Hugo Jeudy: Dear Hélène Cixous, thank you for granting me this interview. In a recent conversation on France Culture [The central French cultural radio, ed.], you ask yourself if Incendire might after all be the book, the one you have waited for so long. You then chuckle and say that if such is the case, one then ought to read it as harbouring every answer. For this interview, I suggest, in a way that I hope will be both tongue-in-cheek and serious, that we take this path. We would then have to start at the end: the text closes with a loss, that of the Book. You write “in me a feeling forms: an overwhelming, desolate mourning”. Is this grief of the Promised Book confined to the book itself, is it contained in the very book that it mourns; or does it now affect your writing more generally?
Hélène Cixous: It was a hypothesis. But book and bereavement are two different beings. When a book writes itself, it is mysterious: it is the unknown. This book may have then given me the impression of being the last. It is a spectral hypothesis. We do not know what grief is: we have a tendency to affix it to a certain period, as coming after an event. Yet, it can happen before the catastrophe. Reading the newspapers, which I do compulsively each day at the moment, there are instances that sit at grief’s table. Not only are the events so terrible, but I cannot separate myself from them. What holds me, and can even fascinate me, is premonition. It is something that happens, absolutely without command. It is a hypersensitivity to something. It only becomes or appears premonitory in a quantity of après-coup. Otherwise, all books would do it. It is a premonition without prophecy, not something that one may announce. Negative events appear staggering, coming in a second, but they are prepared. Each time that, with Ariane [Mnouchkine, ed.], we prepared a show in relation to what is tragic in the world, the pre-sensed events happened in deferred action. I thus always told myself it was an illusion: the events were there, and we merely preceded their hatching. For instance, the forest burns: it’s an event. Yet, I remember asking myself for my entire life why it did not burn. I am in a forest, I live on a forest’s threshold, I go into the forest. Each time, I thought how odd it was that it should burn in Canada, in California, but not here. Yet, it is made for that: it calls for it. In the moment of this thought, the fire materialises: and that, one can say it had been ascribed, it had been inscribed – it laid dormant, it woke up. It is something of which I have been thinking for several years, which was announced. One announces what will come. But what comes has already taken place.
HJ: In Incendire, it seems as though History is led by a single fire. Is an origin of that fire thinkable?
HC: For me, yes. But I can think it in a biographical way. It streaked through my existence like a meteor and a metaphor. There were several moments of fire in my life. Each time, even circumscribed, awoke the most archaic, ancient, antique things there are. They came from mythology, from the Aeneid, from biblical fires. In this very building was a fire. I was to leave for the United States. The fire broke out. It rose; the firefighters were on the balcony. I had two cats. It was then the biblical question struck: which of the two? Which should one choose? This trial remained my model of anguish. Then, the fire brigade put it out. I cancelled my trip: I could not leave without offering shelter to the most precious things here. When I finally got to New York after months of deferral, an alarm rang: the fire had come to the hotel. I felt as though the fire was chasing me. These fortuitous events recall mythical structures that all humans share. If one is sensitive to the Burning of Troy, it isn’t because it is Troy, it is because it’s us. We have already lived it, in this life or another.
HJ: By the fire which burns from text to text, from History to History, you seem to twist St John Perse’s “a same wave from Troy. Rolls its hip up to us” into fire, for it is also with us that this fire spreads.
HC: We carry active memory, even if we do not know it. These memories feed the fire. When the fire is no longer the contextual landscape of a life, when it is at your door, very, very concrete, one has a stupefying experience. The anguish of the thing is not a fear: we do not know which path to take, we become fetuses. In that moment, one has unexpected physical experiences. I had always pictured the smoke rising, but no: it is a strip along the water. Here, there are often fires. The strip stretches over the entire sky, like an army. And it remains like that, day after day. Then, it starts with the smell – a smell one has never smelled in one’s life. One consults a neighbour: we did not smell the same thing in the same place, we become animals.
HJ: Here, in this text full of blanks between words and images, one feels this suffocation.
