Hlne Cixous

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in conversation
with Adrian Heathfield
Paris, September 2010

Writing Not Yet Thought

Hlne Cixous in conversation with Adrian Heathfield
Paris, September 2010
AH: Thank you very much, Hlne, for agreeing to speak to
us as part of the Performing Idea project. In a sense we are now in
the grip of a certain surrogacy. I had wanted to invite you to be in
a conversation in London with others, but life intervened, and now
I must stand in their place. Perhaps I am standing in for the standins. In this video we are making your image and your voice must
stand in for your presence. But perhaps this condition of surrogacy,
of multiple surrogations, is quite apt for a discussion of your writing
and your writing practice. Being there for an other, transporting
an other within or without oneself, delivering an other seem to me
to be very important figures in your writing. I wanted to ask you
about the relation between writing and otherness, the arrival and
emergence of alterity in your work, which I think is always a kind
of labour at limits, a labour of de-selfing, of unknowing. And I
recognise, reading you recently, particularly within the essays in
Stigmata, two vital or reiterated gestures, perhaps they are acts: one
is hearing and the other is carrying. I wondered if we could talk first
a little about hearing? Are there any necessary conditions for you in
terms of this opening of ones ears to the unknown? Preconditions,
almost?
HC: I dont know, I wouldnt theorise or affirm anything in that
field of reception, of receiving, which is of course the precondition
of all preconditions in order to create. I am a writer but I relate to
painters, actors etc., and somehow I am also one of them. But I think
in all those situations of creation, of opening oneself, becoming
a kind of door and space, welcoming space for the apparition or
surge, coming into the world of something else or someone else:
all those who belong to different practices, different languages,
share, I am absolutely sure, what I just called, echoing you actually,
the pre-condition. We are the pre-conditional, pre-conditioned,
pre-conditioning beings without whom nothing and no one would
happen. And actually what is happening right now is the simplest
and most immediate instance of that: I am answering you. And what
I am is an answer. You were telling me that you had four questions or
five questions and you said they probably hid twenty questions, and
I thought, while you were saying, I was thinking back, not uttering
but thinking back, that I certainly have no answer. I only have your
questions as the cradle for hoped-for answers, which may dance in
or never appear. It all happens between us, its a between us-ing.

So regarding hearing and everything that you referred to

in your introduction, for instance when you say, you evoke or you
name that couple writing and otherness: but writing is otherness,
writing others. I other myself, otherwise nothing happens. So, as
Derrida would say, cest toujours dj [it is always already]. These
occurrences of our life, our being alive, imply the together I should
forge a word this togetherotherness that presides and precedes,
pre-precedes everything that comes into the world. Writing is
simply the type of practice that is shaped in language, with words
that are all other words, if I can say so I mean the moment I write,
although I write with known or unknown words, its always the
marriage of heaven and hell. Its what I know and what I dont know
coming together, and playing that game of questions and answers.
Writing, well, is a question. Its an infinite questioning
running after answers which now and then arrive but that are very
often nestled inside the question. They just have to be uncovered, or
heard. So coming to hearing. We have to lend ears, not only an ear but
many, many ears, to what is already speaking, murmuring, signing
around. And probably when one writes, even though sometimes one
doesnt realise, we are concentrating. I mean I am concentrating
but I is we, you, etc.: in order to receive messages, because speaking
writes, its writing around, it comes from afar, it comes from so many
friends that we dont know, or on the contrary. And the preliminary
of writing is that: its paying that hearing attention which is also a
way of opening ones heart or whatever, I mean that part of the body,
to different musics. So we receive messages. Writers are people who,
exactly like musicians, receive messages. And of course they are not
born like that because you have to go through an apprenticeship,
you school yourself all the time, its a permanent training. Work
and practising are essential to being writers or musicians. But then
I dont know a painter who is not the inheritor, that is the receiver,
of messages. Either they belong to what is supposed to be called the
past, but this past is present and this is of course very important
and we must be able to think that, even if it sounds paradoxical or
they come, those messages, from somewhere in the future. Not the
faraway future but the coming future. They are arriving, and thats
creation. I feel close to all those who share this experience. When I
work with artists or painters, which I do now more and more often, I
recognise them and they recognise me in this way.
Ive been working with and for Pierre Alechinsky recently
and he is also working on my work, and looking at his pictorial
work - drawings and writing because he is also a writer - its as if I
were listening to his footsteps, or his pencil steps, or his thought
steps that have left traces everywhere. And he himself, although he

