the secrets of the archive

8/12/2019 The Secrets of the Archive

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European Perspectives

A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticis

Lawrence D. Kritzman Editor

European Perspectives presents outstanding books by

leading European thinkers. With both classic and

contemorary works, the series ais to shape the

major inteectual controversies of our day and to

facilitate the tasks of historical understanding

For a coplete list of books in the series, see pages

V-Vll.

Geneses, Genealogies,Genres, and Genius

The Secrets the Archive

Jaqu Dda

Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic

Colubia University Press

New York


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Columbia Universit ressPubh New York

Copyright 2003 ditions Galile

English translation copyrght 209 Beverley Bie BrahicOriginally published in France by ditions Galile, 9 rue inne,75005 aris rights reserved

ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataA complete CI record for this book is available from theibrary of CongressISBN 0-233 978 (cloth)

The publishers thank the French Ministry of Culture ationalBook C entre for kindly granting a translation subvention.

8Columbia Universit Press books are printed on permanent anddurable acid-free paperc 0 9 8 7 5 4 3 2

European PerspectivesA Seres Soal Tought a Cultul Crtsm

Lawrence D Kritzman, Editor

ua Krtea Stngers to Ourselvesheodor W Adorno Notes to Liteture, o. and Rhard Won edtor e Heideer ControversyAntono Gra Prison Notebooks o and aque LeGof History and MemoryAan Fnkekraut Rememberin in Vin: e Kaus Barbie ial and Crmes

Aainst Humanity

ua Krtea Nations Without NationalismPerre ourdeu e Field of Cultul ProductionPerre VdaNauet ssassins emory Essays on the Denial the

HolocaustHugo a Critique the German IntellientsiaGe Deeuze and Fx Guattar Jat Is Philosophy?Kar Henz ohrer Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearnceua Krtea Time and Sense: Proust and the Experiee LitetureAan Fnkekraut The Deat of the Mindua Krtea New Maladies the Soulabeth adnter XY On Masculine IdentityKar L6wth Martin Heideer and Euopean NihilismGe Deeuze Neotiations 1972-1990Perre VdaNaquet e jews: History Memory and t he Present

Norbert a e GermansLou Athuer Writis Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lanabeth Roudneo jacques Lan His Le and rkRo Guberman julia Kristeva InterviewsKey Oer e Portable Kristeva

Perra Nora Realms mory: e ConstYUctio of the French Pasto Coicts and Divisi

o. aditioso : Symbols

Caudne FabreVaa e Sinular Beast jews Christias and the Pi

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Enghtenent. It stngushes the unves nsttuton

f ote nsutons foune on te ght o te u tosa evetng fo eape egous confesson an even

pschoanatc fee assocaton. ut t s aso at funa

enta nks the unves an aove a te uantesto at s cae teatue n te Eupean an oensense of the te as the ght to sa evethng puc oto keep t secet f on n te fo of cton 2

Lieaue is hen aiae to the moehanctcaecon-

stuctveuncontionai of he new umanies b theigt o sa evehing' puc puishe if on n the

fom of a cton' . Lieaue s hus one of hose ae s paces

hch sans in a nonsubss ive noncop eiive ea ion

o he soveeign of powe (he sate capa the meiaeigion) The unconionai of Liteatue is a space n

whch nohing is beon quesionng an commena

incung he moe of hnking that takes the fom of quesoning an comena. Lieaue s in ohe wos a

space in hch the mpossbi of he emocactocome

ngh be possibe. t is he even of a econsucion a

econstucon as hat hich happens Of couse thee swha Dea cas esewhee the tea appaatus3 to be

eckone wh name a he nsttutona poes whichene a wok as Lieaue' befoe i has eve bee n wien

(pubishng houses mea eview bookshops an makes

he unves sabus an so on) Howeve o think ie

V

aue as such an unconionaty is to eimagne he ie-

a fom the goun up fee of eve such posthesis tohich t has b een subonae n its moen sense bu whichae no necessa to . The iteaue tha Dea efes o

hee s a econsucionasmoehanLteatue ust as heunvesit wthout conion s no eucie to the mana-geasaion an appopiation of knowege that passesune the name of he unives toa. Ths uncon ton-

aiy s not a pue' iteaue o an uncontaminate unive

st tha exiss somewhee beon he tante pesent ouie wthin the contaminate now Rathe it s haDea efes to in this text Geneses Geneaogies Genes

an Genius' fooing Hne Cxous as the

Omnipoenceothe' [utpuissanceautre] of teaue.

What s cae Leatue . . if on n he fom ofcon' aws an unecae ne beteen the secet as

asoute sece an he phenomena a ppeaance of he sece

as such ieaue oes he secet a he same tme as jeaous guaing he secet (no in he fom of an encpion

that s poentia knowae ut as an asoute epivaon

of the powe o choose eween ea an cion).

Liteatue aows one to ea at he same me as ening the

powe to ea (in he sense of a etemnabe o sauabe

nepeaton). Lieaue pesens he igh to ea hiesimuaneous sconnecng ha gh fom an posion

of auhoi that wou eene o goven he eang. t

oes a his n he fom of an even in which enie he


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Notes

1 Jacques Derrida, The Future of the Profession or the

University without Condition (Thanks to the

"Humanities what could take place tomorrow)" in JacquesDerrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed Tom

Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

2 Jacques Derrida, The Future of the Profession', pp.

26-7.

3 Jacques D errida, That Strange Institution called

Literature, in Acts of Literature ed Derek Attridge

(London and New York: Routledge, 992).

XI

U g e q u est-ce que c 'est?1

A genius, whats that?*What o gnius?What o this common noun that claims to name that

which is least common in the world? The noungenius, one supposes, names that which never yieldsanyhing to the generaliy o the nameable Indeed the

genius o the genius, i there is any, enjoins us to thinkhow an absolute singularity subtracts itsel rom thecommunity o the common, rom the generality or thegenericness o the genre and thus rom the shareableOne may readily believe genius generous; impossiblethat it be general or generic Some would say that itamons o a oneperson genre Bu this is another wayo saying that it surpasses all genre o generaliy or thegenericit o all genre Another way o indicating that

* Th original txt of this book was th tanscipt of th opning tak ofth symposium, 'Hen Cixous: Gnss Geneaogis Gnrs, organisd by Mirill CallGrub and hld in th Bibliothu National dFranc (Frnch National Library) 22-4 May 2003.


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t exceeds all the laws o genre, o that whch one calsgere n the arts, lterary genres, or stance, or whatone calls gender, sexual derences Not to mentohumanknd n general, or each tme that one allows

onesel to say genus, one suspects that some super-human, nhuman, even monstrous orce comes toexceed or overturn the order o speces or the laws thatgovern gere

h, certaly beore I attempt, my way,much later, ater a great many detours to answer thsqueston (whats a genus? or what o geus?) , I shallrst turn t every whch way, I shal covert t Threeor our tmes at least No loger s a geus? the? about genus? ut s genus?

then? Then, a second converson, what s genius? ot geus, but genius?

Then, ater that, a thrd converson, how ow todare, overthrowng the masculnt o a French denteartcle ( ge ) , to declne ths noun n the emnne?

And lastly, nstead o turnng to the thrd person( who s ths { }genus? ), mascule or emnne,I address mysel, or reasons I shall not mmedatelydvulge, n the second person, to the secod perso:'Geus, who are you {qui tu} ? 3 I am askng you thsqueston, genus, hear, do you hear?

Certainly everthng I shal say wll be tu ' .Here now, bent on honourng the here and ow we

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have the uque good ortune to share ths place, Iam about, as they say lghtly, to deliver { tenir } 4 a speechto hold orth

How rash o me to presume to hold orth ow

unconscous I am! Ths ow or dscursve, cursve,urtve and ugtve strdng along that s commonlycaed the course o a dscourse how could t ever lettsel be held? Restraed? Contaned? How to man-tan a dscourse the here and ow? How not torenounce rom the outset, renng n ths beast, holdngorth? shall, , be unwse eough not to renoucen any case to egn ot to want to renounce and ur-thermore, holdng to my project o holdng orth, tappears that I am about to do what I can to make my

speech contan an utenable word Ths untenableword, that no one these days would stl admt holdngto, s the common noun o genus. Here apostro-phsed every genre (hey you, who are you) n themasculne, true, but rst and oremost the eminne.

