»I keep scores of little bits of paper, for I note at top speed what presents itself all the time, in a café at a mini golf, while walking along the street, I have small notebooks in my pockets, I scribble on a paper napkin,« 1 outlines writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous her practice of note taking. This kind of noting, which is close to recording or even tracking »at top speed« is not only a daily practice, but also one that happens throughout the day. It begins in the borderland between dreaming and waking up: grabbing the notebook and pen on the bedside, »filling in the darkness the great page at tremendous speed with these inestimable phrases.« 2 This collection of »inestimable phrases« is not so much a subjectivizing as a receptive way of tracing »what presents itself all the time.« As we learn from the following lines from a published letter to her friend and artistic collaborator Alexandra Grant, Cixous is never alone in this receptive writing: »I am with cats as with adored books lodged in my heart, as with the new coming of spring, as with the sudden advent of my mother’s successive lives, as with the beloved who is always at once dead and alive: with all the perpetual presences—from which I am mixed, composed, grafted, haunted.« 3 This writing-with requires an environment of voices, media, kins. Their collective sensations and perceptions are traced in what Cixous calls »[a] forest of variously sized leaves and manuscripts [that] grows in apparent disorder on my table, hundreds of messages, traces, secret plans, magic maps, letters dictated to me by my co-scriptors [co-écrivant(e)s] and which I hear being read to me in their eternal murmur.« 4 The following account on (poetic) writing as a mode of seeing as well as copying describes in yet another way how ›Cixous's‹ writing happens after the death of the author: »I can only attain to this mode of seeing with the aid of poetic writing. I apply myself to ›seeing‹ the world nude, that is, almost to e-nu-merating the world, with the naked, obstinate, defenceless eye of nearsightedness. And looking very very closely, I copy.« 5 Copying, or writing, is a result of »looking very very closely« here. It is a copying-writing relying on the bodily sensorium and its specific sensory capacities (such as »nearsightedness«). Vice versa, writing itself is part of the bodily sensorium, since certain »mode[s] of seeing« only go hand in hand with writing.

This preliminary reading and patching together of quotes by Cixous, her »co-scriptors,« and their writing practice is meant to provide a tangible introduction to the plural voices and sources, the many different physical and virtual spaces (such as dreams or conversations with the dead), and the various locations—as well as materials and formats—that are part of the Cixousian writing scene. In this scene, human, animal, ancestral, as well as textual bodies take the stage, coming together in a »forest of variously sized leaves and manuscripts.« Have you ever tried to archive a forest? I suppose this is what is at stake when it comes to building a hospitable archive for the environment, the creatures, voices and animots, 6 the rhizomatically interconnected clearings, recurring lakes, or gardens 7 contained in the Cixousian textual ecology of its own right.
In 2000, the manuscript department of the French national library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), in Paris opened an archive dedicated to Hélène Cixous’s œuvre. For more than two decades, this archive has been growing under the guidance and thanks to the tremendous efforts of Marie-Odile Germain. Filed and stored under the name Hélène Cixous are here manuscripts and many other materials relating to Cixous’s activities in the field of literature and research—such as letters that she received, but also administrative files and press clippings. Thereby, this archive expands the BNF's library holdings, which, next to books, also include audio and video recordings of conferences with Cixous and about her work.
Laura Hughes, who has researched extensively in and about that archive, recapitulates the challenges associated with the attempt to successively move parts of the Cixousian writing ecology to the BNF, with its century-old institutional logics and orders of documents and knowledge:

»Cixous’s archive interrogates some of the foundational principles of archival science, genetic criticism, and patrimony: namely, provenance and original order. Her papers show a writing process that relies on the overlap between previous work, sympathetic writers (Proust, Derrida), seminars, dreams, and telephone conversations. A fixed order would forego the dynamism of these connections and dialogues. Moreover, Cixous’s writing privileges a polyvocity that sometimes explicitly renounces control over her writing, challenging notions of authorship and ownership.« 8