knows part of what he is doing, the rest of course he doesnt know:

it happens. And following his steps I discover the secret music of
what he is doing: there is a composition. But what I see in his work
I could also probably remark on my own work if I attended to it,
which I dont because I prefer, of course, to run ahead of myself and
not follow, because I have other things to do. After all its a kind of
position of the soul as body (because they are not separate) that is
receptive.
AH: But this togetherness with otherness, this with-ness
with otherness is not necessarily something which is a generalised
condition of writing per se but perhaps of particular forms of
address, particular kinds of aesthetic experiments with the form of
writing itself? Or is it both?
HC: It is both. Of course it is over determined. Because why
should we do that and why dont all human beings do it? Theres a
kind of invisible frontier between those who dont at all practice
this kind of receptivity, of openness or hospitality, and those who
dont care, I mean those for whom it doesnt happen. And then forms

AH: which takes us, in a sense, to the question of carrying

alterity.
HC: Yes. So what determines me, for instance? I know: its
my relation, my age old relation, my originary and always present
relation to the mystery of mortality, the fact that we are mortals,
or that you are a mortal. Because to say the truth you are mortal,
I am not. Unfortunately its your death that is going to happen to
me, to wound me, to destroy parts of me, to take away and tear away
from me large bits of life. So it is in reaction to that that Ive been, I
know, oriented towards a kind of strategy of repairing the damages
of the biting of death into life. You cannot of course ever wipe out the
wound. Exactly as in translation, you cannot translate identically,
so you lose enormous amounts of the flesh of a piece of writing.
And then what do you do? Its not that you accept that, but you try
to compensate a little further away or before, in the other language,
youll graft equivalences, analogies, new quantities of flesh and
blood. Its the same between life and writing, or damaged life and
writing. And here comes the other one. [HCs cat jumps on the table
in front of us] Come in, come in, hop! And there she is, thats Philia.
Sit here Philia. She wants to take her part in our conversation, and
she is most important.
AH: She can, indeed.
HC: So as regards form, I think that the impulsion or the

compulsion for creating what we call form, I mean carving,

inventing new ways of agency in writing etc., I think its dictated,
it goes along, its simultaneous. But of course it is most important
to realise that since everything that happens on the surface, on
the book of writing is a surprise, is something that you have never
thought about before and that has never been yet formulated but has
always been there, but that comes out, naked, maybe without skin,
you have to find a form, a shape to incarnate, embody this new event
in thinking. Then almost simultaneously because maybe there is a
little interval between the rushing out of the illumination of an idea
and its being immediately translated into a medium which can be
painting etc., or writing, there is probably an interval but it is really
hundredths of a second, but it exists then theres an artist in you,
among all the people who are at work to create something because
we are many, were a crew you know when we write something.
Immediately, instantaneously, they will come with an enormous
amount of possibilities, of suggestions that are also immediately
sifted. And youll immediately have proposed, by those unknown
poets, the suitable new shape of a sentence. That is, of course, the
mystery. It happens somewhere in what James Joyce would call the
forge, the smithy of the soul, where one doesnt know how, who, etc.,
shapes: as in mythology when Thetis, the mother of Achilles, needs
magic weapons for her son. So she goes to the forge of Vulcanus and
he at once forges weapons that no one else other than Achilles has
ever seen or could use. That is style.
AH: So I have a sense of writing as a congregation, a gathering
and channelling of voices, a little like a sance, partly a bringing
into the present of voices past but also maybe a sance for future
unknown voices. And I have also this sense in which part of the
question of form for you is perhaps about the conditions of speech
in writing. To give to writing the qualities of saying, so that writing
is a kind of saying out loud in some ways. I wanted to ask you about
the relationship between speech and the poetic. I know that in your
play Black Sail White Sail the question arises of the survival of the
poetic, the survival of poetry in a particular political and historical
context in which it is threatened by violent suppression. In that play
it seems that orality is the mode of poetrys survival; the promise
of its survival at least, since this survival is mediated, as all oral
transmissions are, by the frailties of memory. I also hear in your
other writings, say for instance in your novel The Third Body, the
aspiration of a writing close to speech: this extraordinary phrase
you make, a writing that is air cut out of air. But then I hear at
other times that the text needs the paper. It needs the sustenance
of the material, it needs the register to survive. And that dynamic

