INTERVIEWER

You’ve written that you didn’t start writing until you were twenty-seven because literature was reserved for “great men.” Is that true? What changed at that age?

CIXOUS

That was the age at which Derrida and I started our endless conversation. And of course it was all about writing. We spoke a mélange of Stendhal, and a bit of Mallarmé, some Rabelais, Blanchot. The thing is that Derrida could read me and I could read him. At first I thought to myself, How extraordinary it is that people like Derrida exist! The world is wonderful! There must be others like him. And so I set out to find the other Derridas. After a while I got the impression that there weren’t many, and finally I realized that there were none. We would talk on the phone very early in the morning. We talked nearly every day⁠—about what we were doing, our work, about current events, political positions. It was a constant analysis. This type of relationship changes over time. When you have been friends for twenty years, you turn around and look back and say to each other, “This is necessary.” And after forty years, you say, “This is life.”