Writing Symptomatically

MAIRÉAD HANRAHAN

Abstract:
Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida position themselves very differently in
relation to literature. This article analyses that difference in the light of
their relation to the symptom, the fundamentally unanalysable form through
which the unconscious manifests itself. While Derrida dwells more on the
impossibility of ever accessing the original secret wound to whose existence
the symptom opaquely attests, Cixous tends to focus more on the effect,
the symptom itself. For both, the ‘chance’ of literature lies in the fact that
neither the source nor the destination of letters can be determined. I argue
that the difference between Derrida’s relative resignation to this condition and
Cixous’s celebration of it helps to explain the contrast between his position at
the margins of literature and her unequivocal embrace of it.

Keywords: Cixous, Derrida, psychoanalysis, symptom, OR, ‘Envois’

Cixous, Derrida, psychoanalysis: where to begin with such a vast

terrain? Following Derrida’s lead, the question of where or how
to begin can itself constitute a productive beginning. The question
haunts him. In text after text, especially in the texts written to be
delivered orally — Archive Fever, ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States
of Its Soul’, H.C. For Life, to cite only the most relevant here —
Derrida multiplies his preliminaries, underlining the inaccessibility
of an original beginning. He is profoundly concerned with the
impossibility of beginning, pre-occupied with it, taken up in advance
with advancing towards what precedes him. This echoes Cixous’s
analysis in ‘Tales of sexual difference’ and Portrait of Jacques Derrida
as a Young Jewish Saint of the fascination Derrida’s writing displays
with circumcision as ‘his’ primal scene: the scene which most marked
him and of which his body bears the trace, yet of which he has
no representation. For Cixous, too, beginnings are always plural,

Paragraph 36.2 (2013): 206–222

DOI: 10.3366/para.2013.0088
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/para
 Writing Symptomatically 207
as exemplified outstandingly in an early book, Les Commencements;
like him, when she writes it has always already begun.1 But
whereas Derrida’s beginnings invite reading as an impossible quest
for the unattainable beginning, Cixous’s tend rather to explore the
contingencies which the very inaccessibility of the origin has made
possible. The fact that the beginning remains inaccessible is not the
problem for Cixous. Her question is rather to explore what takes place
paradoxically after the end.
This different perspective on beginning reflects a difference
between Cixous and Derrida specifically in relation to vastness,
with implications in turn for their relation to psychoanalysis and to
literature. In Rootprints, Cixous sketches the difference between them
as follows:
I think I am more circumscribed. What Derrida expresses at times is a vital
curiosity with respect to those types of primitive scenes that elude us, and that
have caused him. I think that I do not have such a vast desire or project in me.
I do not have that sublime physicist’s intelligence [intelligence de physicien sublime].
Which is to say that it is less the ‘enigma of myself ’; it is rather the thirst for the
phenomenon of an instant. Of course, at times I ‘go back’ towards the source. But
I am perhaps more inclined to the study of symptoms.2

For Cixous, Derrida has a ‘vast’ desire to understand what produced

the symptom, whereas her focus on the symptom itself is more
‘circumscribed’, a significant choice of term given its extreme
proximity to ‘circumcised’. What difference does it make whether
one is cut around, or written around? This distinction is central to
Cixous’s discussion of the difference between herself and Derrida in
‘Tales of Sexual Difference’, where the cut is the cut of writing. For
Derrida, writing — Scripture — is at the beginning: ‘As a circumcised
one, he is the subject of a book, the Bible. It is by the stroke of a
Book that he begins to belong to this rich and complicated universe
of the circumcised and the non-circumcised. Thus: it is written [c’est
écrit]. Circumcised by bookstroke’. In contrast, Cixous says of herself:
‘I think that it is not written, not with a knife, not with a stylus, not with
the teeth. It is a mystery of the flesh without tragedy. And if there is a
trace, and if there is a scene, it is not before, it is later, tomorrow, “when
I am grown up”, it is to be imagined’ (TSD, 52–3). When writing plays
an inaugural role, the cut opens up or onto the limitless, the infinite,
the transcendent (Derrida’s ‘physicist’s intelligence’ is ‘sublime’). When
writing follows rather than begins, it too cuts.3 However, for Cixous
its cut is an attempt to circumscribe a specific experience in order to
208 Paragraph
preserve it.4 Rooted in the ‘thirst for the phenomenon of an instant’,
her cut is limited in scope; indeed, explaining that what preoccupies
her in writing is ‘the appearance of a sign, of an insistence, in the vital
river’, she relates her declared role as the ‘astrophysicist [astrophysicien]
of minuscule stars’ specifically to her myopia (RP, 88).
Cixous and Derrida are thus each in their own way physiciens, a
word which translates literally as ‘physicists’ but whose false friend
(in the linguistic sense) ‘physician’ will also prove peculiarly relevant
for this discussion.5 Both are manifestly concerned theoretically (and
arguably concerned therapeutically) with the painful, unknowable
primary scenes which shaped them. As Cixous remarks explicitly in
Insister:
Both he and I are subjects and results of primitive scenes that are very powerfully
different and influential — one could say overdetermining, of those ‘first sorrows’
(says Kafka), first mutilations, first biting pangs of death, which come about during
childhood and whose unconscious tracings in memory mark us or wound us in a
chiasmus.6

