H. C. for Life, That Is to Say...

by Jacques Derrida, Stefan Herbrechter (Translator), Laurent Milesi (Translator)

H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . is Derrida's literary critical recollection of his lifelong friendship with Hélène Cixous. The main figure that informs Derrida's reading here is that of "taking sides." While Hélène Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, "for life," Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death. Rather than being an obvious choice, taking the side of life is an act of faith, by wagering one's life on life. H. C. for Life sets up and explores this interminable "argument" between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. In addition to being a memoir, it is also a theoretical confrontation―for example about the meaning of "might" and "omnipotence," and a philosophical and philological analysis of the crypts within the vast oeuvre of Hélène Cixous. Finally, the book is Derrida's tribute to the thought of the woman whom he regards as one of the great French poets, writers, and thinkers of our time.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

192 pages, Paperback

Published May 10, 2006

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since I have known her, I have read her and I keep forgetting that she writes, and I forget what she writes. This forgetting is not a forgetting like any other; it is elemental, I probably live on it.

This book is collected and edited from a lecture Derrida gave at a Cixous Conference in 1998. H.C. For Life crackles even as it retreats, asserting and then reframing. The questions it poses are almost benign taunts. Derrida is cautious and still playful, ever mindful of the brackets he employs. I now read Derrida under the advice of Richard Rorty. Mine is a reading of bemused wonder, especially under these heightened circumstances. I have lavished praise on the bond between Cixous and Derrida elsewhere. Their links are knotted and braided with an astonishing poetry. The situation is no different here. Derrida examines Cixous writing about her father. He explores the sense of speed and velocity in her prose. The language is sumptuous to the degree of indulgence. I admit to having no regrets. Homonyms reign here, a situation not well suited for translation. An exploration of the words for "side" and "rib" make for fascinating footnotes.

