Volleys of Humanity

Eric Prenowitz

Towards the end of H. C. For Life, the first of his two books on Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida interrupts his reading with a reflection on her reception. He even assumes the role of a ‘prophet’, as he puts it, in order to ‘foresee’ or ‘predict’ what he calls ‘the place of this-life-this-work in History, with a capital H’.1 Derrida notes that the person and the work of Hélène Cixous ‘already have an incontestable legitimacy: a French, European and global renown’.² But, he says, her authority in ‘the world of literature, of theatre, of politics, of so-called feminist theory, in the academic world, the old world and the new world and the third world’³ should not be allowed to dissimulate ‘what remains to my eyes a ferocious misunderstanding and an implacable resistance to reading’.⁴

Derrida proposes an extended analysis of these phenomena which, he insists, are multiple (he refers to them at one point as ‘resistances-misunderstandings’⁵), and all the more intractable in that they affect not only political, philosophical, literary opponents of Cixous’ work (notably in the form of what Derrida calls ‘the armed force of misogyny and phallogocentrism’⁶), but also, most insidiously, those on the ‘inside’. One can resist something even as one supports it, Derrida notes.

In fact, Derrida diagnoses in his own reading relationship to Cixous a certain tireless resistance – dating back at least to the mid-1960s, when she gave him the manuscript of what would be her first book of fiction, published in 1967. This is certainly a significant avowal for Derrida: one imagines he would make short work of most resistances. And he does not claim to have vanquished this resistance; the relatively late date at which he started publishing on Cixous’ work testifies, perhaps, to this. He goes even further: ‘My own reading, through the years, has been nothing but a long experience of more or less overcome resistances, and it will be this way for life.’⁷ But as he points out, and demonstrates, the resistance in his case does not preclude reading. Indeed he is close here to extrapolating a general hypothesis from this experience: all reading worthy of the name may well be a grappling with resistances.

In his very first published text on Cixous’ work (‘Fourmis’, a lecture presented in 1990), Derrida affirms: ‘I have read her as if in a dream for 25 years, forgetting and keeping everything as if it should not be, in truth should never have been, able to leave me.’8 Eight years later, in H. C. for Life, he returns to this theme – or this confession: ‘As long as I have known her, I read her and I forget that she writes, I forget what she writes.’ But he adds: ‘This forgetting is not like any other: it is elemental, my life probably depends on it [il est probable que j'en vis].’⁹ Derrida even affirms that Cixous herself is not ‘innocent’, that ‘she herself resists herself’.¹⁰ Surreptitiously citing one of her neologisms, oublire (‘to forgetread’),¹¹ without explicitly referencing her text – and thereby performatively reading and forgetting, inscribing in his text a reading of hers that is simultaneously effaced or forgotten – Derrida says that ‘She must resist herself [. . .], avoid herself, forget or forgetread herself, misunderstand herself in order to continue.’¹²

I am reading selectively, of course, and these comments on resistant reading may not be representative of Derrida's engagement with Hélène Cixous’ work. Yet it is none the less a striking, recurrent trope; I see no reason not to take this very readerly resistance to Hélène Cixous as a way, for Derrida, of never finishing his reading of her, of keeping her work still to-be-read, of continuing to read her while fending off any definitive reading, leaving it, while reading it, none the less, in or to the future.

Derrida's warning about inside resistance is universally applicable, no doubt, but it should be taken particularly seriously here, I would argue, at the threshold of a volume of essays by Hélène Cixous: how to read Hélène Cixous, today? How to resist resisting her? How to turn resistances into readings? And if all readings are inhabited or constituted by resistances to what they read; if, therefore, readings can never be purified of resistances; if resistances are therefore not simply opposed or opposable to reading, how to evaluate different readings, different mixtures of reading and resistance? I do think that these questions must remain open, particularly regarding Hélène Cixous, and I have no intention of offering interpretative prescriptions or proscriptions here. Yet this openness does not mean that there are no distinctions – and preferences – to be made between readings. Quite to the contrary: this is precisely where the difficult and interesting work begins.

