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MAIRÉAD HANRAHAN
Abstract:
Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida position themselves very differently in
relation to literature. This article analyses that difference in the light of
their relation to the symptom, the fundamentally unanalysable form through
which the unconscious manifests itself. While Derrida dwells more on the
impossibility of ever accessing the original secret wound to whose existence
the symptom opaquely attests, Cixous tends to focus more on the effect,
the symptom itself. For both, the ‘chance’ of literature lies in the fact that
neither the source nor the destination of letters can be determined. I argue
that the difference between Derrida’s relative resignation to this condition and
Cixous’s celebration of it helps to explain the contrast between his position at
the margins of literature and her unequivocal embrace of it.
But beyond all that, there is symptomatology; there is meaning that no theorem
can exhaust. This notion of symptom, which I’d like to dissociate from its clinical
or psychoanalytical code, is related to what I was saying before about verticality.
A symptom is something that falls. It’s what befalls us. What falls vertically on us
is what makes a symptom.9
For Derrida, the symptom is a sign which defies any attempt to fathom
it through knowledge; it involves a saying or making public which
keeps the secret it reveals. In particular, as the alinea accentuates,
while symptoms can be analysed to a certain extent, there is a
‘beyond all that’, that is, a beyond analysis which inevitably recalls
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida’s favorite book of Freud’s and
the psychoanalytical text to which he most repeatedly, compulsively,
symptomatically returns. This ‘beyond analysis’ concerns the secret,
the symptom, precisely insofar as it can’t be (psycho)analysed. Derrida
specifies that he wants to ‘dissociate’ the notion of symptom from its
‘clinical or psychoanalytical code’. The symptom is another name for
the unnameable secret which, precisely, is beyond psychoanalysis.
If to write is always to write symptomatically, and if the difference
between Cixous’s and Derrida’s (symptomatic) writing involves a
different relation to the symptom, what does this imply for the relation
between literature and psychoanalysis? For Derrida, literature figures
repeatedly as the privileged site or place of a secret.10 As the expression
of an absolute secret, is literature like psychoanalysis, in the way that
the pleasure principle is of the same order as the reality principle?
Or is it more primary, more general than psychoanalysis in the same
way that, as Derrida investigates in ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States
of Its Soul’, whatever is ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle is more
fundamental than the pleasure or reality principles, more fundamental
than the sexual or death instincts? Is literature more troubling than
psychoanalysis because it is so fundamentally impossible to situate?
Bearing these questions in mind, let us look at the often-quoted
passage from Passions where Derrida defines his love for literature in
terms of the secret:
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A confidence to end with today. Perhaps all I wanted to do was to confide or
confirm my taste (probably unconditional) for literature, more precisely for literary
writing. Not that I like literature in general, nor that I prefer it to something else,
to philosophy, for example, as they suppose who ultimately discern neither one
nor the other. Not that I want to reduce everything to it, especially not philosophy.
Literature I could, fundamentally, do without, in fact, rather easily [La littérature, je
m’en passe au fond, et en fait, assez facilement]. If I had to retire to an island, it would
be particularly [au fond] history books, memoirs, that I would doubtless take with
me, and that I would read in my own way, perhaps to make literature out of them,
unless it would be the other way round, and this would be true for other books
(art, philosophy, religion, human or natural sciences, law, etc.). But if [Mais si],
without liking literature in general and for its own sake, I like something about
it [en elle], which above all cannot be reduced to some aesthetic quality, to some
source of formal pleasure, this would be in place of the secret [au lieu du secret]. In
place of an absolute secret. There would be the passion.11
The most striking aspect of this affirmation or confirmation of an
unconditional love for literature is how very conditional it appears.
No sooner has Derrida confided his ‘probably’ (thus not indubitably)
unconditional love than he immediately qualifies it, saying that
he doesn’t love literature ‘in general’ and insisting that literature
is only one love among others, no more irreducible than others.
