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Telefoam: Species on the Shores of
Cixous and Derrida
Lynn Turner
Published online: 31 Aug 2014.
To cite this article: Lynn Turner (2014) Telef oam: Species on t he Shores of Cixous and Derrida,
European Journal of English St udies, 18: 2, 158-171, DOI: 10. 1080/ 13825577. 2014. 917004
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Lynn Turner
TELEFOAM: SPECIES ON THE SHORES OF
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CIXOUS AND DERRIDA
Bringing animals, the technology of the telephone, and the maternal together might put
one in mind of the animal-machines of Descartes, doomed to repetition, to reaction, cut
off in kind from the capacity to respond and thus the supposed domain of the human.
Conceptually speaking, this essay pursues the deconstruction of such a distinction that
Derrida explicitly sets out in ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (2008) as well as in
‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ (2002) namely that human response is always
infected by the repetition of the mechanical – say the telephone, and animals cannot be
corralled into uniform, timeless automaticity. His arguments ruin claims of human
exceptionalism and insist on the ongoing complexity of what counts as the living. Derrida has long pressured the discrete tongue of the discipline of philosophy with its necessary infiltration by literature, as well as challenging the limits of the French language,
in which he is both at home and not at home. Sharing his ‘Algeriance’, Cixous’s writing puts perhaps greater emphasis on sounding the poetics of language as the means of
shaping its theoretical ambitions, thus demanding complex feats of invention from her
translators. Paying attention to the poetic articulation of her thought, this essay further
examines the ways in which Cixous doubles and even anticipates that which is now readily associated with Derrida, especially ‘the question of the animal’. It focuses on the
question of the distance-proximity of the telephone and the non-species-specific nature of
communication. Just as a letter can always not arrive at its destination, the telephone
can always produce crossed wires. The shores of the other are subject to limitrophy in
the telefoam of their correspondence, prompting a posthumanist ethics.
Keywords: Cixous; Derrida; posthumanist ethics; postanthropocentrism;
communication
… are there more telephones or animals in the life and works of Hélène
Cixous?
Answer: animals are telephones and sometimes the other way around, and they
multiply, in the prolifauny of all their animal, human and divine metamorphoses.
(Derrida, 2006: 102)
European Journal of English Studies, 2014
Vol. 18, No. 2, 158–171, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.917004
Ó 2014 Taylor & Francis
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TELEFOAM: SPECIES ON THE SHORES OF CIXOUS AND DERRIDA
A glance at the catalogues of major British publishing houses reveals the task of
translators trying to keep pace with Hélène Cixous’s prodigious output, as numerous works that predate her introduction to the Anglophone world – through the
gambit of such well-known collections as Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron’s New French Feminisms (1988) – are yet to appear in English. This hospitality,
however, remains uneven in terms of how these feats of translation are understood. Something similar could perhaps be said of other intellectuals who also came
to attention through the 1980s Anglo-American quest for the philosophical rather
than the sociological investigation of the ‘feminine’, such as Julia Kristeva and Luce
Irigaray, at least in terms of the sheer volume of their work and its relative dissemination in Anglophone and Francophone cultures. Early engagements often
measured the so-called ‘French Feminists’ against established male figures, such as
Jacques Lacan in particular, regarding how they rethought the erasure of the feminine in psychoanalysis and philosophy. Yet attention across the humanities over the
last decade to the question of the animal allows Cixous’s writing to emerge in
another light and one that centrally informs this essay. That said, there is perhaps a
certain kind of repetition in the Anglophone reception of Cixous that symptomatises the difficulty in reading work that defies genre: such was the anxiety over any
form of essential feminine together with the second-wave feminist insistence on
culture over nature that Cixous’s écriture féminine was as troubling as it was
exciting – even for readers committed to dispensing with a necessary equivalence
between realism and feminist literature (Moi, 1988); with the question of the animal comes a new critical resistance to the betrayals of allegory for fear of again
erasing animals in the interests of human concerns (the familiar ruse of the fable).
Yet, listening to Cixous today, we can start to break away from the linguisticism
of poststructuralism and reconceive of a poetics and a politics that no longer
cleaves to the human alone.
Telephoney
Claire Colebrook’s otherwise positive review of a collection of work on feminism
and French philosophy singled out Cixous’s chapter for hostile, even scornful,
remarks in a way that indexes the erratic reception of her work (Colebrook, 2005a).
