H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . . (review)

First presented in 1998 at a conference at Cerisy la Salle devoted to the work of Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida's H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . could appear at first glance to be just another one of those occasional texts programmed by the academy where one scholar or writer pays tribute to another with a few well-chosen superlatives aimed less at shedding light on the work being discussed than at putting the author being celebrated in his or her best light. Though one might expect the homage to be in this case more poignant insofar as Derrida is writing here about the work of a fellow Algerian intellectual and writer and, as is well known, one of his closest friends, the genre would seem to dictate that this not be a significant work of Derrida in its own right. And yet the reader familiar with Derrida's inimitable way of transforming such an occasion into an event, his way of displacing a genre from within, and, as we see here, his unique flair for bringing philosophy to literature, should know better by now.

H. C. for Life is, to be sure, a more than worthy homage to Cixous, all 173 pages of it, an homage that will incite the reader to read and reread the entirety of Cixous' difficult though fascinating and unique corpus. But it is also one of Derrida's most probing texts of the 1990s on questions of life and death, life and power, the relationship between literature and philosophy, speech act theory, translation, psychoanalysis, and the list goes on. Do not thus let the title fool you; or, rather, take it very literally: in this work, Derrida pays homage to the rich and powerful work of Hélène Cixous by rethinking the very concept of life in relationship to power, death, literature, and so on.

Derrida claims at the outset of his extraordinarily careful, inventive, and brilliant reading of Cixous that his work is little more than an exergue in the form of a series of digressions, detours, ellipses, parentheses, and beginnings. Indeed, rather than following a single theme throughout Cixous' work, or giving a reading of just one or a couple of works, Derrida multiplies beginnings in order to lay out a program for what he prophesies will be the generations and generations of readings of Cixous to come, for the centuries of colloquia, courses, and theses to be devoted one day to Cixous. Hence, Derrida begins but then interrupts thematic readings of Cixous on everything from animals, the telephone, the elements, dates, time, and height, to the father and the mother, and, as the title suggests, life and death. Such thematic readings never lose sight of, indeed, each is pursued through, an analysis of how such themes are always woven into the fabric of Cixous' texts in the form of sentences and words, to be sure, but even before that through a meticulous and calculated work on syllables and even letters, beginning with, for Derrida's reading of Cixous here, the "v" of "vitesse" (speed) and "vie" (life).

Life—the theme, concept, and word "life"—are thus at the center of H. C. for Life. Though the book is indeed a series of beginnings and initiations to Cixous' work, there is nonetheless a thesis that runs throughout, namely, that Cixous is always for life, on the side of life. Despite all the concordances and points of contact between their respective works, therefore, Derrida claims that there is this major difference between them, one that puts them on different sides: while he, Derrida, never stops thinking and writing about death, while he never stops believing in it, she, Cixous, who writes so much about death, who knows so much about it, nevertheless, does not believe in it, or believes that there is only one side , the side of life. Even when she thus speaks of death, Cixous is for life, on...