Hélène Cixous, Stigmata

from "Without end"

"As soon as we draw (as soon as, following the pen, we advance into the unknown, hearts beating, mad with desire) we are little, we do not know, we start out avidly, we are going to lose ourselves."

"The unhappy thing would be to have found. As long as we are seeking we are innocent. We are in naïve submission. In prenatality."

"Truth strikes us. Opens our heart. Our lips. Error makes us sense the absence of taste."

(But a sketch.)

"We try to repent, but we never repent. One doesn't repent. One doesn't manage. One makes essays."

"Because our soul has no firm footing...How then to draw a firm footing, when our soul is only a staggering."

from "What is it o'clock?"

"There where there is no witness at all. We ourselves are not our own witnesses. We are without us. Without God. God not having followed us. We, being in the abandonment of God. The sign of these scenes: even God doesn't make it there, even I. This is tragedy according to Celan, according to Aeschylus, the tragedy of no one, tragedy according to Akhmatova. Here we are absolutely alone, no one has ever been here, there is simply no one, we ourselves are not there, no one has preceded us, no one has taught us, it's the first time, suffering is always the first time, the loss of you, my own loss, it is the first time, and what renders it alarming is that 'I' am not there. I don't know how to be there. I don't manage."

"A single wind- but we are strangers and we are strangers. Lodged, lost in the frail cavity. A single wind for roof, for the two of us. This wind, haven't we invented it? Under the same wind, stranger to the world except to us, we are strangers together of the same foreignness and yet each one in her own foreignness, but we were once under a single wind- whispering of love, in parentheses, apart- and in parentheses, between me and you, incertitude. But the two incertitudes are reunited by a single blowing foreignness. Strangers to the world, runaways, we are held in the fragile arms of foreignness, each one in the arms of the other's foreignness,
to be strangers together, and trembling in the wind, is the condition of love, the lover's condition."

"My heart beats from recognizing you, from recognizing: I don't recognize you, I sense that I don't recognize you. (To sense that I don't recognize makes my heart beat); what makes my heart beat is that something remains non-recognized, that I sense the unknown, that I keep it unknown. This is love. I will never know how I love you. I love you; I don't even know it. You will never know how I love you. I love you: I work at understanding you to the point of not understanding you, and there, standing in the wind, I don't understand you."