This chapter argues that the writings of Cixous and Derrida offer new ways of thinking about psychoanalysis. Neither was ever ‘in analysis’; both are committed, however, to what Derrida calls the ‘psychoanalytic revolution’, i.e. the only revolution ‘not to rest, not to seek refuge, in principle, in … a theological or humanist alibi’. Both Cixous and Derrida are constantly interested, also, in the ways in which Freud’s thinking at once falters at and illuminates the question of literature. This chapter investigates these issues in particular in terms of the notions of telepathy and magic. As was noted in Chapter 3, Freud is for Cixous ‘the Shakespeare of the night’: attention is here given to what she calls Freud’s ‘cartography of dreams’ and its correspondences with the work of Joseph Popper-Lynkeus (especially ‘Phantasies of a Realist’), as a basis for thinking about realism and hyperrealism, fantasy, dream and what Derrida terms ‘literary hyperconscience’. This leads in turn to a discussion of Cixous’s favourite Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

This chapter discusses the singular beauty and strangeness of Cixous’s writings as a kind of perpetual disruption of the machines of academic professionalisation and enclosure. Her passion is for the edifying strangeness of dreams. Her writings show a constant interest in the relations between dreams and literature, dreams and the supernatural, dreams and secrets, dreams and the more than or other than human. Her work is often about traumatic experiences or events, but there is always also the power of joy and laughter. She writes ‘escaping texts’. Her writing cuts free of all conventional terms, such as ‘critical essay’, ‘creative writing’, ‘novel’, ‘autobiography’, ‘theory’, ‘post-theory’. Readers are invited to go down into a Cixous text in the same way that they might go down into the illuminated darkness of a painting by Rembrandt.

This short chapter describes how the author wakes up awash in the sounds of seagull cries, and recalls having dreamed of receiving a letter from Freud (written in English, nearly eighty years after his death). All that can be recalled of the letter is a feeling of great pleasure and the phrase ‘probably not’. Pondering what to make of all this, the author telephones Cixous to ask for her thoughts. We are all insane in our dreams, Freud noted in his earliest work, Studies on Hysteria: comparison is made between the insanity of Sigmund Freud and the insanity of Donald Trump. Contrast is made between Freud’s openness to thinking the other, and Trump’s position in which, as Howard Jacobson puts it, ‘nothing strange to him is allowed entry’. Finally, attention is given to the question of ‘dream treatment’, above all the question of (in Cixous’s words in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing) ‘how to treat the dream as dream’.

This chapter offers a critical exploration of Cixous’s Dream I Tell You, alongside Jacques Derrida’s ‘Fichus’, in order to clarify an understanding of ‘dream’ in Cixous’s writings. Dream I Tell You is not a work of fiction, but rather a kind of twilight book of ‘limbo things’ – a seemingly haphazard collection of ‘innocent’ dream-transcriptions, accompanied by a densely poetic and suggestive critical foreword (‘Avertissements’). The chapter shifts from a discussion of Freud (described by Cixous as ‘the Shakespeare of the night’), to her conception of literature as the ‘daughter of Dream’, and finally to Shakespeare’s own work. Particular attention is given to the importance of Antony and Cleopatra (especially Cleopatra’s dream of Antony back from the dead) in Cixous’s writing and poetic thinking. This is illustrated through a reading of the early text ‘Sorties’ (1975) and more recent writings on the subject of ‘Los’, such as Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time (2013) and the companion volume Death Shall Be Dethroned (2014). Dreams bring ‘joys the diurnal world never gives’, above all when they restore to us, alive again, loved ones who have died: the chapter foregrounds the strange and powerful effects of revenance and resurrection in Cixous’s work.

This chapter elaborates a theory of side thinking out of Cixous’s work. Side thinking has to do with previously unrecognised ways of thinking centre and margin, the explicitation of a logic of the side and side-effects, supplement and parergon, the effects of a thinking that operates on structures by a certain sideswiping or sidelining within. I develop this argument through a close reading of Cixous’s FirstDays of the Year (starting with its use of the eerie third-person formulation, thought the author, and its pervasive contention that ‘thinking is not what you think’), alongside Jacques Derrida’s H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… ‘Side thinking’ engages with a diverse array of topics, including amphibology, telepathy, literature and psychoanalysis, love and friendship, climate change, Brexit and nationalism. Extensive attention is given to the work of Samuel Beckett (in particular Endgame, Happy Days and Embers) and to Cixous’s book Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett.

