"We show each other our lucky finds. We dangle our seashells, make them gleam like holy relics. We pass each other our dreams like ageless epiphanies. We cannot dispense with them because they are so archi-originary, we don't even see it. Or else it's as if we were telling each other what we ate, what we wore. Insignificant things that make for a world. We used to say: le Jardin d'Essais. All of that is the Jardins d'Essais. Alchemists of the Verse-Worm.
I take note the way I take note of the corners and folds of his texts. Of those of Proust as well. Or of Rousseau. The rich beings are books. Shakespeare's plays. Strange mirrors in which we contemplate ourselves in the other (in an) image. Everything becomes writing. Everything began in writing, by writing each other, listening to each other write to each other read each other.
The telephone is not for nothing in all this, Most often we 'gave' each other dreams as if in a dream, over the telephone. I imagine one day, he says, researchers, students will write theses on the telephone chez Cixous and chez Derrida, that is, in the texts, because there are many telephones in the texts, they are everywhere, everywhere, and thus I imagine when the telephone starts to become archaic, people will say: there, in the era of telephones those two wrote a lot on the telephone, he says this to me on the telephone. We are surprised by the telephone. Relieved, threatened, promised. He projects a past to come. I turn toward a past past, toward the dawn of the telephone, toward the premises and beginnings, the primitive telephones: birds flowerpots golden threads beginning with Tristan and Isolde and passing through Armance, the Princess of Cleves, the irascible divinities of Lost Time, how is one supposed to live cordlessly, without cor, without horn, without voice, we never stop describing and conjuring all the uncontrollable cut-offs of communication, figures of the ultimate cut-off, rehearsals and sketches, he always further out front in imagining imagelessly the teletechnological event, he always stands way off on the bow of time, searching the horizon, I am more likely at the stern, taking past misfortune as the measure of chances in the present."
—Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida
