Dream I Tell You (2003)

 

"The joyless, atrocious, sad 'pleasure" is in the details of the suffering, in the suffering itself, in the taste you taste to the bottom where nothing forbids you to suffer, and each cruel dish, so relished, offers the heartbreaking pleasure of being able to feel." (6)

From Beverley Bie Brahim's 2006 translation of Hélène Cixous's Dream I Tell You (2003), a "book of dreams without interpretation" that came about at a dinner party, jokingly, when editor Michel Delorme asked Cixous for a book, and this is part of what became of it.

The quoted section up top originally appeared in italics, in an introduction called "Forewarnings", as if something perilous lay ahead, and might still. Do I believe in its sentiment? Yes, it is like what it is to suffer, for all writing on anything is but a simile, an interpretation. For Knut Hamson and his American acolyte John Fante, it was hunger. I googled Cixous and Kathy Acker just now and you'd think the two had never met.

Cixous, Luce Irigray and Julia Kristeva are important thinkers and writers to me. All are still with us. Alive and dreaming, I'm sure.