Ths noun, 'genus, as we are all too conscous,makes us squrm And so t has or a log tme One sote rght to vew t as an obscurantst abdcaton togenes, as t turns out, a concesson to the geetcs othe ingenium or, worse, a creatost natsm, aword, n the language o another age, the dubous col-luson o some sort o bologsng naturalsm and atheolog based on ecstatc nspraton An rresponsble

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and docile inspiration, a drunken subssion to auto-matic writing The muses are never ar o In accord-ing the least legitimacy to the word genius one isconsidered to sign ones resignation rom all elds o

knowledge, explications, interpretations, readings,decipherings in particular in wat one hastily callsthe aesthetics o arts and letters, supposedly more pro-pitious to creation Such resigning is considered mys-tical, mysticod One is said to be conessing to dumbadoration o the ineability o that which, in the usualcurrency o the word genius, tends to link the git tobirth, the secret to the sacrice ut let us not rush todecry all secrets I mystical in Greek always invokessome secret, we shall peraps need to resort elsewere

or this word, mystical.

The geniusness o wom? Wo is it? Who are yo?Though it always marks a birt, a conception and a

creation, who would dare, at this point, to inect thename or noun o genius towards the eminnity o anorigin o te world? Here is one word { e gnie} in ournational language that has not yet been admitted intothe dictionary o the French National Academy or intoour National Library in the eminine Not even,another gramatical singularit, to reer to a singleperson, in the plural We should say, peraps, i pushed,o a single person, a man or a woman, that se is a

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genius {n gnie} or that she has genius { gnie} .N ever would we say that she is or she has, in the plural,more than one kind o genius {pls ne gnie} Thehistorical, semantic and practical singularity o this

noun is thereore such that we have always kept it orthe masculine as well as the singular One has never, tomy knowledge, recognised, in the eminine, the genisesoa woman

The uture o this word becomes thereore strangerthan the singular ate o its past I this uture is

bequeathed to us, we shall have to answer or it Thisis the responsibility I would venture to address todayWhat is going to happen with genius, that o this word,even? y choosing to write it in my title, I play, you

perhaps think, at letting you guess tat I mean to slip aproper noun in under the common one; that is, theeminine rst name and patronyic, Hlne Cixous,towards whom all o us today here now turn Morethan one {nej } genius in one

Certainly certes this warrants detours and justication

For I elieve that I am up to something other thanplay here Play at what, besides, and with whom? Firsto al, one might think, I am playing with the asenceo a word, the word genius , to be precise, in the line osubstantives belonging to the same amily in g (geneses,genealogies, genres) that Mireille CailleGruber has

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judiciously selected for the beautiful arms of the sympo-sium I am honoured to have been invited to. No, notonly have I noticed a prudent, understandable anddoubtless welfounded silence, the lack, the lapse, Ishan't say the slip {lapsus} but rather the ellipsis which

in its agrant absence cuts, like a fault line, through thesemantic landscape of an entire generation of vocablesGeneses genealogies genres in the plural that wasmissing, also in the plura was geniuses.

Much later, were I to propose something like athesis, I shoud try to show in what way the concept ofgenius if it is one, must extricate itself both from theusual meaning of the word and even from its member-ship, albeit evident and ikey, in the homogeneous,homogenetic, genetic, generationa and generic series(genesis, genealogy, genre). Extricate itsef and evenupset the order of things

I have just evoked the line of words belonging to thesame family in g to draw your attention withoutfurther ado to a multidirectiona phenomenon.6 Asort of crossroads or a chorus, shoud we wish to exer-cise our Greek memories, from Oedipus to Antigone,from the Eumenides to Helen Such a multivoiced

phenomenon must for centuries trouble the wakefuvigilance of readers, interpreters, philologists, cryptologists of all ik, psychoanalysts, philosophers, drama

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tists, historians, archivists, lovers of literature who willbend, as they say, over these fathomess depths, theoeuvre and hors l'oeuvre, or extraneous matter, thatHlne Cixous generously bequeaths to the FrenchNationa Library generosity, there's another word

from the same famiy in g, close to geneses, genealo-gies, genres and to genius Or rather, as I sha speciin a moment in order to remain close to this enigma,they wi bend over the unfathomed papers HlneCixous bestows upon or ends to this no ess gen-erous and enigmatic institution caed the FrenchNationa Library. Will it indeed prove itself a generousact of giving and giving back? And if yes, or if no, inwhat way? And aying the donation, and its donor anddonees open to what dangers, to what hazardous

responsibiities is one of the many questions that awaitus, and to which my tentative responses will be any-thing save reassured and reassuring Such questionsought to be prowing around the essence, the destiny,the vocation and the future of an institution as extraor-dinary as a French National Library, as well as aroundHne Cixous's archive (oeuvre and hors loeuvre) onthe day of this contracting, with mutual condence, ofa binding engagement and a quasiwilllike alliance,

which will be my soe topic this evening And my soetheme, for I sha rue out any remarks that do not referdirectly and egibly to what is taking place in this pace,

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talics thus keep the realty of what is said to havetaken place n realty in suspense, in literature. Theitalics make us reect upon, even bring into play, thevery body of the question: What is reality? What is anevent? What is a past event? And what does past' or

come to pass' mean, etc.? So many uncertainties oraporias for whoever claims to set a library's contents inorder, between the library and what's outside it thebook and the nonbook, literature and its others thearchivable and the nonarchivable

Therein lies literature's secret, the innite power tokeep undecidable and thus forever sealed the secret ofwhat it/she {elle} says, it literature, or she Cixous, oreven that which it/she avows and which remains

secret, even as in broad daylight sheit avows, unveilsor claims to unveil it The secret of literature is thus thesecret itsel It is the secret place in which it establishesitself as the very possibility of the secret the place it,literature as such begins, the place of its genesis or ofits genealogy properly speaking. This is true of al lit-erary genres; and as we are aware, Hlne Cixous has,among all her dierent sorts of genius, that of practis-ing, without exception every kind of literary writing,

from the critical or theoretical essay to the novel, to thetale, to theatre in all its forms. We shan't even entionpoetry for poetry is her language's eleent most

8

general of all genres at al times the generating forcebehind her work whatever genre it may be in.Furtherore the genres do not add themseves one toanother, with her they are not juxtaposed. t would beeasy to come up with a thousand examples to demon-

strate that in her ars poetca each genre remains itself, athoe, while generously oering hospitality to theother genre, to a sorts of others which come along tointerfere to haunt it or to take their host hostagealways according to the sae topodynamics of thesmaest being bigger than the biggest: not only is thetheatre in the theatre (the play's the thing . ' ) btdramas get staged in the novels the Book has the rightto speak and turns in turn into ore than one character, even the act or the scene of a play the Tale is

eshed out given a capital letter in a prosopopoeicallegory, speaking up in the rst person etc The graftthe hybridisation, the migration, the genetic utationis multiplied and cancels out dierences of genre andgener, the literary and sexual dierences.

ere we are kept at a respectful distance, within themagnetic eld, but forever at ar's length fro whatone must ca the secret of literature the secret of itsOnipotenceotherness' or the genius of its secret.

