would occur. Not
surprisingly, then, Deleuze and Guattari will place the ‘war machine’ as the
penultimate point of political theory: neither the stable and coded order of political
relations, nor the absolute chaos of complete deterritorialisation, the war machine
refers to the production of potential relations. These may be stabilised into social
coded bonds, but the potentiality of war – of shifting from relations of mutual
recognition to an openness where terms are not yet established in common measure –
is always possible. Philosophy bears an essential relation to war: avoiding complete
chaos there must be some degree of consistency, but if thinking is to take place, then
one cannot have determined the nature of the terms of terrain in advance.
Perhaps, paradoxically, this is why philosophy is non-recognition (which is not the
misrecognition of regarding others as just like me, but of allowing a radical
dissymmetry of relation); and it is also perhaps why philosophy must begin with
‘becoming-woman.’ If man is that being of common sense, recognition, good-will
and the striving for legitimation of opinion and communication, then it is not one
more ‘man’ who will introduce disequilibrium and thinking, but another relation
entirely: the woman, who does not exist, or who is ‘becoming-woman.’
The friend, then, cannot be woman: it is through woman (both her contestation and
refusal) that one might find a friend. Consider, here, an imperative from Lacan:
imagine there is no woman. To say that ‘woman does not exist,’ or that one can
‘imagine there is no woman’ is to yearn for a moment when we are liberated from a
society of brothers who exchange women in common, so that we might become the
type of friendship imagined by Derrida: a friendship without mediating relation. If
men do not exist as common mutually recognising beings, all of whom have
sacrificed a primary relation to an original and pre-social femininity, it is only to the
extent to which they have renounced the myth of woman. Both Deleuze and Derrida
would, presumably, have surpassed that Lacanian challenge. Deleuze and Guattari’s
‘just say no to Oedipus’ will take them to the war machine. Anti-Oedipus operates as
a rejection of that putative yearning for the dark maternal night of the
undifferentiated, a rejection of the prohibited, primal maternal One. Derrida’s placing
of the oedipal relation into a ‘scene of writing’ is also a critique of the Freudian
distance and difference that would constitute Lacan as the purveyor of truth: for the
oedipal scene must not be privileged. The male-male combat waged over the body of
woman must not be accepted as the schema through which all other relations are
mediated. The friend, for Derrida, will therefore be placed in a problematic relation
to polity and oikos, situated – somehow – beyond the bio-familial network of
brothers.
In what follows I want to take this abstract and philosophical problem – of the man
who seeks a friend who is not already bonded in a system of exchange (of women) –
and look at an actual philosophical friendship, if that is what we might call it, between
Derrida and Cixous. Throughout, I suggest that we bear in mind both what Derrida
says – that the friend is no friend, and that a body is itself only through attacking itself
– and what Derrida does. For it is through processes of reading, mourning, saluting,
deferring, praising and praying, even kissing, that something like a Derridean society
of friends exists today. One of those friends is, perhaps, Helene Cixous. Her relation
as a friend, I would suggest, is necessarily paradoxical and impossible. If Cixous is
not to be defined as one who has released herself from the exchange in women then
she must somehow create a new gendered relation that is neither that of male-male
rivalry, nor that of the object over which men wage war. How, we might ask, is she
addressed, and how does she create a form of address from herself?