HC: Yes, it is essential. I am always quibbling about the blanks. There is no politics of the blank. Yet, the cartography of these psychic events has nothing to do with the story. One is always saying we do not have the right words. But there simply are none. It would be too good for there to be a word, but there is none. What one finds in Virgil helps. Latin constructions, moments, offer a pause. It is also recognizing a way to transform the horrid, the unnameable into something that has music. We must leave, but we don’t: this nefarious law of our life where one thinks we ought to go, but we stay; where we leave asking ourselves if we really should have stayed. The History I bore witness to is that of the Jews in Germany during the long period when one could still leave. But we couldn’t. How does the possibility of a departure arise? We wade through this kind of hell each time something activates our indecision. For me, this mini-verse in Virgil, “Jam proximus ardet Oukalegon”, is striking because it starts with “jam”. The entire mind is in this state: “jam”, already, already too late.
HJ: As you recall in a text for Libération [the French newspaper, ed.], Aeneas is then very quickly seized by the cold as he struggles to speak. When the fire takes place, is the question of how its account will be possible on your mind?
HC: I think one does not ask it. It is precisely the moment where one cannot, and comes up against this: for as soon as we write, we are saved. As a child, I often asked what events in the heart of the concentration camps might be. At that level of inhumanity, was it possible to sing? I told myself that it wasn’t. The first questions I asked the survivors were these. Each told me they had laughed and sung. It is now banal, but as a child, it haunted me: just how far might one have annihilated the desire to live?
HJ: In all these situations, you ask yourself the question of the present. The central question, “How to remember well?” is asked in the present tense.
HC: It is vital for me. It was vital to have a piece of paper to put down a few words – that was enough. This is what Shalamov did in the Kolyma. There, where a notebook is life. We now have a thousand accounts of people who recite poems and texts: it is out of fear of losing them. One must absolutely transmit, absolutely preserve what will disappear, what is a memory. I thought about this my entire life, and was programmed by this. Since the earliest childhood, I was in this. The questions came one by one over the years, for there is always another that comes.
HJ: In these same pages, you confront Wikipedia and its digital memory, at once encyclopaedic and diluting. How does the way the Internet organises memory today appear to you?
HC: For me, it would get lost in exactly the same way. It is the same ambivalence as Ra and Tot. When we invent writing, it is, or so says Tot, to make a gigantic gift to memory. We shall be less tired, it will be written, memory will take a rest. But very soon, without exercise, memory records less and less. One must then learn to retrieve. In this sense, they are perverse instruments: the memory is recorded and untraceable. We also know that they are always obsolete and that the memories must therefore be re-recorded every time. Derrida worked with computers; I never do. In the National Library, any technological material must always be torn from the abyss of obsolescence: the validity of this memory endlessly races towards disappearance and must thus always be saved. Nothing beats paper, even if it burns. However, there is today a stupefying drive for conservation. When did we not save, but safeguard these manuscripts before libraries and their instituted conservations? What has been kept is beyond belief.
HJ: One keeps on a computer, one keeps on paper, one also keeps, you write, in the stone. Very early, the mother asks whether it is better to end as a street or a Stolperstein.
HC: I don’t believe it is a good way to remember, but rather a way to avoid falling asleep. It is not such and such a paving stone which marks memory, but the movement it instigates. The cities rustle with a single message: there was a murder. The stone works because it is a shape. Unlike the commemorative plaques of Paris, high-up and nonexistent, this stone bothers. Whereas one can avoid everything, one cannot avoid it. One always looks where one puts one’s feet, not always one’s head.
HJ: One remembers the departed through writing, but writing also keeps the trace of the texts that have preceded it.
HC: It is all that literature does. All great texts are texts which remember. They are heirs which carry all of what was written before, always. There is no great text that is not constituted in an inheriting way.
HJ: Yet, as you write about Marina Tsvetaeva and Clarice Lispector, we are “born from a grave”.
HC: Death is already here. I am very struck by the premature death of great writers. Writers with a long life are rare. This is not simple, for it means that death prepares itself: one dies ten years before dying. Writing is conscious of this. It is death which dictates writing. Montaigne makes this gesture: he goes into his tower. For us, he is young, but not for himself. He has a little plaque engraved, saying, on such or such day, “I withdraw, and from now on: I write”. He retires into a magnificent tomb.
HJ: I think of another tower, which opens a book, Ulysses. Your first published text was on Joyce, and in Incendire, you call upon his “Yes”. Was Joyce present as you wrote?
