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I don't know if you will like this poem [Paul Eluard’s Vingt-huit novembre mil neuf cent quarante-six]. I'm not even sure that I like it, that "liking" would exactly express my relation to it Perhaps the mere fact that I have a relation to it is enough said. I remember when I first read it: the way it struck me immediately with a force that could hardly have been contained in its four almost toneless lines, a force that could hardly have been foreseen, so that I felt the poem as one feels a wound, or perhaps as one becomes aware suddenly of an itch, of a puckering in the skin: the scar of a wound I never knew I'd received. Surely the punctum here (to borrow Barthes' word for the wounding, punctuating aspect of a photograph) was the fact that I knew and could not get over: that Eluard's wife died on November 28, 1946. Or rather the poem was (for me at least) the becoming punctum of that fact: I was feeling something like the unavoidable presence of Eluard's suffering––and precisely his suffering, because in the face of such a poem how can one invoke some anonymous "speaker" or "poetic voice," how can one get past a biography that has suddenly become real?

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Readers of Walter Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels tend to focus their attention mainly on the part of the book that deals with melancholy and allegory. A few more ambitious critics occasionally struggle with the immensely difficult epistemological preface. The first two sections, that contain not only one of the most powerful readings of baroque theater, but also a theory of modern theater and drama as well as a theory of the subject, are generally neglected. One of the reasons for this partial reading or not-reading of Benjamin's book is the odd constellation of its subject matter. Few readers of Benjamin are familiar with the texts from which he construes what he calls "origin," and few baroque specialists are serious readers of Benjamin.

But another resistance might be at work in this screening of attention. Much of Benjamin criticism is shaped by the tradition of the Frankfurt School with its particular Hegelian reading of Marx and Freud. Despite strong counter-tendencies within the Frankfurt School itself, especially by Adorno, this particular combination of Hegel, Marx, and Freud coalesces in a concept of the subject that is firmly grounded in self-reflection and the Ego. Both Marx's class subject and Freud's psychoanalytic subject are thus displaced, in a subtle assimilation process, to the bourgeouis subject ideal.

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From its beginnings, the project of enlightenment has been plagued by a persistent paradox: it promises autonomy to the dependent, liberation to the repressed, health to the diseased, and yet the dependent, repressed, and diseased resist it with what can best (and most paradoxically) be termed stubborn indifference. Part of the resistance stems from a certain kind of pain that always attends the operations of enlightenment, particularly when they are performed by a radical practitioner such as Dr. Marx. Enlightenment, in the broadest sense of the term, methodically removes the layers of lies, superstition, and mystification, only to lay bare the truth. Not only does it offer a new and better truth, but it demands the abandonment of the familiar. It necessarily involves disillusionment, since it attempts to dispel its greatest enemy, illusion, from the minds of the people, and to offer them the naked truth instead.

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John Marston, one of a new generation of "Inns of Court men"––law students at the cluster of gentlemen's breeding schools outside London––engaged early in his career in a common Inns of Court pastime: promulgation of "cynic satyres" to scourge the evils of the time. I have presented at the outset a passage from one of Marston's better-known juvenile, or Juvenalian, productions. Among the satiric conventions it illustrates is the singling out of one character type as emblem of a more general corruption. The speaker, whom we are to imagine on a random stroll through the streets of London, spontaneously encounters one specimen of an egregious affectation: sumptuous, gorgeous, Frenchified fashionability...

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Vers la fin de la pièce, Le Balcon, Mme Irma, "directrice" de l'établissement en question, se trouve pour la première, et dernière fois, toute seule sur scène, après une longue et éprouvante journée. Tandis qu'elle commence à éteindre les lumières, qui lui auraient cozzté "mille francs d'électricité par jour!", elle pense avec fierté à ses trente-huit salons, "tous dorés, et tous, par machinerie, capables de s'emboîter les uns dans les autres, de se combiner..." (153)1 Curieuse machinerie, qui permet aux salons "de s'emboîter...de se combiner". Une machinerie assez paradoxale en somme, qui d'un certain c?té ressemble à un dispositif théâtral, soit un plateau tournant, soit une "salle modulable" telle que c'était prévu initialement pour l'Opéra de la Bastille (et dont l'abandon signalait le début de la fin de ce projet malheureux). Étant donné le rapprochement constant du bordel avec le théâtre (pp. 66-67), une telle association n'est guère fortuite

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Since World War II and the atrocities of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, writers and philosophers have been asking the question once implicitly posed by Adorno: how does one write poetry after Auschwitz? How can the horror of the inhuman be expressed through language? These questions participate in a long tradition of reflection on the nature of poetic language, at the site where such thoughts coincide with more contemporary concerns about ethics and history. Hélène Cixous’ most recent artistic phase takes up these very challenges, of late so urgent in France and America. As always, she takes part in this debate in a way that is particular to her. A constant interlocutor and thorn in the side of a certain Parisian discourse, Cixous has consistently placed herself in the position of the displacer, of the winged thief (la voleuse) in relation to the very discourse whose agenda is to displace and deconstruct.