Derrida, the film of 2002, captures a self-reflexive moment where the philosopher
talks about the lives of philosophers. Referring to Heidegger, Derrida quotes the
German philosopher’s remark that all we can say about Aristotle is that he lived,
wrote philosophy and died. This approach to a philosopher’s life, when we are doing
philosophy, is in accord with the body of Derrida’s own work. Derrida will attend to
seemingly irrelevant textual details, such as metaphor, example, excuse, misquotation
or sounds, but he makes little mention of biography. The philosopher’s living thought
– say Husserl’s beginning as a philosopher of mathematics who commenced his
career explaining the possibility of numbers psychologically, but then had to confront
the problem of truth and validity beyond any worldly psyche –is relevant
philosophically only in terms of the relations its establishes among ideas. On the one
hand every theory must have had a point of worldly, historical emergence; on the
other hand, the truth that emerges cannot be reduced to, or explained by, living
history. Derrida is therefore the philosopher of a certain mal d’archive whereby the
lived, in order to be lived, must already submit itself to a systematicity or writing that
can always disturb the very sense it enables. Even so, and despite its textual emphasis
on the archival logic of theory – that a claim to truth takes place in a body of signs
that it at once displaces but also fails to master – Derrida’s work is also playfully
involved with fringes, margins, accidents, frames and traces that are not the work’s
own. This is because as philosophy, as a claim to thinking or truth in general, the text
at once separates itself from the worldly facts of this or that empirical event, at the
same time as this distancing requires philosophy to be other than merely factual. (
Thus Derrida will from the very beginning say that philosophy must have a
conception of truth beyond mere facts, and yet come to terms with the truth that there
is factuality. In a quite different manner Deleuze spoke of the splitting of events: one
side turned towards the world of bodies with a chonological date, another constituting
an ‘incorporeal transformation’ that would alter time as such. Let us suppose that the
Derrida/Cixous friendship is an event. It can have a worldly existence and be dated –
perhaps some time on or about 1976 with the invasion of the English speaking world
of ‘theory’ with certain French texts. But it might also transform just how we think
about the relation between time, bodies and ideas: what if the body of work that we
have come to know as ‘theory’ has been structured by a certain relation of sex,
seduction and the lure of authorial names? I want to suggest that this is so. To ‘do’
theory required a certain intellectual geography, a reading of French philosophers
within literature departments (enabling a non-philosophical relation to concepts, for
terms could now be torn from their origin as pure potentials for thinking, and become
‘mentioned’ in any number of infidel ways); but it also required a certain society of
friends, translators and disseminators who would (perhaps) be at war with their
departmental home, often acting as infiltrators corrupting the seeming purity of
literary criticism. Something occurred which was a mode of thinking that was neither
philosophy nor literature. If we define philosophy as a claim to pure truth or
conceptual intensity liberated from the extended world of material texts, contexts,
historicity and style, then theory marked a direct challenge to that supposed or ideal
striving for truth. If literature is defined as the capacity to ‘say anything’ insofar as it
presents language as framed, quoted, placed within a work and liberated from claims
to truth, then theory also challenged that borderline, insisting that one could read
Proust for a concept of time, or find in Joyce a use of language that would allow us to
re-structure the very nature of thinking and subjectivity.
Not only did this transformation have a direct effect on bodies, for it became no
longer possible to talk about women, femininity, sex or sexuality in a literal and
referential manner, one might also say that new sexual relations were possible, and
that there was something seductive about theory. Derrida himself suggested this in a
number of texts, perhaps most clearly in his essay on Lacan where proper
deconstructive reading would require a certain infidelity and fidelity. One must not
see the text as nothing more than a mirror in which one would find the truth one seeks
to establish; at the same time one must be equally wary of missing the scene of
writing that detaches a work as intentional from the supposed purity and singularity
of the author. Sexual metaphors abounded in this new mode of theoretical reading, a
reading that would attend at one and the same time to the capacity for a text to
preclude the reader from an attainment of mastery, but that would – by that very fact –
amount to a jouissance that would overcome subject/object distinctions. But perhaps
more was at stake than sexual metaphorics, for the institutional factors of theory, if
not philosophy, have always required fidelities, allegiances, seductions, betrayals,
conversions and couplings. These can occur quite clearly, where translators and
disseminators are at once servants and passive recipients of the voice of the master,
who may one day break away and either find another body of work, and perhaps less
explicitly where one moves on from one authority to another – I used to do Derrida
and now I do Deleuze – leaving behind, perhaps, a spurned master thinker who is then
forced to re-define the terrain, placing himself in a position of greater force. An
example of this would be Alain Badiou’s relation to Deleuze, whom Badiou presents
as the only (but not true) alternative to his own position of mathematics as ontology
and who also, in the second volume of Being and Event, creates a contemporary
geography of the faithful, a list of names of those in accord with the voice of
philosopher of our time. There have, of course, always been philosophical
allegiances; one could be Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, a pragmatist or a
phenomenologist, and could do so while discarding some of the key assumptions or
styles of one’s philosophical father. But the allegiances of theory are different and
have to do with the different, and differently sexualised, personae at play in this new
mode of thinking. These allegiances, as I have suggested, are sexual and involve
seduction. A philosopher, perhaps today more than ever, requires translators and
commentators; beyond that we might note a new mode of sexual friendship. There
are, on the one hand, a society of translators, exegetes and those who are close to the
master in varying relations of degree: from translators who manage to scale the
heights to become quoted friends to – in the case of Derrida – genuine friends who
become combatants (such as Nancy). On the other hand, and alongside this scale of
that ranges from the friend who is caught up in an economy of exchange to the friend
who can become a philosophical rival, there is a new mode of woman. If Sartre had
his Beauvoir, who may have done original work but accepted the manifest role of
dutiful daughter, such a coupling is not possible today. Cixous offers an image of the
newly born woman: one who can neither be placed by the master as a dutiful follower
(for this would place the master back into a philosophy of simple authority without
awareness of the logics of seduction), nor one who can be set into place.