However, if both are driven by an original wound, how that wound

determines their writing in practice differs immensely. Whereas
the unknowability of his original wound inspires Derrida with an
unlimited (‘vast’) desire to go to the limits of the known, to universalize
the limit,7 Cixous considers herself more circumscribed, drawn rather
to the study of the symptom. In contrast with his preoccupation with
the cause that in text after text he shows can never be contained within
the system it makes possible, she focusses on its effects, the localized,
contingent ways in which her hurt manifests itself.
A symptom is a sign of a hidden illness, a sign that a secret exists.
In ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’, Derrida associates it
with a public secret: ‘what should be analyzed as one of the symptoms,
the secrets, the public secrets of the event I am talking about’.8 In a
public secret, the fact that a secret exists becomes public, not the secret
itself. A symptom is thus a secret which simultaneously calls for and
resists analysis, in the sense that its content or meaning can never be
brought to light. In ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the
Event’, Derrida develops in detail the link between the symptom and
the secret:
I propose the word symptom as another term, beyond the telling of the truth or
the performativity that produces the event. (. . .) Beyond all forms of verification,
beyond discourses of truth or knowledge, the symptom is a signification of the
 Writing Symptomatically 209
event over which nobody has control, that no consciousness, no conscious subject
can appropriate or control, neither in the form of a theoretical or judicative
statement, nor in the form of a performative production. There is symptom. (. . .)
Even the effect of truth or the search for truth is symptomatic in nature. We can
offer analyses of such symptoms. You talked of differentiated forms of knowledge;
one could speak of identifying positions of the subjects of enunciation, libidinal
drives or power strategies.

But beyond all that, there is symptomatology; there is meaning that no theorem
can exhaust. This notion of symptom, which I’d like to dissociate from its clinical
or psychoanalytical code, is related to what I was saying before about verticality.
A symptom is something that falls. It’s what befalls us. What falls vertically on us
is what makes a symptom.9