is also present in Black Sail White Sail, because the threatened

poets main aspiration is to be published, the survival is dependent
on the paper machine. You choose not to resolve this tension for the
question of the survival of the poetic?
HC: Yes, because you are referring to a certain type of text
where this is particularly insistent, but let me try to answer a little,
although this is huge. As I said one receives messages and these
messages are voiced. They are angels they are on the telephone
angels on the telephone. I am an addict of all kinds of telephones.
So of course maybe a particular aspect of my writing has to do
with introducing all kinds of idioms that are specific to certain
characters, and also to cats and whatever, all animate beings who
have their own language, so that in a way in my writing there is
an interweaving of all kinds of languages. Im not sure it would be
categorised as simply speech, because I think that many beings,
many human beings who are not writers are almost writers, have a
kind of gift for poetical expression. For instance my mother who is
sleeping in the next room, thats why I lend an ear, because I am afraid
she will need something she has, in her simple way her own idiom,
she finds metaphors, she will come out with extraordinary remarks
that are not ungrammatical, that obey the laws of syntax, etc. All
the time she will come upon a peculiarity and make something
new out of it. And so many people in the streets everywhere are,
would be, poets. This is important for me. Although I never obey
realism or the reproduction of realistic speeches. In France what is
interesting and important is translation: the slight enhancing, or
staging that we have learnt from the Greeks and from Shakespeare.
Its immediately poetical: it has to be. And this of course is by a
slight distortion of syntax, or by segmenting and introducing other
types of idiomatic forms, etc.
But you were referring to a play that is not even published in
France I must say, and which was a kind of cantata to that particular
tragedy of poetry under tyranny. But this is very special of course.
Its as if the greatest Russian poetry almost had prospered, grown
because it was forbidden, because it was inhibited, and it resisted
these laws, these death sentences. So the aspect of orality, which
belongs to writing, became of course more apparent because all
those poets, in order to save their writing, started learning by heart
each others poems in order to preserve them from destruction, if by
chance they survived. But this of course has to do with the essence
of poetry as Derrida has defined it in What is Poetry, Quest-ce que
la posie?, Che Cos la Poesia. [Exit: Philia] It is a certain type
of writing which has to be learnt by heart. Because and it is not
because it is forbidden and crushed out by tyranny all poetry has to

be learnt by heart: it belongs to the heart, it comes out of the heart,

it returns to the heart, and it has to be learnt by heart because you
cannot grasp it and fix it, because it is the most evasive of writing.
It goes at lightning speed, you cannot discipline it and theorise
it, it escapes always, and the only possibility to catch a poem is by
learning it by heart, and by singing it. So the part of orality is that:
you recite it. And you know that Russian poets, and I suppose Polish
poets, would proffer, would sing out their poetry, which one doesnt
do in France. But I think one did it much more currently in England.
Joyce read out his own texts and I think that T.S. Eliot gave readings
in a very special way of his own poetry. This is something that isnt
practiced in France. When poets do that they are right to do it, its
not because they want to be applauded, it is because the phonetic,
the phonic, the musical quality of poetry has to be sent to the public.
But I think of writing in the same way. My writing is very musical
and of course in translation it becomes something else. But for
instance when I work for the theatre there is always our composer in
the Thtre du Soleil, and he just follows my writing, you know we
adjust and adapt to each other without any difficulty.
AH: That comes very neatly I think onto the question of
different conditions of articulation in different writerly forms.
Its certainly the case that if one thinks, for instance between your
fiction and theatre work there is a placement of narrative force in
the theatre work, quite different from its operation in your fiction:
I mean the extraordinary melding, metamorphosis, sliding,
puncturing of worlds that takes place in the fiction is not so present
in the theatre.
HC: Yes, its totally different, yes.
AH: And one accepts of course that you are working in a
very particular cultural context in relationship to the theatre in a
situation of residency as it were, or of commission, and this has its
consequences and operates on the writing in a particular way. But I
am wondering to what extent you see that disposition of narrative in
the theatre as a consequence of the social contract of theatre, which
isnt present in the same way in the contract of fiction? A subsequent
question would be how that disposition of narrative relates to an
ethics of writing practice, how it is one might work a practice with
narrative force to open it in different ways, in different forms?
HC: You are quite right. When I write for the theatre things
happen, theres a kind of alchemy, which the public doesnt know
about, only the company knows about it. Of course its a very special
gesture, and its very ethical and political. First of all because
things happen in this precise theatre, the Thtre du Soleil, that