First attacking her style by implication, holding her ‘essay’ at a distance with the pincers of scare-quotes, Colebrook then suggests that, at best, such a work could only be
a parody of how misogyny might defame feminist endeavours. The work in question
was ‘From My Menagerie to Philosophy’ (first published in French in 1996, in
Cixous’s book Messie). Only one quotation from Cixous evidences what could draw
such condemnation and it connects animals, telephones and the maternal: ‘The need
to telephone has always existed because it’s vital to recall the mother. All mammals
bear the trace of the first telephone cord’ (Cixous, quoted in Colebrook, 2005a:
220). Readers such as Colebrook, so well versed in both continental philosophy and
literature, usually bring a patient sophistication to thought (see Colebrook, 2005b),
yet Cixous exasperates her and reading stalls. Cixous’s books cannot exactly be called
‘novels’ yet neither do they present philosophical exegesis in any traditional sense.
Cixous explicitly rejects the story-telling pull of genre exerted by designations such
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as ‘the novel’ or ‘short story’, preferring to develop what she names a more ‘theatrical recollection of scenes’ (Cixous, 2011). Voices are channelled, voices are interrupted: we are not sure who is affirming what, whether there is a ‘first person’ or, if
there is, to what extent this figure coincides with or exceeds the one who signs herself
‘Hélène Cixous’. That said, extracts – ‘chapters’ – from her books often appear in
academic journals and in works of critical writing such as Dorothea Olkowski’s Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy (2000) (a book designed
to further the influx of ‘French philosophy’ to American academia).The present essay
assumes that the title of the latter book gives an intimation of Cixous’s approach to
writing, that is to say, it is more enactment than exegesis, more performative than
argumentative. As Cixous herself writes, ‘I do not command. I do not concept’ (Cixous, 1997b: 144). As such, this essay seeks to contribute to a greater understanding
of her work without solely and perhaps awkwardly relying on unpacking French into
English and explaining her allusions, but also through complementing Cixousian poetics: ‘Telefoam’ emphasises the sound of the text as its words lap against your ears.
Thus this ‘telefoam line’ does not simply dial, or even Skype, Cixous to connect with
her thought more immediately. Rather, it ushers in a sibilant text that conjures the
scene of the shore as sound waves double those of the sea, as nature and culture
overlap.
Bringing animals and the technology of the telephone together might put one
in mind of the animal-machines of Descartes, doomed to repetition, to mere reaction, categorically cut off from the capacity to respond and thus the supposed
domain of the human (Descartes, 2008: 47–8). Throw in the maternal and women
too are aligned with what is precisely unhistorical. This may be the familiar conclusion that Colebrook rightly finds offensive. Indeed, Elissa Marder has precisely
elaborated the pernicious fantasies of the maternal haunting the telephone in light
of Avital Ronell’s diagnosis (Marder, 2012). For Marder and Ronell, it is the dominant configuration of technology that works to constrain the feminine, which consequently only surfaces symptomatically. However the wager of ‘Telefoam’ is that
there is the chance of something quite different being sounded in Cixous’s writing,
something shared with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the Cartesian prescription of response or reaction (explicitly set out in The Animal That Therefore I Am,
2008, in ‘Typewriter Ribbon’, 2002, as well as his work more broadly). Rather
than maintain human exceptionalism – frequently construed as that power which
harnesses and instrumentalises technology – , both Cixous and Derrida insist on an
ongoing complexity vis-à-vis what counts as the living that necessarily interweaves
the repetition of the mechanical – say the telephone – with what we call response
and with what might be power. Not merely departing from placing the human at
the centre of things, in breaching such classical distinctions as response and reaction, living spontaneity and machinic repetition, Cixous and Derrida open the
thought of a posthumanist ethics. In so doing they accentuate the wounds to human
narcissism outlined by Freud: Earth is not the centre of the universe; we are not
unique among species but related to other animals; we are not even masters of
ourselves but are unseated by unconscious desire. Moreover, they share the ‘cyborgian wound’ underlined by Donna Haraway, that is, the non-separation of organic
and synthetic (Haraway, 2008: 11–12). While considered as ‘wounds to human
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narcissism’ by both Freud and maybe somewhat ironically by Haraway, this essay
unfolds Cixous’s understanding of these conditions as enabling.
