ABSTRACT
Helene Cixous’ Vivre l’orange is ostensibly a reading of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s La Passion selon G. H., but this reading acts as a partial translationThe traces of other paths glint through the various oblivions of Vivre l’orange. These are the paths The Newly Born Woman departs from. One is the detoured path through geography, national borders and cultures, through accidents of language and history that brings Cixous’ Jewish family to Algeria. Vivre Vorange opens with a telephone call, a call impossible to answer. A text written far from the orange, but a partir de l’orange, denounces its guilty distance from Iran, seeks to close the gap. A translation of Iran into orange, the political into the discourse or figure, is effected across Oran, Cixous’ birthplace, the ville natale. And similarly, the buried subtext of the history of Cixous’ own language, a French learned in a colonial context, is perpetually displaced in Tran’; Algeria is mistranslated as Iran.