For Derrida, the symptom is a sign which defies any attempt to fathom
it through knowledge; it involves a saying or making public which
keeps the secret it reveals. In particular, as the alinea accentuates,
while symptoms can be analysed to a certain extent, there is a
‘beyond all that’, that is, a beyond analysis which inevitably recalls
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida’s favorite book of Freud’s and
the psychoanalytical text to which he most repeatedly, compulsively,
symptomatically returns. This ‘beyond analysis’ concerns the secret,
the symptom, precisely insofar as it can’t be (psycho)analysed. Derrida
specifies that he wants to ‘dissociate’ the notion of symptom from its
‘clinical or psychoanalytical code’. The symptom is another name for
the unnameable secret which, precisely, is beyond psychoanalysis.
If to write is always to write symptomatically, and if the difference
between Cixous’s and Derrida’s (symptomatic) writing involves a
different relation to the symptom, what does this imply for the relation
between literature and psychoanalysis? For Derrida, literature figures
repeatedly as the privileged site or place of a secret.10 As the expression
of an absolute secret, is literature like psychoanalysis, in the way that
the pleasure principle is of the same order as the reality principle?
Or is it more primary, more general than psychoanalysis in the same
way that, as Derrida investigates in ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States
of Its Soul’, whatever is ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle is more
fundamental than the pleasure or reality principles, more fundamental
than the sexual or death instincts? Is literature more troubling than
psychoanalysis because it is so fundamentally impossible to situate?
Bearing these questions in mind, let us look at the often-quoted
passage from Passions where Derrida defines his love for literature in
terms of the secret:
210 Paragraph
A confidence to end with today. Perhaps all I wanted to do was to confide or
confirm my taste (probably unconditional) for literature, more precisely for literary
writing. Not that I like literature in general, nor that I prefer it to something else,
to philosophy, for example, as they suppose who ultimately discern neither one
nor the other. Not that I want to reduce everything to it, especially not philosophy.
Literature I could, fundamentally, do without, in fact, rather easily [La littérature, je
m’en passe au fond, et en fait, assez facilement]. If I had to retire to an island, it would
be particularly [au fond] history books, memoirs, that I would doubtless take with
me, and that I would read in my own way, perhaps to make literature out of them,
unless it would be the other way round, and this would be true for other books
(art, philosophy, religion, human or natural sciences, law, etc.). But if [Mais si],
without liking literature in general and for its own sake, I like something about
it [en elle], which above all cannot be reduced to some aesthetic quality, to some
source of formal pleasure, this would be in place of the secret [au lieu du secret]. In
place of an absolute secret. There would be the passion.11
The most striking aspect of this affirmation or confirmation of an
unconditional love for literature is how very conditional it appears.
No sooner has Derrida confided his ‘probably’ (thus not indubitably)
unconditional love than he immediately qualifies it, saying that
he doesn’t love literature ‘in general’ and insisting that literature
is only one love among others, no more irreducible than others.
Fundamentally and in fact, ‘au fond, et en fait’, he can do without
literature; fundamentally, ‘au fond’, his choice of reading material for
his desert island would be books with a highly referential component
(history books, memoirs). Moreover, the ‘Mais si’ of the final sentence
which, coming after the series of negations (‘Not that . . . not that . . . ),
initially appears to be an affirmation, is in fact the beginning of a
conditional clause.12
The series of adverbial phrases — au fond, en fait, au fond — calls for
close analysis. What if we read the first ‘au fond’ not as synonymous
with the following ‘in fact’ but rather literally, as an adverb of place
meaning ‘at the bottom’, especially the bottom of the sea? What if
it were only at the bottom that he could do without literature? That
would mean that he could never do without literature as long as he
has not reached the bottom. But the bottom appears to be the space
of literature itself; on the island there is still room for him to travel
towards the bottom, to carry the history books or Memoirs off to
the bottom, to bring them closer to literature (‘to make literature
out of them’). In other words, it is because Derrida’s interest lies in
approaching literature that literature alone leaves him no work to do or,
more precisely, doesn’t leave him the work he wants to do.13
 Writing Symptomatically 211
Literature, then, would be both at the bottom and the bottom
itself. The undecidable use of ‘au fond’ that introduces an unsuspected
expression of place anticipates another surprising and undecidable use
of the preposition à (at) which conversely complicates the expected
expression of place with a prepositional phrase. ‘But if I love something
about it [literally in it, ‘en elle’], this would be in place of the secret [au
lieu du secret]’: instead of the direct object the conditional clause leads
us to expect (for example, ‘the secret’ or ‘the place of the secret’),
the adverbial phrase highlights not what but where or how he loves.
Literature does not function only as a place in which loving and not
knowing both take place; it functions both as the place and in place of
the secret.
The ambivalence reflected in this passage at the way literature
replaces the secret (and thus makes the original secret more, not
less, obscure) marks a significant difference between Cixous and
Derrida. I would argue that the positions they adopt in relation to the
symptom help us to understand the positions they assume respectively
in literature (Cixous) and at the margins of literature (Derrida).14 While
both write symptomatically, ‘beyond psychoanalysis’, psychoanalysis
gives way to literature very differently in their writing. This is to
claim not that a clear-cut distinction could ever be unproblematically
defined between literature and its others, but rather that the difference
between Derrida’s qualified love for literature and the unreserved
passion Cixous’s texts proclaim for Literature with a capital L, the
‘Omnipotence-other’, produces discernible textual effects which call
for analysis. At least, according to Cixous it was the subject of an
interminable analysis by both of them. The ‘eternal conversation’ with
which Insister begins gives way almost immediately to a discussion of
Derrida’s relationship with literature:
Hence my relation to literature.
— Which relation?
— Chance literature. No one will ever catch it lying or truth-telling in flagrante
delicto. Literature, neither lie nor veracity, no one will ever prove that I am lying
— That’s why you have always stayed in closest proximity [au plus près] to literature
— In closest approximity [Au plus presque], in the neighbourhood. No one will
ever prove that I am inside or outside. (Insister, 7–8)
Whereas Cixous tends to situate herself unproblematically on the
side of literature, she here positions Derrida in ‘closest proximity’,
212 Paragraph
‘closest approximity’ to it. She has Derrida equate ‘literature’ with
chance, a word which, like ‘symptom’ in our earlier quotation, belongs
etymologically to the lexicon of falling. Like the symptom, chance is
what befalls one. In Derrida’s short text, ‘My chances’, symptom and
chance bookend the list of words related to falling: ‘the sense of the
fall in general (as symptom, lapsus, incident, accidentality, cadence,
coincidence, expiration date [échéance], luck [chance], good luck or
bad luck [méchance])’.15 Literature is itself a matter of chance: it is
impossible to control in advance whether it will ‘arrive’, a word which
in French also means ‘happen’. Just as Derrida and Cixous value the
symptom differently, so they differ in attitude towards the chance
which literature figures. As we shall now see, while both celebrate
its inherent contingency, she does not share the regret which tinges
his recognition that literature can never arrive at a predetermined
destination.