In the two-sentence quotation from Cixous evidenced by Colebrook, we learn
that there has always been a need to telephone and that this is connected to recalling
the mother. Let us take this to vouch for an originary technicity and that the mother
is not buried in the ground of nature but able to be recalled. These two cords, the
now outmoded telephone and the umbilicus, are both beholden not to the fantasy
of pure communication or communion but to the possibilities of disconnection, of
unexpected connection, the work of traces not signifiers. The use of the term ‘telephone’ in Cixous – dramatically unconfined to this one essay as the epigraph from
Derrida playfully indicates – should not be taken as a naı̈ve anachronism, in denial
of the ubiquitous advance of mobile technology. Rather, Cixous insists on the materiality of the sound of the voice – the heartland of what metaphysics takes to be synonymous with presence. She marks the tele and remarks the phonē. The ostensible
clarity of the voice is thickened by my play on the telefoam. Its poetic licence conjures ‘telephants’ and ‘telefauns’ in no matter how impossible, how unheard-of a
bestiary (see Derrida, 2006: 102). Even if there is a kind of transmissibility between
animal and telephonic figures, as Derrida suggests, this bestiary cannot be confined
to the Cartesian cage of the animal-machine. Along with these phonemic (‘faunemic’) poetics, Cixous also dramatically addresses Telephone as a kind of character
since it appears with such frequency and such force in her ‘life writing’. Moreover,
in some of the classification-defying texts that pass between Cixous and Derrida on
their work, their own conversations by telephone come to light as generative
sources of thinking (Cixous, 2007; Derrida, 2002b). With an ear for sonorous suggestion, these three contexts are far from separate. As Eric Prenowitz – one of Cixous’s frequent translators – observes, her address ‘O téléphone’ brings in the double
sense afforded by its ‘near homonym’ ‘parler au téléphone’, that is, both speaking
on and speaking to the telephone (Prenowitz, 2008: 130).
Derrida has long pressured the discrete tongue of the discipline of philosophy
with its necessary infiltration by literature as well as pushed to the limits the
French language, in which he is both at home and not at home (Derrida, 1998).
This has often produced texts that are difficult for translators to swallow since they
challenge the purported universality of the concept and cultivate idiosyncrasy. In
distinction to the idealist faith in the concept as simply being transported by language and passed along in the act of translation, Derrida insists on the materiality
and the eccentricity of expression as inseparable from the production of what we
call philosophy. Sharing an ‘Algeriance’, that is, a common childhood as Jews in
what was then French Algeria (Cixous, 1997a), but not becoming intellectual companions until both were living in Paris, Cixous names herself as ‘stand[ing] at the
edge of North Africa. On its beach’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 182). She
takes in the views both inland and seaward as her genealogical memories fan out
across Africa and into Europe. Improperly ‘European’, Cixous remarks on how her
‘unclean’ name remains ‘unpronounceable and unspellable’ in the French language,
while only ‘rumor’ suggests that perhaps it is Arabic or Berber (Cixous, 1997a:
158). That said, she finds hospitality in this language – a ‘French passporosity’ – if
not always in the French State, given the abandonment of the Jews in Vichy
Algeria (155). ‘Arriving’ in French if not exactly in France, Cixous casts herself
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according to the present participle, desiring ‘arrivance, movement, unfinishing in
[her] life’ (170, italics in the original). This ‘passporosity’ indexes her emphasis on
sounding the poetics of language as that which also shapes its theoretical ambitions.
Cixous too exerts her translators.
Paying attention to the poetic articulation of her thought, this essay further
emphasises the ways in which Cixous doubles and even anticipates that which is
now readily associated with Derrida, especially ‘the question of the animal’, focusing on the distance-proximity of the telephone and the non-species-specific nature
of communication. Previously, I have tracked the extreme proximity of their
thought by naming a ‘Cixousian feline uncanny stalk[ing]’ the better-known The
Animal That Therefore I Am by Derrida, through following Cixous’s text translated as
‘The Cat’s Arrival’ (Turner, 2010). First published in Messie in 1996, this cat predates the lecture delivery of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am at the colloquium on ‘L’Animal autobiographique’ at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1997. Yet current
scholarship – including Cixous’s and Derrida’s writings on each other’s work –
increasingly attends to the ways in which their thoughts have long been interwoven
(Cixous, 2007; Derrida, 2006; Turner, 2013). I set this essay on the telefoam, so
to speak, for the sheer difficulty in telling for sure which side (côté) is which. If
the assonance of talking on the telefoam signals waves washing against the shore (la
rive), it thus opens onto Derrida’s ethics of infinite hospitality to the one who
arrives (l’arrivant) without ever fully arriving in the present (see Derrida, 1993).
With Cixous and Derrida I affirm a posthumanist ethics in which not only is the
one who is welcomed not known in advance, but this other cannot be predicted to
be human.
