[Abstract - article in preparation for Parallax]

…I see us, you place your right hand on my left arm to hold me back – it’s true that absorbed by my inner exultation I cast no glance in the direction of imminent destiny – and that’s when – you say to me – at that precise moment the traffic was very dense and energetic – I am already in the street, you barely touch me and you say to me in French “fais attention mon amour,” “pay attention my love,” I’m quite sure of it like the poor being who is reeling from the telephone call from God is sure of God whose face he does not see […]

Then we were on the other side.

I was burning with uncertainty. I was sure I had heard your phrase end with the expression “my love” in French.

- Hélène Cixous, Love Itself in the Letterbox,  p.60-61.

The paper takes its starting point with this scene from Cixous’ Love Itself, which reveals how such a ‘site’ of affirmation – once detailed by Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse as being ‘spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects … but warranted by no one’ – is a most precarious thing. ‘Burning with uncertainty’, as Cixous suggests, saying ‘yes’ (in this case to love of another), and being affirmative is far harder to hold to; with it perhaps always open to ever further need of confirmation. The paper tests the notion that the ‘trouble’, or just the ‘thing’ about yes is that it can never just be yours alone. Whereas no can be all your own. No can be asserted, while saying yes must be met halfway. A yes is never just a yes, but a when, where, how, with/for whom. If you say no, that is all yours alone. That is your prerogative. But a yes is in response to something, contingent upon an offering.  ‘Yes, I will…’ it extends out to another. And in the interstice there is always a matter of time, when (one hopes) that yes is tested and affirmed. 

The paper is constructed out of a series of ‘novelistic’ fragments, combined with key critical sources, which bring into view the precariousness of saying yes, but which also questions the relationship between writing and living. In a series of articles from the end of the 1970s, Cixous refers to those who use language to ‘crucify’ meaning, and those whose language ‘creates’. But she also expresses a concern for the effects of writing taking the place of living. The question remains, is it only possible to say yes as a yes still yet to come? When is the time of yes? Yes potentially reveals a wholly other form of philosophy, arguably being only a form of writing that can not be fully asserted. A point captured by Cixous’ reflection upon her writing, as writing: ‘The difference with philosophical discourse is that I never dream of mastering or ordering or inventing concepts. Moreover I am incapable of this. I am overtaken. All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death, each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception.’