ABSTRACT
If there is an event of literature, understood as a double genitive, one of the manifestations of this re-marking is perhaps to be found in the event of life, the living event beyond all performative power and possibility, that takes place in and from which takes off the writing of Hélène Cixous. Weaving around and over Derrida’s readings in H. C. pour la vie and Un ver à soie, this chapter argues that, at a distance from the rhetoric of might and of absolute puissance, Cixous’s puisse derives its force precisely from the unexceptional character of its events. The chapter thus reads Derrida’s reflections on the event of literature via recent explorations of the unexceptional in politics and aesthetics. In counterpoint with those passages where Derrida discerns a “general” exceptionality or metonymized irreplaceability in Cixous’s writing, one should hear her repeated figuring of the event of literature as a coup d’aile or Flügelschlag, the beating of a wing. This suggests that the sonorous quality of her writing, with its substitutions of sounds through “braids” of homonymy and homophony, is far more subtle, more marginal, and much less noisy than the trumpeted revolutionary or tragic events of political history.