Whomeland
So, there must be a beach, a sea, a sky with all the paradoxes of the – impossible – limit, nondemarcation said Proust, this topology of the incalculable you say,
so that a what can arrive. … In a few pages the doggod Proteus will have sent
reeling the question, What is a What? as well as the question, What is a dog?
(Cixous, 2007: 392)
This ‘whomeland’ surfaces in Cixous’s dramatic discussion of Derrida’s protean
prose (Cixous, 2007: 393). It is difficult to pronounce, immediately throwing a
questioning ‘whom’ into the ostensibly self-evident home. Who me? This land
becomes unhomely, how did we ever think it otherwise? In turning to the
‘whomeland’, Cixous is invoking the interview with Derrida called ‘Eating Well’,
conducted by Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida, 1995b), as well as echoing her own advocacy of the ‘uncountry’ as an undoing of borders (Cixous, 1993).
‘Eating Well’ first took place for a special issue of the journal Topoi (1988)
under the thematic heading ‘Who Comes After the Subject?’ The governing frame
of the title holds Derrida’s attention. While the topic of the subject is nominally in
question, he finds it reinstalled in the maintenance of the ‘who’ and thus he refuses
‘to see the “who” restricted to the grammar of what we call Western language,
nor even limited by what we believe to be the very humanity of language’
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(Derrida, 1995b: 277). This matter of a ‘who’ or a ‘what’ is consequential indeed:
managing what we eat as precisely a ‘what’ and not a ‘who’ is leashed to the symbolic effort to preserve humans from cannibalism. It is strongly implicated in what
Derrida diagnoses as our failure to ‘sacrifice sacrifice’ (279). It goes to the heart of
an ethics that implicitly addresses the human alone (thus claiming a consistency to
what is called the human). Taking Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and its opening command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ as exemplary of the problem, Derrida does not ‘simply’
replace it with an unwieldy wider command such as ‘Thou shalt not kill the living
in general’ but rather affirms that ‘One must eat well’ (Ibid.). The posthumanist
ethics of eating well moves away from the human-centred logic that forbids murder while simultaneously condoning the loophole of a ‘non-criminal putting to
death’ for those who fall out of the category of the ‘who’ and land in the sacrificial
terrain of the ‘what’ (278). Yet this ethics also complicates our symbolic ingestion
of others since it is enmeshed in the practice of eating as a ‘metonymy for introjection’ (282). Thus, a variation upon the uncanny haunts what it is to eat.
The most radical elements of ‘Eating Well’ – foreshadowed in Derrida’s earlier
text ‘Fors’, in which the psychoanalytic writings of Nicolas Abraham and Maria
Torok are explicitly engaged with and implicitly critiqued – are perhaps in need of
emphasis (see Derrida, 1986; Turner, 2015). When Derrida writes that ‘[f]or everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye,
and all the “senses” in general) the metonymy of “eating well” [bien manger] would
always be the rule’, he is not only radically opening out the Levinasian ethics of the
face (Derrida, 1995b: 282, my emphasis); he is also challenging the psychoanalytic
emphasis on the mouth as that which predicts the human by virtue of speech as the
supposedly unique signature of communication from which nonhuman others remain
barred, as well as troubling our effort to maintain a clean divide between actual and
symbolic anthropophagy: if ‘one must eat’ not just to physiologically ingest nutrition
but in order to psychically form a self, and if this eating as metonymy of introjection
is no longer singularly attached to the mouth, then other kinds of identification in
excess of how we are habituated to think of human egos may ensue. Thus these peculiar edges metonymising introjection return us to unsure shores.
Inhabitants of the conceptual terrain onto which Derrida unleashed The Animal
That Therefore I Am may have misheard his insistence on taking species other than
humans seriously by construing it to be another form of identity politics that would
extend theories of difference to include other animals. But rather than ‘simply’
break up the violent false singular of ‘the animal’ into a myriad of particular differences, each animal with its own distinct outline, or blend humans and animals into
the same category entitled to the same rights, Derrida does something quite different in dialogue with the rest of his work: he invokes the limit, say the limit of the
human, but really any limit, as that which suffers from limitrophy. Limits cannot
remain constant, cannot rein in a property. He writes:
Let’s allow [limitrophy] to have both a general and a strict sense: what abuts
onto limits but also what feeds, is fed, is cared for, raised and trained, what is
cultivated on the edges of a limit. … Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly
not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding and dividing the line… (Derrida, 2008: 29)
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Thickened and multiplied, the animal thus becomes an animot, obliging the sound
of a plural (animaux) and written attention to the word (mot). Naming the limit as
that which ‘grows’ together with refusing a ‘frontal’ or oppositional attack on the
‘philosophical or common sense’ shoring up our sense of self as human and
uniquely so, is foreshadowed in Derrida’s early writings (Ibid.). There, the shore
and the limit are already entangled with the problem of the margins, the place
from which and to which Derrida writes in Margins of Philosophy (Derrida, 1982,
first published in French in 1972). There, he was already ‘eating the margins’,
already addressing an inevitable ‘limitrophic violence’ and also alerting us to the
telephonic stakes of offsetting the phallogocentric subject of reason (Derrida, 1982:
xxv, italics in the original).
