Fleurir

Hélène Cixous’s œuvre is a long continuous/discontinuous series of books that are proudly independent one from the other and at the same time deeply interdependent on each other. ‘Fleurir’ enters this Cixousian literary universe through a pair of books, Chapitre Los (2013) and Corollaires d’un vœu (2015), that present themselves as constituting a radical break in the long tradition of books to which they none the less belong. Meanwhile, one of the recurring and increasingly prominent themes of Cixous’s writing is the unwritten in and beyond her writing: what is left unwritten despite or through all of Cixous’s effectively written books. Indeed, her ‘Book-I-Don’t-Write’ must be understood as in some sense constitutional of her writing in all its length and breadth, an absence that is necessarily present as such in each of her texts. It plays a vital, paradoxical role, and its unwrittenness cannot be reduced to that of a simply as-yet uncharted territory – even if charting the still-uncharted is a theme or a practice that runs through all of Cixous’s writing. So we are surprised to learn that Chapitre and Corollaires constitute actual printed chapters or leaves, petals of this unwritten, unwritable book. And to learn, furthermore, that the latter consists effectively in Cixous’s ‘My Life book’, a recounting of certain events or experiences, certain intense relations in the life of the author. Admittedly, Cixous’s writing has always situated itself on the cusp of a certain autobiographicality, writing life into literature… and vice versa. However, these books bind life and writing in an unforeseen manner through a series of intense love stories in view of death, where the lines between life and literature can no longer be reliably discerned.