Before dening in a more formaly theoreticalmanner what mean by secret, then by genius beforereturning after a lengthy detour, to Manhattan prre

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3. Finally, this will allow us to demonstrate that thesecret is not without an anity for the sacred, withthe very genesis of that which, in a sacrice, eects the

sacred, brings forth or gives birth to the sacred andthe secret in a single act of birth. Indeed, in this or that

passage, once again in italics, what one must absolutelynot lose sight of is the Cixous idiom. I would describe

it, this idiom of a signature, as a kind of gift for lettingitself be caressed by a genius of the language that

cannot get over its utter surprise at the touch thatcomes out of the blue to move it and that breaks with

the genetic liation it respects and cultivates andenriches even as it betrays it. This betrayal out of faith-

fulness interrupts with an event the genius of the lan

guage, an unconscious genius of the language, unaware

it was capable of letting itself be thus regenerated bythat which seems to grow out of or derive from it I

am here envisioning the French language as a genius

we often say the genius of the language to designate itsgrammatical, lexical or semantic treasure, the innitepotentiality of its own resources, and I shall come back

to this gure but here of a genius of the French lan-

guage which is served, in a manner both responsible

and conscious of its inheritance, and nonetheless

violent, unpredictable, irruptive, heteronomous, transgressive, cutting, by a completely dierent kind of

genius This latter, for the rst time, softly, violently

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tenderly, opens its eyes to what lies within it, theFrench language, I mean, as if in sleep or sleepwalingin the innite dream of its unconscious, nding itself

there or nding itself back there without ever yethaving found itself there ong with the signature of

the Cixous idiom, in the passage I am about to read Ishall emphasise a literal allusion to dreamng To thelaw of dreams In so doing I mean to anticipate twomoti to my mnd unavoidable in the extraordinaryproblematics and thus the implacable law that HlneCixous brings to bear upon this national institution to

which she makes the both blessed and dangerous giftof her archive.

A On the one hand, immense and active, the dream'simmeasurable invasion of the genesis of her public

writing, hence of her literature I know of no moreimpressive and admirable example in the world of thiskind of complicity, Hlne Cixouss indefatigable and

unique translation of the innite world, of all possibleworlds of the nocturnal dream, into the incomparable

vigilance of one of the most calculating of diurnal

writings. This dream part does not merely furnish

material; it also opens up the abyssal rift of a question

everfresh (what is a nocturnal dream { rve}? Adiurnal? What is waing { rve}? What time does she

wake? And is it daylight when she begins to write? Isshe stil dreaming when she notes her dreams? Does she

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by the author, or on the contrary are the dreams the

inducers? And if so in what way and how, each time,each time in its own singular and innitely overdeter-

mined way? And what if it were all that at once, inex-tricably? A huge and daunting task for the centuries of

readers to come Of these extraordinary Forewarningswhich, in a few pages, provide so much food forthought as regards the givens, the gift and the giving of

these dreams, I shall retain here, for the reasons andaccording to the rules I have announced, but a single

paragraph, so as to point out, in three steps, the geniusof the secret and the genius of the letter, above all of

the syllable g, with which we shall never be done,however it is transcribed (the letter g, the whole word

jet', the word fragment g', as ingnie or gnalogie or

gnrique; and when the word genre' turns up in thesame paragraph, not far from genesis, the paragraph

contains all the words of our tite to know it by It mustbe quoted as an epigraph I'l do it)

After having conded her submissiveness to the lawof dreams, after having described the scene of the

morning's transcription, then the secrets that she in

turn discovers', Cixous goes on to te us what she

won't be telling us; she declares to customs the secretsshe will not be revealing to the customs agents of the

curious, the librarians, the critics and general readersA veteran Freudian, she tosses this chaenge to inter

8

pretation, to let the dreams interpret themselves, intote faces of the customs agents, not revealing thehdden contents, not revealing the proper names of the

goods she's smuggling in. She even publicly swearsthat, saying what she speaks of, she wil not say of whom.

A contagious homonymy stands guard over the secretpseudonyms and metonymies, and over a French lan-gua

ge whose idiom could hardy be better protected

aganst the bloodless transfusion of translation than by

its untranslatable homonymy

ee ecret, in thi volume, I don t give them away I never will

ey know too much [If we understand the grammar cor-

recty, it is therefore the secrets, those others, that know,

they are the subjects of the knowing: the secrets know, it

is not she who keeps the secrets that keep her. As for her,

she nds herself kept in secret, held to the secret by the

secret] I repect their reerve, their twit and turn, I admire

their diguie. ey had to be well hidden to lip through the

cck in my wall when I want in the leat prepared to let them

come. And then time paed One day you can look the dead

peron 's photo in the face. Jen one had jut died my death

you r, jet of boili ng tear kept me from eeing your face The

mon th of tear are pat. (p 2)

There's the incredible grammar of those last sen-tences, their divided meaning, rst of al, multiplied by

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he unranslaable homonymy o les mois { he monhs} bu also moi, me he sel and les moi {selves egos}or exampe (egos as numerous as weeks in a monh allo i hereore caling or more commenaries han anylibrary could conain: my deah one had jus' she says

(bu who one'? died i ransiively died i in myplace and my deah is in apposiion yours (who you?and hen up spur he jes o ears' (why jets, why hisunusual word? Tears ow hey don' oss hemselves

up one doesn' ing hem up like projecions or projeciles o block your view (kep me rom seeing youraces'. To whom is she speaking wih hese monhs

and me's you tu} and you vous} so as o recoun mydeah yours your deah and your aces; your dea

can be hers ha o he me who is speaking and who

speaks o hersel he one spoken o rom he oherplace o he dream or he deah o he you tu} whourher on in he same paragraph wil be disseced weshal see wih all he resources o is unranslaable

homonymy ha is o hese irreducibly Frenchhomonymies whose language all dreams recal (tu,meaning toi, t, u, tu, ha which is sruck dumb wihhe silence o he verb taire and se taire {o hush hushup} Ie tu {he you he silence} o he secre Ie tu ashe genius o he secre genius qui est tu { who is youwho is silenced} ec Jus as monhs o ear s have gone

by like a period o ime and he mulipliciy o 1's or

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me's who are ohers our weeks and jus so many egosso here is he tu who is you and knows o all silen orimpose silence concerning isel.

Te months o tears are past . Now I can gaze at the photo o

yourace withou tfaring up pitiless dream. I admire the tapes-try signers that give the mask its extravagant eatu res A

whole nht with Handel, and I never suspected that the stately

accents are those o the haine d' ele the hate o her! I admire

Freud' extraordinary powefrst and last cartographer these

stnge contin ents, the Shakespeare o the Night : he saw the

movements and cosmonautic calculations q the whole geness

[my emphasis] and anthropozoology othis world, its wiles and

passions, subteuges and sttagems intrigues and plots, games

gender [my emphass] , genre [my emphass agan] and

species

Dreams are theatres which put on the appearance oa play in

order to slip o ther unavowable plays between the lines o the

avowal scenes . (pp. 2-3)

Oher unavowable plays' In his way he heare o h

dream he heare o appeaance smuggles in ha

which is and remains unavowable even as i is being

avowed in he orm and according o he genre o he

avowal brings i in clandesinely as conrabandWhereupon he readerspecaor is aken aside aposropised addressed as riend recipienparicipan in

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closest, the most cultivaed ofreadings can only

conrm, work towards and cooperate n rendering

evenmoreeective.

The Forewarnings' oDream ITllYou speak to us

hus

. you reade-spectatorareaware of this but youforgetwhat

youknowsoyoucanbecharmedandtakenin Youconnivei n

yourown trickery Youpull thewool overyourowneyesTe

thinnerthanazorblade thatslips betweenyouandyourse

is an imperceptible vertical hyphenYouare a you { Tu es un

tu } DoyouseewhatImean? Vois you [It isbecauseof

this qui estt u? that began with the question genius

who are you?'] Iam reminding you ofthe dream5 delicate

work;rst it slips theinvisible laserscalpelbetween the letters:

t,u,t 'eseutu, {youvebeenhad} nextbetweenthesigneds

Siamesetwinnedbyhomonymy tues tu{youareyou } that's

why, Cant tu {being you/having remained silent} tu ne

peuxplus tetaire {youcann olongerremainslent}. Asfor

the bistouri { scalpel } il bisse toutris{ repeats echoes, all

laughter} .