‘Tympan’, the opening chapter of Margins, dilates upon otographies that interlink technical and biological figures (the tympanums of both the printing press and
the human ear). In retrospective light of the opening of the body – the edges of
all the orifices – in ‘Eating Well’, I have argued elsewhere that Derrida here advocates a kind of ‘hearing well’ and that this arises through a telephone conversation
with Cixous (Turner, 2013). The oblique stretch of the eardrum maximises vibrations. In vibrating, it effectively ‘grafts itself’, thereby ‘resist[ing] the concepts of
machine or of nature, of break or of body, resist[ing] the metaphysics of castration’
(Derrida, 1982: xxviii). Reading the site of what was the head of the human subject of reason as thus inevitably open to the other without being able to determine
that other in advance (without being able to maintain the margins) leads Derrida
to the seashore. ‘Tympan’ inserts a long and otherwise unreferenced citation from
Michel Leiris’s book Scratches (Biffures) into the typographically atypical slender
right-hand column, tracking the whole length of Derrida’s ‘own’ tympanic text
(the left-hand column). The particular extract lets loose a series of spiralled forms
from the intestines to snail shells to ‘the concha of the ear’ (xii). Later in the chapter, on the left-hand side this time, the concha comes back. Repeating the gesture
of defying ‘the concepts of break or of body’, the spiral of the other tympanum
invoked by Derrida is both ‘closed in on itself and open to the sea’s path’
(Derrida, 1982: xviii, n. 9, my emphasis). Unlike a more familiar psychoanalytic
subscription to the trouble of the ear as that organ which can never shut and is
destined thus always to be cast as a hole with all the attendant anxieties that castration organises (see Marder, 2012: 113), Derrida recasts this limit by playing upon
the oblique, vibrating tympanum as open and closed, as a telefoam call. While the
dialectical tradition would negate the other without remainder, Derrida’s and
Cixous’s posthumanist ethics maintain a deconstruction of relations between others,
including technical and nonhuman others – a stance informing the editorial impetus
behind this EJES issue.
Telephantasm
Now I write. Which is to say that in my black interior softness the rapid footsteps of an arriving book print themselves.
(Cixous, 1997b: 141)
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To give the readers of Messie a clue, it is not in that collection but rather in an epigraph to the translated text ‘From My Menagerie to Philosophy’ that Cixous
quotes Derrida from his text ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ The latter is the text in which
poetry curls itself into a ball, hiding without being able to see the oncoming vehicle that might run it over: poetry in the form of a hedgehog (Derrida, 1995a).
Cixous then opens her text with the remark that ‘[a]nimals are becoming more
and more important in [her] books’ and immediately installs the ass accompanying
Abraham on Mount Moriah as a communicative presence rather than ‘simply’ a
dumb beast of burden (Cixous, 2000: 40). She conjures their conversation as one
that takes place on the telephone (with a touch of Francophonic distance, this
remains in French in the English translation) and plays on a homonym between
proper and colloquial nouns common to English and French. This ass (âne) that is
a donkey is shadowed by the colloquial English ass that is an idiot, in anticipation
of what David Wills – the translator of The Animal That Therefore I Am – makes of
Derrida’s use of ‘bêtise’, rendered in English as an ‘asinanity’ (Derrida, 2008: 18).
Subsequently, there is a ludicrous scene, reminiscent of an anxiety nightmare,
of a meeting between university colleagues in which our narrator – animated
through numerous animal figures – defends poetry as the only thing that really
counts, only to find herself requested to lecture on this very subject and thus, it is
implied, anchor the term in some conceptual precision (Cixous, 2000: 46–7). It
is here, in response to the question inescapably evocative of Derrida – What is
poetry? – that Cixous connects the telephone and her cat, in an act of resistance
to the request for precision and the ideality of the concept. It is the way that they
‘resolved the question of the telephone’ (Ibid.). It is an elementary communication
between two living entities. The mother is named, but she ‘may also be a son a
husband a lover’ and in this case a cat (48). Addressing their differences in communicability, Cixous has the cat using her body, grazing against her legs as a telephone, to call in for reassurance (while implying distance within this ostensible
proximity), while Cixous whistles her call in turn.
