Towards the end ofH. C. For Life, the first of his two books on Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida interrupts his reading with a reflection on her reception. He even assumes the role of a ‘prophet’, as he puts it, in order to ‘foresee’ or ‘predict’ what he calls ‘the place of this-life-this-work in History, with a capital H’.¹ Derrida notes that the person and the work of Hélène Cixous ‘already have an incontestable legitimacy: a French, European and global renown’.² But, he says, her authority in ‘the world of literature, of theatre, of politics, of so-called feminist theory, in...

Let us propose here a bifurcated reading, between literature and psychoanalysis, with double attention paid to what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of the text, sometimes led by Freud and at other times bypassing him in this trajectory that strikes us to be less a discourse than a strange theoretical novel.¹ There is something ‘savage’ in theUnheimliche, a breath or a provocative air which at times catches the author himself off guard, overtaking him and restraining him. Freud and the object of his desire (i.e. the truth about theUnheimliche) are fired by reciprocal inspiration. This...

What exactly is ‘character’? How is it possible at present to think of the ‘concept’ of ‘character’ – if it is a concept? Assuming that this concept has a history, how far are we along now in this history or in the examination of this history? What does ‘character’ name? These questions are, on the one hand, involved in a whole system of critical presuppositions and crop up from traditional discussions about literature, within a conception of literary creation that is today outmoded. But, on the other hand, these same questions, having cropped up out of a disintegrating system, allow...

Then, (while the machine of all trades – of history, (hi)stories, machines and the typewriter of all the lost texts of all peoples – carries on with its analyses, helixtrolyses and other operations in poetic physiochemistry; and the structural synthesis of the whole of culture in general linguistic equivocity; without forgetting to programme the etceteras; in a parenthesis).

(and while Jones Shaun, as a professor, asks himself answers)

(and while, as young women and researchers,Finnegans Wakescatters itself on all the free benches of a public lecture theatre registered what’s more in Vincennes)

it is a question –(while, as...

If, among the billions of motifs that ‘adomically’ [cf.FW615.6] constituteFinnegans Wake, I simply could not help [m’empêcher] picking out [pêcher] the ‘Phoenix’, it is because this motif appears at the beginning of thePortrait of the Artist, where it is surreptitiously associated with the theme of Sin [Péché].

ThePortrait of the Artistrecounts the genesis of the artist Stephen Dedalus. It begins somewhat like this: ‘Once upon a time there was a strange little birdie …’ This strange bird, a tuckoo (a cuckoo badly pronounced, that is), will grow into Dedelus, the flying artist, a strange...

You have probably recognised that the title of my essay is an imitation of the title of Joyce’sA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have chosen to pursue a kind of meditation on creation and perhaps also on the different attitudes that men and women show with regard to becoming an artist. The moment I say that, I reproach myself for using the wordsmenandwomen. We have difficulties nowadays with those words. At first I want simply to give a kind of warning. We always get confused because of those words, but we have...

I have not written this letter. It is still there. Speechless, present, shy, it is my letter to Zohra Drif. It stays with me, unwritten, patient. I have a blank letter that does not leave. It is addressed to Zohra Drif. But it is held back. This letter has its reasons. For not writing itself. For not vanishing. It has been addressing Zohra Drif in Algeria on my behalf for decades. What halts it just before the paper and suspends it between my shores, my countries, is a long story. The loss of words I never had.

It all began...

There are so many, and each one calls to the other, I could never note them all. I shall let them come here in the order without apparent order in which they come when I pronounce their key-name that is the colour of the chrome with which I buttered language with my brush in order to relish painting,

I say Oran, and the words come running down the boulevards and the alleyways, up the hills, along the cliffs the colour of raw meat overhanging the coast, here they are clacking high in my new child’s ears dazzled with sonorous sparkles:...

Books are characters in books. Between authors and books, not everything can be taken for granted. At the point where the author (‘I’) thinks s/he can close the door on a chapter, the book puts its foot in the door. If I want to explain myself, the book cuts me off and takes the floor in my stead.

The story I have to tell is the story of writing’s violence. I want to write what I cannot write. The book helps me. The book leads me astray, carries me away.Itwants to write. It wants me to writeit....

I get along well with the mysteries of the word sexuality and even gender (I get along with these words and these conceptsin French, because for me, they live, work and create in the French language); however, in the face of the word nation I feel ill at ease, I am intimidated, uncertain. I can only feel implicated without reserve if I retain the semantic value of the word’s Latin root:natio, birth. With Nation I am caught in the tension of two opposites: non-belonging and belonging.

I sense that the word Nation, the Latin word erected, glorified, enlarged...

‘Everyone is welcome’, ‘We seek to employ everyone and allocate them their rightful place’, proclaim all the posters for the Oklahoma Nature Theater. It is the largest theatre in the world. It is so vast that some of its employee-inhabitants have never had time to visit. Hundreds of men and women instantly disguised as gigantic angels and demons are being hired amidst a racket of trumpets and patriotheatrical fanfares. The largest angels and demons in the world.

There is virtually no audience. This is because nearly everyone who arrives in Oklahoma, synecdoche of America, becomes an actor, each person preferring...

The book I don’t write? I was about to say. What did I have in mind? Or who? You say that, and the thing becomes a forest, a temple, an army, and each word divides itself up and eats itself.

The Book I don’t write, that’s generic. The Book I don’t write is the one I don’t write, only That One. Or perhaps – a Mallarméan use of the Book – Books, I don’t write them, in general the book thing is not something I do, but also the Book I don’t write is the oneIdon’t write, you’re...

It was a viva at the Sorbonne, serious business in those days of doctorates weighty as destinies. The thesis director was Professor Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a man I venerated, noble and implacable, stern as Saint Just, who called himself J-J in secret in order to share in the rages and indignations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, something I only heard about later, an upright man, probative as a surgeon’s scalpel, a master who made his disciples feel the cutting edge of his knife, fond of laughter, a chaste lover of literary genius, thus it was that in the final days of his life...

On 29 June 1984, the day of the last scene, I cried floods of tears. It was the day of his burial. I see myself outside in a crowd I do not see, he is inside. I am waiting for him to come out. Now he is coming out. What I see of him: his last form. What appears is a body of light-coloured wood. His last costume. On seeing the coffin a part of my heart cracked. Floods of tears burst forth. Would I say I was ashamed? I was undoubtedly the only one in that mourning crowd to...

In homage to the author from Dublin, who was both my hunter and my prey for so many years, I mean to the thief from Dublin to his translator, and histranshater, by way of epigraph I shall take my first steps in Cities via a small detour throughFinnegans Wakewhere on p. 301 an air of nostalgia for Trieste awaits us. Trieste, the at least triple city where as a young man Joyce used to pass on languages [était passe-langue] at the Berlitz School.

Dear and he went on to scripple gentlemine born, milady bread, he would pen...

We have inherited magic words, which we do not wish to touch for fear of causing their (shimmering) wings to lose a little of their dazzling dust. We have inherited from distant words, Latin words, Justice, Truth, Humanity. Or from a Greek cousin, Democracy. And this inheritance accompanies us, sends us messages, glistening incitements. We are enchanted. Are they allegories? And then all these ravishing words are feminine in those gendered languages. Surreptitiously added to their charm is a pinch of difference, a sexual dusting, a slight exaltation. By virtue of what are we ‘human’, by virtue of what do...