“To begin (writing, living) we must have death.”
(Helene Cixous, Three steps, pg.7)
“Writing: a way of leaving no space for death.”
(Helene Cixous, Coming to, p. 3)
“I armed love, with soul and words, to keep death from winning.” (Helen Cixous, Coming to, p. 2)
To read Cixous is to read death, or to read life, against death.
Coiling up from death is the force of love. Where death is the pre-condition for writing life, for what springs forth in vitality from the loss that cannot be reconciled.
“The first book I wrote rose from my father’s tomb.”
(HC, Three steps, p. 11)
I am keeping notes here really, to grasp a moment in Cixous. A moment she re-plays and works inside over and over. I was going to write about “birth” in Cixous, and I will. It’s beautiful how she writes birth and births writing. But one starts with Death to arrive in Birth with her, to know this twinned love of birth from death (in life).
“Writing is good: it’s what never ends.” (HC, Coming to, p. 4).
Isn’t education (like writing), predicated upon death? Education, in it’s ongoing birthings, re-generating knowledge, practices, and social values as each generation grows up from, and is tutored by, the death of previous ones. We are durational beings.
Derrida maintained that Cixous writes “for Life” – to which she replied in text, “had he read Tombe?”
Yes, he had, and all the others, which are “on the side of life against death, for life without death, beyond a death whose tests and threat are none the less endured, in mourning even in life blood and breath, in the soul of writing.”
(JD, H.C. for Life, 2006, p. xiii)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Nane Jordan.