This brief communiqué between species resonates with Cixous’s related text
‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’ (1997b, first published in French
in 1996). In ‘Writing Blind’, traditional figures of illumination such as ‘broad daylight’ inhibit Cixous’s practice (139). She abandons the ostensible clarity of the
eyes for the sake of ‘becom[ing] a thing with pricked up ears’ (Ibid.). With passion
she seeks out a night, or the personified proper noun Night, and writing behind
her eyelids where her own ‘animots’ pass by (139–40). This night does not annihilate, it facilitates. In this night the touching communication of Cixous’s cat – ‘the
cat whose cat I am’, that is to say, the cat whose cat she is following – resumes,
only to incrementally evoke a donkey, and one that is connected to the ‘telephone
exchange’ (142). Subsequently she again invokes the donkey with Abraham and the
conversation they, surely, must have had. This is accomplished without mentioning
Abraham’s son Isaac, or the event of sacrifice commanded by God – the featured
cast and the major event usually in theological or ethical focus, though this is the
event to which they proceed. Again her prose anticipates elements of Derrida’s
thought. On the one hand, Cixous has it that one only says ‘foolish things [bêtises]’
to other human beings, implicitly acknowledging that this trope of animal stupidity
has nothing to do with animals. (English idioms that name human behaviour as
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idiotic through recourse to animal figures include ‘to make a pig’s ear’ of something, or the speciesist and sexist insult ‘stupid cow’.) On the other hand, she
implies that these foolish things are lies, and that with animals one would rather
‘ride straight to the essentials’ (143). Perhaps it starts to sound as if this repeats
the tenacious opposition that Derrida traces from Descartes to Lacan, namely that
the capacity to lie is another proper ability of the human (Derrida, 2008: 131).
‘Writing Blind’ even involves a compact play on ‘duncity’, easily evoking the ‘dansité’ that Derrida homes in on when pointing to the two loopholes in Lacan’s plot
that allow animals to pretend – but not ‘pretend to pretend’ as humans are supposed to do through the signature of the signifier – namely, seduction and combat
(Derrida, 2008: 127–29). ‘Dansité’ straddles English and French, ‘dancity’, density
and the colloquially English word ‘dense’, meaning like a dunce.
Yet the alternative passage to chatting with humans, or making a bêtise, is the
donkey riding ‘right away’ (Cixous, 1997: 143). Write away: this is the movement
to which Cixous submits. She may say she writes ‘on’ the donkey (like writing
‘on’ the telephone), yet this is under the aegis of ‘writing blind’ (143). This cannot be reduced to the habitual and trivial abuse of animal figures as human alibis.
Her process and her book may seem inane, anarchic, or even criminal to the ‘policeforce reader’ that she anticipates, but Cixous ‘exercises the right to invention’
(150). In allowing for such invention, she ‘search[es] for one land’ but ‘find[s]
another’ (Ibid.). There is no prediction, no compass. Nicholas Royle even finds the
force generated by the term ‘away’ to be a kind of signature of Cixous’s own
deconstruction of presence, sufficiently pronounced to warrant titling his very essay
on the topic ‘Away’ (Royle, 2007). Cixous’s only common ground is the art of
the cut: ‘All living beings, mammal or vegetable, know that one must cut and trim
to relaunch life. Nip the quick. Harm to help’ (1997b: 144). A few paragraphs
later and the interplay of animals and the telephone is signalled:
Our telephone is our donkey stopped and placed on the table near my hand.
… it is our personal animal, the being called-telephone … There is no more
living more ordinary more divine more adorable-and-terrifying more familiar
and less familiar than this instrument-that-allows-a-conversation between two
distant people.
(145)
O telephone
I was in the process of writing: But the telephone rings. And I wrote: and it’s
you (I mean the telephone itself). It was then that the telephone rang, this one
here, and it was you. It was you! And I burst into laughter. (I must say I was
not waiting for you). And it was you and I say to you: o my love I was in the
middle of writing: but the telephone rings. And you say to me: no way! – I
swear! I say with fervor. And you say to me: but are you sure this happens
outside, or is it in the text?
TELEFOAM: SPECIES ON THE SHORES OF CIXOUS AND DERRIDA
Here, I cannot continue. I do not know where outside happens or if the text
is inside, inside outside or if the text is itself outside, or if outside is in the
text. This is what happens when one writes what happens.
