Where Thinking Is Not What We Think

This article offers a reading of Hélène Cixous's Jours de l'an (First Days of the Year), the first of many texts by Cixous to feature the problematic of an unwritten book which would be at the origin of all her other books. In particular, it examines the relationship between the text as a whole and its final chapter, "An Ideal Story," in the light of Heidegger's notion of thinking as digression, arguing that for Cixous the search for truth takes a necessarily oblique, indirect form. After consideration of the detours the text takes via Clarice Lispector and Marina Tsvetaeva, it contends that the story Cixous ends up telling runs counter to the one it set out to tell, simultaneously taking its place and reaffirming the need to tell it yet again.