Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editor's note
- Preface: On being interviewed
- Part I Writing the enigma
- 1 The play of fiction
- 2 The novel today
- 3 Literature suspends death
- 4 In the beginnings, there were many …
- Part II Writing the feminine
- Part III Writing and politics
- Part IV Writing and theatre
- Part V Writing roots
- Part VI On painting, music and nature
- Part VII Dialogues
- Envoi: But the Earth still turns, and not as badly as all that
- Bibliography of Hélène Cixous's works
- Index
4 - In the beginnings, there were many …
from Part I - Writing the enigma
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editor's note
- Preface: On being interviewed
- Part I Writing the enigma
- 1 The play of fiction
- 2 The novel today
- 3 Literature suspends death
- 4 In the beginnings, there were many …
- Part II Writing the feminine
- Part III Writing and politics
- Part IV Writing and theatre
- Part V Writing roots
- Part VI On painting, music and nature
- Part VII Dialogues
- Envoi: But the Earth still turns, and not as badly as all that
- Bibliography of Hélène Cixous's works
- Index
Summary
This interview was published as “Aux commencements, il y eut pluriel …”, in Genesis (Spring), 131–41, 1997.
mc-g It's the plural to which “beginning” corresponds in the texts you write. And it's in fact precisely a manner of being in the world which expresses itself by this plurality, manner and matter corresponding to the world, corresponding with the world. For I does not begin: I has/is already begun. I is always Beyond — and so it is, for example, just as you call it in Partie, BeyondI (but also, since it isn't always obvious, more-than-I): “BeyondI, a character composed of more than a whole, which plays its role at a certain distance from sexual difference.” But I is also less — just one part of its innumerable parts. And set in motion, then, more or less, I is always with: neither One nor All but vibratile, vibrating with correspondences and discords linking it to its surroundings.
So, to say, as your texts do, that one can only begin in the plural, plurally, whichever form that plural might take, masculine or feminine (how should this be written? how might it be heard?), is to say that one is on the side of life. That one has opted for what grows, moves, metamorphoses, and transforms. It's to state that I is located, from the beginning, in a tremendous upwards thrust. I is within, in the middle: in the course of time, generations, transmissions.
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- White InkInterviews on Sex, Text and Politics, pp. 30 - 48Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008