For instance, Derrida vigorously denounces one particular form of internal or laudatory resistance: the ‘reductive manipulation that consists in classifying the work and the name of Hélène Cixous in the series of “great-French-women-theoreticians-of-the-feminine-thing (feminine-writing, feminine-sexuality, etc.)”’. Derrida doesn't exactly name any names, but he adds: ‘You know too well the taxonomic column of this blacklisting under the cover of eulogistic reference: the list of French women theoreticians, I, J, K, X, Y, Z or X, Y, Z, A, B, C.’13

This ‘taxonomic’ gesture – the cutting up of an ensemble and the labelling of the resultant fragments – is particularly reductive in the case of Cixous’ oeuvre for at least two reasons. In the first place, the diversity or heterogeneity of her work is such that to single one aspect out for exclusive attention is to occlude all the others. But even more importantly than the taxonomic dismembering of such a varied corpus, what really gets Derrida's goat, one senses, is the damage this operation does at a different level: it effectively negates a trait that paradoxically runs through all of ‘this-life-this-work’: a radical – and performative – challenge to any appropriation or recuperation. Thus even the texts upon which Cixous’ reputation as a French feminist theorist is primarily based, notably ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’, are much more than ‘theoretical’ essays. They are edgy, creative, cunning, in-your-face literary performances as well as meticulous, rational analyses, theoretical argumentations, political critiques or manifestos. The troubling irony of this very partial lionisation or election of Hélène Cixous, the ‘eulogistic reference’ Derrida condemns, is that one of the main theoretical thrusts of those texts consists precisely in an implacable problematisation of the very category of ‘theory’.

III

But I am getting ahead of myself. To heed Jacques Derrida's warning about the ambivalence of any critical appreciation is to set oneself, it would seem, on a slippery slope: if looking to Hélène Cixous’ work for insight into French feminist theory, for example, can in fact be a way of resisting and reducing it, how might one proceed otherwise? Derrida offers no miracle solutions – although he is interested, as we will see, in certain more or less magical formulas. The only path he proposes, for those hoping to analyse and begin to outmanoeuvre these resistances, denegations, repressions, which, again, are not necessarily contradicted by a certain international renown, is that of a kind reading: reading Hélène Cixous, I would call it, if I could still use these words naively, in an honest, serious, engaged way. No pitched battles or trench warfare, not even a talking cure: only reading.

So while Derrida forcefully suggests, as we have seen, that reading and resistance to reading can never be completely disentangled in practice or simply opposed in theory, he also affirms, at the same time, that the resistances, the ‘avoidances or denials’, regarding Cixous’ work boil down to a certain ‘im-potence of reading’.14 Derrida does not stress or directly address the apparent paradox of these two readings of reading. Yet I don't think he would renounce it either. The fact that reading can never be sure it is clear of resistance puts all the more pressure on it to continually reinvent and re-empower itself. And Derrida has a lot to say, and in great detail, on reading Hélène Cixous, and above all in reading Hélène Cixous, on the way to read(ing) Hélène Cixous.

I will take just one example. In a long, performative, sentence that seems to be addressing us from within Cixous’ text, Derrida attributes this resistant impotence to a certain lack of courage – but courage in what he calls a ‘new sense of the word’:

the courage, the heart, the courage to give oneself over, crossing through the resistance, to what happens here in language, to the enchant of what happens to language and by language, to words, to names, to verbs and finally to the element of the letter, of the homonym ‘lettre’ as it is put to work here, to what signs an experience of bodily engagement with the untranslatability of the idiom and which, through the chain of replacements, of homophonies, of metonymical substitutions, of changes in speed, of infractions of all the great codes, conspires to produce unique events, unique in the way they put into question once and for all the best protected securities: genre, gender, filiation, proper name, identity, cultural heritage, the distinction between faith and knowledge, between theory and practice, between philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature, between historical memory and political urgency, etc.¹⁵

Derrida's recommendation here can be glossed crudely as follows: in order to resist the pervasive and insidious resistance to Hélène Cixous’ work, one must, in reading, be attentive to something extraordinary that happens there in and to language, producing unique events that radically challenge conventional, pre-established limits and distinctions.

But, before returning to this reading lesson, programme or prophecy, a word about two words in this passage. The first is ‘courage’ in its ‘new’, derridian sense. The ‘new sense’ of this word is never explicitly spelled out, but it very likely comes from its old meaning, i.e. its etymology, which is alluded to: courage comes from the ‘heart’ (cœur). And the heart, for Derrida, particularly in the expression ‘to learn by heart’ (apprendre par cœur), already says something about poetry, untranslatable idiomatic singularity and the work of the signifier that can never be reduced to a semantic content.16 To read Cixous, Derrida says in effect, you need this kind of courage: the hardy heart to give yourself over to the crawling inchoate energy of the textuality of Hélène Cixous’ texts.