IdbetterstopIdon 'twantpeopletobristlea t thethoughtof

thephilosophical andphilosophicomical resources of the lan

guage (pp 3-4)

And indeed she knows o stop on the brink of mere

cleverness, when the signer, being mere signier, is

34

no longer signicant But of he Siamese, untransat-

able homonymy of tu which reduces you you osilence and secrecy, fall ing silent and being silenced, we

know we know nohing: who is he tuyou o whomshe says tu est tu', you are, as English puts it, silenced.

Youhall not speak and you won' be spoken of, I

prose you, you promise me, I promise myself, tu seratu, you yourself and no one else. The law s yours, it isyours and only yours, t s reserved, desned for you,nurfr dich bestimmt, as it s said of he man before theaw' in Kaka As for hat which mgh, here or therein the Forewarnings', seem excessivey playful and

arcial, for example, the bsse tout rs' , you must wato see the dream of 9 January 1995 for he scene wih

Faima (the dedicaee of the book, she whom in rea

life has transcrbed he dream manuscrpts along wthso many oher exts, and deserves universal gratiude

for wha these writngs said o be transcrpions mply,

namely, no jus knowledge, conscientiousness andpaience, but a way so subtle, so intellgent of beng in

une wh he texs). The scene in question s a genesis,a hospa delvey nvolving Eve, the mothermdwfe

in real fe, whom he dreamer orders o take her bis-

touri', whle Thessa (alias Thessie) btes down on acushon on which one sees a mysterious tiger, srangely

ncknamed petgre' { liiger} who mgh this be, onewonders and who seems o know more than i les

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careful thatis, todquickly, ot toloseaistat ad

ottolet itself beovertake by what sheds herself

dig eve before she has looked for it, eve ifwe

knowshe hasbee lookigfor it for ceturiesad has

alwayskow where shehas lookedfor what she has

just found at theveryspot, ithecrook of this brach.

Herhadwritig remids me ofall the squirrels i the

world

Thus fromthe start shewriteso wakig, by had,

o theedge of thebed,o oeof thethousadorte

thousad otebooks theBNFis to iherit Shewrites

upo wakigiorder towritedowher dreams.But

ofte, as i theparagraph wehavejust read,the dream

itself comes alogtoiterrupt sleep The dreamwakes

Up.23Thedreamkeepswatch, iexible, everready to

summo up thewakefuless, the cosciousess evervigilat i the memory of the dream - ad what a

icredible memory! I kowof oetomatchit The

dream the gives the order towrite dow, to ote,

eve tobegito analyseit,thedream Whichkeepsits

force ad its iitiative ad its secret, eve as it uses

ustitigly of the power it has over her, over the

writigthat bedsits wilig bodytoit. 'Shewrites on

wakig' , so this must be uderstood not oly as she

writes at the momet of wakig' , but alsojustasshe

writesi pecil,iik,byhad' , shewrites fuelledby

theoeiriceergofthedream, asoewouldsay of a

40

missile that it is propeled, for example, ad drive byatomic eerg. Her writig is set i motion by wakig,at the moment of wakig but also, thaks to the eergof wakig, she works o wakig, she burs the eerg

of a wakig which is the order of the dream as well at

the order of the dream but ot of the order of hedream, at the order of the dream which also orders

actively ad passively, its ow iterruption The dreaswitches itself o. How ca this be? It falls silet while

giving itself to be spoke of, i its place It falls silentitis you: il est tu. But the wakig, this rst wakig is

already o the lookout, it keeps watch with all itsmght, it keeps watch without stit, it supervises, still

it keeps vigil over the dream, it dreams of rousing all

the powers of the iterrupted dream Of the dream

that has just falle silet, for it has just fale silet/itcomes to fall silet { il vient de se taire} , it comes fromthat which it sileces eve as it speaks Wakig is poised

o the edge of the silet dream, as if the dream that hadpassed might still be comig or comig back (A

occasion to touch, too rapidly, i passig, upon the

unfathomable eigma of a sort of disaliation, i the

great laguage of Frace, betwee two word famlies

oe mght have thought related. I refer to a surprisig

etmological dissociation betwee the nous rve

(rverie rvasserie) or the verb rve on the oe had,apparetly of ukow origi, pure Frech, lackig

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a situation of heteronomous obedience to the

Omnipotenceother of literature Now the caesura ofthis other waking does not fall between the time of the

dream and the rst moments of waking, but leaps in tomake an interruption in the interruption that sets inmotion the work of the vigilant writing, the diurnaltime of the literary act proper. This, while miracu

lously keeping the thread of the dream going (this, forme, is the miracle), the gift of the writing, nonetheless

cuts it o instanty and knowingly transgures all thegivens, taking into account, so as to incorporate as well

as surpass them, all the resources of a vast literary expe-

rience, an incomparable science of the language, of thethousand and one libraries of universal literature so as

to create events totay without precedent, and without

imitators, no schools possible, there where, as I shallshow in a moment, the genius consists precisely in

making the work come, giving it room, giving, period,giving birth to it as event, paradoxicaly breaking withall genealog, genesis and genre This is where, as I shall

explain more fully in a moment, the geniusness of a

genre of geniuses is no longer part of the homogene

ous family of genesis, genre and genealog One couldnd an example of this rupture, within the ction

itself, in Manhattan, once more, when, following the

passage transcribed in italics, on Monday, 2 April 2001

(on the subject of the word sacrifce and the 'force of the

44

Secret' ) , se continues, in roman type: TheeveningofCertes I noted' , etc. , words folowed, as at teverybeginningof the bookand rst chapter entitledCertesa Sacrice' , by an impressive piece of work on te

words cte act or aux cts de { coast, hill rib . . beside . at theside a

longside } her brother Thebookopenswita sentence that ought, likesomany others,to beremembered foreternity : I didn't want to gotoCertes andthereIwas on mywayside bysidewithmybrother I'm forever doingwhat I didn't wanttodo I

wastinking . . .' ThetoponymCertes, in its adverbialform certes' { certainly truly to be su re} once againcapital-etterised, is the anagram or cryptonym ofSecret Inthe title Certes a Sacrice' , one cannot tel

whether the capital letter marks the rst letter of the

phraseor a propernoun Afterwards, one canunder-stand, providedone is nottoo dozy, that Certes, capitalC, is one of theinnumerablecrypts, the turninginto-aproper nounof an adverb Certes is the Secret the,anagrammatic transformation of Secret Certes is thetrope or the Secret place of the story that you wilnever reach Certes, as place, is oneof the mostfantas-tic personages, whichis tosay, in the rhetorical sense,as gureor trope, and as secretdestination or secretdestinee the somebody wo keeps the force Sec

ret,its anagram Unless it is the force of the secret thatkeeps her Each time I have said certes ' , andyoumay

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ave noticed tat tis as been often, secretly I wasururing secret, te reverse of a welkept secret

Tis waking witin te waking is terefore teextree vigilance of a ost rened and practised literary conscience, a ost audacious one as we, but also a

igly supervised and supervising one, one skilled likenone oter at founding itself on literature's secret, tatis, on te cryptopoetic power tat seals up everyting,sign and seal of universal literature in new Frenc lan-guage, everyting one ust not tell Se seals o, seblocks, blocks as one boards up a door or as one sentences te reader not to read wat e reads or con-demns24 i to read wat e doesnt know ow to readTo stand before te boardedup door, wile e strolls inte endless labyrint as if te door stood ajar Every-

ting tat Hlne Cixous gives to te BNF will reainsealed, readable unreadable, tat is, arked wit te signor verdict of tis boarding up wic not ony as neverkept anyone fro reading, but opens on te contrary aninnite eld to reading and its pleasures to te love ofte Onipotenceoter of Literature Te door is

barred but please coe in Make up your own ind. Irecal te subtitle of Benjamin a Montaigne: you mustnttell, and te subtitle, in parenteses, of te most power-ful play I ave ever seen, he Story you will never know) .

