Citation/Abstract

This study is intended to evoke the refractory aspect of a prism that bends and deflects light in order to produce a spectrum, a broad sequence of related ideas. We look at a spectrum of twentieth-century thought that originates with the late nineteenth-century French literary avant-garde. We have chosen to discuss two writers from those centuries, Stéphane Mallarmé and Hélène Cixous, whose works are commonly described as hermetic and illisible . Derrida plays the role of intermediary in this study because of his separate writings on both Mallarmé and Cixous. We first examine their writings in the light of differences--hyperbole versus ellipsis--and then look for the fusion between them. Both writers pose the question of the existence of poetry. Both writers speak of a desire for a non-representational nouvelle écriture . To situate this writing, we examine the avant-garde writing strategies that emerge from the Tel Quel period during which time Mallarmé's theoretical writings are valorized, and then apply them to the areas of sexual difference and political testimony.