That is, and this is the second word, to the enchant of her writing. This is a word coined by Cixous, presumably from the noun chant, ‘song’ and the verb enchanter, meaning ‘to enchant’, and originally ‘to chant magic words’. Derrida takes this neologism from a book by Cixous he is in the process of reading, OR, The Letters of My Father (1997), and applies it in turn to her work. In OR, it is defined as a very particular kind of language (‘that unlimited language without sentences all in willpower comparable to the unknown language of God’¹⁷) that is shared by people and animals, and constitutes the ‘proof’ that all ‘creatures of creation’ belong to ‘a single superior intelligence’.¹⁸ This enchant seems to name the song, the singing, the song-like enchantment of writing in the broadest sense: before language becomes the mundane human system of workaday correspondences between signifiers and signifieds. This takes place in Freud's head, by the way, as he sings ‘the song of enchantment’¹⁹ to one of his dogs. It is undoubtedly not fortuitous, furthermore, that there is a ‘cat’ (chat) hidden in enchant. Turned back by Derrida towards Hélène Cixous’ work, the enchant refers to the way her writing provokes and taps into the musical workings of the signifier, the untranslatable letter, idiom or air of language.

So Derrida has something very particular in mind when he counsels reading, indeed when he calls to readerly arms as the only hope of overcoming the various resistances to Cixous’ work. He does not promote just any reading. He calls for a ‘countersigning reading’,²⁰ which must have two characteristics. In the first place, it must be extremely attentive and open to the power of the enchant: to ‘an experience of bodily engagement with the untranslatability of the idiom’, to the musicality of the text irreducible to a simple meaning content, etc. In the second place, and at the same time, such a reading must ‘sign something else’;²¹ it must use – it must invent – an ‘other language’.²²

While initialling, in turn, Jacques Derrida's appeal for a certain approach to reading Hélène Cixous, I would stress that it is not enough for the ‘other language’, the new language or discourse that must result from the kind of reading Derrida promotes, to be fundamentally different from the cixousian ‘language’ it reads – assuming such an identifiable thing as a ‘cixousian lauguage’ can be said to exist.23 It is not enough for the ‘other language’ of the reading to bear a signature different from that of Hélène Cixous’ inimitable writing. It must also be the fruit of a very patient, meticulous, open-minded and open-ended attention to the textuality of the cixousian text. To read Cixous, Derrida says in effect, you must invent your own textual world, but this invention must also be in some sense dictated, down to the very letter, by the text that is being read. It's a paradox, to be sure, confounding prospective readers with intractably contradictory imperatives (Be creative! Be attentive!).

The double bind of this double imperative call to reading may seem disabling, but it shouldn't. One of the most important reading lessons Derrida takes from Cixous’ texts is precisely that only an attentive creativity is truly creative and vice versa: there is no purely receptive, objective, neutral reading, no matter how attentive or meticulous it may be. In the name of its meticulous attention, a reading must also add something of its own. In other words, when it comes to reading, the active and the passive modes are inseparable: the inventive, egoistical impulses and the self-effacing, studious, submissive or receptive ones. An immediate consequence is that the distinction between ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ can no longer be established with any confidence. But if a reading writes, in this sense, does a writing necessarily read? Does every writing necessarily countersign another writing? Certainly Hélène Cixous’ work exemplifies this double relationship, where the most inventive creation takes inspiration from the most dedicated, receptive analysis; in her essays this reading-writing interdependence is perhaps most explicitly legible.

Once reading is understood in this double way (there is no reading worthy of this name that does not countersign what it reads), it is difficult to revert to a simpler alternative between descriptive science and free invention. In fact, one begins to notice instances of such hybrid reading events at every turn. For example, Derrida's use here of this cixousian word enchant is already a ‘countersigning reading’: Derrida takes this neologism from a book by Cixous he is in the process of reading, and by dint of extracting it from the passage in which it occurs and applying it to the general structure of the cixousian textuality he is exploring, he transforms it into a sort of philosophical semi-concept. Derrida's use here of this word enchant is at once very cixousian and very derridian. Call it derrixousian.