have an immediate effect which is ethically, culturally, politically

very strong. It reaches a huge public, its almost comical you know
because the Thtre du Soleil with me will address 100,000 people
whereas the proportion is 100,000 to 1,000 when I write my fiction,
or lets say 10,000. And the Thtre du Soleil is a place where you
can re-activate, rekindle passions, which I know otherwise are
smothered and will disappear. Its as if we are resuscitating the
emotions and the capacity for tragedy of a public. And for hope, and
for dream, and for despair: all things that are disappearing from
the world at large. So for me its important that there are places like
that house, that magic house of the theatre, where I give up part of
my what could I say what would gratify me as a writer. What I do
is I write, and what I write is a play and its swallowed, eaten up by
the actors. It becomes, really, flesh and blood. It becomes their body,
their movements, its a breath that they inspire, and that sends
them acting, being active in a way that is passive, because they are
sent to other continents in an innocent way. So all of us, we give
up part of our what should I say properties, what we own, etc.,
in order to try and reach a horizon which is very far away, which is
ideal and dream-like. So we are very much like a crew on a ship. Ive
been working for the present play, and its not a metaphor, on The
Endurance, the ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Thats what we are,
we are the endurance, and I think its the metaphor of everything
that we do: endure, and survive. So for me this is important. And
Im ready to give up two years of my life for that because I know it
will bring new sources of thinking to a large public who need that.
But of course my own writing is hidden, its transformed you were
speaking about air its the air that they breathe. But then its not
so simple because alongside the performing of the play there are a
number of little texts which are in my usual writing, and which are
like little lighthouses, that are necessary also for the public and the
actors.
AH: So regarding the grip of narrative in this theatre space,
my sense is that it arises from your affinity with tragedy, or lets say
not with tragedy per se, but with the desire for a suspended tragedy?
HC: Yes and this is the political trend in all I do because you
are quite right it is tragedy in the Greek sense, that is in the sense
where its with the Greeks that the most, not even modern but to
come, ideas and ideals of our societies have been elaborated three
thousand years ago. That is: democracy, freedom, the thirst for
justice. All the concepts that are like stars in the sky and that do not
exist, but that work for the very slight progress that humanity can
operate at a very slow pace. But its there. [Enter: Philia] Its not a
tragedy without any hope, it is tragedy with consequences and the

re-thinking that the too late of tragedy re-sounds in written traces.

It was too late, it is too late, but its written, there are witnesses and
even though they are dead they are still to be heard.
We are dead, I mean I feel I am dead, but I still go on speaking
and writing.
AH: But tragedy in the fictional work is less of a possibility?
HC: Everything I write is tragic, but since I write, its
untragicalised.
AH: Regarding the opening of the text, perhaps through the
suspension of the tragic, or its deferral, you have an affinity with
its continual opening perhaps this is a notion that takes us to the
temporality of endurance. You hold to an investment in process,
in the unfinished, in a certain kind of formlessness, and in the
passage of truth, in truths passing. I took a quote from Stigmata:
I want the world of pulses before destiny, prenatal and anonymous
night, the arrival, to see arriving. So in a sense there is a bringing
of language into the passing present, into a space of imminence. I
wonder to what extent this textual space of the passing present is
really about bringing writing toward the conditions of thought? So:
to write almost as one thinks. I wonder to what extent this is really
about what I would think of as a negotiation between thought and
the experience of duration, of enduring. The text is mirroring the
ways that thought is constantly doing its work on the experience of
duration, on the sensate flow of differentiations.
HC: Hmm. After all writing is a faithful, an unfaithful, but
mostly faithful tool. Let me try and describe the process. There is
an event. It can be something that happens in the street, it can be a
dream. For me I know its an event because I have been moved, Im
affected. I start with that, with emotion. Which means I have been
touched, or hurt, and I dont know anything about the reasons or
the causes of my emotions. Then I make a halt. And its as if I were
inclining over or bending over a body, dead or alive, or a river, or a
mine, and trying to decipher, or a small scene in a film for instance,
or when we rehearse. A couple of days ago I attended a rehearsal at
the theatre, and I was moved by things that lasted one second that
were so precise. And if they hadnt been spaced, staged, in that
second of time, between as Charles Baudelaire would say two
seconds, that second between two seconds, that small gesture or
expression of a face there, would have been neutral. I mean nothing
would have happened, but there was a spark. And after that when I
came out of the theatre I started thinking about that, and I found
all kinds of explanations as if I were a physician or a physicist, or
an astrophysicist, looking at faraway stars that are quite close, and