Fundamentally and in fact, ‘au fond, et en fait’, he can do without
literature; fundamentally, ‘au fond’, his choice of reading material for
his desert island would be books with a highly referential component
(history books, memoirs). Moreover, the ‘Mais si’ of the final sentence
which, coming after the series of negations (‘Not that . . . not that . . . ),
initially appears to be an affirmation, is in fact the beginning of a
conditional clause.12
The series of adverbial phrases — au fond, en fait, au fond — calls for
close analysis. What if we read the first ‘au fond’ not as synonymous
with the following ‘in fact’ but rather literally, as an adverb of place
meaning ‘at the bottom’, especially the bottom of the sea? What if
it were only at the bottom that he could do without literature? That
would mean that he could never do without literature as long as he
has not reached the bottom. But the bottom appears to be the space
of literature itself; on the island there is still room for him to travel
towards the bottom, to carry the history books or Memoirs off to
the bottom, to bring them closer to literature (‘to make literature
out of them’). In other words, it is because Derrida’s interest lies in
approaching literature that literature alone leaves him no work to do or,
more precisely, doesn’t leave him the work he wants to do.13
Writing Symptomatically 211
Literature, then, would be both at the bottom and the bottom
itself. The undecidable use of ‘au fond’ that introduces an unsuspected
expression of place anticipates another surprising and undecidable use
of the preposition à (at) which conversely complicates the expected
expression of place with a prepositional phrase. ‘But if I love something
about it [literally in it, ‘en elle’], this would be in place of the secret [au
lieu du secret]’: instead of the direct object the conditional clause leads
us to expect (for example, ‘the secret’ or ‘the place of the secret’),
the adverbial phrase highlights not what but where or how he loves.
Literature does not function only as a place in which loving and not
knowing both take place; it functions both as the place and in place of
the secret.
The ambivalence reflected in this passage at the way literature
replaces the secret (and thus makes the original secret more, not
less, obscure) marks a significant difference between Cixous and
Derrida. I would argue that the positions they adopt in relation to the
symptom help us to understand the positions they assume respectively
in literature (Cixous) and at the margins of literature (Derrida).14 While
both write symptomatically, ‘beyond psychoanalysis’, psychoanalysis
gives way to literature very differently in their writing. This is to
claim not that a clear-cut distinction could ever be unproblematically
defined between literature and its others, but rather that the difference
between Derrida’s qualified love for literature and the unreserved
passion Cixous’s texts proclaim for Literature with a capital L, the
‘Omnipotence-other’, produces discernible textual effects which call
for analysis. At least, according to Cixous it was the subject of an
interminable analysis by both of them. The ‘eternal conversation’ with
which Insister begins gives way almost immediately to a discussion of
Derrida’s relationship with literature:
Hence my relation to literature.
— Which relation?
— Chance literature. No one will ever catch it lying or truth-telling in flagrante
delicto. Literature, neither lie nor veracity, no one will ever prove that I am lying
— That’s why you have always stayed in closest proximity [au plus près] to literature
— In closest approximity [Au plus presque], in the neighbourhood. No one will
ever prove that I am inside or outside. (Insister, 7–8)
Whereas Cixous tends to situate herself unproblematically on the
side of literature, she here positions Derrida in ‘closest proximity’,
212 Paragraph
‘closest approximity’ to it. She has Derrida equate ‘literature’ with
chance, a word which, like ‘symptom’ in our earlier quotation, belongs
etymologically to the lexicon of falling. Like the symptom, chance is
what befalls one. In Derrida’s short text, ‘My chances’, symptom and
chance bookend the list of words related to falling: ‘the sense of the
fall in general (as symptom, lapsus, incident, accidentality, cadence,
coincidence, expiration date [échéance], luck [chance], good luck or
bad luck [méchance])’.15 Literature is itself a matter of chance: it is
impossible to control in advance whether it will ‘arrive’, a word which
in French also means ‘happen’. Just as Derrida and Cixous value the
symptom differently, so they differ in attitude towards the chance
which literature figures. As we shall now see, while both celebrate
its inherent contingency, she does not share the regret which tinges
his recognition that literature can never arrive at a predetermined
destination.
* P.S. Finally a chance, if you will, if you yourself can, and if you have it, the
chance (tukhè, fortune, this is what I mean, good fortune, good fate [aventure]:
us). The mis-chance (the mis-address) of this chance is that in order to be able
not to arrive, it must bear within itself a force and a structure, a straying of the
destination, such that it must also not arrive in any way. Even in arriving (always
Writing Symptomatically 213
to some ‘subject’), the letter takes itself away from the arrival at arrival [se soustrait à
l’arrivée]. It arrives elsewhere, always several times. You can no longer take hold of
it. It is the structure of the letter (as post card, in other words the fatal partition
that it must support) which demands this, I have said it elsewhere, delivered to a
facteur subject to the same law. The letter demands this, right here, and you too,
you demand it. (PC, 123–4)
While OR thus wholly endorses Derrida’s proposal that all letters are
‘dead’ letters, letters which cannot be delivered at a specific address, it
focusses above all on how letters keep the dead alive.
To conclude, letters figure as the sign of an original wound for both
Derrida and Cixous. But while for Derrida they are the reminder
as much as the remainder of a tragic situation, and thus similar to
psychoanalysis in reopening the wound (even if they cannot divulge
the secret they symptomatize), Cixous tastes no poison in the gift of
writing. In her case, nothing adulterates the silver (or indeed gold, or in
French) lining of the cloud: writing is the unqualified good (fortune)
made possible by the tragedy whose place it marks. Both Derrida and
Cixous — like all writers — write symptomatically, in the sense that
their work manifests the existence of a secret which can never be fully
uncovered. Their attitude to that symptomaticity forms an integral
part of their symptom; it is also a site of difference between them.
Derrida’s understanding of how letters work is, indeed, acute in every
sense: brilliant, but also tinged with suffering. For Cixous, the fact that
220 Paragraph
literature lies ‘beyond’ (psycho)analysis is unequivocally, and constantly,
a source of joy.
NOTES
1 As Cixous sees it, however, their writing practices differ in that a word is
always the ‘first motor’ of Derrida’s writing (he begins when the right word
comes to him) whereas words for her come later in the process; see ‘Tales of
Sexual Difference’, translated by Eric Prenowitz, The Portable Cixous, edited
by Marta Segarra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 48–60; 59.
Further references to this text will be preceded by TSD.
2 Mireille Calle-Gruber and Hélène Cixous, Hélène Cixous: Rootprints,
translated by Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 90 (translation
modified). Future references to this book will be given in the text, preceded
by RP.
3 See Mairéad Hanrahan, ‘Long Cuts’, parallax 44, 13:3 (2007), 37–48.
4 For Cixous, Derrida’s boundless curiosity is ‘vital’, on the side of life: at issue
here is the difference between two vital desires, not between a lifegiving one
and a deadly one.
5 This spectral figure of a doctor reminds us that literature and psychoanalysis
are themselves ‘false’ friends, that is, similar forms generating different
meanings when read as belonging to different codes, one of the differences
being precisely the greater or lesser degree to which the doctor appears. This
is clearly not to suggest that the boundary between the epistemological and
the therapeutic, or the theoretical and the clinical, can ever be definitively
determined within psychoanalysis, let alone between it and literature. They
have been shown to be inextricably linked in all sorts of ways. Indeed, Cixous
was among the first to bring out how Freud’s clinical practice was affected in
the ‘Dora’ case by his epistemological drive. Much recent trauma theory has
concentrated on the cathartic aspect of the urge to write. Derrida’s critique
of Lacan in Resistances of Psychoanalysis pointed out that Lacan’s defence of
the boundary between psychoanalytical and other discourses depended on
making experience of a particular clinical situation the principal criterion
determining whether one was eligible to talk about the passions, thereby
discrediting or disqualifying any other discourse seeking to think about what
Derrida recapitulates as ‘all this [ça, the word used in French for the id]’
(Resistances of Psychoanalysis, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Paascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67). Whether
or not the doctor is in evidence bears little relation to whether he’s at work.
6 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 151–2.
Writing Symptomatically 221
7 For some critics, this extends to a desire to contain the universe. For a
discussion of Derrida’s fantasy of inclusiveness in Glas, his ‘fantastic desire’
that his calculations ‘include what they can never include’, see Lawrence
Johnson, ‘Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul]: Between Nicolas Abraham
and Jacques Derrida’, Postmodern Culture 10: 3 (May 2000), para. 8. This
view contradicts Derrida’s own position that ‘What is put in question by
[deconstruction’s] work is not only the possibility of recapturing the originary
but also the desire to do so or the phantasm of doing so, the desire to
rejoin the simple, whatever that may be, or the phantasm of such a reunion’
(Resistances of Psychoanalysis, 27).
8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’, Without Alibi,
translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 264.
9 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Certain Impossible Impossibility of Saying the Event’,
translated by Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33:2 (2007), 441–61; 456–7.
10 For example: ‘Literature remains the absolute place of the secret of this
heteronomy, of the secret as experience of the law that comes from the other,
of the law whose giver is none other than the coming of the other’ (Geneses,
Genealogies, Genres and Genius, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 48). For a discussion of the links between
Derrida and Blanchot in relation to the secret, see Ginette Michaud, Tenir au
secret (Derrida, Blanchot) (Paris: Galilée, 2006).
11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: “An Oblique offering”’, On The Name, edited
by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr. and Ian
McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 27–8.
12 Cixous emphasizes this ambiguity (previously practised to powerful effect by
Derrida in texts such as The Post Card) in the abridged version of the passage
she imports into Insister: ‘I can do without literature easily enough. Yes it’s
true [Mais si]. Yes it’s true [Mais si], without loving it in general and for itself,
I love in literature. If I love something in it, it would be in the place of the secret’
(Insister, 9).
13 In this respect, it would be interesting to revisit the reasons Derrida gave
Derek Attridge for not working on Beckett in Jacques Derrida, “‘This
Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature,
edited by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60–1. See also
Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995) and Shane Weller, ‘When the Other Comes Too Close: Derrida and
the Threat of Affinity’, Kritikos 3, June 2006.
14 Of course, Cixous’s writing also profoundly troubles the boundary between
literature and its others (philosophy, autobiography, etc.). The issue here is
rather how literature’s symptomaticity is connoted in the two works.
15 ‘My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean
Stereophonies’, translated by Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking
222 Paragraph
Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Joseph H. Smith and
William Kerrigan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984), 8.
16 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated
by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121. Future
references to this text will be preceded by PC.
17 This is the case both throughout ‘Envois’ (see for example 51, 67, 96,
183, 223) and in numerous other texts. See for example the end of Ulysse
gramophone: ‘I decided to stop here because an accident nearly happened as
I was scribbling this last sentence at the steering wheel when, leaving the
airport, I was returning home on my way from Tokyo’ (Paris: Galilée, 1987,
143; my translation).
18 Hélène Cixous, OR, Les Lettres de mon père (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 61; my
translation. Future references will be placed in the body of the text, preceded
by O.
19 I have discussed Cixous’s reflection on reading in ‘Oublire: Cixous’s Poetics of
Forgetting,’ Symposium 54:2 (Summer 2000), 77–89. See also Jacques Derrida,
H.C. for Life, That is to Say. . . , translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan
Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Verena Andermatt
Conley, ‘Souffle de vie: Hommage à Hélène Cixous’ in Hélène Cixous, croisées
d’une œuvre, edited by Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 343–52;
and Peggy Kamuf, ‘Aller à la ligne’, in L’Événement comme écriture. Cixous et
Derrida se lisant, edited by Marta Segarra (Paris: Campagne Première, 2007),
73–84.
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