In the following, I will consider the peculiar role of the mutual relation between body and writing, and how the institutional Cixous archive in the BNF can only host and attend to certain dimensions of this peculiarity. At the same time, as I will argue with Hughes, Cixous’s writing practice also archives itself beyond the institutional archive in publications. While this auto-archiving may be less persistent and systematic, archiving notes on the published page as well as the reproduction of (rare) family portraits and ephemera  9 pertain to Cixous’s ›life-writing.‹ 10

The peculiarity I am speaking of may sound self-evident in the first place. Each kind of (animated, i.e. non-machinic) writing is an embodied practice, and hence body and writing are always in a mutual relation therein. For example, here and now as I am typing, copying, and pasting this text close to midnight, with a runny nose, and having in mind the encouraging email that Cixous sent out today to the followers of her seminar announcing the title of the upcoming one:

In the midst of all that ›What happens to us,‹ 11 this message keeps me up and writing, reminding me not just of »the great scene« 12 that writing can never detach from, but also of the community that it relates to. All that is part of what Cixous’s writing affirms. It is writing in relation to other bodies, and writing through, with and of the body, or écriture du corps. 13 Over decades, the name Cixous has been associated with a more historical term from the 1970s: écriture féminine (feminine writing). The term marks Cixous’s entanglement with so-called French Feminism at the time, and the establishment of her research and study program in études féminines at Vincennes University in Paris. Often overlooked remains Cixous’s early deconstruction of Western as well as patriarchal dichotomies such as body/mind, flesh/language, nature/culture through writing, resulting in a philosophy characterized, among other aspects, by thinking sexual differences and liquefying identity categories. 14 Écriture du corps speaks more clearly of Cixous’s anticipation of the discursivity of the body, and that the body is much about material-semiotic knots. Today, these terms by Judith Butler and Donna J. Haraway help to describe Cixous’s critical engagement with the powerful as well as empowering intertwining of bodies and discourse, and how the effects of this entanglement are neither biologically/materially determined, nor simply inscribed and hence easily rewritten. From the 1970s until today, this shows in Cixous’s writing, and how it is concerned with questions of gender, with all kinds of desire and the subversion of their patriarchal suppression, with the inscription of historical trauma and violence (related to the Shoah as well as post-colonial Europe) in bodies and family dynamics, or with questions of embodied memory.

The topics of Cixous’s écriture du corps are as manifold as its (genre-bending) formats: books, theatre plays, published letters/epistolary essays, 15 and not least seminars, or écriture parlée (›spoken‹ writing). 16 In the following I will refer to these various materializations of écriture du corps as textual bodies. Thereby, I do not just aim to underline that the plurality of écritures in Cixous is the result of the different ways of (the) writing (of) the body. Textual bodies incorporate the bodily dimensions of writing by means of textuality. Through their appearance and performativity they emphasize that reading—like writing—is also an embodied activity. This concerns, for example, the presence or absence of commas. According to translator and literary scholar Claudia Simma, they act like »signs of breathing« (Atemzeichen) in Cixous. 17 Also typography, or what Christa Stevens calls the »graphical body« (corps graphique) is part of the encounter between textual body and reader: 18 Italics and capital letters become instruments to rhythmize paragraphs or make single words stand out and scream, while sudden breaks interrupt the order of text
and reading. Furthermore, »flashes of materiality« and »flashes of the quotidian,« as Hughes puts it, 19 such as »scores of little bits of paper« stemming from Cixous’s constant note taking are part of textual bodies. One example therefore is this transcribed post-it from Manhattan: Lettres de la préhistoire (2002).

As Hughes reports, post-its are one of the tools Cixous uses to organize book projects and manuscripts. Christa Stevens adds that post-its are also space for notes. The creation of the latter is an integral part of writing the body, which »at top speed« already generates graphical impulses such as the triple underlining in the textual post-it above:

»[...] for Hélène Cixous, noting is already writing, and her writing strives to preserve, even highlight, the first graphic impulses and the bodily act from which it originates, through the presence and absence of punctuation, the length of sentences, the imprint of breathlessness.« 20

The post-its, as Hughes has observed in the course of readings between the archive and books, sometimes wander from the personal archive into publications, as we can see here. There is not just the transcript of the note written in shorthand, but also a tangible account on the textual object, »a flesh-pink post-it.« Its typographical feature is being repeated as the post-it becomes interwoven with the text: »Forgotten underlined three times, as if forgotten by three forgettings.« As an interruption to the text flow, the post-it continues to prevent forgetting. Becoming an attention-grabbing part of the textual body, it fulfills its functionality as a reminder even in its transcribed, remediated form on the published page.