HC: He is present like these texts that weave me, but he is not an interlocutor. I have interlocutors with whom I speak almost daily, several times a week. Never with Joyce. He is an artist, not a meditative type, nor a pure philosopher. He, in fact, has no particular message. He is a friend, as a master of technique, and in the revolution of language. His work on the signifier already existed, but he generalises it. He pushes literature until it tips over: it should inaugurate a liberation of literature, but this has not been the case. I think that Joyce is like Picasso. He tells literature: you don’t need to get dressed. Fall, spit on the floor, burst with laughter, use all the voices, be a ventriloquist – you can do everything with language. He belongs to the world of pictorial revolutions. I am very pleased by this, because I neologise all the time. It is not about crafting, but about a vital need. I can cross the borders: it’s what he does.
HJ: You speak of Joyce as a pictorial revolution. You write with paint brushes, various kinds of paper. Is the pictorial active when you write?
HC: Yes, always. It is very physical. Totally physical, writing. It is a relation with matters. In the studios of some friends who are true artists, I see that they work in exactly the same way. Substance and paper are very important. With [Pierre, ed.] Alechinsky, there are always numerous brushes in place, all clean, all different – and he knows which one the work calls for. Likewise, a comma: 1938, Nights – the comma makes a scene of what would otherwise be mere stage direction. It is decisive. A sentence that traverses me must go there. It is imperative.
HJ: If writing is like drawing, is reading sometimes like looking?
HC: Reading is fuel. I read all the time to feed my own boiler. Reading requires inspiration. I always ask myself why I go and find such or such book: well, because I want to. It is like hunger. I want to eat this – oh, is it not the season? Well, for me, it shall be the season. I recently fetched Tolstoï, whom I have not read for 50 years. I read these books once, but of them remained a little trace, a glimmer. Yet, I am struck when I understand that these books are what I needed. In my first fifteen years, I must have accumulated enormous supplies of traces, of texts which are covered over but act as signals.
HJ: You speak of texts as fuel. Is the text also a fire?
HC: If it is a fire, it’s a fire of joy. Writing is always extremely joyous. It is orgasmic, it is a need, but an erotic, sexual need. It does not work any other way than that. Reading is the same. When I read, I come all the time. Otherwise, I let it drop. I am constantly marvelling at texts: marvelling and joyous. It may be compared a little to the gigantic season of rehearsals in my theatre. The best thing in theatre are rehearsals. For it is so alive, so lost: one goes forward, seeks, fumbles, does not find, it is catastrophic, but we shall find, and find the unexpected. Then, we get to the stage where everything is good. And so we time it all. This interests me less and less. I prefer rehearsals. In the same way, reading allows a view inside the cave, a visit to Vulcan. I sometimes read my texts, to correct them before printing. I sometimes tell myself a botched exposure might take place. But I am lucky enough to be reassured by this vision of primitive reading. For me, printing is entering into other ways and codes. I love manuscripts. There have been exhibitions, where one sees only two or three pages, but it is wonderful nonetheless. I have the great luck of frequenting the National Library and seeing the manuscripts – these treasures are overwhelming. I recently got to see “manuscripts” of Rembrandt’s, to hold them. I was struck: it is a manuscript and a drawing, where one feels the hand. I feel as though I have met persons. It makes me laugh, sometimes. Flaubert writes the same sentence ten or twenty times, on large sheets: he tries it out. In the book, it will only be one line, it will stop when it is in fact restless, on edge. Hugo makes me die of laughter. He has brushed his beard, prepared his gigantic architecture. Whereas his drawings have far more savagery, a mix of savagery and self-righteousness. Rousseau and Rimbaud are very clean. This does not mean it isn’t tumultuous: it is defensive. Rousseau is on the lookout.
HJ: You say that it is as though you have met persons. Welcoming and receiving come back so much, in your reflections on memory and on writing. In Incendire, you write: “It occurs to me that I am myself a graveyard, a vast mental territory where guests from all periods, all tongues, all sexual varieties are welcomed”. Does one welcome a person or a sending?