There was a subsequent reading of Cixous's whimsy about her "Uncle Freud" and in the process Derrida lost me. It has happened in most of my reading of him: I am fine and then suddenly lost. Thankfully my bearings were recovered and I finished the book in awe.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A week ago yesterday I found out that my best friend had died. I do not know when exactly he died. The specifics remain unclear. We had become close during the time I lived in the Southern California desert starting in 2009 and remained in extremely close contact for a decade. Though Paul was nearly four decades my senior, he was instrumental to my (ongoing, 'cause that's irreducibly how it works) recovery from alcoholism/addiction and, being a person with with whom I had an uncommon rapport, he became more important to me than anybody else has been in my adult life. The book I was reading when I found out that Paul had passed, Lillian Ross’s account of the production of John Huston’s 1951 film adaptation of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, had a special relevance considering that Paul had been a producer as well as a United Artists talent liaison in the Los Angeles of the 60s and 70s; I had always loved his wild and intemperate stories about the seamy side of that particular milieu. My experience of grief manifested itself less as sadness or despair, and more as a kind of rapid cycling of mood, fundamental to which was an experience of sensory-motor lassitude and something like a general neural dislocation. I very quickly began to think of Jacques Derrida. I thought of Jacques Derrida because when I think of writing on death I immediately think of Derrida (and Heidegger, I suppose, from whom Derrida inherited so much). I first read Derrida in 1997, when I was seventeen and then eighteen. The first two books I read were APORIAS and ARCHIVE FEVER, though I cannot recall precisely the order in which I read them. My suspicion is that I read them piecemeal at something like the same time. APORIAS was probably also the first major philosophical work I ever read whose principal subject could be said to be death. I read a healthy amount of Derrida during my years in academia (terminating in 2004), but at a certain point late in the undergrad years I came to essentially think of myself as a Deleuzian. That being said, Derrida continued to mean a great deal to me. I last partook of a thorough reading of Derrida when I returned to his masterpiece SPRECTERS OF MARX probably close to a decade ago. It was an undertaking I found valuable in the extreme. I have not read him since. After Paul died, I immediately considered revisiting Derrida’s THE WORK OF MOURNING, but when going through some of my old books kept at my mother’s house, I came upon a copy of H.C. FOR LIFE, THAT IS TO SAY…, which I have never read so much as a single time. This struck me as a lacuna that ought be immediately corrected. The fact that the book looks at life and death, two “positions” or “sides,” in the context of Derrida (congenitally, it would seem, on the side of death) and his friendship-affinity with Hélène Cixous (on the side of life), seemed to make the book especially valuable to me right now on two fronts (life-death, friendship-affinity), and of course in his introduction to the Stanford University Press edition of the book, Laurent Milesi, one of the two translators to have collaborated on the project (the other being Stefan Herbrechter), addresses how H.C. FOR LIFE is not only a late work from Derrida, but that the philosopher himself passed away before the translation could be completed. There are certainly resonances and reverberations here that speak to me where I am at right now, and let me say very directly that reading this text has been one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life. What I love about French philosophy and critical theory has a lot to do with both language and approach. When we speak of literary theory we are speaking in the end of theory that IS literature rather than theory ABOUT literature. Whereas German philosophy (Heidegger being a preeminent example) so often feels like the arduous construction of unwieldy edifices, I think of a lot of postwar French theory as been nakedly indebted to what Marcel Proust belatedly caused to happen in the form of Roland Barthes (Barthes’ language, Barthes’ method). I have always seen Derrida as just as much an extension of dynamics at play in Barthes as those I have found operating in Heidegger (who in his exhaustive interrogation of the question of Being is in some sense the first 20th century “deconstructionist”). We might start down this road by noting a fascinating footnote (number 42) in H.C. FOR LIFE which connects the word déesse (goddess) which the homonymic initials D.S. (in turn linked to the initials H.C.) utilized by Barthes in “The New Citroën,” and perhaps also a “punning acronym” for “différence sexuelle,” a concept regularly at play in the work of Hélène Cixous. If by way of Barthes we necessarily follow a thread back to Proust, then when Derrida considers what it might mean to attempt to speak from H.C.’s side, du côté de chez elle, he consciously evokes DU CÔTÉ DE CHEZ SWANN, the first volume of Proust’s RECHERCHE. All this is a matter of course when it comes to Derrida. That H.C. FOR LIFE is adapted from a paper delivered at a conference means that all of its fecund play with homonyms and forking paths of etymology takes on a special status that needs to be considered, as he states directly early on, in terms of aurality. Even just take that one word: “aurality.” The oral, the aura, gold (or), hour (heure). Et cetera. Derrida plays with this stuff with a kind of magician-level virtuosity. One is very much conscious of in large part reading the transcript of a performance by a bravura showman. For a sense of the specific nature of how this particular species of deconstruction works here, I would like to draw attention to one more footnote from the book (number five), this time citing it in its entirety: “Derrida’s dense humorous development brings together par ici (‘this way,’ ‘through here,’ and, in most other contexts, ‘[around] here’), parousie, and the name of the conference venue, Cerisy, as