The resurrected post-it against forgetting in Manhattan is only one out of many of the »various sized leaves […] hundreds of messages, traces, secret plans, magic maps, letters dictated« that »grow[] in apparent disorder« on Cixous’s table, and that sometimes become transplanted into a textual body. At the same time, this growing »forest« continues to migrate from Cixous’s desks in the 14. Arrondissement—and from her residence in Arcachon to the 2. Arrondissement—where the manuscript department of the BNF is located. But how to get into that archive in the first place?

Cixous’s archive, the fonds Hélène Cixous is part of a national institution, and thus part of what I call an Archive with a capital A. 21 The Archive is located in the building of the BNF in Rue Richelieu. This building can be entered by the public after passing a security check, and after a short walk through the historical courtyard where people linger on Fermob chairs—the ones you also find in many of the public parks of Paris. On the ground floor, everything unnecessary for Archival work needs to be stored in lockers, which includes water bottles. Stairs and elevators lead up to the historical reading room. The authorization to work in the Archive needs to be acquired beforehand. This requires a registration as a researcher with the BNF, as well as communication with Marie-Odile Germain, the conservateur en chef about one’s (legitimate) research interest, for example as a literary scholar or as a translator. Only then is it possible to access the historical room with gigantic windows, leather-covered seats and crimson armchairs that are surrounded by very dry, warm air, inviting to fall into an Archival delirium. (The public is invited to peak at this silent spectacle through the glass door at the entry of the reading room). The arrival at the final destination, the armchair, is preceded by yet another protocol. The friendly library staff checks what one wants to bring to the sacred hall, and assigns a number and an armchair. Then it is time to pick up the requested documents. The request therefore is made on the basis of the BNF’s catalogue, that gives a rough overview of what the Archive contains. 22 This request then meets the detailed knowledge and the commitment of archivist Germain, who matches archived documents with the request, and puts them in flat grey cardboard boxes. The boxes are called navettes (shuttles)—they facilitate the transport of documents, but also the weaving of Archival material into a research process, which from this moment on happens under the guise of the maitres de salle, who make sure documents are handled sensitively and that legal regulations are respected. In the case of Cixous’s archive, it is only possible to transcribe from the documents. Publishing such contents requires additional permission.
Whereas I have no objections to these reasonable rules and regulations for the sake of copyright, personal rights and preservation, I cannot deny that the daily security protocol disciplined not only my body, but also my research activities in this Archive. Although I wouldn’t draw a direct link between the multi-stage process of gaining access to the Archive and my research there, I should say that working in this historically laden salle felt draining. As a scholar without a set of historical or philological methodologies I felt somehow out of place. Finally, a general strike kept on interrupting the apparatus of the BNF and limited working hours, until the pandemic ended my time in the reading room.

Even without such a dramatic end, I would have left the Archive puzzled. After more than two years of reading and writing with ›Cixous‘s‹ texts—that continuously perform the deconstruction of authorship—I found myself studying handwritten documents by that person. This not only felt uncanny, it also felt somehow wrong, and like a superficial understanding of écriture du corps, limiting it to its ›primal scene,‹ i.e. to the handwriting that fills Cixous’s notebooks, journals, notepads, but which can be also found on post-its, paper clippings, and paper files in the archive. Given the pervasiveness of handwriting in this archive, how to approach it from an angle that pays attention to its intertwining of corporeal materiality and discursivity?
Manuscripts and handwritten notes are perhaps the closest you can get to a writing body. Even centuries later, handwriting, literally, is a material trace of the writing of hand. Adding to this the understanding of »body writing« (Körperschrift) by Aleida Assmann, who understands this as, above all, »body marks,« like scars, that »arise out of long physical habits, unconscious imprints, or the pressure of violence. Its common features are stability and inaccessibility.« 23 While handwriting is not stable, it is an inaccessible carrier of bodily imprinted information about physical habits or past experiences, e.g. the violence in the course of the ›re-education‹ of left-handers. Regardless of somatic factors and discourse (e.g. societal norms), handwriting changes over the course of a lifetime. In the archive, handwriting is perhaps the most intimate and the most visible trace of the singularity of every body-in-writing. Handwriting is perhaps physio-graphical.
This physio-graphism exceeds the visual appearance of handwriting. Its effect on the paper certainly contributes to the magic of original (and literally hand-written) manu-scripts over centuries. This magic is even hard to resist for Hélène Cixous, her royalty Medusa of deconstructing essentialism. As archivist Germain recounts, it was Cixous’s fascination with manuscripts archived at the BNF (e.g. by Proust or Kafka) that motivated her decision to move her archive there. Germain quotes Cixous saying:

»A mystery passes between the manuscript and the person who touches it. For me, to put my hand on Proust’s notebooks is to touch the touch of Proust’s hand. A memory of the material, of paper, passes the electricity of the senses from one body to another.« 24

I must confess that I have also succumbed to the magic of such artifacts at times. For example, when I came across funny drawings and poems in Cixous’s meeting files or when I held a letter from Roland Barthes addressed to her in my hands. Such artifacts were like portals to the past that I began to fantasize about in that moment. In retrospect, these fantasies allowed for an escape from the rigor of the archival reading room, and they kept reminding me that my perspective on the archive and the conclusions I would draw, would be as situated as the documents of this archive itself.
After all, what is the status of ›original sources‹ as handwritten notes and manuscripts for studying a post-modern writer and philosopher like Cixous, while also taking into account the corporeality of the writing process that underlies their publications, or textual bodies? There are numerous approaches to that question by Cixous scholars. Daniel Ferrer, who analyzed manuscripts for Osnabrück (1998), emphasizes that the point of dealing with Cixous’s archive is not to compare the (published) text with its previous versions, and thus assign it a recognizable origin (une origine repérable). Instead, the manuscripts should be placed in relation to one another in order, to observe the writing process (l’écriture en procès) and the multiple ways and emergences in the course of text creation (le surgissement multiple de l’invention). 25 Germain, Cixous’s archivist in the BNF, methodologically responds to such an approach practically, by using transcripts of manuscripts instead of facsimiles, and by highlighting the fact that a manuscript is a kind of not-yet-solidified material, it is »not yet set.« 26

As shown earlier with the post-it in Manhattan, some of that not-yet-fixed material becomes nevertheless part of Cixous’s published texts, while remaining more or less visible as material from the writing process and/or archive. As a result, these materials—whether archived in the BNF or in Cixous’s private archive—are multiplied. For example, there is a post-it resting in a card box—ready to be accessed in a few weeks or a hundred years—and there are the remediated imprints of the post-its on the published page in Manhattan. For Hughes, these imprints are like »portals« that »allow the reader to warp between the BNF, Cixous’s personal archives, and live, mutating texts.« 27 The simultaneity of archival items that are interwoven, transplanted, and graphically remediated in Cixous’s textual bodies, and the archiving process in the BNF together make a ›virtual archive‹ that exceeds the rules as well as the physical limits of the institutional archive. The virtual archive is like »a rich, resilient double of itself […] growing out of and yet outpacing its material counterpart.« 28 Indeed, the effect is the deconstruction and destabilization of the established distinction of manuscripts and notes, as pretexts and of ›finished‹ publications. This continued circulation of material between archive, writing table, and publications adds to the »limitless potentiality« of the virtual archive. »Cixous focuses […] on the archive’s potential for living on,« 29 writes Hughes. In my view, this is the most significant effect of this virtual archive: It prioritizes circulation instead of sealing material. Most importantly, it generates reminders in Cixous’s textual bodies that the embodied experience of »noting at top speed what presents all the time,« that reading and writing with »co-scriptors,« that »the apparent disorder on my table,« the »defenceless eye of nearsightedness« and not at least »being with cats as with adored books« belong to »all that the physical archive cannot contain.« 30