Derrida – the theoretical event of Derrida that structured a style and potential of
thinking – opened up a new mode of coupling. On the one hand there is the
philosophical friend, who in true fidelity is a combatant or rival. In reading through
both his contemporaries (such as Foucault) or his fathers (Husserl, Heidegger,
Bataille) Derrida shows the greatest respect through deconstruction. Here, the very
aim of the other’s text is taken up and applauded: Foucault’s attempt to free reason
from its totalisation of the other, Husserl’s striving for a pure truth beyond
historicism, Heidegger’s commitment to overcome a metaphysics that would begin
with a subject of truth, and Bataille’s distance from Hegelian appropriation. In all
cases it is Derrida’s stunning fidelity and effacement before the Ur-text that
demonstrates a certain un-doing. If it is the case, as Foucault would have it, that
reason’s attempt to know madness must always place madness as an object to be
mastered, does not Foucault’s own project of historicising such rational objectives
itself have to take on the very totalising gesture it would delimit? Derrida has two (at
least) modes of reading, and I would suggest that these are highly gendered. First,
there is the truly philosophical rival whose text offers itself as a hyperbolic challenge,
pushing the limits of deconstruction and philosophy to varying degrees: from the
playfully framed and delimited Searle of Limited Inc to the more seriously considered
but ultimately surpassed Nancy of On Touching. The latter volume hails its rival with
all the respect and love of one who might threaten the primacy of deconstruction’s
very project, with Nancy having the audacity and spirit to go into questions of touch
and sensation that Derrida would have always been ‘too cautious’ to approach.
Second, there is the relation, or non-relation, of love and enigma, usually directed to a
non-philosophical other – a literary (Mallarmé, Joyce), architectural (Tschumi),
photographic (Plissart) or dramatic (Artaud) other who halts the deconstructive war.
Cixous’s texts are addressed by Derrida in this second mode: not as a rival to be
placed in a terrain of metaphysics whose outside can neither be grasped nor avoided,
but as one for whom a different mode of question or problem – indeed the failure of
the question – is enacted. Thus we might distinguish the mode of deconstruction in
relation to the friend, where the other text also working at the limits of metaphysics is
shown to fall into a logos of presence, from the deconstructive relation of seduction
and love. In that latter mode the text is unreadable, offering itself as what the
philosopher could not say, could not begin to say. As style or ‘syntax of itself’ it does
not require the undoing of deconstruction; nor does it solicit deconstruction’s
demonstration of its undecidability. It exists and insists as that which puts philosophy
in its place. Sometimes writers operate in both camps. In his early works Derrida
suggests that Joyce’s attempt to arrive at a pure ‘equivocity’ – a language that would
be the very antithesis of Husserl’s striving for pure formal translatability – is
ultimately a grounding gesture that encompasses all the voices of the world. Much
later, Joyce will become an enigmatic textual object, no longer a rival so much as the
name of a text that dazzles and stuns and silences philosophy’s will to mastery. The
same shift applies to Artaud, whom the early Derrida will delimit as having produced
one more desire for a ‘beyond’ of sense and representation, but who will later be
hailed as a provocateur, a voice whose tracings cannot be rendered as either subject of
a thesis of object of a deconstruction. Perhaps this shift has to do with the event of
theory, with deconstruction shifting its emphases away from philosophical critique to
those strange performative borders that would allow ‘Derrida’ to operate if not in
philosophy departments at least in art, literary, cultural and visual theory. And
perhaps this is why, also, something like the event of Cixous is possible, if not
necessary.