In talking publicly about Hélène Cixous and her work after many years of ‘forgetreading’ her in private, Jacques Derrida adopts a prophetic mode. However, it is not easy to pin down exactly what he prophesises. Yet this, I would argue, is part of Derrida's point: he is predicting that Hélène Cixous’ work has a future, even in some sense that it is of the future. That it is yet to be read, that it will be read, in the future, and that what it means or is, now, depends to some extent on that reading to come. This indeterminacy is a general structure of prophecy: if a prophet were to say what the future holds, then that future would no longer be future, since it would already be known, fixed, effectively archived. So a prophet, as prophet, can only really say ‘the future is coming!’ or ‘I know that in the future you will know what the future holds – or will have held, as long as it was still in the future’. So, without saying what this reading will discover, Derrida predicts that Cixous will be read (‘she will at last be read’24), that one day the day will come when she is read in the strong sense of the word ‘read’ that he promotes and prescribes. Of course, Derrida knows that she has already been read, that she is already being read (not least in Derrida's own text), but just like the praise that also resists, he is looking ahead to a time when the resistance will be, if not necessarily vanquished, decisively addressed, analysed, accounted for, which, according to him, is not currently the case.

So Derrida's prophecy looks, as it should, to the future, but it is also performative: it also aims to intervene into the thing it attempts to describe (the future reading of HC). ‘I participate, at the very least, in the provocation of what I feign to predict,’²⁵ he says. However, this performative provocation nonetheless leaves its object entirely to the future, as it must. Thus Derrida incites us to read Hélène Cixous in this way: ‘Take the challenge, if you can and if you have the courage, but be forewarned: you will see what you see, you will read what you read.’²⁶

All the same, Derrida does go one step further in his prophecy. He says that Hélène Cixous’ work will one day be read, in the strong sense, and that when this happens, the work itself will serve as an ‘analyser’, a kind of ‘quasi-scientific’²⁷ analytic tool, for whoever might try to ‘identify these resistances and account for them’.²⁸ There is a circular logic to this prophecy: in order to read Hélène Cixous you need to overcome the resistances that inhabit and inhibit any reading of her work, and yet in order to overcome these resistances you need to have read her work (which will then be the analyser you need to analyse the resistances). This is a kind of hermeneutic circle: you can't understand it until you've read it, but you can't read it until you've understood it. If such circles don't make reading easy or guarantee its success in advance, they certainly don't preclude it. Indeed they probably represent the only path reading can take. The fact that the path is not simply open (or simply closed) is the best indication that it's worth the gambol.

Perhaps this collection will contribute to the reading-to-come of Derrida's prophecy. Yet even here we must beware of internal resistances. By separating off Cixous’ ‘essays’ from the rest of her work, and by publishing them together in translation, a book like this one may partake of or participate in precisely the kind of ‘reductive manipulation’29 Derrida decries. The tracing out of demarcations between various genres of Cixous’ work and the riding roughshod in translation, no matter how attentive the translator, over the untranslatable idiomatic singularities of the original may be the first steps in a resistant appropriation, however contradictory this may seem, that undermines what it makes available. The body of Cixous’ oeuvre cut up, ‘edited’, packaged, framed, introduced, desiccated, ironed out, universalised, pre-digested. Neutered, declawed. If we take Derrida at his word, one cannot begin to read Cixous, according to the strong sense of reading he promotes, without questioning, among other things, the limits of ‘genre’, for example between fiction and essay, and without ‘an experience of bodily engagement with the untranslatability of the idiom’.

However, it would be a mistake to think that according to the logic of this warning, since translations of Cixous’ texts, or distinctions between them in terms of traditional genre categories, invariably do irreparable violence to the texts’ enchant, such operations must simply be avoided at all cost. The deconstruction of borders (between theory and practice, for instance, between essays and fiction as between philosophy and literature or signifier and signified . . .) does not open onto a toothless relativistic indifference. Distinctions can and must be established even if they are never natural, but inevitably cultural, that is political, biased, contingent, conditional – and this applies to the nature/culture distinction as well. It makes a difference, however, if they are traced out in full view of the pitfalls or shortcomings they can never completely neutralise. With this in mind, I will offer a few remarks on the rationale for publishing this volume of Hélène Cixous’ ‘essays’, and thereby reinforcing the problematic genre demarcations, as well as on the more or less wilful decisions that determined the particular selection it contains.

VII

Hélène Cixous’ writing is typically divided, for bibliographic reasons, between ‘fiction’, ‘theatre’, ‘essays’ and ‘interviews’. To this list the category of ‘seminars’ (for the moment unpublished) must be added, as well, perhaps, as that of ‘notebooks’ or ‘manuscripts’. Without forgetting what she calls ‘the book I don't write’, in a category of its own. But there is much crossover and it would be impossible to establish an absolutely consistent, rigid taxonomy. There is no absolute line between Hélène Cixous’ essays and her fiction, to take just these two ‘genres’: in both, the theoretical cohabits with the creative, the philosophical with the poetic, the analytical with the oneiric. As an example of the more general unclassifiability of Cixous’ work mentioned earlier, this particular subversion of genres is one of the unmistakable strengths and signatures of her writing: the creative, poetic invention is in no way contradicted by the hyper-conscious, super-critical analysis. Admittedly, this is the very principle of performativity, whereby a critical consideration of something simultaneously does something. Yet in Cixous’ work this non-contradiction is not an exception or a special case, but rather the very element of the writing.

Furthermore, the ‘essays’ often cite or refer to the book-length ‘fictions’ and vice versa. A spectacular example is precisely what happened in and to ‘The Book I Don't Write’, one of the texts included here. This ‘essay’ was written to be presented at a conference on Cixous’ work that took place at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (the French national library, or BnF) in 2003, on the occasion of Hélène Cixous’ gift of the quasi-totality of her manuscripts to the BnF. The essay enacts a subversive resistance to this event: while the library's interest in her manuscripts represents a certain public, institutional, national recognition of her work, the transfer is experienced also as a sort of entombment. The essay's title is a warning or a caveat, problematising the apparent appropriation of the entire body of her oeuvre, indeed of her writing, of her manuscripts as the living trace of her writing, into the ‘Necropolitan Library’. The essay explains that even as she wrote one book after another, the manuscripts of which are now archived in the BnF, there was another book, ‘the book I don't write’, perhaps the most important book by Hélène Cixous, but one that has always remained unwritten. And since it is unwritten – but no less present for it, on the contrary – it has left no manuscript of its own to be absorbed into the Library. That book, at least, will not be taken.

‘The Book I Don't Write’ refers to a number of actually written books by Hélène Cixous, recounting their making-of, or not-making-of. In particular, it discusses the genesis of Manhattan (2001), which is itself the belated account of an event that took place in Hélène Cixous’ life in the early 1960s, before she was a published author, and at the same time an account of her failed attempts to write this account during the intervening years. So ‘The Book I Don't Write’ constitutes in some sense a supplement to Manhattan – not only a ‘theoretical’ or ‘critical’ reflection on the book, but, since the book itself consists largely of a reflection on its conditions of (im)possibility, its continuation or extension. In a similar way, this very essay, ‘The Book I Don't Write’, and the event at which it was pronounced by its author, is itself taken up, recounted, revisited, reinterpreted, fictionalised, transposed, reincorporated in a later book of ‘fiction’, Tours promises (2004).30

However, the absence of any pre-given line of demarcation or taxonomic principle does not mean that there is or should be no distinction between the books of fiction and the essays. For one thing, the extraordinary transgressive dramas that occur in the Manhattan-‘The Book I Don't Write’-Tours promises sequence depend in large part on the apparent stability of the fiction/essay borders. Their transgression serves there as one of the central figures of a generalised challenge to the traditional demarcations between fiction and reality, life and work, poetry and criticism.

Furthermore, the essay genre itself might be taken as a particularly cixousian form: a kind of genre-problematising genre. The word ‘essay’ comes from the French essai, meaning an attempt or trial. It generally designates a relatively short piece of expository prose writing that treats a given subject while making no pretence of exhaustiveness or objective scientific analysis. It is neither art nor science, or rather, it renounces neither art nor science. As Adorno puts it, ‘The essay [. . .] does not let its domain be prescribed for it.’³¹ The unabashed circularity of this logic (it determines its own domain from within its domain . . .) recalls the hermeneutic circle of reading discussed earlier and, in a similar way, implies a performative constitutional leap: the essay only discovers its travel plans en route, and there can be no return to the positivist dream of a pure exteriority of subject to object.