Is wat separates genius, ten, fro everyting tatgt seamlessly connect it to a genesis, a genealogy or

46

a genre, not tis absolute event tat marks te unde-cidabe liit between te secret and the penomenonof te secret, between te absolute secret and tepenomena appearing of te secret as suc? Tis iswere te genius of inspired events pays along wit

Literature, wit its Omnipotenceoter For Literaturedraws tis undecidable line te instant it wips tesecret it keeps fro you into its ciper, out of sigt,true, but tat it keeps {garde} absolutely wile andingit to you to look at again { regarder} , but witoutoding out any ope of your grasping it, tat is, wiledepriving you of te power or te rigt to coose

between reaity and ction, between ction wic isaways a rea event, like te pantas, and socalledreality, wic ay always be noting but a yperbole

of te ction Tat, at east, is ow I interpret te wordoter' in te ter tat Cixous reserves for LiteratureOnipotenceoter' { (Tut-puissance-autre' } I salnot insist, aving done so at lengt esewere, on watse does wit te word puissance' in te Frenc lan-guage I soud, owever, like to attept to expainte oter, te attribute oter', in te expressionOmnipotenceoter' Tis omnipotence {puissance}peculiar to literature consists in giving you (it is a gift,of genius, and generous), in giving you to read at tesame time it prevents you {fro reading}, or ratertanks to te power {pouvoir}, tanks to te grace

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project, objection and abjection, one could add subjectile) I have just mined in order to make them comunicate underground with the name of the father ng as well as with a German idiom also present in heCixous genealog through her Germanspeakngmother, thus with the Heideggerian thought of being-thrown as Gewoenheit but also with the translation ofGegenstand of this object that one also used to call,before Kant, Gegenwu( is thrown in front, aheadof, counter to), and thus of all that runs counter to or

encounters in the poeticalsemantic chain whosethought elan adjusts and recongures in Te Meridianegen counter, Gegend the region, Gegenwort thecounterword of Bchner's Lucile, the Gegenwart thehereandnow, and Begegnung the encounter); we

must grant that this extraordinary threeletter syllable { }2S ( . hinjet has at least two semant elds portees n t esense of the musical stave, of period of gestation and oflitter or brood) or, equally, two extraordinary destinies

On the one hand it covers and stirs up the wholehistory of that which, in thought, philosophical

thought or the thought of philosophy in particular,

such as it seems to me, in its most original develop-

ments, brought into play in this work, nds itself pre

congured by the gure of the jet (object, subject,

project, objection, abjection, Gegenwu EntwuGewoenhe it) and by the gure of jeter-lancer {throw

50

toss} in the toss, the uncertain toss of the dice namelythe idea of the event, of the arrivingness of hateve;or whoever arrives, of the other as that which happens,

an idea forever indissociable from the experience in thecourse of which the dice are tossed

But, on the other hand this powerful formaising ofthe et' which encompasses the greatest generalit ofthe Cixous library, which forms her eement in thesense of general milieu', is also strewn about like an

atomic particle, an a but insignicant phoneme orgrapheme, as element, here in the sense of the atom-

ists' stoikheion in the sense of the letter or of theminimal composition of letters in the sylable, word or

word fragment. Like a strewing ete} of words forexample, and I sha limit my clues to a certain dream

of 25 March 1997 from Dream I ll You Withoutmapping all possible routes through this very densepage, I shal favour the red line of a re, the re of an

ardent ove which enames the whole dream andwhose re, one might say, catches the word, from the

etter to the syllable, then to the vocable, jet jeter je

t adore je { I adore you I adore you ad I you} . Here aresome fragments of this dream:

In this huge fair big as cty sprung up for a day every-thing keeps us apart and everythng unites us. The

miracle, or our luck is that despite everything we

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how to read, how to read her, I don't believe has hap

pened yet, save in some rare instances. There is, certes,an undeniable celebrity quality, Hlne Cixouss aura

and global reputation But strangely, these go alongwith a lack of appreciation, in France above al This

state of aairs deserves lengthy, discriminating analysesThese would, needless to say, rst of al take intoaccount the writing or the poetics, they would study

the language whose untranslatability, although rootedin the French idiom, for that very reason, paradoxical

as it may seem, resists the codes and customary usagesof French language and lierature It resists them, one

might as we say it encounters erce, frightened,

threatened, denied resistance. The same analysesshould show how these resistances are tied to those of

the people and powersthatbe of French culture, itsuniversity, its schools, above al its media What Hlne

Cixouss work does to these codes is a storm so unpre-dictable and so intolerable that there is no question of

her garnering a folowing The dearth of readersformed by or to this work makes the clearsighted,

insightful and premonitory hospitality that the BNFgrants her here today al l the more signicant We must

pay extraordinary homage to this institution We must

acknowledge it as the prestigious and sole depository of

copyrighted publications, certainly- certes- and of hal-lowed archives But this keeper of the pasts noble her

54

itage is also, a s it happens, because of its very traditionality, the bold and prophetic forekeeper, I dare say, of

masterpieces to which, despite al the resistances I havenoted, a future is promised Such a forekeeper is vital

for the Omnipotenceother of literature, inasmuch as,without being nationalistic, this literature, in thiscountry, is linked in its events to the body of the lan-

guage called French whose life and survival it ensures:a timetocome in a word I am sure I speak for a of

Hlne Cixouss admirers when I express my gratitudeto the BN but gratitude is due, above all, needless tosay, to MarieOdile Germain Better than anyone, in al

its minutiae, she knows the interminable and daunting

task she assumes with such generosity, devotion and

timetried competence

That which I sha try to approach as I attempt toredene genius is not unrelated to this heteronomy

that delivers us, in literature, over to what Hlne

Cixous calls the Omnipotenceother The hyphenbetween these two words seems destined to indicatethat these three signications, the absolute, the power

ful and the alterity, are basicaly one and the same

thing, the same Cause (Ursache as she often species),

and the same law as literature We would be wrong

to think that this experience of genius is merely a

matter of obedient and passive reading; it tries theendurance that throws us into the writing And if this

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questions in the ethical or deontological sense of the term(what has one the right to classi as literary ction oras nonliterary document? Who authorises whom to

unveil what of the secret or of the nonsecret in a

public work of literature? Who authorises whom andauthorises himself what in order to permit the divulg-

ing of such and such identiable iations or relation-ships in the genesis of the work employing privatenonliterary documents (dreams and letters, for

instance) it has been legay decided wi never or notfor decades enter the public domain, etc?).

This is why I had to cut short my rst quotation at

the word ibrary', at the words tombstone of a

library' These words aow us to conjure up an a butmute institution, dedcated to the deatly silence of a

tomb closed up over its genius, that is, over life (forgenius, as its name indicates, always bears witness for

le) A tomb supposedly closed over genius; that is,ver the life of the secrets it keeps; for this alusion to

the library of Yae University, as setting of events thatreall happened, aready opened, like the abyss at thebottom of a tomb, a the probems of this library we

are in, as if the word library, as it stands in the sen-

tence quoted, already contained the space and the

future of this library; as if the word were already in-

nitely greater, more abyssal, than the conservatory towhich one imagines one condes it as a particle of the

58

body of ones body of work Everything that is happening here today was already foreseen, glimpsed, tod,

predicted, even prewritten or prescribed in the YaleLibrary in 1964 Date, coincidenty, if I may conde inyou, when I had the astonishing uck to meet Hlne

Cixous, who had not yet published a word The near-ness of this meeting at the Bazar is archived, moreover,on page 55 of Manhattan, in the list of incipits' I cantherefore, swear, attest, certes, that the deed really hap-pened in reality', in a reality stranger than ction,athoug Hne Cixous remains responsible for herapocalyptic evaluation of the thing She indeed writes:Like therst time that she had ((seen" [quotation marks at"seen] Derrida at the Caf Balza And similarl whenshe meets Gregor in the Li rar Apocalpses tha t know not

what the areThis apocalyptic event in the Yale Library deserves

to have been so aptly caled, famed, named primal

scene' by Hlne Cixous: The fateful primal scene

[ takes place in realit [ ] in the tombstone of aibrary at Yale.'

