Quelles lois Steven Cohen transgresse-t-il quand, le 10 septembre 2013, il réalise sa performance Coq / Cock sur la place du Trocadéro à Paris et est, en conséquence, condamné (sans peine) pour « exhibition sexuelle »? C’est la question que nous posons et la réponse ne se résume pas à des dispositions légales….

This article concerns the Portrait of Jacques Derrida, drawn by Hélène Cixous in 2001. The pages I choose to focus on are nine extracts of Derrida's footnoted additions to an essay by Geoffrey Bennington, either annotated or highlighted, sometimes both, in Cixous's hand in red, blue or black pen. The central point I develop is that Cixous's close relation to Derrida is not so much to an intimate friend whose skin could be touched, as to Derrida qua writing being, Derrida (...) as corpus. I argue that intimacy operates by loosening Derrida's tongue, entering into his tongue in order to get to his heart by means of a hand-performed ‘ritual’, which I call the ritual of ‘sur-lining’. (shrink)

Spectrality has always been a threat to order, to the logic of difference and binary opposites — a threat therefore to the classic law of ontology, which deconstructionist thinkers and writers have consistently sought to subvert, prominently among them Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. While also engaging in an implicit dialogue with Louis Althusser's theory of ‘interpellation’, Cixous and Derrida have reinvented the psychoanalysis of gender-production through their reading of each other. Spectrality is for them an injunction to preserve otherness (...) and safeguard the presence/absence of what in fact does not yet exist, the almost unnameable which pushes at the boundaries of language and thought, and whose mystery writing aspires to attend to. Burials should not thus be performed according to established practice: they must be faulty. (shrink)