INTERVIEWER

How would you describe your own process of invention? Your works of fiction are, of course, intensely autobiographical.

CIXOUS

The problem with the question you’re asking is that it is entirely theoretical. When one writes, one doesn’t ask oneself, Is it fictional? Is it autobiographical? No. Now, another comment. All writing that is strong, alive, is autobiographical. At the same time, everything is invented. Everything Proust wrote has passed through what reality whispered to him. Of course, there are a thousand ways to be autobiographical. Take Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which is of course entirely invented, but also The Life of Henry Brulard, the autobiography, which does not bear Stendhal’s name. When I read them both, I am transported with admiration. But what makes the autobiography autobiographical? It is already transposed, it is comic, it is tragic, it is poetic. And all that takes place in it happens to someone who is at once Stendhal and not Stendhal. Derrida pointed out, for example, that Nietzsche emphasized that philosophy is autobiographical. Of course, if the philosopher doesn’t say this, we don’t dare suggest it, but nevertheless it’s true. If we know Kierkegaard’s story, we realize that his reflections are the result of what he experienced, his own research, his anxieties.