‘My little wild fever-struck brother’: human and animal subjectivity in Hélène Cixous’ Algeria

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of human and animal subjectivity in two autobiographically informed texts by Hélène Cixous. It takes her view on the word ‘human’ and the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family, as a point of departure. By thinking through this figure, I argue, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and anti-Semitism in Algeria and develops her own response to such kinds of political evils, arguing for human relationality and animal corporeality. The article shows that Cixous’ meeting with Fips creates a stigma that, belatedly, breaks through the barrier between herself and the dog; the reopening of the wound takes place in a poetical writing that reveals an intense ‘animal humanity’ formed by communal suffering, finiteness, and love. The lesson Cixous learns from the memory of Fips the dog is how to become ‘better human’. This becoming is also an assault on the false humanism of the colonial project and on racialized social exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Cixous
• human
• animal humanity
• corporeality
• subjectivity
• stigma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 30. In French: ‘Je ne vois pas d’autre mot pour parler de cette direction, de ce dévelopement, de ce progress, de cette croissance, qui se fait ou ne se fait pas, au cours de la durée de notre vie’. Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Entre tiens,” 39.

² Ibid.

³ Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 32.

⁴ Ibid., 30. Cf. Cixous, “Volleys of Humanity”: ‘By virtue of what are we “human”, by virtue of what do we say that we are? By the fact that we read. We are reading, in the morning as soon as it is day, we read – from the cradle, from the first gaze we already want to belong to a gaze and fall under a gaze, already we are reading. We are giving ourselves to (be) read. We are making links. We are mirroring ourselves in the mirror of the other’. (264)

⁵ Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 31.

⁶ Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 219.

⁷ Cixous, Franke and Chazal, “Interview with Hélène Cixous,” 162. She continues: ‘Cultural because of what I heard, what I understood when I was young about the position of my family in history and of my family as Jewish. […] [B]ecause my family belonged […] to those who have been persecuted, oppressed, massacred. They aren’t anymore, the Jews are no longer massacred of today, we’ve changed our object of persecution, but I was born into a universe where my family was persecuted’. (162–63)

⁸ Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Entre tiens,” 13. (‘What is most true is poetic’.)

⁹ Ibid., 88. Cixous’ remark on Derrida about the profound influence of Algeria upon her friend’s ethics in this regard can be taken equally as a remark on the ‘poethics’ of her own work: ‘faire le moins mal possible, être avec l’autre’. Cixous, “Celle qui ne se ferme pas,” 55.

¹⁰ Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Entre tiens,” 13.

¹¹ In English: Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes. Fips also makes a brief appearance in later her later books, for example in Si près from 2007 and in Philippines from 2009. He is also mentioned in her first novel Dedans (from 1986), but only as a causal figure (un chien) without a name.

¹² With George Kateb, I define ‘political evil’ as the ultimate wrong of engaging in the large-scale systemic ‘obliteration of personhood’. Kateb, The Inner Ocean, 201. However, I include all beings (human and non-human) who are able to suffer the consequences of violence or neglect.

¹³ For a reading of the many other animals and animots that populate Cixous’ work, see Goh, “The Passion According to Cixous.” Fips, however, is also an indicator of something more specific.

¹⁴ In “Stigmata“ Cixous notes that ‘[t]he word Arab belonged to French colonization’, applying a generalized label to the native population and disregarding the ethnic, linguistic an religious differences; just as talk of ‘French’ neighbourhoods is ‘also colonial vocabulary’ (246).

¹⁵ It was in fact, as Cixous notes in “My Algeriance,“ that ‘a living fragment of my maternal family had landed [in Algeria] after it blew up on the Nazi minefield’ that had led to the complications of her situation in Algeria and her exposure to social exclusion and colonial violence (204).

¹⁶ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 254. First published in Philosophy Today, 41, no. 1 (1997): 12–17.

¹⁷ Ibid., 255.

¹⁸ Ibid., 254–55.

¹⁹ Ibid., 255.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., 256.

²² Ibid., 259.

²³ Ibid., 255.

²⁴ Ibid., 256.

²⁵ Ibid., 261.

²⁶ Ibid., 256.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Cixous, Reveries, 42.

²⁹ Cf., Cixous “My Algeriance.“

³⁰ Cixous, “Stigmata,“ 249.

³¹ Cixous, Reveries, 45–6.

³² Cixous, “Stigmata,” 258.

