Everything-Is-Well-Said Living Beside Me in the Process of Continuing: Jacques Derrida as Writing-Writer Reader of Hélène Cixous

In the search for a comparative measure of the importance Derrida grants to the various authors he reads, one could do worse than to tally the number of words he coins or reinvents in their honour. Surely Cixous would come out on top. And beyond wordcounts, her work inspires/requires him to produce particularly subtle, complex and inventive writing. It is also true, and these two things are beguilingly difficult to disentangle, that Derrida’s reading relation to Cixous’s work is unique: not only is he her first reader, in multiple ways, but he is at once inside and outside, deconstructing the borders between the public and the private, the published and the unpublished, the fictive and the biographical, the work and the life. This essay attempts to open new perspectives on these paradoxical relations, for example by reassessing the question of ‘sides’ as developed by Derrida: no longer Cixous/Derrida as life/death, but rather side-by-side in, through or for life.