Exile Within and Without: The Lost Gardens of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida

Abstract “We are of the same garden,” Hélène Cixous writes about Jacques Derrida and herself in Rootprints . Born in Oran and Algiers respectively, both Franco-Maghrebin writers/thinkers indeed share the garden as a mythical figure of longing, loss and exile: the Jardin du Cercle militaire in Cixous’s algériance and the Jardin d’Essai (“Garden of Essays”), as well as the family garden or “orchard,” in Derrida’s nostalgérie , all symbolizing the expulsion from a promised land (Cixous when she was two and a half years old, Derrida at age eleven). For Derrida especially, the garden was a lost “intact PaRDeS” (“Circumfession”), a Talmudic Paradise from before the vowels, but also a “garden of reading” common to them both (Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint ), while Cixous reminisces, in the “Expelled” section of “This Stranjew Body,” how she felt admitted into the “second and last paradise, that after which there was nothing more to lose,” symbolized by the “Garden of Essays” with its homophonic décès (demise). The aim of this essay is to situate this shared problematic of an exilic, real as much as literary, political as much as poetic garden in relation to its manifold associations with WW2 and their families’ displacement (which, especially in Derrida’s case, triggered off a deep-seated abhorrence of rootedness and belonging, and, in Cixous’s case, an incessant questioning about departing/fleeing vs. arriving/staying). Their mutual evocations of this partly fantasized ‘primitive scene’ of a forbidden/lost (and, for Cixous, found and lost again) garden, alongside the many other gardens conjured up especially in Cixous’s writings (for e. g. “A True Garden”), will allow us to assess in what ways the irrecoverable sense of traumatic loss leading to exile, exodus and uprootedness, including from/within the self, is both evoked and redeemed by the imaginary, transformative work of literature.