HC: I do not know whether it is a sending. I think it is a transposition of a multitude of events, small and large, which, like in art, seek their form. It is about finding the words, which cannot simply be any words. It is a translation: a sublime translation which must be of an absolute precision. One must have a very rich language. It is necessary to have completely absorbed the dictionaries. It is a rule not often followed, but absolutely vital. Each word is a laboratory. To those who write with the already-written, one must say “no”. Each word is a well, an expedition, a colossal work. When one reads, when this work has already been done by the scribe, one feels a sense of jubilation: there is the name.
HJ: The book too closes by the search for a word, heard in a dream. Trying to remember it, you go through “God”, then “woman”, before finally reaching “Jew”.
HC: It could have been something else. But it was probably what occupied me. Now that you tell me these words, some are inexhaustible for me. “God” is inexhaustible, because I do not even know what it means. And yet, one cannot do without it, in any language, even though God’s name changes absolutely everywhere – something which amuses me to no end. Some words come with weapons: “Jew” is an eclipsing word. It comes and goes, it is a word with consequence, constantly carried into historical tempests. One never knows what one says when one says “Jew”. Its mystery is infinite. I thus force myself to go there and say: “now, let’s talk”. It is a stranger that one knows by heart, but which remains strange. “Woman” bores me. When, very early, I started to realise that I would never be done with it, I was devastated. An entire existence spent occupied with this, does not interest me. What is said with that word always strikes me as rather cursory.
HJ: And you have in fact taken some distance from “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Even though it is still largely taught in Britain, there has been insistence for about fifteen years on your rejection of this text as an emblem.
HC: Absolutely. These are civic obligations. I did not expect it, but it was political.
HJ: This spring marks the transition from Galilée to Gallimard for this text. After three reprints and almost half a century, it will now be available for a long time to come.
HC: The picaresque adventure of this Medusa is an unforeseen event in my life and continues to be unforeseeable. What I can observe, what can affect me, plays out over two centuries: the twentieth and the twenty-first. It is then about the adventures of a great character, the Medusa, in the present centuries. So many things irritate me: others give me a feeling of astonishment and gratitude. The text is dated: it has an age. When I wrote it, I was over thirty. All this is extremely marked by a historicity: it was a certain state of mind whose tone was in keeping with the circumstances. It was an act, a hymn to freedom in every field, including the strangeness of the editorial context in which it appeared.
HJ: What was this editorial context?
HC: I had been asked to write an article for a magazine, L’Arc. This issue was devoted to Simone de Beauvoir, with whom I didn’t have a good relationship. To write a text on Simone de Beauvoir without sympathising with her did not seem fair to me. I was told that it didn’t matter – one could be free. ‘Oh, so we’re free? Then I shall use the land to plant something.’ So the text was written without taking Simone de Beauvoir into account. I was expressing myself on a stage that I had been exploring for a few years in a completely individual way, based on my experiences. These experiences were partly academic, partly strictly related to my genealogy, and partly due to what I saw as an alert among women in the United States. I wrote freely: I am glad I let out those Medusa cries. I don’t know what voice she had. For reasons that have yet to be analysed, this Medusa has had an extreme power of attraction. But not in France: it was the United States that carried it. The Medusa is like a rocket that took off from the United States [1975, the year of publication of the issue of L’Arc referred to here, also marks the first joint space mission between the United States and the Soviet Union, ed.]. In all English-speaking countries, including those of the former British Empire, the Medusa is a well-known character. Why is it in France that there were the fewest echoes? This could be a way of thinking about misogyny in France: a complex misogyny, both ordinary, as it manifests itself in every country in the world, and a French misogyny, largely perpetuated by misogynistic women. The Medusa is everywhere, except here.
HJ: Everywhere, except where you are?
HC: From its launch pad, which was Paris, she left and went around the world. Over the years, it has been translated into almost every language without my being able to intervene, and very often from its English, or rather American, version. I have often worried about this Medusa of French origin travelling the universe on the basis of English. This has led to endless misunderstandings, for there are misinterpretations [contresens] in both French and English. The question of agreement between adjectives and nouns is also lost. But it was and is a fact.
HJ: Were you tempted to translate the text into English yourself?
