The Presences of Deconstruction

This article focuses on literature's response to philosophy and provides a reading of Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. If Cixous's novel evokes specters in its poetical composition and its writing, it is due to an analysis of a presence of absence largely indebted to Derrida's philosophy. However, there is more than that and more than the official difference Cixous and Derrida have acknowledged publicly. Cixous's difference is also able to differ from Derrida's difference itself. In Cixous, the exercise of a thought ruining dualism is not anchored in a hole of presence nor is the only resistance to the solidity of the concept. It prepares an affirmation of being without any restoration of positive plenitude, and, thus, exceeds Derrida's own philosophical exercise of deconstruction.