Derrida: Accepting Literature

It is no accident that Derrida first theorized the fundamental place
of chance in the structure of the letter in one of his most ‘literary’
pieces of writing. ‘Envois’, the postscripted preface to The Post Card
(thus written after the texts it introduces), comprises a series of letters
from an unnamed and potentially multiple signatory to an unnamed
addressee equally uncertain in terms of both gender and number.
While the preface claims to ‘demonstrate’ the law that ‘a letter can
always — and therefore must — never arrive at its destination’,16 it does
so ‘practically, effectively, performatively’ (PC, 121) rather than take
the form of a logical argument. Thus, for example, the fact that the
letters are all written in transit — on planes, trains, in cars, on foot —
reflects the impossibility of their ever arriving at their destination.
Derrida expounds in most detail on the law of the letter in a postscript
to a postscript of one of the letters:
P.S. (. . .) But this is why, dear friend, I always say ‘a letter can always not arrive at
its destination, etc.’ This is a chance.*

* P.S. Finally a chance, if you will, if you yourself can, and if you have it, the
chance (tukhè, fortune, this is what I mean, good fortune, good fate [aventure]:
us). The mis-chance (the mis-address) of this chance is that in order to be able
not to arrive, it must bear within itself a force and a structure, a straying of the
destination, such that it must also not arrive in any way. Even in arriving (always
 Writing Symptomatically 213
to some ‘subject’), the letter takes itself away from the arrival at arrival [se soustrait à
l’arrivée]. It arrives elsewhere, always several times. You can no longer take hold of
it. It is the structure of the letter (as post card, in other words the fatal partition
that it must support) which demands this, I have said it elsewhere, delivered to a
facteur subject to the same law. The letter demands this, right here, and you too,
you demand it. (PC, 123–4)

The law of the letter is a ‘chance’ which immediately divides into

good and bad, ‘good fortune’ and ‘mis-chance’, ‘mis-address’. On the
negative side, a letter cannot arrive at the specified address. However,
the positive corollary to this ‘mis-chance’ is that a letter without a
specified address can arrive at a destination. When first announcing the
law he will demonstrate, Derrida specifies that this law is good rather
than regrettable: ‘this is not negative, it’s good, and is the condition
(the tragic condition, certainly, and we know something about that)
that something does arrive — and that I love you’ (PC, 121). The
condition on which a letter can arrive, and on which love is possible,
is that the address not be determined in advance. Thus ‘Envois’ with
its unnamed ‘you’, its unceasing focus on the straying of the letter,
presents itself as a series of letters which nonetheless do arrive, which
find a destination in whoever reads them, or to borrow Derrida’s
word, ‘intercepts’ them. The lack of chance that they would arrive at a
predetermined destination is their chance of arriving at an unforeseen
one. While what he nevertheless persists in calling a ‘true letter’ —
one ‘reserved uniquely for you, not for your name (. . . ), for you. For
you the living one [la vivante]’ (81) — remains impossible, this very
impossibility yields the occasion of a loving chance:
Well yes, this is our tragic lot, my sweet love, the atrocious lottery, but I begin to
love you on the basis of this impossibility; the impasse devoted to fate cannot leave
us to await anything from a chance to see it open itself one day (. . . ) the chance
of the impasse devoted to fate can be the impasse itself, and what comes to pass in
it for being unable to pass. This chance (affirmation without exit) can only come
to us from you, understand? (81)

