(Un)Grounding the human. Affective Entanglement and Subjectivity in Hélène Cixous "Algerian Reveries

Abstract

This article examines the place of the human in Hélène Cixous’s work. Taking her extended conversation with Mireille Calle-Gruber (‘Entre Tiens’) as a starting point, the article shows how Cixous employs the word ‘human’ to denominate a transformational, embodied process, directed at an ethico-political becoming, rather than to invoke a differentia specifica vis-à-vis other forms of life. She thereby moves our conceptions of the ‘human’ beyond rational subjectivity and universal humanism, and we find a double investment in the term: Cixous’s ‘human’ takes into account our material existences and affective entanglements with other (human and non-human) beings, but it also invokes our specific capacity as human beings to transform and create ourselves and our environments in unforeseen ways. Such a conception of the ‘human’ is deeply embedded in Cixous’s formative experiences in colonial Algeria, as this article argues with particular attention to Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage (2000) and her writings on Algeria published in Stigmata. Escaping Texts (1998). The article takes two recurring images in these texts as central examples to unravel the links between Cixous’s two strands to her understanding of ‘human’ and her experiences of colonial injustice. After first laying out the two strands, which become explicit in ‘Entre Tiens’, the article subsequently turns to the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family in Algiers, and to the image of closed gates as markers of colonial dehumanization and racialized social inclusion/exclusion. By thinking through these figures, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and antiSemitism and develops her own response to it, arguing for human relationality and affective corporeality, for the human as a specific disposition and responsibility within a larger universe, and she is shown to thus challenge the false humanism of the colonial project.