Stigmata: Escaping Texts
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Stigmata ‘Hélène Cixous is in my eyes, today, the greatest writer in the French language… Stigmata is henceforth a classic…. One of her most recent masterpieces.’ Jacques Derrida Routledge Classics contains the very best of Routledge publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times. For a complete list of titles visit http://www.routledgeclassics.com/ Hélène Cixous Stigmata Escaping texts With a foreword by Jacques Derrida and a new preface by the author London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge First published in Routledge Classics 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge New York, NY 100 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1998, 2005 Hélène Cixous Index compiled by Indexing Specialists (UK) Ltd, 202 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2DJ, UK All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-02366-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-34545-6 (Print Edition) CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii FOREWORD BY JACQUES DERRIDA ix PREFACE: ON STIGMATEXTS BY HÉLÈNE CIXOUS x Reading in painting 1 Bathsheba or the interior Bible 3 2 Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking 16 off Ringing in the feminine hour 3 In October 1991… 30 4 Hiss of the axe 42 5 What is it o’clock? or The door (we never enter) 48 6 Love of the wolf 70 7 ‘Mamãe, disse ele,’ or Joyce’s second hand 83 Going off writing 8 Unmasked! 109 9 Writing blind: conversation with the donkey 115 10 My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria 126 From my menagerie to Philosophy 11 Shared at dawn 145 12 Stigmata, or Job the dog 149 BIBLIOGRAPHY: HÉLÈNE CIXOUS’S BOOK-LENGTH 159 PUBLICATIONS 1967–1998 INDEX 164 ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Rembrandt, Bathsheba bathing, 1654. Copyright Réunion des 4 musées nationaux 1.2 Fragment of a drawing by Rembrandt. Copyright The Board of 8 Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum 1.3 Rembrandt, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Copyright Réunion des 13 musées nationaux 2.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Vierge à l’Enfant. Copyright Réunion des 20 musées nationaux 2.2 Pablo Picasso, Etude pour ‘La Repasseuse’. Copyright Réunion 22 des musées nationaux 2.3 Rembrandt, Décollation de Saint Jean Boptiste. Copyright 24 Réunion des musées nationaux FOREWORD BY JACQUES DERRIDA Translated by Eric Prenowitz Sublimity of a book in twelve songs on the wound [blessure]. I hear it as a blessing of the blessure, a great poetic treatise on the scar at the origin of literary writing—and no doubt of all writing. I have often declared my admiration for Hélène Cixous, for the person and for the work: immense, powerful, so multiple but unique in this century. I have even written, I believe, that Hélène Cixous is in my eyes, today, the greatest writer in the French language. I shall only add two words for Stigmata—and about the said ‘French language’: 1. A weave of poetic narratives, this unprecedented book overflows our language, the ‘French language’, in every way, while nonetheless cultivating and illustrating it in a rare and incomparably new fashion. A practically untranslatable fashion. In order to speak of the wound, all wounds, some would say ‘traumatisms’, to name the scar in general, at the origin of Hélène Cixous’s writing and in her ‘primal scenes’, it overflows and scarifies the French language without sacrificing it, marking it while translating itself, in advance. It points poignantly in the direction of the stigma as scar, not far from pick, in the direction also of the stigma which comes from our Greek memory (stigmè: the point, the spike or the punctuality of the instant) with its sti resonating in English (stick and sting), no less than in German (Stechen), etc. 2. Stigmata is henceforth a great classic. It can be read as the best introduction to Hélène Cixous’s entire corpus whose strokes of genius it heralds and collects together as the becoming-literary of her life. But as her newest, most unforeseen book, its writing is also perfectly accomplished, its composition admirably orchestrated. One of her most recent masterpieces. PREFACE: ON STIGMATEXTS BY HÉLÈNE CIXOUS Translated by Eric Prenowitz The texts collected and stitched together sewn and resewn in this volume share the trace of a wound. They were caused by a blow, they are the transfiguration of a spilling of blood, be it real or translated into a haemorrhage of the soul. Every character has been struck in a heart, one of our hearts. A letter stabs Bathsheba. My dog, an avatar of Job, lacerates my foot with his desperate teeth and forever prints his message of indignation in the flesh of my memory. None of the scenes that are played again here in painting, in language, in its several truths, avoids the cruel mark. At the same time, each of these scenes is a scene of flight in the face of the intolerable. But not only flight in order to ‘save one’s skin’ as French idiom says. In fleeing, the flight saves the trace of what it flees. This is why they flee: to maintain the horror unforgettable—the horror we would not live in the present although we want to keep its awful treasure, its proof, its testimony, its transfiguration. Writing, like painting, engendering forms of art that lacerate the eyelids, writing at night to pierce it with lightning: this is my struggle to escape from and to face the terrifying thing, the spirit of crime that resides sometimes in you, sometimes in me. I write to conjure in all the meanings of this word in French and English, in a conjuration—a conspiracy of languages to produce tragic responses to the repetition of evil. Conjure(r) makes appear, makes fly, supplicates. All these texts aim to flee the fatal nail, the sword, the knife, the axe which threatens to fix, to nail, to immobilize them in, by, death. Their first and best ally in the evasion is the poetic use of the languages of language. If only we listen, a language always speaks several languages at once, and runs with a single word in opposite directions. Ulysses had already slipped away from Polyphemus by playing on the polysemy of his proper name. Language’s tricks are the allies of the artist who goes into resistance or exile. Joyce said this a hundred years ago and Montaigne five hundred. Every language artist is an artist of the struggle against the condemnation to death. Sentences and their words always lead elsewhere than the place we were expecting them. Neither the reader nor above all the author knows, foresees, commands, calculates, anticipates, prepares for the event of revelation. This incalculable is the text’s promise and taste of triumph. All literature is scarry. It celebrates the wound and repeats the lesion. One day I wrote a little canticle to the scar. Scar has the advantage over cicatrice of being only one syllable, a hard, scary and blinding note, scar plays on letters with star and scare. Jacques Derrida has devoted a full square of sublime periods to the escarre, scar has the favours of the legendary and cinematographic imagination, from the epidermal point of view, Scar is comparable to Siegfried’s invisible point of mortality, a non-scar, but a trace reserved for the passage of death, a door requiring a password, scar adds something: a visible or invisible fibrous tissue that really or allegorically replaces a loss of substance which is therefore not lost but added to, augmentation of memory by a small mnesic growth. Unlike scar, stigmata takes away, removes substance, carves out a place for itself. Stigmata are traces of a sting. Piquer in French, to prick, to sting, to pinch, pricks in order to take, in order to prick piquer steals, strikes and removes, sows, speckles signs its blows, leaves behind and takes away, annoys and excites at the same time, gives back what it takes, serves the interests of the thief and the police. Piquer has the resources of Figaro in French: it has innumerable aptitudes and identities. One can be stung by the bug of (se piquer de) literature or philosophy as others can shoot (se piquer de) drugs. With piquer and stigmata we have what we need to explore the scene of writing. In this volume I chose to cultivate the stigma. In the first place I take it by its roots. Its etymology. Let us follow the sti. What a stupefying multitude starting with the Greek stigmè, and the Latin sti-! Stigma sticks, stings in English.