Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper argues that Hélène Cixous’s poetical and philosophical turn at the end of the 1970s not only results from an encounter with Clarice Lispector’s works as many important studies have advanced, but also from a confrontation with Martin Heidegger’s works, which Cixous was reading extensively at the time. Although Lispector is a very pronounced influence in Cixous’s texts from 1979 to 1982, the filigreed presence of ‘s phenomenolgy makes itself felt at every turn. Focusing mainly on Vivre l’orange / To Live the Orange (1979), this study explores how Cixous addresses one of the major limitations of Heidegger’s though: the neglect of the body. Cixous’s profoundly sensuous poetics shed light on a dimension of existence where the body is no longer reduced to being the mere accessory to meaningful ends, as per the epistemology of readiness-to-hand. In spite of the dizzying destruction of the theoretical and scientific comportment, Heidegger’s phenomenology left intact one of Western philosophy’s most fundamental biases: its aversion for the living body, a livingness that escapes the grasp of linguistic categories and concepts. Far from dismissing Heidegger, however, I propose that Cixous adds another turn of the screw to the phenomenologist’s destruction of metaphysics, renovating some of Heidegger’s key concept in the process, giving the philosophy of Existenz a new life.