In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Crossing LinesJacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone1
  • Eric Prenowitz (bio)

[H]e must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.

—Freud, "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis"2

My unconscious is connected to your unconscious.

—Cixous, "La venue à l'écriture"3

Jacques Derrida seems to have thought a lot of Hélène Cixous's telephone. He will have spoken a great deal about it by all accounts, and it might be said to have occupied and preoccupied him without ever becoming a purely theoretical object of reflection. One gets the feeling Derrida spent a lifetime thinking and speaking on Hélène Cixous's telephone, which is to say in it, into it and out of it, through it as well as of it, and even into it of it, all at once. It is hard to imagine how he could have done otherwise. [End Page 123]

You would be forgiven, perhaps even vindicated, for thinking he's talking about it when he says, in H.C. for Life …, "[W]e have talked to each other more on the telephone than, as one says, tête-à-tête, face to face. Infinitely more."4 According to the most restricted context in which the comment appears, this "we" or "us," the pronoun "nous," alone or in the reflexive, nominative-subjective formula "nous nous," "we to ourselves" or "we to each other," refers to a general, relatively undefined group: Derrida and his audience ("I am sure that a certain number of us can say this: we have talked to each other more on the telephone"5). For a reading that is informed by the broader context of the essay, however, it is clear that this "we" or this "us" also refers, if only by inference, to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous.

Derrida goes on to suggest to his readers, whom he thereby constitutes as prospective doctoral students, "the program or the title of ten or twenty theses to come in the university, tomorrow, when it will have to canonize H.C.'s corpus. Subject: telephones and the question of the telephone in H.C.'s work."6 Leaving this compelling call unanswered for the time being, I propose to address here a not unrelated ring or buzz, a telephonic conversation or dialogue, and a persistent hang-up. A telephone calling, if I can put it that way, shared in duplex, in the duplex sense of the word, by Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. One of my hypotheses, which I attempt to justify in tracing out a certain number of exchanges, is indeed that these two big talkers talk to each other, about each other, that they phone each other, literally, more than it might at first appear. However, I hope to make clear that I do not say this in view of a realist, biographical, anecdotal reduction of what is one of the most extraordinary literary-philosophical exchanges—an exchange that obliges us to rethink what we mean by "literature," "philosophy," and "exchange"—to a simple communication between two living people in their lives, as distinct or even as in principle distinguishable from their works. On the contrary, this exchange takes place in the work, through the work, in the working through of the work, but in such a way that it subverts the conventional border between life and work. My telephonic hypothesis is in part a consequence of this subversion: if works are also lives, if lives can never be entirely extricated from works, if people are also the constructs of texts, and all the more so with the lives and works at issue here, then it is not only a question of justification but of critical literary urgency to also give the people and the lives their due.

Something of Derrida's peculiar interest in the telephone and, if you take my word for it, in Cixous's telephone, is suggested, in [End Page 124] any event, by the last two words of the citation...

pdf