It is no coincidence that Montaigne, who was the first to use the word in this sense, figures prominently in Hélène Cixous’ elective literary family. Montaigne's Essais were first published in 1580: arranged pellmell, with no apparent organising principle, they propose freewheeling explorations of more or less timeless, more or less universal topics such as ‘Sadness’, ‘Liars’, the possibility that ‘Our happiness can only be determined after our death’, ‘Cannibals’, ‘The uncertainty of our judgement’, ‘Thumbs’, whether ‘Cowardice is the mother of cruelty’, etc. The looseness of the essay form – this ‘form’ with no pre-ordained form – certainly offered Montaigne virtually limitless licence to address an extraordinarily broad range of subjects. And yet the turning out of Montaigne's inquisitive mind to examine the world in all its diversity is inseparable, in the Essays, from a deep reflection on himself. As Montaigne says famously in his preface, ‘I am myself the matter of my book’.

Each of these factors – the formal or quasi-formal traits of the essay genre, the literary-genealogical hotline to Montaigne, the subversion of subject/object relations or of those between inside and outside, microcosm and macrocosm, between self-examination and political or critical engagement with the world – make the essay genre, with its particular history and character, however contingent or paradoxical these may be, a meaningful one for Hélène Cixous and her work.

In addition, there are a number of very clear contextual or biographical reasons for making this distinction between the ‘fiction’ and the ‘essays’. For instance, Hélène Cixous’ essays, almost without exception, are written ‘on demand’, generally for oral delivery at conferences or colloquia, whereas the books of ‘fiction’ have always been written in some important way ‘for themselves’. As Cixous has often pointed out, she has always written her fictions during the summer holidays far from the city. For instance, in ‘The Unforeseeable’, included in this volume, she writes: ‘Every summer I go off to write the book I have no notion of.’ On the other hand, the essays are generally written during the ‘school year’, from September to June. To fully appreciate this distinction, one would have to take into account the particular significance of this yearly cycle in French society and popular consciousness: the long summer months, with their traditional exodus from Paris, are decisively cut off from the rest of the year. One might therefore expect the essays to be more ‘scholarly’, and the fictions to be freer, less aimed at an academic audience, somehow more summery.

VIII

The concept of selection implies both a separating off and a collecting together. While any process of selection serves to constitute a new body – for example, a volume of ‘selected’ essays by Hélène Cixous – it comes at the price of a violent disruption of another: in this case, the corpus of all Cixous’ works, published, unpublished, yet-to-be written, etc. There is a further ambivalence inherent in this concept: is selection a mechanical, rule-obeying process, with or without a teleological goal; a process that happens automatically, requiring neither art nor intelligence nor courage nor invention, like Hegel's inexorable dialectic or Darwin's ‘natural selection’? Or, on the contrary, does it consist fundamentally in what Derrida calls the ‘decision’: the paradigmatic gesture of a living subject, a discerning intervention beyond any possible calculation, that cannot be reduced to the application of a law or an algorithm?

The constitution of this ‘collection’, or perhaps we should say this ‘disruption’, of Hélène Cixous’ work to which we have given the name ‘essays’, has been neither simply natural nor entirely conscious, calculated or premeditated. I cannot say with certainty who or what made the selections of which this book is the result. Yet I can, retrospectively, point out some of the constraints and aspirations that clearly played a role therein.

I have attempted to include a representative range of Hélène Cixous’ essays, both in terms of the topics addressed and the occasions for which they were written, and as a result they cover a range of styles, voices, textures, sensibilities, approaches, aims, levels of discourse, modes of organisation, objects of enquiry. Five of the translations have not previously been published in English, and three appear here in significantly altered versions. The earliest essay included here was first published (in French) in 1972, although Cixous began publishing in journals and newspapers in 1964. Since the end of the 1970s, however, much of Cixous’ essay writing has consisted in the preparation of texts to be presented orally in the first instance. Many of these later essays have been presented in English, some only in English.

I have also tried to include a range of translators in this collection. Many worthy translators have been left out, but this collection can be read as a collective case study in the difficulties – and joys – of translating Hélène Cixous, and the quite different ways of rising to the task. I have not attempted to standardise the translations, although I have revised two of them substantially and made some minor modifications elsewhere in the name of consistency. I have also checked a number of things with Hélène Cixous herself, who has suggested a few small changes. While this is not the full critical edition that Cixous’ work deserves, I have tracked down innumerable references, most of which were missing from the original publications, and provided a series of additional notes to highlight some of the most obvious allusions. Hélène Cixous’ original notes end with [HC], the translators’ notes with [tr.], and the others are my responsibility. I have included complete bibliographic information about the essays at the beginning of the volume: I hope that more than a few readers will make the effort to look up the original texts for comparison.