From an early philosophically oriented attention to conditions, limits, the sayable and
the logic of metaphysics, Derrida ‘progresses’ to a series of couplings that will take
the philosopher outside the academy to more loving relations with those – writers,
artists – who will not place the philosopher within a phenomenological tradition but
will allow him to create himself as a proper name. For Cixous, ‘with Jacques Derrida
poetry began to gallop philosophy’, and for Derrida in response: ‘Hélene reads me in
an incomparable manner’ (3-4). Deconstruction had two modes. To the friend it was
a combat waged over the (now absent) ground of presence; it was a transformed
oedipal war. Given that there is no being in general, no presence before or beyond the
struggle of discourse, then philosophers encounter themselves in relations of mutual
and combative mourning, and Derrida would always find his rival to have still been
too in love, too seduced by the myth of some metaphysical beyond. To the lover, by
contrast, deconstruction emasculated itself, presented philosophy as a binding or
taming that could only look longingly, silently and seductively at a text– because it
made no claim to mastery – that deconstruction could never master. This seeming
effacement of itself perhaps gave deconstruction a much higher virility, for unlike a
history of philosophy that had placed woman and literature within its borders as an
example, Derrida could regard himself, and archive himself, as the one newly born
man, cognisant of philosophy’s own limits, coupled to others who would be
powerfully beyond philosophy in a silence capable of ‘saying anything,’ and allowing
deconstruction to say nothing.
Both Derrida and Deleuze considered the friend to be both factually and
philosophically crucial to the possibility of thinking. Factically, Derrida will argue
that those very texts that open the question of the polity – what it is to live justly – are
also partially closed, traced or haunted by a determined figure of the friend. Justice
and politics takes place among friends, or those who can be recognised, welcomed
and communicated with in a manner that allows one’s own being to flourish.
Hospitality is thus defined through a logic of auto-immunity: a welcome or inclusion
of what is other than the self also strengthens, realises and maximises the self’s own
power. But this factical condition and opening also allows us to think the friend
hyperbolically. Beyond any society of brothers in actuality, beyond democracy as a
concrete institution which has always bonded a fraternity of those who have already
recognised one another as like-minded, we might extend justice, democracy or
friendship to its highest possibility. Such ‘undeconstructibles’ as justice are effected
because there is only this actual society of friends because a movement of justice –
opening, welcoming, risking – creates a band or relation, a band always potentially
extendable beyond any normative instance. In Deleuze, too, the friend is at once
factical – there needs to be the right assemblage of bodies in proximity, with
productive conditions enabling time and debate in order for philosophical problems to
emerge – at the same time as the friend is a figure within philosophy. The friend is a
conceptual persona, a way in which the construction of a plane of concepts is created.
Explicitly, in the Platonic dialogues, the philosopher discusses what justice or love
might be with a series of friends. But the presence can be more implicit. Descartes
speaks to an idiot, a person who does not yet know anything. So what can we say
about this idiot? He thinks and therefore he is. Such personae and modes of
friendship are configured in philosophy’s own history. Friends include the fiancée,
the woman whose good will to truth allows questions and explanations, or (if we take
Sartre in relation to Beauvoir) the woman as lover who allows the philosopher to be
anti-bourgeois. The woman in Sartre is not a corporeal chattel but an opportunity of
engagement, a way for the philosopher to negate a history of bad faith where others
are not treated as beings-for-themselves.
Taking up this factical-philosophical couple, how do we account for the personae of
seducer and seduced? As I have already suggested, empirically we now see the life of
the philosopher as requiring seduction. One becomes a philosopher through practices
of translation, exegesis, conferences – the new symposia – public appearances and
modes of institutional ordering. Seduction also works today within philosophy, not
just factically but diagrammatically. Philosophy takes on the relation of love-letter,
which is at once seduced-disabled in its submission to a beloved, while being
seductive for those of us who witness and read. A text may become a lure in its very
self-emasculation. To take an example: how might one be – as Cixous was – read by
Derrida? Not read as a rival or combatant who must be put in his place – as Foucault
was returned to reason, as Nancy was returned to phenomenology, or as Levinas was
returned to metaphysics – but as one who disabled deconstruction, whom we witness
(seductively) as the one with whom Derrida would not war? Are we to be seduced by
this scene of seduction? Are we witnessing a primal scene, where we as readers are
presented with a coupling that can only place us, as children, somehow neither as
proper male rivals/combatants, nor as others to whom Derrida might also address a
textual kiss? The scene between Derrida and Cixous is at once factical with its
institutional ramifications of mutual consecration (that continue today with Cixous as
the less than dutiful daughter), but also philosophical in its framing, performance and
realisation of seduction in the mode of philosophy itself. By the time Derrida actually
writes with Cixous, actually relates as seducer and seduced, the philosophy itself
already plays out a scene of seduction between the friend and seductress. That is to
say, in addition to the texts that actually couple Derrida with Cixous, a scene of
seduction has already taken place. A relation of combative fraternity is made possible
between deconstruction and those texts at the borders of metaphysics, while a relation
whereby deconstruction allows itself to be seduced by certain literary others leads the
way for a certain approach to the woman who will never suffer the war of philosophy.
