Stigmata

Escaping Texts

Hélène Cixous

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134282692
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

A 'wilful extremist' according to the London Times, Hélène Cixous is hailed as one of the most formidable writers and thinkers of our time. Acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, to a surprising extent. With the inclusion of Stigmata, one of her greatest works into the Routledge Classics series, this is about to change. Questions that have long concerned her – the self and the other, autobiographies of writing, sexual difference, literary theory, post-colonial theory, death and life – are explored here, woven into a stunning narrative. Displaying a remarkable virtuosity, the work of Cixous is heady stuff indeed: exciting, powerful, moving, and dangerous.

Ringing in the Feminine Hour

3
IN OCTOBER 1991…

Translated by Keith Cohen

‘En octobre 1991…’ was first published in Du féminin (Le Griffon d’argile and Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1992):115–37.

In October 1991… When I chose the title for this lecture, it was 1990. That meant that the future lecture was without title. That I didn’t know what would be essential. It meant: I don’t know what will be the shape of the world, or of me, in October 1991, or if I’ll still have a shape. It meant: blindness, non-clairvoyance, unpredictability. And then, too: will I be in October ’91? Who knows? I like being in the present; am interested in what’s in process: of passing by, of happening. The instant—the eternity of the instant.

I come not to you this evening with tomorrows [demains]; with two hands [deux mains], of course, but with nows.

I like being in the present. You’re going to say: then keep running! That’s exactly what I try to do. And besides I have a particular affection for the present because it’s the time of the theatre. That’s something I discovered working in the theatre: the singularity of this genre that invents, invents for us, incessantly, a time without time.

The present is also always a just-after. But for us, October—for us in the past—was back-to-school, the tenth month which was the first month, the beginning and the end of an epoch. It was the first day, a threat, and a maturation.

So, in October ’91 and just after, what was there, what’s left? What makes this October and what gets away? What has passed away?

To give a fast answer, with a scene that remains for me that of writing: one of my lives, for example, is also: the USSR. It appeared, through the different readings that have been offered of what I’ve managed to write—of what Cixous, as they say, has managed to write—that I am—that is, she is—often, perhaps mainly, concerned with the loss of her paradoxes. This one, for example: I cannot save from perdition that which I’ve already lost. Obviously, I’m not going to try to save the USSR.

But on the other hand, my path through perdition has been traversed, or crossed, by the catastrophes and cataclysms of our century. And I was thinking, around October or thereabouts, of the witnesses; of the fact that we are the distant, foreign, insufficient witnesses of non-witnesses. We are the strange privileged, non-privileged witnesses of the non-witnesses. It seemed to me that we have a duty to act as reverberators by writing the history of this century’s pain and sorrow. This history produces a set of signs, metaphors, one of which seemed to me fairly familiar—as it is to everyone—I know it was primordial for me, subjectively: it’s the metaphor of the wall. In us. The wall in us, outside us. And followed by the question: what if we took away our wall? History of walls, history of annihilations: that’s what we shall have had to deal with in that October ’91.

I use the word we—it’s true, I’m always having problems with pronouns. When I say the word we I’m aware of the double value it has. In one sense, it’s violent, I admit: I say we as if I were you and you were me. But it’s also a form of humility.

The disappearance of the USSR. I do not plan on giving a political presentation. I’m always back at the theatre, our theatre. Theatre about us, subjected to the winds of History. Here: outside of France. And a few of the remarks I shall make are precisely because of travel. I’m going to report on one effect, out of a thousand, of the disappearance of the USSR, such as it can be observed in France—a characteristic item of our period, inscribed across the French scene. A kind of flash effect of events on our ideology, on our discourse, on our desire: for example, in France, an effect on something that belongs to our recent memory and which is the downfall of what they called ‘PC.’

At the outset there were newspaper articles which I would call ill-intentioned or written in bad faith—as always: thus, the usual—articles on ‘PC’—but the American phenomenon! That is—and this won’t be news to you—on the notion of ‘Political Correctness.’ Typically, in French public opinion, a vast confusion was created, a hodgepodge of PC [French Communist Party] and ‘PC’: what the PC was in any case was infamous, because it was the PC. Inscription, therefore, of a phobia in France. France manufactures and sells phobias and phobogenic products. You have to be in Paris to smell the daily odor of the hunt, this desire to kill, this desire to set up for decapitations. Odor of newspaper. But in October, it was the French PC and the American ‘Politically Correct’ that were rejected, both of them, placed on the Index!

Why am I recalling these incidents? Because it’s true that when I write in fugue style, when I write on the lam, I am of course always pursued and caught by echoes of the great scene. Right now, for example, because of the intensity of contradictory struggles, it’s a question of identity, of nationalisms; it’s the sad phobia of non-identity that has arisen in Berlin for instance, and in general the phobia of difference. Each time I say to myself: luckily there is a voice, that voice of poetry-philosophy, to think with or, in any case, to sing with; to inscribe, to play on, to strum the contradictions and the world as tragedy.