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(Cixous, 1997b: 143)
In this epigraph, taken from ‘Writing Blind’, it is not simply a matter of speaking
on the telephone but of the telephone itself speaking. Who speaks? This implicit
but crucially organising question should confirm the point of view and anchor the
subject – a human subject (indeed it is the question that Colebrook highlights,
especially as point of view becomes dispersed into ‘talking assemblages’ by Gilles
Deleuze [2005b: 226]). Here the question of ‘who speaks?’ surprises the ostensible
point of view of the narrator. There is no simple personification of technology.
The telephone asks a ludic question as to where ‘this’ happens, adding extra pressure to the establishment of point of view. Which ‘this’ is in question? This conversation? This talking telephone that interrupts? Is ‘this’ anything at all? Riffing on
the infamous refrain of ‘there is no outside-text’, Cixous identifies the ‘this’ as
what happens when one writes. Writing is that which confounds sides, confounds
the shore, confounds nature and culture or technicity in a posthumanist movement.
This moment in ‘Writing Blind’ bears resemblance to passages in ‘The Cat’s
Arrival’ in which the cat speaks. Elementary critiques of representations of animals
in literature might quickly zone in on such a familiar and easy ruse of subordinating
animal figures to human interests. However, Cixous is careful to remark on this
remarkable speech (see also Turner, 2010: 78). In the middle of the essay, the
narrator elects to bathe Thea the cat, who has installed herself in the narrator’s
heart and house despite protestations (Cixous, 2006: 32). Cleaning Thea, however,
is imagined as a denuding disaster in which her fur dissolves away completely,
necessitating that the narrator cover her with a towel. Amid the echo of shame,
their bodies are made, if not the same, then similarly in need of the modesty of
clothing. Thea reproaches the narrator for ‘passing the limit’ and names her transgression as the ‘exaggera[tion of] love’ (Ibid.). This speech thus reposes difference
even in the guise of common communication. The first example is yet more striking since it comes hot on the heels of the unfathomable titular event of the cat’s
arrival. Unforeseen and unwelcomed, this essay begins with the narrator’s surprise
that ‘the Event would be a cat’ (21). Attempting to refuse to accommodate a
foundling cat for any second longer than necessary, the narrator takes this cat –
who becomes Thea – to her cousins’ house and leaves her there. But the cat, with
a newly torn ear, returns and not only returns but ‘came to thank the hostess for
saving her from the hell into which she herself had thrown her’ (22). The alliteration and proximity between thanking and thinking in this section – Thea thanks
the narrator, who wonders what way of thinking this might entail – demands to be
read as deliberate (see Turner, 2010: 78). It presages the radical restaging of
Martin Heidegger’s ‘What is called thinking’ in Derrida. When he writes, ‘[t]he
animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’,
Derrida challenges us not to repeat the cant of a definitive distinction between the
human and the animal (Derrida, 2008: 29). Thea thinks and thanks and these
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things redouble the surprise that she be there at all, challenging anthropocentrism
not simply by refusing to project human qualities upon nonhuman species, but
questioning whether we can properly identify the anthropos as such. Crossing all
manner of thresholds before the narrator realises that some form of guest might be
approaching her, Thea’s sure-footed arrival signals all the elements of the ethics of
an infinite hospitality common to Cixous and to Derrida.
The incredulous arrival of this cat is reiterated in ‘Writing Blind’ and set a little more explicitly in the context of the ‘always unexpected Messiah’ (Cixous, 1997b:
150, italics in the original). There this cat is also bound up with the arrival of a
book, likewise unexpected and unable to be booked into the present. There a
chapter of a book is named as that which ‘could be called the imitation of the cat’
(151). In this comparison it is the chapter that imitates the cat, not the other way
around. It is even a ‘barely weaned’ cat that yet grows and instructs you (151).
There this arriving book, like a cat, is an archiving entity that speaks to you.
Autobiographical animals
Being able to suffer is no longer a power: it is a possibility without power, a
possibility of the impossible.