trying to calculate what sparks that small event, which was there,
a little nothing. And of course it not only has to do with the setting,
which is most important, for instance a painter always has a setting
the frame, the wall but the writer has everything, we have all
space. So behind when you say there are twenty questions behind
my questions its just the same: there was the story of a number of
actors and characters and the mood in which they were, this one
and that one and that one. And I thought really its extraordinary
because the theatre is more than a film, which is different I adore
certain films it is a staging of life, but as Baudelaire would say,
seen between two rocks, or through the keyhole. And then suddenly
you see that it is because the infinite is restrained and bordered:
then you perceive the infinite, because you have a split, finite
piece of deep life. Which is what one does with the camera, what he
[Hugo Glendinning] is doing now. He is putting borders to catch
something, which is mysterious. So writing is also an instrument
or a tool that focuses on sparks of thinking that are not yet thought.
It is not yet thought; it is being a thinking. And it will become at one
point thought; that is, it will become such that one will be able to
formulate it and to repeat it, it will be grasped. But of course when
I write let me take the example of my dreams, which is that kind
of sport to which I really compel myself, I subject myself. Because
dreams are genii they are so extraordinary, so much more gifted
and inspired than I am. So when a dream is performing I have
near my head a notebook with that kind of pencil where I can write
in a way which is I could even write on my sheets you know but
something in me can write in dark night. Of course I dont write
properly its only notes, you know, its just little flickers Maman?
Just a second.
[HC attends to her mother]
AH: So we were talking about writing in a condition
approaching or approximating the conditions of thought, a writing
before thought.
HC: Yes and that exists, of course, but its not a privilege or the
condition of a writer of poetical fiction as I am. Philosophers work
in the same way, I mean real philosophers worthy of this name!
AH: You do not think of yourself as a real philosopher?
HC: I am not a philosopher, though I write philosophically,
my voice and tradition is literary. But in France we have a strong
tradition of thinking writers, and that is a blessing for me because I
can go way back to Michel de Montaigne, and you cannot dissociate
the literary and philosophy. Now there is a kind of schism between
writing, literature and philosophy but in the beginnings, no.

AH: Returning again to this question of thought or prethought in writing, there was an extraordinary exchange that you
had with Michel Foucault in which you spoke of Marguerite Durass
work.
HC: Oh yeah, Ive forgotten what we said, you know?
AH: Perhaps I can recall it a little for you, as I think it relates
to this question of the passage or duration of writing. You talked
about Durass work as being something that you could hardly recall;
a kind of writing full of power that was instantly draining away. And
Foucault replied, yes youre right; its a kind of memory without
recollection. I think then you spoke about loss in writing; that for
Duras the loss is never ending: there is always more to lose. There
is quite an elemental difference between you as writers, around
this question of loss. It may be directed towards the question of the
impression that your writing makes or leaves: not something that
cannot be recalled, but that must be recalled, again and again, that
also pricks, that wounds in a certain way.
HC: Yes its true. But this is not a question
AH: No its a statement, Im sorry. But it relates to the vitalism
of which you were speaking.
HC: In this I am more a writer than a philosopher because
the philosopher wants and has to be recollected. And he posts, I say
he because until now they are all still men, he posts reminders. So
even Derrida who is the most writerly of all philosophers, except of
course that I wont say that Nietzsche is not a poet. But the aim, the
ambition, the desire is to weald a fight against error, darkness, etc.,
and insert reminders that are decisive. Even when Derrida works
on the undecidable there are everywhere assertions, as if he were
climbing up the Himalayas, and you have grasps, I mean he doesnt
lose grip in between the different steps that he pushes further on
and further on and further on, beyond the beyond. But this is not the
purpose of a writer. I dont think that there are peaks for instance, in
writing that you have to reach for. Lets take the example of Marcel
Proust. I would say that everything in La Recherche du Temps Perdu
is equally important: there is no moment where you have reached
the summit and there you are. Except the last twenty pages, where
he suddenly tells you and this was my secret, and this is my art.
But we dont read his research or his search backwards beginning
with the end where he says thats the secret, now that you have the
key, you can start reading. No, everywhere you can go inside his
text, and it is absolute text. So this is my way of thinking that my
writing is somehow produced. You can get inside everywhere, and
as you said regarding beginnings and endings, its never ending,

and its always arriving and never arrives. As life.