In a joint interview published in 2005 ‘we’ readers witness a scene of positioning and
seduction where Cixous and Derrida each define themselves and the other through a
relation of philosophy to literature. Derrida begins the interview, suggesting that
despite an ‘abyssal difference,’ both he and Cixous are writers, and although Derrida
had to begin his career philosophically, it is actually as writer of multiple voices, ‘so
many others, men or women’ who speak ‘in me.’ For Derrida it is by means of this
career movement, beginning in philosophy as exegete, becoming-writer through the
reception of voices, arriving at what Cixous refers to as ‘Choreographilosopher’ that
he also becomes a purely fictional ‘I.’ Any philosophical persona that we might want
to use to ground Derrida’s text would be a fiction after the fact: ‘The “I” has a fictive
status there, of course, but which is different from that which it had in my first texts
where I said “I” or “we” in the abstract fashion of the philosopher or classical
theoretician’ (2005, 7). In this interview Derrida thus creates a relation between
himself and Cixous that is also a relation between philosophy and literature, a sexual
relation and a relation between the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ of the text. He may
have had to undergo an apprenticeship in the single abstract voice of philosophy but,
through becoming a writer, through receiving voices and making the text dance – and
we need to bear in mind that in dance the work of art and artist coincide – Derrida is
no longer an object of exegesis, or a voice within the philosophical terrain. The
others whom he addresses, for Cixous and for the Derrida coupled with Cixous, are no
longer combatants but voices received and multiplied. There is, in this relation, a
becoming-woman of the philosopher; he is now nothing other than a plane of
reception, multiplying and repeating, and it is this coming into literature that Derrida
also sees as directly political. Only if voices can be liberated from a constative
ground, only if they can be freed from a delimited and attributable position, does one
arrive at a radical hospitality that will receive the voice of the other before and beyond
an already determined polis:
I am the inheritor, the depository of a very grave secret to which I do not
myself have access. … This theme has also interested me from a political
point of view. When a State does not respect the right to the secret, it becomes
threatening: police violence, inquisition, totalitarianism. I take the right to the
secret to be an ethical and political right. Now, literature opens this privileged
place where one can say everything and avow everything without the secret
having been betrayed: due to the fictional status of the literary work, even if I
reveal to you the truth of my secret, I can always claim, by right, without
being refuted, that ‘it is not I who speaks in my name.’ This poses again the
question of the ‘proper name.’ Who speaks? Literature has this political right
to say everything. … This right – to say everything without avowing anything
– weaves a link between literature and democracy (12).
Only with the text as enigma, as secret, as literary object that cannot be assimilated or
read, do we arrive at a genuine political openness: ‘When something is foreseen, on
the horizon, it is already over. Therefore it does not happen. This is also a political
reflection: only what the available schemas fail to foresee happens’ (10). It would
follow, then, that the deconstruction that would find the other text’s silent and
unwavering commitment to an inescapable metaphysics – the ‘philosophical’ Derrida
at war with Foucault, Bataille, Levinas, Searle or Nancy – must arrive at the literary
Derrida (through Cixous) who can be fully open and receptive. Does this not, yet
once more, place woman as muse who will lead the philosopher away from the
grubby wars of relation to a dance, in which there is no longer a disjunction between
the I who performs and the performance itself?
Derrida and Cixous both claim that his career is one of self-loss, where he is capable
of transcending the rigid positions and combats of philosophy to become nothing
more than voice and text, to the point where any “I” is fictive. Through literature,
through woman, the philosopher overcomes his isolated and embattled self to become
text. The opposite movement occurs with Cixous in relation to Derrida. If it is
Cixous’s hailing of Derrida as a ‘prophet’ or ‘Choreographilosopher, coryphaeus,
choir,’ it is Derrida’s address to Cixous as ultimately familial, as always expressing a
certain myth, that allows him to posit all that she says as ultimately autobiographical.
