Helene Cixous's Creaturely Poethics

Drawing on Jacques Derrida's and Sarah Kofman's conception of writing, Anat Pick's notion of the 'creaturely' and Kari Driscoll's 'zoopoetics', this article discusses the relationship between textuality and animality in Helene Cixous's work. Cixous's writing has been described as inscribing the body in the text, which may be considered an ethical engagement; her embodied poetics can thus be called a creaturely poethics. The analysis focuses mostly on Cixous's latest texts: Les Sans Arche d'Adel Abdessemed (2018), Animal amour (2021) - which deal openly with animals - and her recent fictions on the Shoah, 1938, nuits (2019) and Ruines bien rangees (2020). In them, animality not only traverses human and non-human animals, but also beings considered inanimate, such as Osnabruck's synagogue. Particularly, Ruines bien rangees gives a voice - and, above all, a 'cry' - to all beings reduced to silence, and therefore to death, by the Nazis.

Automated summary

This article discusses the relationship between textuality and animality in Helene Cixous's work, focusing on how her writing inscribes the body in the text, considering it as an ethical engagement, and her poetics as creaturely.