AH: I wondered
HC: Thats the dimension of the other. Since the other is after
all the main character. You always other so you never self, you
never appropriate. You always have that countersignature of the
other, it is always an other signature. And actually my question is,
permanently, but who has written that? I never know. In my last
book Double Oubli de lOrang-Outang its essential: it refers to a
book which I really dont know, although its supposed to be written
by somebody who is me. Im not even sure that somebody else whom
I could name hasnt written it.
I dont think a philosopher would accept that disowning.
I disown.
AH: With regard to writings relationship to sight, to the
visible, to what you can conjure or bring into view, I found in The
Third Body a commitment to a writing that has the spirit to be
without recourse to visibility. I wonder if we, or if you, are in the
same place now in relationship to the orders of the visible. Culture
has shifted, the status of the audible and the tactile has increased,
the haptic proliferates in visual culture: transformations that have
brought the body into a different status within the cultural field.
HC: Youre quite right.
AH: What Id like to ask is what now is your relationship to the
visible world?
HC: I think I havent changed. But let me say, for instance,
I dont think that my books can be adapted to classically thought
cinema. So I still go on belonging to that subterranean type of
writing, which is philosophical. Even though there are scenes,
and even though I can write plays that on the contrary belong to
the visible and the audible. That I can do. And even though all my
dreams are visions, totally visions that I could describe in the most
precise way. Exactly as if you take a dream of Kafka, he will describe
a scene, very precisely. So my dreams are exactly the same: I could
tell you the shape, the colour, everything. I could reconstruct
completely a total world with my dream images. But when I write it
happens elsewhere: in the regions of the soul, and in the heart, the
passions. But youre right, something is happening more and more,
and particularly in France but Im sure its the same, differently,
everywhere. But this is very far away from poetry, from real writing.
But what I think is that if you take this Alechinsky here for instance,
you see? [HC points to a painting] I would say it has its large part of
invisibility. It seems to be visible, but in order to come out of this

visibility, to reach another level of visibility, you have to spend an

enormous time looking at it, because it doesnt present itself at first
sight. No, its not true, on the contrary.
AH: Of course the theatre in any case is a place where a
regime or an order of the visible is in some ways always in question,
because of the many perspectives of seeing. Obviously the theatre
in particular traditions is organised into a certain kind of scopic
regime
HC: This is a good remark. If you go to the Thtre du
Soleil particularly now. I have seen the play a hundred times, but
according to where you are sitting or standing, you see something
totally different, and each is as important. Its as if there were, on
the stage, lets say a hundred possible plays. Because its totally
peopled, its totally exhalted by forces, there are 40 actors on the
stage who multiply themselves, and things happen as in the secret
of reality, that is, there are so many possibilities, and as a spectator
you pick up one, or this one.
AH: Is there any consequence for writing in theatre space of
this understanding of the kaleidoscopic scene of seeing?
HC: Yes, there are of course, but they are also paradoxical.
There are several stages of different types of writing, and the work
of different voices is also implied; there is a narrative voice, there
are the voices that are the most powerful and that imprint the most
important messages, actually those of comment est-ce quon dit
un film muet dj? of the cinema before it was speaking.
AH: Silent movies, yes.
HC: Yes there are consequences but this type of writing, as
you said yourself, obeys, is somehow commissioned by the needs of
collective work.
AH: Thank you Hlne, no doubt many other questions will
come rushing back to me as soon as I leave this table, but thank you
so much.
HC: Thank you Philia. hm?
AH: Yes
HC: Shes been working hard, hm?
AH: She has, shes made a profound contribution I think.
HC: Shes important!
AH: Shes distracted us all the time, which is very important.
HC: And she understands very well what we are doing. I dont
know who she is exactly because every time I write she will lie on the

piece of paper that I need, which means that she understands very
well what is most important for me. She would like to be the writing
incarnate. So I have to negotiate with her. I push her a little, or I pull
my page from under her.
AH: Is she the same cat of your extraordinary essay on the
episode with the trapped bird?
HC: No, shes not the same, unfortunately. She is an emanation
of her. Theres also Aletheia. But Aletheia is always hidden, as
Aletheia is. She will come out the moment you go through the door.
So you see night is visible and day, that is Aletheia, is invisible.
x

This conversation was shot and edited by Hugo Glendinning

and first screened at the Performing Idea events held at
Toynbee Studios, London, October 2010.
Performing Idea was the first themed year of the
Performance Matters research project investigating the
cultural value of performance through a series of commissioned
dialogues, workshops, symposia, and performance events.
Published by Performance Matters
Text copyright Hlne Cixous and Adrian Heathfield 2011
ISBN 978-0-9570149-0-9
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without written permission.
Performance Matters is a collaboration between
Live Art Development Agency, Goldsmiths, University of London
and the University of Roehampton, London.
Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.