ABSTRACT
A French feminist playwright and theorist, Hélène Cixous, writes this about the place of in-between, of entredeux:
Entredeux is a word … to designate a true in-between—between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning. For me, an entredeux is: nothing. It is, because there is entredeux. But it is—I will go through metaphors—a moment in a life where you are not entirely living, where you are almost dead. Where you are not dead. Where you are not yet in the process of reliving. These are the innumerable moments that touch us with bereavements of all sorts. There is bereavement between me, violently, from the loss of a being who is a part of me—as if a piece of my body, of my house, were ruined, collapsed … Everything that makes the course of life be interrupted. In this case we find ourself in a situation for which we are absolutely not prepared. Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to ‘live’. But we must. Thus we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition, these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call an entredeux. Wars cause entredeux in the histories of countries. But the worst war is where the enemy is on the inside; where the enemy is the person I love the most in the world, is myself (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997: 9–10).