HC: No, I had antipathies. The idea did not please me at all: so, it would be her, I would owe her everything, I would be the author of the Medusa? While providing a total opening, its flamboyant wake covers up my work. It is quite cheeky of this Medusa: it’s a sham! (laughs). Then, after years: it was nowhere to be found. I started getting messages: ‘Where is she? We talk about it, it has echoes, but there is no text’. This led to republications in every language except French, until one day a French academic living in the United States said to herself: ‘I can’t go on like this: I need the text in French’. She came to France and began to realise that it was completely inaccessible. So I was approached by certain bookshops: ‘There is a permanent, an absolutely incessant demand: why don’t you republish it?’. I finally said to myself that I had to do it. I put Galilée to work: it had its little galilean career, which was soon exhausted and disappeared, once again. The calls came in: foreign publishers were asking me what to do. I spoke to Gallimard about it: ‘It’s a pity that this Medusa story should continue its published career in this mad and maddening way’. Upon which he immediately offered to publish it in this way. She has been making a fuss for fifty years, landing all over the world. There was even a request from the Faroe Islands. Though they have always read it in Danish, they wanted it in their own tongue. Ten years ago perhaps, I resigned myself: this desire teaches me something.
HJ: In the new preface, the time of writing is 2025, but by its own admission, the Medusa is in 2024. If it is you who are ahead of her now, is she going back to her date of birth?
HC: She is getting younger because she is not ageing: I doubt she will make it to the cradle, but at least to infancy. She will never be old: of that I am sure.
HJ: You mention ‘voixiels.’ In 1975 already, one could read ‘illes’ in your text. Do you see inclusive writing [écriture inclusive] as a partial realisation of what you were calling for in 1975?
HC: The Medusa has always been ahead of everyone else. As for me, it is simply how I wrote. But people were way behind. I knew when I was writing that the women I was writing for were behind me. To move faster than the times, one has to be in a friendly, joyful and fantastical relationship with language. These are things I could afford to say back then, but I would not say today because I would sound like I am preaching from my old wisdom. But back then, I used to say to all women: ‘Come, come and play’. I discovered what it was to be a woman at that time, and it turned me upside down. ‘Cixous’ was ahead of her time: why? Because my story as a girl was unique. I entered the most biological world of women, if I can say so, at the age of fourteen. My mother was studying to be a midwife: she was still very young herself. I worked with her: she was German, she had just entered the French system. I could make her recite her lessons, she could explain things to me: questions of language, too. When I was fourteen, I saw childbirth for the first time in an Algiers’ hospital. Others followed, and I began to relate to women’s bodies, I who had not yet gotten my period. It was an experience, a drama, a solidarity, an absolute identification with the often dramatic adventures of these bodies. When I arrived in France and started looking at the state of women, often academic, often university students, I said to myself: ‘Where are they?’. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that a certain population was lagging behind in its awareness of and relationship with the body. This backwardness was even more pronounced in women who belonged to a bourgeois educated class. I realised that there was a lot of violence being perpetrated by men against women, all the time, which continues. They were unarmed because they didn’t know themselves. I saw this in my friends, but not only them: it is not always about friendship, it can be very hostile. But when one says ‘My stomach hurts’, one listens to one’s peer [semblable]. In this area, I had experience, I lived it every day.
HJ: Are the women you see around you today peers [semblables], friends or companions?
HC: Peers [semblables], always. What is close to “queer” makes sense but obscures a large part of the living world. For though there is some of that, there may be no more women afterwards – which isn’t true. Feminist movements in France are often very primitive and elementary, which is quite honourable. They are not queer: what could they say? There is something about being a woman, with a woman’s body which is not a man’s body, that belongs to this global universe. This will likely not please many: I love all that is transgender, and I love it in literature, where it has always been. But it seems to me a way of choosing, of going over to the other side, to the other camp. What a pity: I think one ought to have everything. What is to stop a woman from also being a man when she feels like it, also masculine, bisexual, animal, in short! Why would one want to go to the other side, why would one want an inverted mirror? “Woman” can mean anything. So can men, should they take this path: “extravagance” in the true sense of the word. Invention. Queer is a part of what I have done, but only a part. I watch Preciado with interest because he is someone who radically carries out. Who-was-she, no: he. It will not be remembered that this person was once a woman.
HJ: Yet it is towards Orlando that Preciado returns.
HC: But Orlando is not that: one has to do it several times, to be Orlando.
HJ: In the film, it is no longer only through sleep that transition occurs: Preciado wants to emphasise the physical, medical reality of the transition.
