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229 t w e l v e Bit: Mourning Remains in Derrida and Cixous One has perhaps to let oneself be taken in a little longer by the words, the morsels of words or dead bits in decomposition that let the writing go a bit more unbridled. — j a c q u e s d e r r i d a , “Ja or the Faux-Bond” Bit Bit. In English, the word is “bit.” But which bit is this bit? Is it a noun or a verb? Is it a piece of something torn off with the teeth, or is it an act of biting or having been bitten? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “bit” can mean the thing one bites or the act of biting, the cutting edge of a tool, or the biting part of anything. By extension, the dictionary informs us, “bit” also means the “bite” or “sting” of death or disease or anything else that threatens to destroy me from without. This “bit” is a foretaste of my future death. The dictionary also clarifies that the word is so constitutively confused that even when “bit” clearly means the mouthpiece of a horse’s bridle, “it is not clear whether the word in this sense signifies that which the horse bites or that which bites or grips the horse’s mouth.” Biter or bitten, active or passive, inside or outside, the word resists the possibility of deciding. The word “bit” is also a bit of the word “bite.” Marder-Ch12.indd 229 Marder-Ch12.indd 229 11/10/2011 4:21:52 PM 11/10/2011 4:21:52 PM 230 Photo-Readings and the Possible Impossibilities of Literature And it is this bit that designates its aftermath and remainder. The bit is a bit of a bite—its leftover bit—the severed piece that remains—after the event. In French, the word for “bit” is mors. This bit, this mors, shares its root with the words mordre (to bite), morsure (a bite), morceau (morsel), and remords (remorse). Like the English “bit,” all of these words appear to be located in and around the mouth; they all cleave open a confusion between the biter and the bit, the eater and the eaten. But in French, unlike English, the word mors also appeals to the ear as well. From its sound, it is indistinguishable from the command mords (bite!), the word for death (mort), and the words for the dead (mort in the masculine singular or morts in the plural). Mors, mords, morceau, morts, mort, morsure, remords: Bit, bite, morsel, dead, death, sting, remorse. Throughout their work, in text after text, Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous each put these words to work by tearing them to bits and reworking them differently. For Derrida, the word mors returns again and again throughout many (if not most) of his major early writings on the work of mourning and the question of the remainder.1 As I hope to demonstrate in the pages that follow—even if only schematically —through this word, along with its various decomposed and recomposed elements, Derrida explicitly questions psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject, of sexual difference and of mourning. For Cixous, the morsure (bite) is one of the primal sources of writing. Linked to a primal scene (that is to say an event that has happened to me but to which I can never be present ) and often, but not always, figured by the bite of Fips the dog, the bite opens an uncloseable wound, and leaves an indelible mark on the body. But more important, perhaps, it bites back, through remords (remorse) returning again and again as a trace in me of the one who bit me and hence a trace of that bit of me that will never be part of me but that never lets go of me either. Remords. Remorse. Hélène Cixous glosses the word in the opening pages of her book L’amour du loup et autre remords (The Love of the Wolf and Other Remorses). The first section of the book is called “Ma conscience me mord la langue avec tes dents” (“My conscience bites my tongue with your teeth”). This means that my conscience does not belong to me; it is that living bit of you that lives in me and bites back through me. Although remords is born from pain, without it there is no writing, no life, and...

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