The atopic, crazy (in Greek atopos aso means mad',extravagant') topologic, the unthinkabe geometry of

a part bigger than that of which it part, of a part morepowerful than the whole, of a sentence out of propor-

tion with the what and the who of that which containsit and whoever comprehends it, the atopia and the

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pori o n pprently tomic eement which incudesin its turn, within itse, te eement tht overows itnd with whic it sprks sort o chin rection, ver-itble tomic explosion, I shnt ony insist on thiswen I return to te interrupted quottion I something is redy not obvious, it is perhps the beong-ing to literture o the quoted nd interruptedsentence, te reerence to te l ibrry t Ye nd to thepriml scene clled real in the very plce in wich itmigt ve been ntsised For I hve excerpted thissentence rom tht wich one cs in French, gin inthe strnge grmmr o mscuine genre, th

e prire

d'insrer o Manhattan The publishing house, Editionslile, is but lone tody in not mking do withun quatrie de couverture {bckothebook copy},

yet noter problemtic mscuine, nd in keeping theexquisite trdition o the prire d'insrer ive Let uspy homge to one o the privileges nd honours othis extrordinry editori institution, yet notherreson or Michel Deorme to be with us tody Theprire d'insrer is one o Michel Delormes precious gitsto the B ditions ie pubishes prires d'insrero type never seen ny more, prires d'insrer signed bythe uthors, prires d'insrer tht re not n intrinsic prto the work they introduce but occsiony hve gret

literry vlue nd constitute genre o their own,works or opuscules in their own r ight. The prire d'in

60

srer I ve just quoted is mniesty nd egibly signedHne Cixous But it is not rightully prt oManhattan, the work o ction sid to be utobio-grphicl nd entited Manhattan tht it purports topresent or to metonymise. by itse tereore itrises, reitertes nd symbolises te legl problem o

imits tt we hve just evoked Wt is outside ndwt, rom the outside, perchncends tseprt o theinside s wel? I remnd you tht Dedans {Inside} wsthe title o one o Hlne Cixouss rst books pub-ised in 1969 wrded the Medicis Prize, publishedby two other houses, including Les ditions desFemmes; i I insist upon tese editori dt, it is

becuse the coming study o the lie nd work, s othe whole Hne Cixous rchive (oeuvre nd hors

l'oeuvre or extrneous mteril) wi hve to mke con-siderble room or wht is not mere editoril circum-stnce surrounding the work, but istory o thiscountrys editoril politics, ence in trut o its wholecuture, its politicl culture notby, during te psthlcentury

(Prenthesis. In te gret nd incredibe topoogic ote set theory tht I m so doggedly nysing ere, Ive once gin used the expression se trouver {to

nd onesel, to hppen, to hppen upon} To pointout tt something rom te outside, s outside,

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trouver of its tropes, of its supposed or haphazard etymologies, without venturing into the Greek or Latinand German tropes o f encounter (tn), shall imitmyself to reading a few sentences, from the very endof Or. The narrator is ecstatic at the fathers letters,everything must be read between the lines 1 have

ec

-

tioned o: 'I never expected such grace [ ] t Sbeautiful This proud syntax, the uprightness of its

bearing recognise the rhythm, it belongs to theantique armation of being [ . vital assent [

am utterly delighted: it is a high calm vast impersonalspace in which Ifnd myse [this time in whih Ifdmysends itself written, to draw attention to tself, nitalics] Without pain, without memory without for-getting without weight without me But as subime

joy I nd myself the second time without italics andwithout indicating the place: it is not there that she

nds herself, but simply that she nds herself, she nds

hersef for the rst time or nds herself again at lastshe nds herself, thats a, absolutely, utterly hersel I am adrift on the lips of the letters like a smile hence,

if, in the end, she nds herself somewhere, she nds

herself absolutey, reexively, to be sure, but mean-

while she nds herself in a place, namely, as the fol-lowing sentence informs us, adrift " on the lips of the

letters like a smile] Here is the promise of a textwithout reproach

64

Thefnds itse thus both site and event, the taking-place of an absoute innocence, of an antique arma-tion of being like a 'vital assnt without faut, before

any faut, any guilt, any resentment and any reactivitYes, I nd myself, yes, here is where and how I nd

mysel This is aso, et me say, my own feeling: that it isunique ad I take it as an arming act of grace, an actof conrmation and of consent, of assent, each tine I

discover that she has found before me, that which Ibelieve myself to be the rst to have found, this or that,

a by mysef, there where I nd mysef, and this is, as iswell known, in a place and in the mddle of a history

utterly dierent from hers, where I nd myself ndingwhat she, herself, has already found, there where shends herse And I dont then feel any debt, any guilt,

any resentment Whatever she gives me, whatever shends hersef nding before I nd myself nding it in

turn, owe her nothing I beieve this to be exceptionalAnd not just in my own life where I didnt expect any

such act of grace In this same parenthesis , I shall condeanother silar experience that remains for me hence-

forth inseparable from the preparation of this lecture I

had already written, I shal even dare to say elaborated,formalised to the best of my abilities, and even printed

out everything you heard earier concerning the turbu-

lence of the et, of the g, of the jet, of the letter getc, of the Gewoenheit and of the Jete when, in the

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course of rereading Manhattan I come across a passage

which, analysing the aleatory combination of omnipotenceothers, notes the secret, again this is her word,

of the psychical conductors and navigations along

nucleotidic vessels unsuspected by me towards the ale-atory meeting point where the accident takes place in

my sensibilit' (p. 12 1 ) . She makes note of two suchaccidents, and before the one that leads back to illness

at an eary age and death from lung disease, here is whatshe writes: ' 1 . The letter G the association between thenames the tendery loved elements of the Georges andthe unrecognised name of Gregor; the impossibility in

1964 sti for me to pronounce the wordsj' ai and all the

other angelwords in j 'ai g jet gel, etc., instinctively I

always tried to avoid any disturbing contact with G but

it is everywhere in disguise in the French language.Another example of a debt for which I feel not the

slightest indebted: after having, all by myself, asso

ciated, justiably I believed, initiay, that which in hersurpasses oth sexual and literary genre, I came across,

as if for the rst time, I swear, a certain italicised

passage, in Manhattan again, which says the foowing(but any reading worth its salt would regenerate the

entire context a truly endless task):

Everything is perhaps already (played) there in the undecidablednition of the deck chir {la chaise longue} a discrete and

66

al l the more i nsidious gureor t he hermaphrdite: i n the trans-

gression the l iterary genre; in the transgression osexual genre.

I should hae recognised t he demon the deck chai (p 1 27

Whereupon, this also needs to be pointed out,

switching to roman type, the story slips the wordgenius, with more lightness and irony, into the mouthof Eve, the mother:

- Letters always were your weak point says y mother,

whereas I the genius who sent e special letters in which

he was talking from London, [ J in 1933 while was

in Berlin in a trice I sent hi packing (Loc. cit)

Elsewhere, Eve again issues a clearsighted warning

against genius:

You arent capable of distinguishing between a genius and

a liar

As for me don't even read the letters of some dubious

genius (p 196

There you have Eve, the mother, on the wordgen us .She keeps it at arms length. Eve is wary of geniuses,

she has learned to be suspicious of men of genius. The

truth is, these socaed men of genius are nothing but

selfsled geniuses, they take themselves for, want to

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love for Literature (I had such love for Literature . . )it seems to put an end, on account of literature, to allhypotheses of genius She has loved him for hiscounterfeit genius, hence believing blindly in a qualityof genius that Gregor has successfully faed (devilish ashe is) but he himslf would have lied to be loved as agenius of a countefeiter, thus as a veritable evil genius,succeeding by means of slyness and an admirable aswell as amiable devilishness, in passing for a genius andin maing himself love lie an authentic genius, thereal McCoy. The evil genius may be he who under-stands better than others, how to pass for and maehimself loved well and truly lie a genius.)