So the ‘mis-chance’ itself is a ‘chance’. What he calls here ‘our tragic

lot’, in a previous quotation the ‘tragic condition’, elsewhere the
‘tragedy of destination’ (23), is also what makes both love (‘I begin to
love you on the basis of this impossibility’) and a love-letter possible:
the only love-letter I can receive is the one I intercept. The work of
letters — literature — is the silver lining of what remains for Derrida a
tragic cloud.
214 Paragraph
If the only recipient of the letter is the one who inter-cepts, the
signatory of ‘Envois’ is the one who ac-cepts this condition (51):
‘I accept [ J’accepte], this will be my signature henceforth’ (26). This
signature clearly disseminates Derrida’s own proper name — Jacques sept
— drawing our attention to the infinite number of ways in which the
seven letters of his name, or names, combine to create other meanings.
They combine among others with the letters and sounds of ‘sept’,
seven, a privileged number throughout the text (as Cixous highlights
in the earlier quotation from ‘Tales of Sexual Difference’, the ‘7 écrit’
of the Apocalypse (183) is a homonym of ‘c’est écrit’ [it is written]). But
this structure also means that anyone who reads ‘Envois’ is placed in the
position of accepting this condition: the senders are as legion as the
addressees. In other words, to read ‘Envois’ is to countersign, to accept
the position of accepting the unacceptable, that is, literature: ‘literature
has always appeared unacceptable to me, a scandal, the moral fault par
excellence, and like a post card seeking to pass itself off as something else,
as a true letter that would have to pass through the censor or customs,
an imposture’ (38).
Derrida thus remains haunted by the impossibility of a ‘true letter’.
Notwithstanding his analysis that this impossibility is the very chance
of literature, what makes literature as we know it possible, for him
it also remains ‘tragic’, ‘unacceptable’. He makes no pretence to like
literature, the realm of pretence, for itself. However literary they
may be, his texts have no pretensions as literature (it is interesting
that in ‘Envois’, a text which is profoundly concerned with issues of
precedence and anteriority and which plays endlessly on the various
tensions associated with the verbs attendre, entendre, there is little
evidence of the verb prétendre); at most he pretends to pretend, in the
same way that he pretends to ‘demonstrate’:
to set all the bounty hunters off the track [mettre en déroute les chasseurs de prime],
leave them a photomaton, a post card in the style of a composite portrait, a placard
or poster (‘wanted’): let them desire to have his skin but without being able to do
anything about it. This is literature without literature, in order to demonstrate
that an entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain
technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect the political regime
is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psychoanalysis. Or love letters. (197)

This desire to demonstrate situates Derrida ‘beyond’ psychoanalysis in

at least two ways. Firstly, it accompanies a desire to lead astray (mettre
en déroute also means to rout, make retreat in disorder) the ‘chasseurs
de prime’, the bounty hunters/origin hunters elsewhere termed the
 Writing Symptomatically 215
‘guardians of tradition, the professors, academics and librarians, the
doctors and authors of theses’ in whom the (postal) epoch to which
they belong ‘automobilizes itself ’ (62) and who, unlike the ‘you’
to whom ‘Envois’ are addressed, always feature in the third person
as ‘them’. Such a desire evokes the unconditional resistance in the
political or military sense of the term that he calls attention to in
Resistances and which finds explicit expression in ‘Envois’ in the
desire to ‘blow up all the (private and public) police stations [postes]
and even all the post offices’ (185). Secondly, by demonstrating the
limits of a ‘certain technological regime of telecommunications’, he is
demonstrating the conditions on which psychoanalysis is possible —
along with philosophy, love-letters and literature itself.
At one level, then, Derrida’s ‘literature without literature’ can be
read as going further than literature, going beyond literature in the
same way that it goes beyond psychoanalysis. But it also invites
reading as a resistance to literature, as suggested by the importance
of demonstrating, which inevitably retains the notion of logical proof
(however haphazardly structured the demonstration may be), and as
expressed, significantly, in one of the (seven) mailings most dated by
sevens, ‘7 September 1977’:
The old impossible dream of exhaustive and instantaneous registration (. . .), the
old dream of the complete electro-cardio-encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-
bio-gram. And flat — I mean first of all without the slightest literature, the slightest
superimposed fiction, without pause, without selection either of the code or of
the tone, without the slightest secret, nothing at all, only everything — and flat in
the end because if such a card were possible, even if for only a very brief lapse of
time (afterwards they would need centuries of university to decipher it), I could
finally die content. (68)
Notwithstanding his appreciation and demonstration of the ‘chance’ of
literature, at some level Derrida dreams of putting an end to literature;
the end he dreams of is also the end of literature. The ‘chance’
literature represents for him is always both positive and negative: a
‘bonne chance’ and a ‘malchance’ constantly overtaking each other
as do the sender and the addressee:
I can’t write the word ‘doubler’ [in French, both to double and to overtake]
without thinking of us, of us in two cars I mean, and in particular of that day when
having passed me in a traffic jam without noticing — or rather I had stopped for
gas [essence in French], I have forgotten — you no longer knew that I was following
you, you thought I was ahead of you and you accelerated, accelerated, I did not
succeed in catching up with you. We both had our feet to the floor. We were
216 Paragraph
leaving everyone behind us but never was an accident more probable. (. . .) Our
double auto analysis. (162)
Writing, like driving, involves accepting the chance of an accident
(another fall),17 running the risk that the worst will happen: ‘only
an accident, and this time the worst one, can happen, arrive, not so,
happen to happen, arrive to arrive’ (169).