One direction of movement in this scene is that of the male philosopher becoming
literary, but in such a way that the point of arrival is a proper politics of not knowing
or determining an other. Derrida, through, Cixous is not only a critical relational
voice that would solicit a text to disclose its impossible point of undecidability; he
becomes a radically other voice who exceeds all relation. But when Derrida addresses
Cixous, we see one more act of re-territorialisation, where the woman philosopher is
really the medium through which both their lives are expressed. Coupled to Derrida
who is nothing more than a fictive “I” and who will allow all other voices to flow
through him, Cixous is presented as both one who enables Derrida to liberate himself
from a band of brothers (a philosophy that must be overcome by a more open
literature) and as one who returns herself, in her own writings, to the family. Derrida
addresses Cixous (after she has claimed that even though she recognised herself in
Derrida’s essay on Artaud, her books comes from elsewhere): ‘But ever since your
first books, the so-called “autobiographical” vein irrigates an underground stratum
that is absolute, even if it gives birth to an immense familial mythology: the dead
father is always there, the “true” father! And the brother. Later there is the mother’
(8).
I want to make three points in conclusion about gender, genre and
literary/philosophical personae. First, each author in this loving interview seems to
accuse the other (however seductively) of autobiography, suggesting in reply that
writing is great only when it frees itself from actual persona to become voice as such.
HC: ‘The book comes to me …’; JD: ‘But … the autobiographical vein irrigates [a]
stratum that is absolute.’ HC: ‘I don’t deny that the family is there, but my family is
not all me. … As for you, your philosophical problematics are sorts of self-portraits.
… All your books constitute an autobiography ….’ JD: ‘I would hope so, but if it
were true, it will have been so above all after the fact.’ Second, something happens to
the very possibility of philosophy and its others. Cixous, as others have noted,1
praises herself for being a bricoleur – a montage of voices, none of which is
privileged – and Derrida in response claims that he too is a recipient of multiple
voices. Elsewhere, in the early ‘philosophical’ work, Derrida is rigorously critical of
such a possibility. Levi-Strauss’s dream of not totalising the voices of myth, of
merely presenting the structures of various cultures without decision or position, is
both a metaphysical and an impossible gesture: there is a violent but necessary
relation one must bear, insofar as one speaks, to the other voices that one would
(ideally, naively, nostalgically) long to present as a pure multiplicity. Faced with a
philosopher who would be other than metaphysical, Derrida notices an essential
violence, appropriation and inhospitality. In his essays on Artaud, Bataille,
Heidegger, Foucault, Husserl, Nancy or Levinas, Derrida is insistent that one cannot
simply step outside metaphysics; there is no such dance. Coupled with Cixous, that
stricture is no longer in play. Philosophy, through Cixous, surpasses itself and poetry
begins ‘to gallop philosophy.’ Finally, we can say something about seduction as a
philosophical event. Deconstruction has always been about philosophical seduction,
about the lure both of believing oneself to have broken free, finally, of metaphysical
decisions, of violence, of reason, appropriation and war, and of regarding a text as a
secure ground for truth, presence and revelation. A being is possible only through
auto-immunity, a certain anticipated attack on itself that would allow a distinction
between self and other; at the same time, that very being that is constituted in relation
to otherness would strive to free itself of the risk and contingency that constitutes its
own ipseity. As Irigaray noted, following Lacan, one is given to oneself only in
relation to an other who is seductively enigmatic – an other figured as an
inappropriable and unreadable woman who allows the reading, relating subject to give
himself relations. One can either, as Irigaray sought to do, imagine a sexual relation
in which the other were not a vehicle of enigma, not a screen in which one might
theorise unreadability in general. For Irigaray such a relation would be genuinely
sexual in that one would not be seduced by a figure of the other in general. And when
Derrida reads philosophically – when he finds in Husserl a dream of presence, in
Foucault a desire for unreason, in Nancy a nostalgia for touch, or in Levinas the
fantasy of a thinking not contaminated by Greek thought – is this not when he finds a
genuine other who is more than a condition of his own auto-immunity and selfbecoming? Derrida’s Cixous, and Cixous’s Derrida, archive each other as vehicles
through which they came to be what they ought to be. Through literature Derrida
escaped the performativity of mastery; through reading Derrida, Cixous was able to
read the master as a dancer, a prophet and choir, never a purveyor of truth:
For there to be performative language, one must anticipate, master the
conditions, agree upon the codes and conventions, which neutralizes, to a
certain degree, the irruptivity of the event. The pure event defies
performativity. The puisse at work in Hélene’s texts, this strange subjunctive,
which is thus neither an imperative nor an indicative, is situated on this
tangential line which I follow between the possible and the impossible. I try
to think otherwise what the philosophical tradition, from Aristotle to hegel,
bequeathed us with regard to the possible (11).
1
Frédéric Regard, ‘Derrida Un-Cut: Cixous’s Art of Hearts,’ Paragraph 30:2 (2007) 1-16, 4.