In this regard, I shall speak of the theme of betrayal. You must have seen, as I did, those scenes cropped from the stage of history and politics and apparently already mise-en-scène for the theatre: I’m thinking in particular of the face of Gorbachev, a Shakespearean face. Suddenly, we saw a diminished, humbled Gorbachev reintroducing tragedy across the political airwaves. There is no way that I’m going to cry over Gorbachev. On the other hand, I watched with enormous interest the stripping, the despoiling, the uncrowning of the Statesman. All the more so in that Statesmen fiercely resist, I must say, being uncrowned. I have never seen any Statesman, in France during our epoch, submit, without resistance, to such a stripping or uncrowning. The last tragic ‘act’ that we saw was de Gaulle’s back. But the unmasking, the ripping away of the persona and the projecting, the hurdling toward a denuding of the human—that’s something we’ve never seen.

What was seen was an uncontrollable suffering, regardless of its cause or quality. And it’s true that a Statesman does not show that, does not suffer. I shall speak therefore about betrayal, our betrayal; the betrayal that we always indulge in. About neglect. About the infantalizing situation produced by neglect. For as soon as we’re betrayed, we are little children. I shall speak of persecution: of the subject that becomes object, a thing that falls between the cracks. About the abrupt, shattering, terrible, magnificent confession of blindness. The confession that Gorbachev made of blindness. Of having been blind. Of being blind. We saw him being blind. Blindness seen is the stuff of theatre.

What else did I think about that summer, heading toward October, on the point of turning into October? About point of view. About the expression ‘point of view.’ An expression that I wouldn’t be able to make as much as I want of in a language other than French. For thanks to our language—such are the gifts we get from our languages— ‘point de vue’ is the same as point of view in English, but also: ‘point of non-view.’ The place where there is no [point] view [vue]. The point of view always carries with it: no view.

The point of view: a story, for example, that I borrow from The Imitator by Thomas Bernhard. A story about a beautiful view, about belvedere. It involves two university professors who climb Mount Grosslockner; and Thomas Bernhard tells us that these two characters have a bond of friendship; that they have reached the point where there’s a telescope; and that, inevitably, once they’ve gotten there, and despite all their professorial resistance to the idea of believing what they’ve always been told, that they would find themselves before a landscape of extraordinary beauty, each of them wonders who will be the first to grab the telescope. With that, a new circle of point of view opens: it is very complicated to figure out which one, decently and without bringing on feelings of guilt, has a right to the telescope. Thus our two academics debate, and at the end of their discussion they finally reach an agreement. It’s the elder—and, Thomas Bernhard says, the wiser, the more foresightful one—who is the first to look through the telescope. And he is filled with wonder. Then it’s the other one’s turn, so the colleague takes the telescope, looks, lets out a loud cry and falls down dead. After which, there’s only one left to wonder just what it is in the point of view to cause so significant a difference. How was it that…? But since there’s only one left, no one will ever know. Because you need two for point of view to function.

That’s why I always liked Plutarch when I was little. He’s the one who taught me that when you tell a story, you always have to say: ‘according to such and such version,’ ‘according to this version,’ ‘according to that version.’ That’s just what the newspapers don’t do, naturally. Nor do we.

The most important point of view for all of us is, I believe, in this example: only Brutus can kill us. Only the person who can’t kill us can kill us. Ah, but that’s Caesar’s point of view. Brutus’s point of view is, of course, that only Caesar can kill him. That is, only the pre-killed Brutus, only Brutus seeing Caesar’s knife coming at him, can kill first. The question being precisely who is going to kill first. Depending on point of view.

What did I think about that summer? About love being full of non-love. About the quantity of non-love in love. And especially about the conflation of the executioner and the victim.

(Nota Bene. This is a self-reproach: I want to say right off that I’m not talking about the executioner and the victim of the major scene, before which I feel humbled: not about the Holocaust. I’m sticking to the domestic scene.)

How, in private, the executioner—you or I—feels he’s the victim of the victim. How the victim is the executioner of the executioner. Which makes our relations of amorous persecution very difficult. I was thinking about the fault of the victim. I was thinking about the tragic truth that the victim is guilty of being victim. About the danger incurred by being the cause of a feeling of executioner, of guilt, in you, in the other.

But pay attention: I am now taking the point of view of the victim. Later, I’ll change.

We are all guilty innocents. We are guilty of being innocent. That is, guilty of innocence. Or of guilt. That is, innocent guilty ones. That’s what makes so dense and difficult the mystery of …: there I don’t know any more if I can use the word ‘innocence’ and the word ‘guilt’ separately. So, let us speak instead about the mystery of forgiveness. Forgiving is imperative. Except for one thing: it is extremely difficult to forgive. I don’t even know if forgiving exists. I don’t know if there is such a thing as forgiving. In general, our practice of forgiving is a revenge. To forgive… If I forgive, I signify that there’s a fault. To forgive is to offend.

What’s to be done to forgive, to be forgiven? We need forgiveness. Every day. Every day we need forgiveness. Every day we need to be forgiven and to forgive. We who are guilty of all the faults in the world. What’s to be done when instead of forgiveness there is, in general, repression or avoidance? I don’t know. It seems to me that we’d have to find a forgiveness beyond forgiving. A forgiveness that is neutral, absolute, unexpressed. Advance forgiveness. Forgiveness afterwards is already much more difficult to express. So, advance forgiveness, yes.

And accordingly, since I’ve been moving about these intense states, these difficult situations: what’s to be done so that love—our principal activity, even if we don’t believe it—loves? I’ve gotten to the point of saying to myself that only love with...