I have not included here any of the considerable subcategory of Cixous’ essays that are centrally concerned with Jacques Derrida. These will be collected in a separate volume. While this decision does limit the representativity of the present collection in a very significant way, it is none the less true that even in these essays, Derrida is one of the most important references, characters, interlocutors. I have also included none of Cixous’ numerous essays on art, since these too will appear in a separate volume in English. I have chosen not to include any of the essays that are already available in English-language collections. In particular, I decided not to include the two most popular of her essays: ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’. These are widely accessible, and it seemed important to leave room here for less-well-known essays by Hélène Cixous.

Notes

1.	Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire . . . (Paris: Galilée, 2002), p. 116. It wouldn't be too outlandish to take this ‘H majuscule’ as already fulfilling the prophecy in a sense, at least to the extent that this letter ‘in History’ doesn't belong to history alone.
2.	Ibid., p. 117.
3.	Ibid., p. 117.
4.	Ibid., p. 117.
5.	Ibid., p. 118.
6.	Ibid., p. 118.
7.	Ibid., p. 120.
8.	Jacques Derrida, ‘Fourmis’, in Lectures de la Différence Sexuelle (Paris: Des femmes, 1994), p. 97.
9.	Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, p. 131.
10.	Ibid., p. 120: ‘elle résiste d'elle-même à elle-même’.
11.	This word appears in Cixous’ OR, les lettres de mon père (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
12.	Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, p. 120.
13.	Ibid., p. 121. Behind this ‘column’, we can detect two manoeuvres on Derrida's part. On the one hand, he is clearly separating Hélène Cixous off from the now canonical series of ‘great-French-women-theoreticians-of-the-feminine-thing’, where her name is commonly adjoined to those of (Luce) Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. These other théoriciennes get at best an initial or two in Derrida's book (though we should remember that the book itself is called H. C. for Life, and that Derrida can make a letter speak volumes). Indeed, in Derrida's second book on Cixous, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius, he pointedly conjugates ‘genius’ in the feminine in Cixous’ name, and insists on the singularity of her thought and writing. On the other hand, Derrida is simultaneously denouncing the phallocratic misogyny that consists in aligning these three (+ n) ‘theorists’, authors of such radically different bodies of work, in one column under one heading. Hélène Cixous’ writing is unique, but so is the writing of the other ‘French’ ‘feminist’ ‘theorists’, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, for example: each merits careful attention, and those who lump them together like lead soldiers in a single, lockstep column, even to salute them, do them a very dubious service.
14.	Ibid., p. 119.
15.	Ibid., p. 119.
16.	See, for example, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, where ‘poem’ is pseudo-defined as, among other things, ‘a story of “heart” poetically enveloped in the idiom “apprendre par cœur” [. . .] I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean [vouloir dire] and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word itself [du mot cœur]’ (trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Elisabeth Weber (ed.), Points . . . (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 291 and 295.
17.	Cixous, OR, p. 18, cited in Derrida, H. C., p. 93.
18.	Cixous, OR, p. 18.
19.	Ibid., p. 19.
20.	Derrida, H. C., p. 120.
21.	Ibid., p. 123.
22.	Ibid., p. 123.
23.	This question leads to an inevitable paradox: if an author's ‘language’ can be rigorously defined, then it immediately becomes repeatable, imitable and already an imitation of itself. Therefore not at all the author's language. So here too, an author must resist herself, resist her ‘own’ language if she wants to have any hope of speaking or writing for or as herself.
24.	Derrida, H. C., p. 117.
25.	Ibid., p. 124.
26.	Ibid., p. 124.
27.	Ibid., p. 117.
28.	Ibid., p. 117.
29.	Ibid., p. 121.
30.	Another example of the overlapping relationships between books of fiction and essays is Cixous’ text called ‘Vues sur ma terre’, published in 2000, which constitutes in some ways an addendum or a prolongation of her 1999 ‘fiction’ Osnabrück.
31.	Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’ [Der Essay als Form], Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 3.