Abstract

Hélène Cixous has written a substantial body of writings about art. This article borrows Derrida's conception of the countersignature to explore the relationship she envisages in them between the plastic arts and writing. It argues that the works to which Cixous is drawn, many of which involve copying words, are driven by the desire to capture what is essentially uncapturable in the artist's idiom. Recognizing in them a displacement of her own concerns, Cixous suggests in these texts that all art speaks a common language in so far as it represents the same attempt to pass beyond its own limits, visual or verbal. Writing and painting are thus as much translations of each other as one language is of another. In particular, their status as translations or copies profoundly troubles the possibility of determining the signatory of the text