Cixous: The Fortune of Letters

Whereas Derrida dreams at some level of an end to literature, Cixous’s
celebration of its endlessness is unequivocal. This is particularly
manifest in a book which on rereading strikes me more and more as
a ‘beyond Envois’. It echoes Derrida’s text strangely closely, ‘in closest
proximity’, endorsing his message about the structure of the letter in
many ways, yet does so with a twist, a significant shift of emphasis.
In OR, My father’s letters, the narrator receives a boxful of letters her
long-dead father had written to her mother sixty years previously
during their engagement, which her brother had kept, unread, for
thirty years. ‘Keeper of letters [Gardien de lettres]. Pure keeper, pure
keeping. Keeper of my father’s being [l’être]’: his way of ‘keeping’ the
letters is not to read them, ostensibly because they were ‘addressed to
my mother’ but perhaps also in order to ‘keep his father who is also
my father’.18 Like Derrida’s ‘guardians of tradition’, he respects the
idea that the signatory and recipient of a letter are determinable in
advance. In contrast, Cixous’s narrator concurs with Derrida’s analysis
of the structure of the letter. She repeatedly asserts that the letters are
addressed to her — ‘today it’s me their apparition is addressing’ (O,
42) — because by chance it is now her turn to read them; the address
is determined retrospectively:
Now they were ringing. But behind me I had so many years without them which
held me back.
— Is it really me you’re asking for?
— Who else? We want to speak to the person who picked up the receiver.
(O, 77)
Their addressee is whoever receives them. Moreover, it even appears
that they never arrived at their original destination:
She never read these letters.
She never received them.
 Writing Symptomatically 217
This correspondence is so far from my mother, it is so close to me. They can no
longer ever arrive for her [lui arriver] I thought and I felt great pity and great fear
and a great affliction of joy. By luck [chance] they had not yet arrived for me.
It is fortunate yet it is unfortunate that letters arrive for us. Once read, they
begin to lose their sap their breath their cries their claws. Not only letters:
everything that arrives and doesn’t leave again. (63)
Although the reason the narrator’s mother (‘she’) never received the
letters is because she is now so different from the young fiancée to
whom her father wrote, Cixous also makes clear that, already at the
moment of writing, there was inevitably a discontinuity between the ‘real’
Eve and his fantasy of her: ‘But every fiancé writing to the one who for years
is the living “goal”, firstly writes (to) himself’ (71). Similarly, the reason
the narrator defers reading the letters she has chanced upon is that,
like her brother, she fears discovering a gap between ‘her’ father and
the author of the letters. The young doctor who is about to resurface
having been preserved intact risks being a disquietly unfamiliar father,
whom it would be more appropriate to address in the third than in the
second person (78).
Not only is the narrator thus in the position of Derrida’s interceptor
but, again as in Derrida’s text, the ‘chance’ the letters represent is
both fortunate and unfortunate. However, whereas for Derrida the
dominant misfortune is the impossibility of a ‘real’ letter, the fact that
the letter can never arrive at a predetermined destination, Cixous is
most concerned with their arrival at an unexpected one. The danger
for her is rather that letters can arrive too well; the idea that a letter
which has arrived never leaves again is later repeated explicitly: ‘Once
arrived, they can stray, but they will never again leave’ (114). While
the narrator’s ‘chance’ is that the letters are ‘in the process of arriving’
(189), the problem is that the time of arrival cannot last: ‘The letters —
what unhappiness if I had read them earlier. They would have been
dead for a long time as they are dead for the fiancée dead a long time’
(84). This might initially suggest that a letter, once read, is doomed to
effacement. Yet OR is also the text in which Cixous coins the term
oublire, a portmanteau of oublier [forget] and lire [read]. Being forgotten
is the condition necessary for a book to arrive more than once: a book
that has been forgotten has the chance to return (and it is no accident
that the book with whose return OR opens is The Gambler).19 The
difference thus suggested between letters and books is not structural —
both belong for Cixous to the category of ‘written animate thing’
(197) — but rather a matter of their material vulnerability: a published
218 Paragraph
book has a greater chance of surviving being forgotten than a letter.
In contrast, the difference between letters and people — ‘non-written
animate things’ (197) — is that when the latter return after an absence,
they have changed along with us. OR is above all a celebration of the
‘chance’ of letters: the possibility they have of arriving again and again
and again.
In contrast with Derrida’s focus on the difficulty of determining
the sender of the letter, Cixous concentrates on what that difficulty
signifies about the sender. Whereas Derrida warns that a message can
never be guaranteed to arrive, for Cixous messages arrive all the time:
even the absence of a message from her father is a message: ‘this
absence of a letter takes the place of a letter’ (191). If there is no
message from her father, it’s because ‘on the other hand he himself was
the message’ (90). In fact, the ‘chance’ by which a letter arrives again is
declared not to be a chance at all, but rather determined by the letters’
signatory, what the father wanted, or more precisely what he didn’t
know he wanted:
What troubles me is being designated by chance. Without any dispute. But
there is no chance. Everything that will happen was inscribed by the sender
in the marvellous form of a totally unimaginable and totally unpredicted future
possibility.
Just then — I choose a book from the shelf. This one or that one? I take the
one that takes me. I cut as one cuts into bread. The book opens. I look. I had
fallen on a letter. I’m not making it up. Twenty times a day, we enter a draw.
This letter was addressed to me. It said: ‘In the end nevertheless we depend/On
the creatures we made. In any case, it was very wise to have made them.’ Signed:
Your Freud 16th May 1935. This letter replied also to my father’s letter dated the
15th May 1935, but he didn’t receive it and I’m the one who receives it today, the
letter of wisdom which soothes my fright. (91)
The choices she thinks she is randomly making are not planned
consciously or foreseen by the author of the text she chooses, but
nevertheless determined in the sense of being made possible by him.
The fact that Freud’s letter (originally addressed to Lou Andreas-
Salomé) corresponds with her father’s letter written at the same time
appears one of many coincidences in OR: the numerous similarities
between Freud and the narrator’s father, a young Jewish doctor writing
daily to his fiancée; the fact that the letters resurface when her son is
the age her father was when he died (‘Now in my house I have a
father and a son who have about the same age my father my son’ (50)),
 Writing Symptomatically 219
etc. But in effect Cixous’s message in OR is that these are not just
coincidences (another word belonging to the field of falling, like
accident, chance and symptom). On the contrary, she stresses that
what happens, what befalls one, is motivated by what went before.
Not consciously willed or planned; the quotation from Freud’s letter
corroborates the idea Derrida developed at such length in ‘Envois’
that the successor precedes the predecessor and, at the end of the
book, the narrator specifies explicitly: ‘It is enough to ask and not
to will [vouloir]. Blessed is the fiancé who does not will, but he who
asks will be saved’ (187). Nevertheless, nothing is incidental: thus, for
example, the name of Cixous’s childhood dog, Fips, brings to light
for the narrator a hitherto unsuspected hostility on her mother’s side
towards him (176).
While no signatory may be able to determine what will be
transferred, transmitted, Cixous’s text signals that, once inscribed, what
is dead can always be resuscitated:
everything we silenced in order to live and not kill, everything we buried torn
into little pieces thrown to the wind lied incinerated covered with three layers of
paint turned over into its opposite redrowned at sea and on land smothered under
the pillow, all that’s needed is the sign of a pen, of a fishbone at daybreak, the
slightest thing, the name of the slightest thing, the name of a dog, a slip, a little
scar tissue, the stamp of an anguish hidden in the garden. (173)