This chapter provides a critical introduction to the voluminous writings of Hélène Cixous, foregrounding her importance in relation to literary studies, creative writing, autobiography and life writing, women’s writing and queer theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, poetic thinking and the visual arts. The chapter is organised around four principal motifs: Cixous as dreamer, realist and analyst, and finally (as if caught in the act) ‘writing’. In keeping with her own emphasis on the ‘play of the letter’, the book’s subtitle also provides an acronym: draw. The introduction closes with a discussion of Cixous’s interest in drawing and writing, and especially writing as drawing.

‘Cixous cuts’ are also about the desire for ‘no cut’, for the sort of seamless, cut-resistant writing that Cixous admires in Clarice Lispector. Such seamlessness is also an element of dreams. This chapter explores further the notion of ‘writing by dream’. While Joyce might seem the obvious precursor in this context, here it is argued that the writer with whom Cixous has most in common as one who ‘writes by dream’ is Lewis Carroll. This chapter seeks to elaborate on the affinities between Carroll and Cixous developed in the preceding chapter (‘Portmanteau’), through a detailed reading and analysis of the figure of the ‘cut’ in the Alice books. Cuts are everywhere in Carroll’s work, but even in the most mortifying example (decapitation) they are always strangely innocuous. This chapter argues that Carroll’s books do something new in the history of English fiction with the figure of the ‘cut’, above all through the logic whereby (in Cixous’s words) ‘effects precede their causes: first the piece of cake is eaten, then it is cut’. The Alice books emerge as key texts for understanding Cixous’s double concern with trauma and with narrative composition as (in the White Queen’s uncanny phrase) ‘living backwards’.

This chapter is an extended meditation on the beauty and polyphonic possibilities of the English word ‘away’, specifically in terms of how it enables a critical reading and appreciation of Cixous’s writing as escaping, in flight, going ‘away’, as text – but also as sound or music. This involves a detailed reading of Cixous’s ‘Writing Blind’ and Kafka’s ‘The Departure’, as well as extended discussion of how ‘away’ works in Shakespeare (especially Antony and Cleopatra), Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stevens’s The Man with the Blue Guitar. A critical close reading of Paul de Man on Keats’s ode discloses a new emphasis on the haunting inscription of ‘away’ in the poem. This leads back to a further encounter with ‘dream in literature’, wherein the writings of Cixous, Shakespeare and Keats sound together in the figure of the nightingale.

The phrase ‘dream in literature’ can be understood in three distinct but interrelated ways, as 1) the role and importance of dreams in literary works; 2) the impulse or compulsion to dream, to fall into reverie, to lose oneself in a dream or dreamlike state while reading a work of literature, the experience of becoming fascinated, immersed or set adrift in a book; and 3) where ‘dream’ is a speech act, an order, request, plea or desire: dream in literature as one might breathe in the night air, inhale a perfume or a strange gas. The chapter explores Cixous’s ‘writing by dream’ (as Derrida calls it), focusing in particular on the nature of the ‘I’ of the dreamer, and the relationship between ‘realisim’ and ‘telepathy’. It interweaves readings of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Question’, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with readings of Cixous’s own writings (including Rootprints, Ayai! The Cry of Literature, Hyperdream, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, and Death Shall Be Dethroned).

This chapter focuses on Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, launching off from Kafka’s celebrated remark about the need for books ‘to be the axe for the frozen sea inside us’. It starts, as Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing starts, with the ‘H’ at the beginning of Hélène Cixous’s name, pronounced ‘ash’, i.e. ‘hache’ in French, or axe. It explores the relations between writing and trauma in terms of the notion of signature, elaborating on the view of Jacques Derrida (following Jean Genet) that ‘the signature is a wound and there is no other origin of the work of art’. This in turn leads to a discussion of écriture féminine, bisexuality and, finally, the complex and multiple figurations of ‘giving birth’ in the context of Cixous’s work. Through a discussion of Plato’s Theaetetus and philosophy as ‘maieutics’, the chapter proposes the neologistic portmanteau term maiopic writing, which combines ‘giving birth’ with what Cixous calls ‘writing blind’.