(With) Or the Art of Innocence

In (With) Ou I’art de I’innocence—“(With) Or the Art of Innocence”—published in 1981, Cixous develops a number of the themes expounded in To Live the Orange. As in the earlier text, Cixous distinguishes in “(With) Or the Art of Innocence” between those who “chase after” words in order to “crucify” their meaning and those whose language “creates.” ¹ In the passage translated here, writing, in this creating sense, is deemed vital to living. The author describes her project as “writing you,” an endeavor that is beset with difficulties. Language, arising from absence, is a chain of endless substitutions that remove us from the truth. There is the danger that the pre-existent language system will speak (for) us, and that its distortions will annihilate the complex reality of what we express. ² Although the author cannot fulfil her aim of writing “the book of You,” there is insistence in “(With) Or the Art of Innocence” on the positive benefits of the attempt: it is “the most beautiful of all failures.” Through writing, the author may circumvent “the torture of the cut” and transgress “the law of silence”: writing “approaches,” “loves,” “reads,” “listens,” “celebrates,” “keeps.” It can propel the subject beyond the self-interests of the ego, towards others. As in To Live the Orange, the other is heralded as crucial in effecting this self-transformation. The (re)acquisition of “innocence”—recalling the supposedly lost innocence of the biblical paradise prior to prohibition—portrayed here as deriving from an interior knowing “way below the surface of knowledge,” and hence preceding self-promoting patterns of thinking and relating, is viewed as intrinsic to the process.