While OR thus wholly endorses Derrida’s proposal that all letters are
‘dead’ letters, letters which cannot be delivered at a specific address, it
focusses above all on how letters keep the dead alive.
To conclude, letters figure as the sign of an original wound for both
Derrida and Cixous. But while for Derrida they are the reminder
as much as the remainder of a tragic situation, and thus similar to
psychoanalysis in reopening the wound (even if they cannot divulge
the secret they symptomatize), Cixous tastes no poison in the gift of
writing. In her case, nothing adulterates the silver (or indeed gold, or in
French) lining of the cloud: writing is the unqualified good (fortune)
made possible by the tragedy whose place it marks. Both Derrida and
Cixous — like all writers — write symptomatically, in the sense that
their work manifests the existence of a secret which can never be fully
uncovered. Their attitude to that symptomaticity forms an integral
part of their symptom; it is also a site of difference between them.
Derrida’s understanding of how letters work is, indeed, acute in every
sense: brilliant, but also tinged with suffering. For Cixous, the fact that
220 Paragraph
literature lies ‘beyond’ (psycho)analysis is unequivocally, and constantly,
a source of joy.

NOTES
1 As Cixous sees it, however, their writing practices differ in that a word is
always the ‘first motor’ of Derrida’s writing (he begins when the right word
comes to him) whereas words for her come later in the process; see ‘Tales of
Sexual Difference’, translated by Eric Prenowitz, The Portable Cixous, edited
by Marta Segarra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 48–60; 59.
Further references to this text will be preceded by TSD.
2 Mireille Calle-Gruber and Hélène Cixous, Hélène Cixous: Rootprints,
translated by Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 90 (translation
modified). Future references to this book will be given in the text, preceded
by RP.
3 See Mairéad Hanrahan, ‘Long Cuts’, parallax 44, 13:3 (2007), 37–48.
4 For Cixous, Derrida’s boundless curiosity is ‘vital’, on the side of life: at issue
here is the difference between two vital desires, not between a lifegiving one
and a deadly one.
5 This spectral figure of a doctor reminds us that literature and psychoanalysis
are themselves ‘false’ friends, that is, similar forms generating different
meanings when read as belonging to different codes, one of the differences
being precisely the greater or lesser degree to which the doctor appears. This
is clearly not to suggest that the boundary between the epistemological and
the therapeutic, or the theoretical and the clinical, can ever be definitively
determined within psychoanalysis, let alone between it and literature. They
have been shown to be inextricably linked in all sorts of ways. Indeed, Cixous
was among the first to bring out how Freud’s clinical practice was affected in
the ‘Dora’ case by his epistemological drive. Much recent trauma theory has
concentrated on the cathartic aspect of the urge to write. Derrida’s critique
of Lacan in Resistances of Psychoanalysis pointed out that Lacan’s defence of
the boundary between psychoanalytical and other discourses depended on
making experience of a particular clinical situation the principal criterion
determining whether one was eligible to talk about the passions, thereby
discrediting or disqualifying any other discourse seeking to think about what
Derrida recapitulates as ‘all this [ça, the word used in French for the id]’
(Resistances of Psychoanalysis, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Paascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67). Whether
or not the doctor is in evidence bears little relation to whether he’s at work.
6 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 151–2.
 Writing Symptomatically 221
7 For some critics, this extends to a desire to contain the universe. For a
discussion of Derrida’s fantasy of inclusiveness in Glas, his ‘fantastic desire’
that his calculations ‘include what they can never include’, see Lawrence
Johnson, ‘Tracing Calculation [Calque Calcul]: Between Nicolas Abraham
and Jacques Derrida’, Postmodern Culture 10: 3 (May 2000), para. 8. This
view contradicts Derrida’s own position that ‘What is put in question by
[deconstruction’s] work is not only the possibility of recapturing the originary
but also the desire to do so or the phantasm of doing so, the desire to
rejoin the simple, whatever that may be, or the phantasm of such a reunion’
(Resistances of Psychoanalysis, 27).
8 Jacques Derrida, ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’, Without Alibi,
translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 264.
9 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Certain Impossible Impossibility of Saying the Event’,
translated by Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33:2 (2007), 441–61; 456–7.
10 For example: ‘Literature remains the absolute place of the secret of this
heteronomy, of the secret as experience of the law that comes from the other,
of the law whose giver is none other than the coming of the other’ (Geneses,
Genealogies, Genres and Genius, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 48). For a discussion of the links between
Derrida and Blanchot in relation to the secret, see Ginette Michaud, Tenir au
secret (Derrida, Blanchot) (Paris: Galilée, 2006).
11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: “An Oblique offering”’, On The Name, edited
by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr. and Ian
McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 27–8.
12 Cixous emphasizes this ambiguity (previously practised to powerful effect by
Derrida in texts such as The Post Card) in the abridged version of the passage
she imports into Insister: ‘I can do without literature easily enough. Yes it’s
true [Mais si]. Yes it’s true [Mais si], without loving it in general and for itself,
I love in literature. If I love something in it, it would be in the place of the secret’
(Insister, 9).
13 In this respect, it would be interesting to revisit the reasons Derrida gave
Derek Attridge for not working on Beckett in Jacques Derrida, “‘This
Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature,
edited by Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60–1. See also
Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995) and Shane Weller, ‘When the Other Comes Too Close: Derrida and
the Threat of Affinity’, Kritikos 3, June 2006.
14 Of course, Cixous’s writing also profoundly troubles the boundary between
literature and its others (philosophy, autobiography, etc.). The issue here is
rather how literature’s symptomaticity is connoted in the two works.
15 ‘My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean
Stereophonies’, translated by Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking
222 Paragraph
Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, edited by Joseph H. Smith and
William Kerrigan (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984), 8.
16 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, translated
by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121. Future
references to this text will be preceded by PC.
17 This is the case both throughout ‘Envois’ (see for example 51, 67, 96,
183, 223) and in numerous other texts. See for example the end of Ulysse
gramophone: ‘I decided to stop here because an accident nearly happened as
I was scribbling this last sentence at the steering wheel when, leaving the
airport, I was returning home on my way from Tokyo’ (Paris: Galilée, 1987,
143; my translation).
18 Hélène Cixous, OR, Les Lettres de mon père (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 61; my
translation. Future references will be placed in the body of the text, preceded
by O.
19 I have discussed Cixous’s reflection on reading in ‘Oublire: Cixous’s Poetics of
Forgetting,’ Symposium 54:2 (Summer 2000), 77–89. See also Jacques Derrida,
H.C. for Life, That is to Say. . . , translated by Laurent Milesi and Stefan
Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Verena Andermatt
Conley, ‘Souffle de vie: Hommage à Hélène Cixous’ in Hélène Cixous, croisées
d’une œuvre, edited by Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 343–52;
and Peggy Kamuf, ‘Aller à la ligne’, in L’Événement comme écriture. Cixous et
Derrida se lisant, edited by Marta Segarra (Paris: Campagne Première, 2007),
73–84.
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