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On Cardiac Rhythms
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 17, Number 4, Fall 2002
- pp. 218-225
- Review
- Additional Information
Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 218-225
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Review Essay
On Cardiac Rhythms
Laura Camille Tuley
"Organized discourse is of no use to me."
"What is most true is most poetic."
"My business is to translate our emotions into writings. First we feel. Then I write. This act of writing engenders the author. I write the genesis that occurs before the author. How does one write the genesis? Just before? I write on writing. I turn on the other light."
—Hélène Cixous, Rootprints
To read of and with writer Hélène Cixous, one must develop a relation, invariably dense and tenuous, to fragmentation. Her two most recently translated "theoretical" texts, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (1997) and Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998), position her reader in rapprochement with the question of traces. The practice of tracing is a term that echoes the influence or traces of her intellectual colleague Jacques Derrida, but which is taken up by Cixous, here, as in previous writing, in her own language, through her own persistent probing of the limits of representation through the lens of her experience, as an exploration of the lived and philosophic "roots" of "poetic truth."
"The origin of material in writing can only be myself. I is not I, of course, because it is I with the others, coming from the others, putting me in the other's place, giving me the other's eyes . . ." (1997, 87).
I want to begin my reading of Cixous's dense and tenuous textual tracing with Rootprints, and with a series of moments that she assumes as pivotal in [End Page 218] her "inter views" with coauthor Mireille Calle-Gruber, moments that reverberate throughout the text. The book, itself a composition of fragments, is predominantly a discussion: an extended interview of Cixous by Calle-Gruber that is also a commentary on Cixous's work in the form of questions that generate further, infinitely open ended, questions, or a dialogue between two contemporary women authors that is also an intimate conversation between two kindred souls on some of art or life's most vital concerns (for example; love, desire, death, mourning, and creativity). To supplement or follow these views in between are essays dedicated to and springboards from Cixous's body of fiction and thought; an essay by Calle-Gruber on Cixous's fiction, an essay by Jacques Derrida on her (and his) philosophical obsessions (which clearly merge with her fictional ones), and an afterword by Cixous's translator, Eric Prenowtiz, on the movement of her thought/writing and his simultaneous power and incapacity to translate its flow. Finally, Cixous's autobiographical piece, "Albums and Legends," positions the reader at that most essential point of departure, her "origin" or roots. In some ways this less ostensibly conceptual or substantive essay subtly marks the point of departure for the text. What becomes abundantly clear in this text is the critical relation between sensitive reading and inventive response; that is, the way in which in the act of careful reading, as in the art of compassionate listening, one does more than passively receive a narrative thread, one is called to recognize and thereby to actively re-member one's other. Cixous notes in her collection Coming Into Writing And Other Essays, "My voice is my other. I write and you are not dead" (1991, 4). In Rootprints she observes that her writing is "further-than-myself in myself" (56). Cixous refers typically to a combination of "actual" and literary "others," but, of course, in her work, as in the tradition of Continental Philosophy to which her work is deeply indebted, one's "other" is never an entirely external or tangible object or person. Rather, in remembering/rewriting one's other, one remembers and thereby composes the underlying alterity [reference?] of self. Or, more to the point, we write our autobiographies, what is "I," through the other—or foreign—who offers him/herself as a text to be read. The German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin famously wrote that one finds one's own (das Eigene) only through the foreign (das Fremde). "The other in...