(Derrida, 2008: 28)
In 1997, during his address at the Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium on his work under the
heading ‘L’Animal autobiographique’, Derrida tracks the way in which the philosophically embedded division between the one who calls himself ‘man’ and that
which he calls ‘the animal’ is shored up by the conceit of ability. Habitually Cartesian ‘man’ locates himself as the one with the ability to speak, to lie, to respond, to
mourn and all the rest, while the reactive animal has no such powers. Deconstructing this division, Derrida asks his audience whether they themselves can respond
(Derrida, 2008: 8). It is a gesture that troubles the ‘autobiographical animal’ if one
understands this to mean ‘the animal who has the ability to write their autobiography’ or animality supplemented by this ability. But it is also a gesture that is familiar
to readers of Derrida’s work: writing of the death of Paul de Man, he counter-intuitively asked whether we have the capacity to mourn (Derrida, 1989: 31). How will
we decide who or what to mourn, for how long, in what manner, and how will we
know when the work of mourning is complete? Capacity or ability as the property
of an intending subject is precisely what is put into question. In the case of animals,
Derrida prefers to write of the ability to suffer as a ‘possibility without power’ in
which ‘[m]ortality resides’ (Derrida, 2008: 28). Moreover, this vulnerable finitude
is a condition shared by humans and other animals.
In 1998, speaking again at Cerisy but this time in honour of Cixous (‘Hélène
Cixous: Croisées d’une oeuvre’), Derrida shows the intimacy of his reading of her
work. While the previous section ‘O telephone’ has proffered some of the ways in
which Cixous unsettles the point of view of who or what it is that speaks, at this
colloquium Derrida gives his most extended and nuanced reading of her work.
Amongst and as much as bringing attention to the animals and the telephones, Derrida gives emphasis to a particular notion of ‘might [puisse]’ in Cixous, asserting
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TELEFOAM: SPECIES ON THE SHORES OF CIXOUS AND DERRIDA
that ‘[e]verywhere she assays a mighty power of the “might”’ (Derrida, 2006: 70,
107, italics in the original). This delicate emphasis has not gone unnoticed. In reference to Peggy Kamuf’s writing on both Cixous and Derrida, Ginette Michaud
links the ‘thought of “puissance”’ that Derrida invokes vis-à-vis Cixous with the
force that he emphasises in such well-known texts as ‘Force and Signification’
(Michaud, 2006: 91). Thus this is a force that breaks open context, breaks open
signification, prevents it from ever remaining definitive: it is not a power given
over to the hands of an individual to wield. Indeed, Kamuf characterises this power
as a ‘powerless power’ in light of Cixous’s use of the subjunctive (92). Cixous herself uses the modification ‘Toute-puissance-autre’, translated as ‘other-omnipotence’
(see Michaud, 2006: 92). While Michaud does not understand this might in light
of the ‘possibility without power’ in The Animal That Therefore I Am, the line of
‘Telefoam’ connects the two. Perhaps Derrida himself more explicitly troubles the
present indicative: to what, to where, to when does ‘the animal that therefore I
am’ refer, when Je suis (I am) can be equally heard as Je suis (I am following), as is
constantly the case in that text? Yet his insistence on the transformation of ability
when construed as the ability to suffer speaks to Cixous’s transformation of power
into might in the subjunctive mood of that which is yet to occur. He even suggests
that the English language assists the discernment of this transition, given the homographic overlap between ‘might’ as possibility and ‘might’ as strength (Derrida,
2006: 45). If this puissance were to be graspable in the present, it would vanish
into the ether. This might is no possession; it can only be improper. The right, or
the law, of this might is ‘autoimmune’: it turns on itself (108). As such it goes
hand in hand with the poisonous risk that is autobiography – always infecting and
affecting the self with the other (Derrida, 2008: 47).
Calling for countersignature, talking on the telephone always appeals to the
other. Constitutively ‘writing blind’, the telephone, like a psychoanalytic session,
eschews the face-to-face encounter. The transported senses touched on in this essay
such as speaking of a donkey or a cat on or as a telephone, take communication
out of the immediacy of the present. Moreover, these ‘animalséances’ do not only
recollect the past or address trauma in psychoanalytic fashion but also open future
connections and thus furnish surprise (Derrida, 2008: 4). During a telephone conversation between Cixous and Nicholas Royle that was staged in front of a postgraduate community at the University of Sussex, she asked about some unexpected
sounds on the line. Royle stated that it was a seagull. Laughing, she replied, ‘can
you imagine that I get her call!’ (Cixous, 2011). However unlikely it is that Cixous
be countersigned by a seagull, in this event she sided with the shores once more.
Siding with the shores, treading in each other’s footsteps, we know that our
traces are always able to be erased; these are the shores that we share.
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NY: Columbia University Press.
Lynn Turner publishes on deconstruction and animals, feminism, science fiction and
visual culture. Her books include The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Ed. 2013),
Visual Cultures As … Recollection (co-authored, 2013). She is an Associate Editor of
Derrida Today and Arts Editor of parallax. She leads the MA in Contemporary Art Theory
in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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