Writing Symptomatically

Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida position themselves very differently in relation to literature. This article analyses that difference in the light of their relation to the symptom, the fundamentally unanalysable form through which the unconscious manifests itself. While Derrida dwells more on the impossibility of ever accessing the original secret wound to whose existence the symptom opaquely attests, Cixous tends to focus more on the effect, the symptom itself. For both, the 'chance' of literature lies in the fact that neither the source nor the destination of letters can be determined. I argue that the difference between Derrida's relative resignation to this condition and Cixous's celebration of it helps to explain the contrast between his position at the margins of literature and her unequivocal embrace of it

Art · Epistemology · Impossibility · Literature · Physics · Psychoanalysis · Unconscious mind · Computer Science · Law · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Translation Studies and Practices

• A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event

  Jacques Derrida, Derrida et al.•Critical Inquiry•2007

  Add to list