well as, in the next paragraph, parricide—par ici sounding like a half-pronounced parricide in French, therefore a quasi-parricide or a parricide en comme si (French comme si = Latin quasi: as if).” (Quasi-parricide is the condition of the translation—which is all translation—of the untranslatable. Structural linguistics has already itself died of related wounds.) You get the idea. Derrida is always performing as a writer, always starting with a sleight-of-hand and proceeding accordingly. If Barthes speaks of beginning at a Degree Zero, Derrida posits a theoretical Degree Zero and immediately performs a feint, “beating a retreat” in his coinage here, always backing up and backing up some more. He tells us that this book (lecture) is going to have a number of beginnings. He speaks of endings, the end, provisional hovering terminations. It is both a rhetorical feint, again, but also something far more salient. The lecture and the book eventually have to come to a stop, to be sure, but more pertinently there is death, the ultimate rubber stamp of finitude. The Epilogue to H.C. FOR LIFE finds Derrida speaking very directly about this end and its status precisely as “the end.” Okay. Right. Derrida has long been deep into the thick of Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death). You quite possibly already knows this. I have already indicated that I do. Right. Let us now very simple parse the text for very clear evidence of what the Derrida “side” might look like, and what the H.C. "side" might look like. Remarking upon having received news of Derrida’s death whilst completing the English translation of H.C. FOR LIFE, Laurent Milesi comments on the new sting this brought to a line of Derrida’s from the book’s Epilogue: “For me, death counts, it counts, and my days, my hours, and my seconds are numbered.” Right. Precisely because of the presence of the clock here, I would like to immediately counterpose this line with one Derrida himself quotes in the text proper from Hélène Cixous's OR: “These are lives of power, at great depths, unsubjected to the clock…” Aha! This might be the simplest way of breaking down what we might mean by the two sides in dialogue in H.C. FOR LIFE. It is quite simple, overly so, perhaps, but maybe not overly overly so. Let me back up. Let me begin again, à la Jacques. Perhaps I might start again in order simply to barrel right on through. The beginning retreats into the multiplicity of pre-beginnings, invoking the prefix of “prelude” and of the French word “prénom.” Hélène Cixous is author of LE PRÉNOM DE DIEUX (her first book) and PRÉNOMS DU PERSONNE. Also of LES COMMENCEMENTS. My wishing to barrel through puts me close to the side of H.C. Derrida says he is himself all about adagio and lento, much later he will tell us that H.C. (life), the speedy one, is about allegro and presto. Derrida discusses Belief (heterogenous) and eschatology (The Big End). “To believe when it is possible and measurable only by the yardstick of the possible, is not yet to believe.” A leap of faith? At least one of provisional belief? How might we be said to “believe” in music? “What happens then, as far as belief and the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant de l’enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature becomes an enchanting chant?” Ah, yes, THAT kind of leap. The leap IN THE WORK. We are already approaching the side of H.C. Might (puisse, or puissance vs. puisse). Derrida proceeds beyond mere belief and considers how to give “might” back to H.C. Might as in “might happen,” the wish, is already a possibility that has something to do with "might" as force realizing itself in action (mightiness). I would that it “might.” My “might” sees it through (or can/could). Derrida is going to “interrogate” the letter C. C, c’est (c’est pour la vie), si. Qui est-ce? Qui est C?. C of the “six hundred voices.” Yes, life, how could it be anything other than polyvocal? (And of course “sais” means “know.”) To flirt with speaking from (of/on) the side of H.C. (“initialed and initialized”) is to act the “as if” and to indulge in “playing all the differences.” “We will have to ask ourselves, much later, what being on someone’s side, on the other’s side, also means. But also at the other’s side. Or else alongside the other, which does not amount to the same thing.” Derrida is not actually on the side of H.C. He cannot be. He has to acknowledge this in order to be anywhere near her side. He is not on his own side either. Really, though, he asks, what is a side? “Side, which is to say what?” Even the side itself has its side. God will come to be Side with a capital S. H.C. “might” be an atomist of metonymy. The “might” is in the elements more than in their aggregation. Then from élément to événement. Événement: allegro, presto. From OR: “One had to be quick.” Also: “Mighty the spirit of the letter.” Yes, exactly, both the letter and its speed. An extraordinary and dizzying formulation from H.C.: “Je suis moi-même ta lettre à moi dis-je.” Okay. Something of a change of direction, a provisional re-beginning. From Hélène Cixous’s JOURS DE L’AN: passages in which the author presents herself as the daughter of dead-fathers but ON THE SIDE OF (in her exact words) the living mother. Mother (mère) and sea (mer). Hélène Cixous’s mother, as it so happens, was named Eve. Again, the only true questions are impossible questions. Impossible questions may also be the crucible of life (the leap it requires). Derrida says of H.C.’s autofictions that they constitute “work that auto-hetero-analyzes itself like a grown-up.” I love that. It articulates the business of the kind of work I currently feel called upon to rise toward, and this is a lovely way of putting it. Death, though she knows it to be real, constitutes for H.C. a “nonside.” The work (the writing) is not itself born of Freudian death-drive. No, “vivre fait livre.” The dead-fathers themselves declare that they die alive. Or H.C. mobilizes the living of the dead. The work does this. The work: a word (and so on), a speed (on and on). One side only, that of life, though it has its peripheries: à côté d’Ici, à côté de Là. Derrida considers H and hache (axe). Derrida considers Balzac’s discarded title for THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS: NE TOUCHEZ PAS LA HACHE (Rivette returned that title, I might add, to his film adaptation). Cixous’s father was called Georges, Derrida’s mother Georgette. A distorted consonance of sides and a constitutive differential of alliance. H.C. is on the side of her mother. Derrida is on the side of HIS mother and the dead-fathers. The side of Eve, the side of life: “Vivement que—this untranslatable phrase says at once life, the vivacity of life, the acceleration of speed, and the mighty impatience of the wish.” Derrida sees H.C. as a déesse of punctuation in her writing, divine regulator, as such, of speed(s). Power becomes a verb, powering, mighting. Might becomes the “absolute performative.” Speed at its utmost limit, speed of the letter, produces the make-let doublet; H.C. can address a letter and instantaneously receive it at her address. Something like a wish becomes very much an omnipotence. Aye, Speedy. “The changing of gear is the lever of might, even might itself.” The metaphor of the braid (life’s methodology of incorporation). “Between me and my cat…” The cat and the side of life and the yes upon yes of Molly Bloom (in Joyce’s ULYSSES). Derrida beholds in H.C., in something like astonishment, “a radiant radiology or radiotelephony” H.C. herself in OR: “What is distance? Two oceans under my forefinger. We are bodies in minds fast as the radio.” Bodies IN minds. Death shall have no real dominion thereby! Uncle Freud. Nuncle Freud (sic). We have one particular chapter in TOTEM AND TABOO, a chapter on ���Animism, Magic, the Omnipotence of Thoughts.” The Rat Man. The murky pre-animism of Belebtheit (which the search-engine-approved translator renders for me as “bustle,” though I much prefer Derrida’s “poetico-performative magical might”). Life, life, life. The wish, the leap, the “as if.” Das Überunmöglichste ist möglich. The most impossible is possible. The more than impossible is possible. The “as if” may well become a performative wish that consecrates the impossible in triumph over death, forcing all the dead to ever live in “bonds of immortality” and “fleeting touch of eternity.” Woosh, whew. Derrida cannot be on the side of H.C. Can H.C be on the side of H.C.? Which it to say…? Metaphrasis: Greek word for translation. There is always an obstructive agent, all too active. You have already stopped being on the side that rose to articulate itself as soon as it opened its mouth. But there is still something there. This side of life is familiar to me. I came to Derrida because I wanted to consider death, to do some kind of inchoate work on something, really to make myself available for a personal death-reckoning (at a time when it was unmistakably called for). In finding H.C.’s side I actually find something closer to my own side, the side I was on before my friend died and am still on in the aftermath, because my commitment to this side is nearly autonomic. Derrida mentions Clarice Lispector only a couple times in passing. My suspicion is that Derrida has not adequately assimilated Lispector if he has assimilated her at all. Hélène Cixous has written a great deal about Clarice Lispector, stating that her encounter with Lispector’s work in 1978 changed everything for her. I have read everything New Directions has put out from Lispector over the last three years and change. I think THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. (initialed and initialized) is probably my favourite novel of all time. The "side" that Derrida ascribes to H.C. was already in large part there for me in Lispector. It is life as immanent and infinite material substance transcending itself precisely as immanence and materiality. To put it overly simply, but maybe not overly overly simply. I know this. I live this, or am expressed in its lived livingness, myself serving, at my best, expression of its might. H.C. FOR LIFE ends up reminding me what I am already doing and supposed to be doing. There is not a missing part here. I have what I need, I am doing the indicated things in accordance with the true living mandate. Still, it is profoundly valuable, totally heartening, to look at this side, the side of life, from the side of Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death), not thinking myself any more absolved from having to actually die than does Hélène Cixous, precisely because of the way this affinity between Derrida and Cixous statifies this particular discourse, considered directly in the aftermath of the loss of my most dear friend. Derria and Cixous were/are both Algerian Jews (my friend was also Jewish, though I am not), and late in the text proper Derrida presents a series of increasingly personal meditations that foreground both Judaism and the private history of two friends. One of the most lovely passages in H.C. FOR LIFE comes from H.C. writing, in her book ILLA, about a garden whose name can only be summoned within the garden itself, and Derrida going on to imagine her seeking “to draw the other out of death by the wisps of his tallith.” I found this extremely moving. Eternal life is substitution, the list of sequential Jonahs, Jonah ever replacing Johah. Of course, the triumph of life over death rests in the suspension of the centrality of the individual (the individual Jonah). Derrida is one such Jonah, so is my friend Paul. Even H.C. and myself will have to cough up the Johah of ourselves. That is the deal. There is one last beautiful convergence I cannot help but mention. Derrida gave the lecture from which the book emerges thrity-five years after his first encounter with Hélène Cixous, at a time when he was thirty-five-years of age. Last night I watched Philippe Garrel’s film L’ENFANT SECRET for the first time, instantaneously one of my favourite films of all time, and one that speaks to the shared psychospiritual field of my friend Paul and I. I was born the year that film was released and Paul was the age I am now. Final words: le vivier du vivement … in the afterglow d’un tout est bien dit de tout à l’heure.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes Derrida gets too wrapped up in himself (or Freud) to talk about the subject at hand.

[Derek brown]

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