End of this parenthesis that will nonetheless serve as

introduction to what I wish to say about genius',wherever we meet up with it, wherever it occurs, if itdoes, and wherever it sets the scene for an event that,far from tting into the series, into the hmgeneus(the word is apt) sequence or ongoing liation of agenesis, a genealogy or a genre, brings about the absolute mutation and discontinuity of all others. How canthis be? I shall attempt to be more precise about this inmy conclusion, from the point of view as always of thelibrary archive but relating it now not only to the inci-

sive occurrence of a rupture but also to the aporia of agift that gives more than it gives and than it is given to

70

now, both on the part of the giftgiver or giftgiversand on the part of the receivers the gift given withoutnowing it, unawares, and thus without acnowledge-ment, a gift that never seems to be one, to have thequality of genius, and which therefore calls for no gratitude nor any conciousness of giving. Genius is a giftthat never appears such, lie what it gives. This might

be its other secret dimension. Hence the irony thatallows a countefeit and countefeiting genius to giveus food for thought on the subject of genius.

One last return to my quote from the prire d' insrer ofManhattan, at the point where I left o In it, wealready saw the multiplication of the toponymcal andtopological paradoxes that come along to cplicate

this sort of set theory that Hlne Cixouss archivablecorpus brings to mind. That which I henceforth namecorpus includes wors published under the heading ofliterature and texts of all inds that are neither depen-dent on nor independent f the literary oeuvre strictsensu and as such. A set theory of this corpus ought toca upon what one might consider axioms of incompletion, a system whose closure remains nonsaturableinsofar as the belonging of an element to a set neverexcludes the inclusion of the set itself (the biggest) in

the element that it is supposed to contain (the small-est). The smallest is big with the biggest, the small is

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f b b f d d


46/56

forever be essentay ncapabe of deternng, and afortiori takng possesson of, that whch t wecoes,sheters, safeguards, that whch t has the sgna vrtueof oerng hosptat to.

And ths s good. Theren may e some quaty ofgenus, f there s any, a genus gven and gvng.

There at the heart of ths aance, ths aoyage, thssebnce and resembance of homogenety, thethread s cut,28 and t s the cut of a genus, aong athe Gs. Instead of proposng a ong theoretca de-onstraton, I prefer once agan to quote a few nesfrom Manhattan:

I didnt look at him.

I was struck by the onomastic resembance between

his name and that of my son the dead but I immediatey

pushed away this sembance of resemblance what coud

be phoneticaly more removed from Georges than

Gregor, thats when he drew my attention to the anagram

saying that up until now theyd been caled Georges from

father to s on in th e family, meaning his an d that he had

been born to cut the cord I am he one who sees to the

cutting of the cord says he. He was missing a tooth on

the side on top, you hardy noticed it Gregor?

I must have ooked at him. thought of my son whose

name is of the earth [Georges a georgic or geotropicaname: Hne Cixouss corpus constitutes her eds and

76

one nds therein a text entited Views ofmy ands';* one

might dream of geogeneaogy or geotropism and speak

of a comprehensive geography of her work her genius

is be cause o f its many languages roed into one, and

Algeria into France in ageriance geographica] whose

disappearance is sti so cose and aready so distant with

what remains of the trembing assurance proper to

orphaned mothers who make beieve they don't fear

being swept o their feet with regret Then right away

I ceased turning back I got up I headed for the Library.

(pp. 89-90)

On the subject of these few nes, so as to cut shortn turn, I sha restrct ysef to two na reveres ortwo suppostons {supputations}.

The rst, certany - certes the ost rsky, goes o ntwo drectons at once both towards a stuatng ofgenus and towards the everparadoxca ste of tsexpresson. In other words towards ts address, towardsthe 'thou { t u } of ts address By a secret rasng of thestakes, by a hyperboe of rony that akes matterseven ess decdabe, that whch surey ponts, to yway of thnkng, towards a sharpy nongenetc, non-geneaogca, nonhoogeneous understandng of

In Heln Cixous. Croises d'un ouv (Paris: Galie, 2000).

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matchboxsized cake of soap still ivorywhite no doubt

stil packed in its glossy jaundiced paper vest with the

logo of the Kings Crown Hote.

Why have never thrown out the 'incriminating bits ,

wonder, I wrote this question as it came, noted the

expression incriminating bits and didnt touch it. Thisis a question, this is a fact.

Or perhaps I ought to have asked myself why I had kept

or have kept the 'evidence? This would require scrupu

ous reection, an analysis to which we should devote

ourselves some other time

To say have kept would be an overstatement, have

not saved, protected, the idea has never crossed my mind

On the other hand, Ive never had the idea of discard

ing This is a fact: in the little room in the form of a

tunnel that sometimes we cal a cellar sometimes a store-room someimes an archive a few cardboard boxes con

taiing the remains, vestiges, proof pieces of evidence,

boxes oce led with win bottles that end up contain

ing terrible secrets A matter of many, many letters, draw

ings, a number of audio tapes , dating from the spring of

1 965 as well as a few casset tes

Might there also be some objects? Dinky little boxes

for which would have given ten years of my life, the las t

ten?

That the evidence should still be there is in its elfnote

worthy. (pp 745)

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My last sUppo Ston revoves around the genesis ofManhattan, it stie, itslength of conceptionand birthdate, its genealog and genre, if you like The impatient patience of itswriting was, I reckon ,hauntedbythe BN itdwelt intruth in the arcane pa sts ofFrenchliterary genius thats le

ep noore and over which theBNF watches, and over whichinparticuartheBN F'sfuture, beyondits past, keeps watch. The BN F's tasksto come are already turning up to torent theManhattanarchive.

Onthis top ic, allowe, in passing, tomake a con-jecture, another nameforspeculationor supposition. Isha assue, probably outrageously, its responsibiitThisis that rst ofa,givento or depo sited intheBNthe Cixous co rpus ,i f its deposi ting or donation i sto be

meaningful, thatis, ifit is to have a future, shouldbeatthe heartof an ac tive research centre, of a newkind,open toscholarsfromall parts of theword. Asformyaforeentionedsupposi tion,naely that the past andfuture of theBNF is one of themotifs ofManha ttan I,sha back up this supposition, this supputation, what a

word, with a sngle example.

It s o happens that a recent, and thorough re-reading

of Remembrance Tings Past for a recent and unprec

edented seminar course led Hlne Cixous to write

the folowing, excerpted from a long reverie on the

destiny' into which, she caims, Proust fel'. Fell

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tomb is he wo, it is not just any wo. Poust issuppose to have fallen into o stumble onto hisestiny. As in al genius stoies, its about the ineluctable chance wheeby the ice fall on this sie an notthat. Between the veb to fall, moeove, to fal hee o

thee, to fall upon, to fall upon this one o that one, tofall upon a estiny, an the veb s trouvr {happenupon, n onesel, thee is a common mak of contingency which always ceates a special case. The cas,as it happens, is casus, that which falls as it falls. It ischance o chanc { ate on which a payment fals ue,tem } . Often both at once fo bette o fo wose. O nefalls, fo bette o o wose, upon this o that, him ohe, as the l uck an the cossing of paths woul haveit. ust as Stenhal, Cious ecals, owne up to

anothe tumble o his hose, to having falen o hishose again, tough luck fo his hose no oubt, soPoust, accoing to the epession I mae use of tobegin with, foun himself in place of someone else,an lne Cious says Poust also fell into a estiny,at least, as naato, in place of someone else. As fa asbetine was concene he was sue it might have notbeen he he love, it coul have been {ut pusomeone else. (Supu c ut pu he wites in his manu

scipt in the BN) ll it took was . . (p 45)Whethe Cious ea this Supu in a manuscipt ofPousts at the BN as she claims, o whethe its

