Cixous

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes famously contemplates a 19th century urban landscape photograph and conjures up, via this image, an alternative model of temporality that he calls ‘utopian time’ and that he associates with a return to the body of the mother.  Barthes’s description of what happens when he looks at this ‘fantasmatic’ image is figured as a quasi-photographic operation that opens up onto a complex reflection on temporality, language, and an alternative (non-referential) conception of writing history.  Beginning with a reading of this ‘utopian’ image, this paper explores what happens when photography loosens its grasp on its various referential conscious powers: (to know, to prove, to document) and gives itself over instead to become a form of writing. As writing, photography calls for a mode of reading (of events, texts, and the world) that is neither conscious nor unconscious as conventionally understood.  In this sense, photographic writing operates at the very limits of what can be imagined as ‘visible’ or even ‘possible.’  Picking up on Barthes’s invocation of Freud’s remarkable claim that the maternal body is the only “place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been before,” this paper argues that the psychic status of this conviction takes the photographic form of an impossible ‘déjà vu.’  Impossible, because the notion of ‘déjà vu’ as it is developed here does not refer to the repetition of something that one has seen before, but rather to the photographic recurrence of that which was never seen before. As such, déjà vu, opens up the question of how the photographic maternal bears witness to an un-photographable event.  The paper concludes with a discussion of several of Hélène Cixous’s recent fictions in order to show how, in the photographic images of ‘déjà vu’ that come to us in dreams and in writing, we might by chance discover latent traces of as yet unwritten future histories.

"Brower explores the way philosophers were inspired by entomological social systems and communication to reflect on human psyche, social behavior, community organization, communication, and inter-individual relationships. His essay rehearses the swarms of insects embedded in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, not only showing how many of the major concepts (or philosophemes) in continental philosophy – sexuality, politics, thinking, time, interdependence, and language – draw lessons from the world of insects, but also illustrating again how the insect world spurred human reflection."

"Brower provides a vivid demonstration of the vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition in France and its theories of the incarnate word. Taking off in large part from Derrida's reading of Freud's essay on the mystic writing pad, Brower asks what do we mean by a slip of the tongue or slip of the pen, and in what way do the images that surround these notions privilege sight over the other senses. The tongue, moreover, is not just an organ of speech. It is also the site of taste. Taste seems immediate; it seems to be removed from the scene of writing, or from the ineradicable difference that Derrida detects in Husserlian phenomenology in *Speech and Phenomenon*. But to the extent that Derrida sees taste and touch as part of the future of psychoanalysis, then these senses too much be mediated, must be inscribed in the logic of the trace and hence subject to interpretation. Taste, and particularly self-taste, is never simply present, but always mediated by the voice of the Other..."
  ("Introduction" to FLS 38, by Paul Allen Miller, p. xvii)

Abstract:
Following one of Jacques Derrida’s early questions — namely, How is writing involved in speech? — this essay reconsiders the role of the tongue and the sense of taste in the oral phenomena of speaking and saying. The contact the tongue makes with the mouth or teeth is just as much a materialization of language as what is commonly called “writing.” The tongue acts as a pen and the mouth, as a blank page (or palimpsest). Mouthed writing is accompanied by sense experiences. There are various selftastes to the tastes of speaking, the tastes of words, or, even, the tastes of thoughts. Freud’s notes on speaking in one’s sleep, telepathy, the mystic writing-pad, and memory are revisited and sup- plemented with the writings of Hélène Cixous on the taste of words, telephoning, saying-to-oneself, and forgetting. The auto-affection of tasting-oneself-speakwriting is offered as an alternative to the meta- physical presumptions Derrida implicates in Husserl’s understanding of speech based on the auto-affection of hearing-oneself-speak. As such, writing (haunted by the trace of death) and speech (invested with living- presence) is now confronted with the selftastes of speakwriting with one’s stylangue in and on the mouth as the scene of writing (ever accompanied by tastes of life-death).

ta su ginekonomije i šta ih pokreće? Kako se manifestuju i zašto? Da li se radi samo o ženi/ ženskom/ženstvenom ili je ipak reč o ženskim libidinalnim ekonomijama koje zajedno s muškim, učestvuju u neprestanoj razmeni u životu čoveka? Podsećajući se diskursa o polnim razlikama, polna razlika se tumači kao komplementarna studijama roda kako bi se izbegle isključive vrednosti esencijalizma i konstruktivizma.

Allo Illa ? L'étéléphone : conversation illimitée vers l'étranger

« Ça téléphone partout dans l'oeuvre d'Hélène Cixous, tantôt sans arrêt, tantôt discontinu. Ça respire, ça chauffe, ça mange ». Vous aurez reconnu à une ou deux différences près les deux premières phrases de L' Anti-OEdipe, « ça fonctionne partout, tantôt sans arrêt, tantôt discontinu, ça respire, ça chauffe, ça mange. [ça chie, ça baise] Quelle erreur d'avoir dit le ça. Partout ce sont des machines, pas du tout métaphoriquement : des machines de machines, avec leur couplages, leurs connexions ».
L'une des lignes de forces de l'écriture-téléphonée à partir du multi-raccordement signé H. Cixous est de parler au lieu du ça,  juste à côté: par exemple en transitant par un mot latin ouvert aux erreurs d'accent et de prononciation : Illa, mot dont les deux syllabes issues d'une langue dite morte n'arrêtent pas de téléphoner en continu et en discontinu à la langue française, de sorte qu'elle se retrouve en situation de « conversation illimitée vers l'étranger ».

This paper explores Helene Cixous’ response to the theory of ‘Gift’ and then presents a ‘live’-reading of the Song of Songs in terms of Gift. This is an approach to the Song of Songs which could be seen as a kind of birthing that allows multiple escapes the Realm of the Proper. The goal that will both succeed and fail is to enter Cixous’ feminine realm of ‘pure’ Gift with the text through form and language of the paper. Rather than being confined to cycles of exchange and return, of absolutes, of economies, the Song of Songs will be shown to continually overflow boundaries and break laws. The new and unique are birthed all the time inside the text, rupturing language into unlimited possibility and endless creativity. Love escapes. Bringing together Cixous’ own live-texts and the author’s creative response to the Shulamith, the scene is set for a vibrant reading.