The preposition: withagainst

Some passages from an interview with Hélène Cixous. The entire interview can be read here.

"How does this theory [ the interviewer, Kathleen O'Grady, is referring to Cixous' "theory" of écriture féminine ] inspire your own philosophico-poetic texts? Does it provide an ethical and political framework in addition to its aesthetic dimensions?"

For me, theory does not come before, to inspire, it does not precede, does not dictate, but rather it is a consequence of my text, which is at its origin philosophico-poetical, and it is a consequence in the form of compromise or urgent necessity. Each time I have written or that I write a so-called "theoretical" text - in quotations because in reality my theoretical texts are also carried off by a poetic rhythm - it has been to respond to a moment of tension in cultural current events, where the ambient state of discourse - academic discourse, for example, or journalistic or political discourse - has pushed me to go back over things, to stop my journey and take the time to emphasize, to display in a didactic manner the thinking movement which for me was indissociable from my poetic movement, but which seemed to me to be entirely misunderstood, forgotten or repressed indeed by the topical scene. So all that is called "theoretical" in my work is in reality simply a kind of halt in the movement that I execute in order to underline in a broad way what I have written or what has been possible to read for a long time in my fictional texts. Never has a theory inspired my poetic texts. It is my poetic text that sits down from time to time on a bench or else at a café table - that's what I am in the process of doing at this moment by the way - to make itself heard in univocal, more immediately audible terms. In other words, it is always a last resort for me. So no, it does not provide an additional ethico-political structure; it is the concession a poet makes in accepting pedagogic responsibility.

To another question, she responds:

I ought to say, once and for all, a certain number of banalities or truisms: there was an issue of l'Observateur, quite recently, with a long interview of Jacques Derrida entitled "Yes, my texts are political," which is to say that the journalistic attitude or superficial reading oblige him to repeat something that is absolutely obvious, it's that his philosophical writing is a writing that is always political, that always has political effects - and it is the same thing for me. It's as if a certain audience only used the term "political" for that which has as its object or as its centre a reference to historico-political events properly speaking, events that could find a place precisely in the newspapers and the history books. Yet the political - this is a triviality, I am ashamed to have to say it - does not stem simply from the political scene, from the political events reported by the media; it begins obviously by the discourse of the speaking subject on him- or herself, which is to say that all that makes the political scene -- relations of power, of oppression, enslaving, exploitation - all of this begins within me: first of all in the family and in the interior of myself. Tyrants, despots, dictators, capitalism, all that forms the visible political space for us is only the visible and theatrical, photographable projection of the Self-with-against-the-other. I suggest we add the preposition "withagainst" to the English language. The equivalent in French being: "contre." I cannot even imagine how one could think otherwise. So when I write texts of fiction, and when in these texts of fiction I deal with problematics either that touch on the definition of the subject, or a human subject, or when I put family scenes, questions of exile, into metaphor and into poetic narrative - my first narrative which was called Dedans reads in fact as an oblique ethico-political treatise on the conscious and unconscious situation in Algeria between the `40s and the `60s - one is not obliged to read it in that way, but that is what it is. There is always a political reflexion and engagement running through it. It is thus simply a different form of the same fundamental scene that is the scene in which Shakespeare, or Kafka, portray their characters. It has exactly the same dimension. One cannot divide, for example, human destiny between the introspective, which would be non-political, and then a sort of exterior which would be political. It makes no sense, no more than if one were to consider the Greek tragedians. A human subject has a destiny in so far as it is a human being citizen. It cannot be separated. In this way I could say that there is not a single one of my fictional texts that does not resonate with echoes of world history. I was born political, in a sense, and it was even for political reasons that I began to write poetry as a response to the political tragedy.

And in the same way, as I have very often said, there is not only the question of the representation or the inscription of an ethico-political problematic, there is also the question of action. I know that here too it is thought that action - that is, what is called action - is an action that ought to be visible in the field, in the field of war or in the field of the political scene, properly speaking, of the Parliament, etc. And I am uncomfortable saying that literary actions are actions that have a force of transformation, a force of political affirmation, and a revolutionary force that no person who has been in a situation of distress has ever denied, quite to the contrary. The Algerian exiles, the Algerian intellectuals who are exiled, that is who are threatened with death, those who survive the massacres, are the proof: the first ones to be killed and massacred are those who make gestures of writing. Another proof: among them, I have many friends for whom it is essential to come into a text to text relation or communication with people like us. Finally, and what is more, in France there is a tradition of a relationship between the literary text or the writer and public opinion. Poets, novelists, philosophers, etc. have always thought of their gestures of writing as a political gesture, and they have carried it out also in this manner. When Zola goes from the work of art to the combat for Dreyfus, he takes only one step. And so I am not going to enumerate the gestures I make in this domain, but they exist. And I will add that, in a manner that is strictly specific and reserved to writing, I think - I have always said it, I am reaffirming it - that the writers who are conscious are guardians, not only of the res publica, the common wealth, which is only one aspect of their work, but above all - it is their role, it is their mission - they are the guardians of language, that is to say of the richness of language, of its freedom, of its strangeness, strangerness. Language is a country in which scenes comparable to what is happening, for example, at this moment in France, in the domain of the opening or the closing of borders, are played out in the linguistic and poetic mode. There are ways of writing French that are ways of writing "good" or proper French in setting up its borders and defending at all costs French nationalism and nationality. There are, on the contrary, ways of degrammaticalizing or of agrammaticalizing French, of working in syntax for it to be an open, receptive, stretchable, tolerant, intelligent language, capable of hearing the voices of the other in its own body. And this is a great revolutionary tradition of French poetry - in this sense I feel myself to be in the lineage of someone like Rimbaud - a certain breach of the limit, a certain unfurling of language, above all, a certain work on the signifier and, of course a necessary political attitude. One could well imagine that power could be taken over by "good French" in Academia and the media, and in that situation there would no longer be freedom of thought, quite simply.

Comments

[TS]

And all the New Critics go, "doo, dodoo, dodoo, dodoododoo do, dodoo, dodoo..."

Wonderful, wonderful passage. Why do defenders of the American New Critics so often fail to take them the crucial next step? I mean they were getting there, maybe, but never quite went far enough. Some might even say it's up to us to pick up where they left off, and not to treat them with all the false respect of piety or moral condescension, or as a treasured inheritance of dogma.

[Mark]

Merleau-Ponty ('Metaphysics and the novel'): 'For a long time it looked as if philosophy and literature not only had different ways of saying things but had different objects as well. Since the end of the 19th century,
however, the ties between them have been getting closer and closer ... Classical metaphysics could pass for a speciality with which literature had nothing to do because metaphysics operated on the basis of an
uncontested rationalism, convinced it could make the world and human life understood by an arrangement of concepts. It was a matter of ... explaining life ... Everything changes when a phenomenological or
existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world ... but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world ... When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world ... one can no longer credit oneself with a perfect
transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression.'

[Amie]

Thanks, TS and Mark.

The following link is in French. well worth a look.

http://pierre.campion2.free.fr/hugocesson1.htm