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anothe bight iea of he ction, I havent the meansto vei an inee it mattes little. This is witten ina

novel an is st an oemost novelistic. But it is sig

ncant that the ction s houl have put this Supu ina manuscipt suppose to have been happene upon in

the BNF achives.The Supu { ighthavebeen} , (SUPU) in he shothan, supposes anothe possible encounte, anothepossible love, anothe possible stoke of estiny. lneCious has not only evoke, sinceely o not, it matteslittle, he access to the BNF achives, to Pousts manuscipts, she also points to the fact that Poust stumbleonto a estiny (an al of Manhattan an he entieoeuve consists in showing, in not a few pimal scenes,the estiny she heself has stumble onto, an onto

what and onto whom, unening is the list of the singulaities that she has eithe stumble onto o com acrossas an Englishspeaking Poustian woul have it) . S he haespecially been stuck with amiation, by the abbeviating an playful an leane an pecious an viill-Fnc contaction of cet pu (SUPU fo shot) inplace of c ela auait pu ; an even ifshe mae it up, thiscomic wo that, in fou so vey oveeteine lettes,SUPU, simultaneously busts out laughing, phoneti

cises the witing an above all fomalises, via this conitional past which thus meets its algeba, eveythingone might have to say about any contingent event

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Translator's Notes

I am grateful to Hlne Cixous Laurent Miesi andEric Prenowitz for reading the translation-in-progress

and providing corrections clarications and nspiration. I am solely responsible for the aws that remain.

My ambition has been to stay as cose as possible toDerrida's syntax, which with its use of parataxis frag

ments deay double negatives asides and afterthoughts in or out of parentheses grace notes ( 'certes . ') and

digression (etc. ) would in itself be worth close analy

sis for what it might reveal about the saping of his

argument

Jacques Derrda's intertextua comments are in

parenteses ( ) and brackets [ ] as they are in te orig

inal text; the transators comments and alternative

readings are in braces { } where such proximit is usefu

and not too distracting; oterwise they are reegated to

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l i hi lk D id il d hi di ' i b k f i d ff l


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- \

later in his talk Derrida wil draw his audience'sattention to his frequent use of this word and pointout that certe is an anagram for ecret We decidedto leave certe in the text, translating it, now anagain, as certainly'.

3 tu: the second person singular/familiar pronoun inFrench; it is also the past participle of the verb tare(to fall silent) Thus gne qu et/e tu can meangenius who is you', genius who are you?' and/orgenius who has fallen silent'. Throughout thislecture Derrida plays on al the meanings of tu

4 tenir (to hold): in French one does not make orgive a speech, n tent un dcur Derrida plays onvariations of this expression mantenr for instance ,means maintain or hold by hand (man +tenr) and

mantenant means now, making for a largelyuntranslatable compression of meanings in thispassage

S How rash of me: in fact what Derrida says, Cequ 'l faut d' ncncent , means, literally, how muchunconscious' - in the Freudian sense is needed topresume to hold forth.

6 multiirectional aplu eur e in French e(ways, roads, paths) is a homophone of x

(voices), hence the shift from roads to chorus.7 liation: cals to ind l (threads) as well as l(son or sons); hence in this passage and elsewhere

92

in te bo ok tropes of weaving and t ropes of famlyrelationships will overap.

8 intriguing plot: in French ntrgue eans plot';Jacques Derrida writes n ntrgue la plu ntrguante

9 as it happens : in French, e true is literally it(he) nds itself' as well as it happens ' . The manymeanings of this French expres sion are played uponagain and again in the text; soetimes in English itwill be translated as it happens'; at other times bythe more literal it ( or she) nds it/ herself ' .

1 0 n ouns names nm in French means both (oreither) noun' and nae'. Thus, further down,when acques Derrida writes un prnm prperone must hear the overlapping' of prnm (rst

name) and nm prper (proper noun).1 the prire dinsrer: a (loose) page or two of text

inserted in a book and which summarises, in a stylebetween that of an author 's foreword and that of ablurb, the book's contents.

12 Omnipotenceother: Derria explains later inthe text and in greater detail in his book H C pura e cet a dre . . (Paris Galile, 2002), that theword puance as Cixous uses it, is, perhaps,

formed from the subjunctive pue (may, might,let it . . ) Its sense therefore is that of potency. Inthis translation, puance wi be translate as

93

' d h ' hl i ll b 2 h i f h i h F f


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;i

omnpoence' and mgh' whle pouvoir wll beransaed as power'

1 3 given place led to or provided the occasion:

n Frenc donner lieu may mean all hee hngs4 One has no more eyes: n Frenc plus d'yeux du

tout, n whch one may also hear plus deu (nomore god)

5 capital-iterature: Derrda plays on hehomophony of he leer 'L and e word elle (she)

6 issue from tissue of iterature: Derrdawres 'A mns que Dieu toutpusant ne soit issuede Littrature e ou tPuant tisue de Littture, nwhch one hears boh ne ot su and ne ot-issue.God comes from s born of engendered by leraure bu s also he su of leraure

7 L'Ange au secret . the secret angel: n Frencau secret s an expresson wh a mulpc ofmeanngs some of whc are unfolded n he followng nes of he ex

18 stubbornly hushed up: n French ttu crypt et tucrypttu { subborn cryped and hushed up }w pays on all e possbe meanngs of hevarous co mbnaons o f sounds and syllables

9 delirium: n French dlire a combnaon of he

negave prex d and lire (o read) n he nex senence Derrda plays on oublire, a combnaon ofoubler (o forge) and lire.

94

2 the crying out of the sacrice: n he Frenc ofManhattan Cxous wres a re: l { cresson } wc has he same sound as sacrce

2 1 s ' entenda: anidiomwicusestheverbentendreo hear reexvey (o ear onesel us eray

someone he ars oneself keepng he secre22 with the help of waking: n French he expres

son au rveil ends self o e varous nerpreaons Derrda develops n s se con of s ex

23 The dream wakes up: s passage connuesand develops he pay on e vocable rve, found nrve (dream) rveil (wakng) rveiller (o wake) veilleand veller (reaed o keepng or beng vglan) andsueiller (supervse overlook) Here rvervelle may be ransve or nransve; ha s he

dream sef wakes up or he dream wakes (er) p24 seals . . . blocks . . . sentences . . . condemns:

in every case the verb Derrida uses is condamnewc can means al hese hngs

25 two semantic elds: Derrda uses he wordporte, whch can mean musca save and ler orbrood among many oher hngs

26 stroke of genius a trumpedup one:

Derrda s playng on he phonc coseness of e

French expresson avoir un coup de gnie (ave abrlan dea) o e coup du gne (he srokeblowof he gens) whc s muc more ronc

95

27 Silent genius : Derr ida has written 'Legne qu est


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27 Silent genius : Derr ida has written Le gne qu estu ' , which means 'genius which has falen silent,but the ear may also hear ' e gne qu es u' , 'thegenius who is you. See note 3 .

28 the thread is cut: in French e es coup liter-

ally 'the thread is cut b ut also 'the (telephone) lineis cut A coup de is a 'phone call; phone cas asDerr ida indicates are a recurring motif in Cixousstexts; a coupefle is a kind of pass that perts oneto go to the top of the queue ahead of others Ireca also the connection between (thread[s])and (son/sons) , and the cutting of the maternalcord in Cixouss work. A these meanings hauntthis passage and the quotation from Manhaan

29 does without proof, takes place Derrida here

plays extensively on the dierent meanings of twoFrench expressions: se passer de), to get along/dowithout; and avor leu (a, de, to take place (of), tobe advisable, if need be.

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the secrets of the archive

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