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The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness

How can the poet open his universe to the destinies of a people? He who is first of all an explorer of the Self, how, in what language foreign to his ego, by what means could he write much more and altogether other than Me?

And another question: how can I, who am of the literate species, ever give speech to an illiterate peasant woman without taking it away from her, with one stroke of my language, without burying her with one of my fine sentences? In my texts would there never be but people who know how to read and write, to juggle with signs? And yet I love this Khmer peasant, I love this royal mother from a village in Rajasthan who knows so many things and doesn't know she lives in a country I call India. For a long time I thought my texts would only live in those rare and desert places where only poems grow.

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When the terrestrial earth is lost, the celestial earth remains.

No more plateaus of perfumed skin, no more hills raced up and over by horses and gazelles, no more waves swept and rowed by branches, no more streams, their bellies full of animals,

There remains the earth above, the boundless sea, its belly full of stars

The airy earth remains, all traversed by birds.

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This interview was compiled and translated by Catherine Anne Franke from interviews conducted by herself and Roger Chazal in Paris, June 1988.

Interviewer –– I would like to focus on the new work that you're doing in collaboration with the Théâtre du Soleil. I would like to talk in depth about this recent work for Ariane Mnouchkine's troupe, and then ask you to sketch briefly the movement of your work in the theater, which might include a discussion of your earlier plays, such as Portrait de Dora and Le Nom d'Oedipe. Perhaps then you could suggest ways in which your new relationship to the theater has influenced your writing of fiction, influences seen most notably in the case of your recent fiction, Manne. But could you first speak a bit about how you came to work with Mnouchkine, about the genesis of that artistic venture, and about the genesis of the two plays you have written so far for the Théâtre du Soleil: L'Histoire Terrible Mais Inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge, and L'Indiade ou L'Inde de Leurs Rêves.

Hélène Cixous –– How I came to work with Ariane is kind of novel, it's a short story in itself. I've known her for a long time; I met her because I went to see 1789. I was struck by the strength of this work. At that time I was involved in a kind of action with Michel Foucault. This was a small movement called GIP- Groupe Information Prison - which dealt with prison conditions. I went back and told Foucault about Ariane's work, and suggested to him that we should meet her and ask her to work with us. So I took him to the theater. I didn't know Ariane at the time, but we spoke together and immediately came to both a kind of sympathy and agreement. She made a very short play for us that lasted four minutes and we started doing it in the streets. It was a kind of caricature of prisons and police, performed by some of the actors from the Théâtre du Soleil. We tried to perform it in front of prisons, but I think it almost never succeeded, because before we could finish the police were there, and at that time they were extremely violent. Once I was even knocked out, in Nancy in front of a prison.

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The theory of hysteria as proposed by Freud, and as redefined by Lacan, is central to the trajectory in thought and writing that led to the form of expression known as l'écriture féminine. Hélène Cixous' play Portrait de Dora (written in 1976), was emblematic of this trajectory: in rethinking the question of hysteria, this play posed the problem of the relation of women to psychoanalysis and literally set the stage for the emergence of l'écriture féminine.

L'écriture féminine saw itself as a possible solution to hysteria, and yet today, we can see that this supposed alternative has led to its own particular form of closure. The analysis of this itinerary then allows for a certain thinking about the current impasse in l'écriture féminine and about our culture in more general terms.

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Orange is woman's fruit. A bright, glistening ball of flame, a magic circle of desire. Orange desire is not the desire to have, to take; it is, rather, the pleasure of giving, the pleasure of having pleasure in giving. The orgasmic orange explodes in love at the base of feminine desire, abates and explodes again. Finding inspiration in the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous* Vivre l'Orange establishes a mystic dialectic with Clarice's spirit. The female body, represented here as the dark continent of adventure and exploration, finds expression in the Symbolic through the narrator's linguistic dialogue with Clarice. Rejecting the masculine economy of investment and return, Vivre l'Orange privileges expenditure and gift, a pleasureful giving. Love, as the erotic dialogue of bodies through language, is reinscribed as intertextuality, something Cixous does elsewhere.

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A review of Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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A review of Clément, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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