What is calling you, poor body, what lifts you, and drags you, what attracts you so late, in those nights, so far into the lands where you are never again truly at home, amid the crowd of lively creatures who recognise you and whom you no longer know, no longer see, you are summoned, you answer summonses, you meet people dressed and coloured in presence, in reality costumes; they don’t attack you, don’t reject you, don’t welcome you, don’t see you, you aren’t there, you should go and pursue your profession, your shadow cannot assert itself, you’ll be awaited, it seems, there are buildings, full of halls of science of people of scholarship of seriousness of reading machines and deleting machines, you ought to be bleeding freely from this, there are chairs and meanings, chumps to chop, tongues to iron, there are bureaucracies, circuses full of believers full of sound and sawdust, in silver prize costumes, there are lecture halls full of heads, of prosecution of rules of laws of rights of predictions of licences of exams of blindness of corridors of signs of doors through which to enter and leave without screaming, without collapsing thunderstruck, without bleeding without stopping without appearing to crumble away, to widen, without even wobbling, of queues of beings with which you have no relationship at all. Or rather with which you are in an incomprehensible relationship; of incomprehension. You go no further.

If it had only been one step away but it wasn’t just about a step. Rather, it was about everything not to do, to make it possible not to live with these people: not love each other, not seek, not bond, not detach from each other, not touch each other, not look into each other’s eyes or hope for each other. What heartache they don’t feel, what joy does not sear them, what cries do not rip their hearts in two. You have seen the world shudder from the perspective of god the madness, the squirming of worms committed to the cauldron.

There is a crack in the earth. A crack so narrow, it’s all that’s left of the void, but it’s enough. There’s fire inside the crack, it’s a fire that’s catching on slowly, deeply, radically, so slowly that men have time to extinguish it if they fear it, to crush it, cut it out. There’s a woman who wants to travel around the world between the edges of the crack. Everyone calls out: but there’s a fire! Madness! Madness! But the woman lets herself go without a struggle, carried with the flux of the fire that doesn’t consume her, that envelopes but doesn’t bury her, as if her body were of water that does not quench. The woman’s face was veiled.

Today facing life, close to living, to dying, as if before the entrance, the exit, the transition, and now I am not living, I’m not dead, all the paths lead you astray, the nights are unending, they’re extending, poor tender, well-intentioned thing, you look around yourself at those who don’t know, with the most extreme wisdom and most extreme naivety. With a strange joy in your sorrow. And in the joy the strange bliss of feeling you’re entirely against death. Death loves me. And this love, this sweet appalling love in my heart, this is life itself.

‘Do I understand you?’ ‘Yes.’ What would understanding mean? From one letter to the next, still alive, the questioning. ‘Do you know that I love you?’ ‘Yes.’ Yes hadn’t she already said yes, in advance, and so said everything? She believed she had. Understanding, she would know later. Do you know? ‘Yes; if you like; as you like.’
Even if she didn’t know. What was to be known couldn’t not be known, to her, between them, somewhere, to the infinite where she was drawing away from herself, losing herself in him, blindly, without fear of getting lost. ‘You know how much I love you?’ ‘Yes.’
Listen to the untiring questioning of love: how? How? Echo it, reflect it back, always the same call repeated, the words would change, the song start up again, another bird but the same species, as if all questions were only the eternal action of acquiescence, a pretext for making what’s understood resound amid the unfamiliar.
His questions were not your questions.

The music of his questions. You were dancing on this music, the way a dancer doesn’t actually dance to a piece of music; rather she dances to her own body. Your soul in scansion. Your naivety. He could have thought:
‘My book was given to a woman who can read, and she will say: your book entrances me, I cannot read it.’

‘Do you hear my words?’
Yes. You were hearing her words, but you weren’t hearing the words within her words.

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Angst is available from Silver Press — published on 16 March in the UK and forthcoming in June in the US. 

Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, and is emeritus professor of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded and directed the Centre d’études féminines. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays, and collections of critical essays; recent titles in English translation include So Close, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, Hemlock, and Philippines. In her 1975 essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, she created the term écriture féminine to describe a uniquely female style of writing.

Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and editor. Working from Portuguese and French, she has translated works by Victor Heringer, Cidinha da Silva, Patrícia Melo, João Gilberto Noll, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk; as well as Marcel Aymé, Josephine Baker, Annie Ernaux, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Françoise Sagan, Leïla Slimani, Stendhal and Jules Verne, among others. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded the Shadow Heroes translation workshops enterprise – www.shadowheroes.org. Lewis’s translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She won the 2022 French-American Foundation prize for non-fiction translation with Martin’s anthropology memoir In the Eye of the Wild.