³³ Cixous, Reveries, 46.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 259.

³⁶ Ibid., 258.

³⁷ Cixous, Reveries, 44. In French: ‘petit frère fauve enfiévré’. Cixous, Rêveries, 77.

³⁸ Ibid., 42, 73.

³⁹ Ibid., 46, 81.

⁴⁰ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 254.

⁴¹ Cixous, Reveries, 45; Cixous, Rêveries, 78.

⁴² Ibid., 248. On Cixous and names, see her OR, les lettres de mon père, 21–2.

⁴³ The ‘soul’ Cixous defines with Tsvetaeva as ‘our capacity to suffer’ (Cixous, “Bathsheba,” 17).

⁴⁴ Cf, Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 56.

⁴⁵ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 248.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 250.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 249.

⁴⁸ Cixous, Reveries, 46.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 42.

⁵⁰ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 256.

⁵¹ Ibid., 254.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Levinas, “The Name of a Dog,” 151–3.

⁵⁵ Cf. Cixous, “Volleys of Humanity”: ‘Humanity does not mean only that “moral quality”, which is somewhat suspect in its homocentrism of concern for others. It also refers to a people. To the People. The People of human peoples. It is this French word caressed by the poets – it is not the Mankind used in English, which says the human species’ (267).

⁵⁶ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 247.

⁵⁷ Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 5; and Calle-Gruber and Cixous, “Entre tiens,” 14.

⁵⁸ Derrida used the neologism animot in singular both to ‘have the plural animals (animaux) heard in the singular’ and to expose the violence in the category of the animal – ‘a name [men] have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other’. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47, 23.

⁵⁹ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 249.

⁶⁰ Cixous, “Writing Blind,” 186; and Cixous, “Conversation avec l’àne,” 81. First published in TriQuaterly 97 (1996): 7–20.

⁶¹ Cixous, “Inter Views,” 9. She continues: ‘When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to “live”. But we must. […] It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux. Wars cause entredeux in the histories of countries. But the worst war is the war where the enemy is on the inside; where the enemy is the person I love the most in the world, is myself (9–10). The word entredeux means literally ‘between two (or perhaps entertwo), meaning the space or the time between two things, points, events’ (113).

⁶² Ibid., 10.

⁶³ Of which her first cat, Thea, is a transfigured resurrection: ‘And suddenly the resurrection and it had the feature of a cat’ (“Stigmata,” 252). Cf. Reveries: Fips came as ‘small dog no bigger than my cat in which he returns. But immense. […] my soul the dog’ (42). Cf. also ‘The Cat’s Arrival’, a translated excerpt from Cixous’ book Messie. Cixous’ cat figures in that tradition of feline professors extending from Montaigne to Derrida – a cat who teaches us about catness, but also about aspects of our humanity that we ignore or deny. Cf. Derrida: ‘But cannot this cat also be, deep within her eyes, my primary mirror?’ Derrida, The Animal, 51.

⁶⁴ Cixous, “Stigmata,” 249.

⁶⁵ For a reading of Cixous’ deconstruction of an anthropocentric understanding of the human-animal relation, see also Segarra, “Hélène Cixous’s Other Animal,” 119–34.

⁶⁶ Cixous, Reveries, 42.

⁶⁷ Cixous, “Stigmata,” p. 249.

⁶⁸ When in H.C. pour la vie Derrida discusses the proximity between his and Cixous’ work, he distinguishes them along their different philosophical inclinations, noting Cixous’ thinking as always interested in and turning towards life, while his work is concerned by an examination of death (40). Cixous discusses the difference between her and Derrida’s thinking along the same lines in ‘Inter Views’ (see esp. 82–90); cf. also their conversation in Cixous and Derrida, “Du mot à la vie,” 22–9.

⁶⁹ Cixous, “Preface,” in Cixous, Stigmata, xii.

⁷⁰ Cixous and Calle-Gruber, “Inter Views,” 30.

⁷¹ Cixous, Stigmata, 233.

Additional information

Funding

The Swedish Research Council supported this work under Grant number [2014-968].

Notes on contributors

Helen Andersson

Helen Andersson has a Ph.D. in Ethics from Lund University, Sweden. She is an Associate Professor of Ethics and a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at the Faculty of Theology, Uppsala University and is currently leader of the research project Ethics and the Politics of Writing: Membership, Testimony and Representation, financed by The Swedish Research Council.