HC: But it has to happen through sleep, through dreaming: when one dreams one is different, one is. One finds ‘her’ who can be another. There is no reason to assign: but there, there is an assignment. That is why I always welcome animals. I do it with my cats: it is so powerful to be in contact, in exchange, in conversation with these beings who have no resistance to species. When I talk to them, they talk back, as cats. I understand more or less what they say: when I don’t understand, I tell them, and vice versa. I have no “woman” religion. What a catastrophe when I understood we would never get out of it, neither in my lifetime, nor for thousands of centuries – what a bore ! The freedom we have with this is infinite, but we always start from scratch.
HJ: Always from scratch?
HC: For this, memory does not function. All women start from scratch again. They discover it little by little. There are thus trends, and ideology. Because there is an extraordinary resistance of what changes its name, “misogyny”, “sexism”, and that this struggle is a part of being human, one always starts the discovery and the struggle anew. With “Jew”, it’s another story, for it is History as such. The most cruel, most worrying History: Evil goes there, which is not the case with “woman”, in which there is everything, always.
HJ: Do you think we will ever be done with “Jew”?
HC: I ask myself this question. One is dealing with humanity, its need to reject all the disgusting things in oneself onto the other. But I do not think it is possible in history. There may be another, late history which I do not know. I have long thought it to be western history. Yet antisemitism is mediatically imported into Japan today. In the Algeria I came from, colonial with a strong Jewish community, there was a shared history between Muslims and Jews, common to the point of making them impossible to distinguish. Of course, with French colonialism it then turned into a radical rivalry. Every day, I heard this: “dirty Jew”. Every day: daily life. It was a permanent activity. When I came to France: nothing. I was very surprised. But there was a historical explanation for this: there were simply no more Jews to hate, all had been deported. One could no longer feed the ogre. Then, it came back – the Sephardics of North Africa came and took on that old role. The emergency when I came to France was thus not antisemitism, but the question of women. Could I call this coincidence good luck?
HJ: It is this Jewish cathedral that you dream about without ever being able to build it: the impossible Jewish cathedral.
HC: Yes, I will never be able to. It supposes a certain world, an uninhabitable world. Proust wants to build a cathedral. The expulsion which could take place with homosexuality, which he calls inversion, is a part of that world. There are thereby palliatives of all kinds. Even more than impossible, this cathedral is unsayable for there are thousands of ways of being, of not being, of non-being Jewish. We do not even know to whom we speak: we are always in negative theology. I welcome with joy these limit-works, like that of Celan, for it is exactly what he feels. One must be a poet of this dimension to have the possibility of dialogue with peers [semblables] who are dissimilar. It is not about making literature.
HJ: You sometimes say that Derrida helped you to not simply live with the dead. Does he help you still?
HC: For as long as I live, this population will increase. It is an extremely disagreeable experience of desertification. Each time, it reactivates the challenge: one must keep them. Keeping is something I know how to do. He is always here. He was afraid of death, I am not. Now, the door opens and it is only a ghost. I walk and all fall down. It is difficult to maintain lightness. If it does not change my way of writing, the content changes. When one lives, as I always have, with Montaigne, it is not the same thing: he was never present, I never lost him. Such is the case with a certain number of creators that I absolutely adore, but that I do not grieve for. Literature is not lost. One sometimes says of Shakespeare or Homer that they did not exist; it would not change a thing: therein lies a freedom. One may then have fun with the text. With companions, like Nick Royle, entire zones of what makes the world in my eyes do not simply serve a function. To follow a line, to follow a play of signifiers which runs through an entire text is of the utmost rarity. There is a zone that is very seldom frequented: that is the text, and Nick finds himself there. I could share it with Derrida, but he did not like literature. However, he read philosophy in a literary manner. He respected Genet, to whom he gave everything. But I never could get him to read Lispector or Bernhard. Celan, yes, but Celan is not literature, it is pain. I could never persuade him to go to literature. He had a literary temptation, but only a temptation. Literature harbours much philosophy, but not all. Yet, when philosophy has genius, it is because it writes.
Translated by Hugo Jeudy
[Note: This text in fact draws together two separate interviews, which took place on 16 December 2023 and 12 June 2024. I would like to express my gratitude to Peggy Kamuf and Nicholas Royle for their precious comments and suggestions.]
