Hélène Cixous Hyperdream: Derrida’s Gift of Death

Hyperdream is not a book about mourning. It is an act of mourning. Mourning for mother. Mourning for a friend: J.D. Mère. Ami. Mommy. My me. Morning comes and the narrator anoints her mother. This unction against death conjures another. Giving grieving to the mother whose living flesh skin is inscribed with moutheyesscarsores calling, gazing, insisting to be seen, holes to be healed. A skin of eyes. Unheimliche. The scene of the home, homme, femme, healing unto death. The gift of death from the giver of life. How does one go about mourning the present? “I’ll be this skin tomorrow” [1] The Twins burn into the night. “One dies in the end, too fast.”[2] Manhattan. May happen. Those who gave us the gift of life, the two (mommy-daddy) must always fall in time, towers collapsing into the ashes of tomorrow.

“This concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom.”[3] Freedom is the gift of death, the other’s sacrifice of the self, for the other, in the other. As the narrator keeps vigil over death, the death to come of her mother, she remembers 1) The Twin Towers in New York. 2) Her friend Derrida who she wishes she could telephone. 3) The bed her brother has been sleeping in that was once owned by Walter Benjamin. “You can always loose more.”[4]Leaves fall from trees to spring new life. More loss.

Benjamin’s bed, a literary inheritance her mother bought years before, a place to lie, alive. More life.

“To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.”[5]

The aura of Benjamin’s bed haunts the narrator with memories of her friend, conversations, conversions.

“Maybe I ought to convert.”[6] Her friend tells her once, promising to continue the conversation. She is haunted by never finishing this conversation, whether he was speaking to her or through her to himself. The conversion from life to death? Death to life? Christian conversion, as he speaks of in The Gift of Death? The call has been disconnected --------

But Derrida is granted a leave. Having left her once, he is given leave as a patient is given leave from the hospital of death to visit the world, this hospitality. Ghostpitality. A leave to converse, traverse the line of life and death. “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”[7] The narrator understands her loss is life. “We were dying of death, one goes on dying for a very long time, but since we might see each other again, life could ebb and flow, come back in go out again, I told myself, its warm flux irrigate all that was dead dying from the death of my friend, my animals, my trees my books my dreams all that was needed I told myself was to invent some superhuman strength[.]”[8]Life is always loosing. “Now and then one could re-establish the lines of communication that nourish friendship.”[9]Holding on to the haunting trace of the other established in the call, a call that continues past death, that even comes from death, beyond death, the call yet to come. “It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility.” Response from death. The future’s call to the past to create the present. “I wanted to go on living on the hypothesis of leaves being granted but perhaps inside me the other side, my friend’s, truth to tell, had blazed itself a voice to which I’d never on my own have considered yielding, but which spoke to me with an authority I couldn’t not wish to yield to, supposing it was my friend’s, providing I myself remain unaware of this.”[10]

Now burning the ashes of yesterday’s tomorrow.

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[1] Hélène Cixous. Hyperdream Trans. Beverly Bie Brahie. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. passim.

[2] An utterance attributed to J.D. that becomes a major mediation for the narrator. passim.

[3] Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 15

[4] Cixous, passim.

[5] Hamlet Act III Scene 1 Lines 72-75.

[6] Cixous, 104.

[7] Matthew 28:20

[8] Cixious, 149

[9] Cixous, 146.

[10] Cixous, 159-160

A Bad Joke: Nietzsche and The Dark Knight

Friedrich Nietzsche reconceptualized ethics by questioning the foundations of good and evil. He traced the terms back to what he called the development of “noble morality” and “slave morality.” Etymologically, the word “good” is related to the words the Goths, Greeks, and Celts used to describe themselves, an affirmative definition based on the nobility of life. “Bad” is the term for others in noble morality. However, with the development of “slave morality,” the terms were reversed in a negative definition that applies the term “evil” to what was formerly “good” and makes the “bad” become “good.” As Nietzsche explains, “[w]hile every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself;’ and this No is its creative deed” (p. 36). Absent immanent affirmation of life, slave morality must develop an elaborate mechanism for enforcing itself as not the other. This is because since the rise of the church in Europe the rules governing morality have been in the hands of a priesthood, and, according to Nietzsche, “The truly great haters of the world have always been priests” (p. 33).


For Nietzsche, the victory of Christianity in Europe is the spread of a certain type of attitude that defines the self in relation to others: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge” (p. 36). The meek are promised that they will inherit the earth as a way of stopping them from becoming active against their masters, a reactive force. It is ressentiment that defines the self by first negating the other, by projecting evil onto the other, in what is a failure of forgetting. For Nietzsche the noble is able to forget any perceived slight against itself, because it is strong, but the weak latches on to the evil as a means of developing the self: so that evil is both something that we apply as a label for the other that we conceive of as our oppressors and a source for our own bad conscience in recognizing that evil is also inherent to ourselves. In the reactive, slave morality of the person of ressentiment, the statement “They are bad so I am good” is what allows us to say “I am,” but so doing requires a memory of our own selfishness which triggers bad conscience. In the development of bad conscience there is an inability to employ “active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.” (57-58). Christianity, and by extension modern European morality, has developed a system to overcome this forgetfulness, making us always aware of our debt, never letting us get over it. And the job of enforcing this order falls to the ascetic priests, those who deny life by enforcing a set of rules that create bad conscience by telling us that we’re evil, that life itself is evil, but also provide succor through adherence to their rules and sacraments.


In The Dark Knight the Joker describes himself as a man of action: “I don’t have a plan … I just do things.” The things he does include robbing a bank, kidnapping a fake Batman and killing him, attempting to kill the mayor, chasing a SWAT van with Harvey Dent in it around Gotham City, having Dent and Rachel Dawes kidnapped and tied to explosives, rigging two ferries with explosives, and lying. He is the man of active destruction. One wonders how these things can be accomplished without plans, however the Joker explains: “I just did what I do best – I took your plan, and I turned it on itself.” The Joker’s actions are reactions to the plans made by Dent, Batman and Jim Gordon, but in these reactive actions the Joker puts the forces of law and order (and Batman) in a position where they are forced to be reactive – his reactive force stops them from being active by making them reactive as well: a will to nothingness. As Gilles Deleuze explains, the fulfillment of nihilism is the nihilism that destroys nihilism, or the will to nothingness entails the negation of nihilism itself, so that the man of active destruction wants to be overcome. The Joker tells the mob that he wants to kill Batman, but he cannot and continue to exist. As the Joker tells Batman: “You. Complete. Me.” Batman and Joker are two sides of the same coin, the coin that Harvey Dent uses at first to “make his own luck” and then later in his acceptance of chance as destiny. Two-Face is born from the affirmation of destiny, the acceptance of the Joker’s role as an “agent of chaos,” because “you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.”


The Joker recognizes the ressentiment at the heart of the slave morality in Gotham City: “Their morals, their code … it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see – I’ll show you … when the chips are down, these civilized people … they’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster … I’m just ahead of the curve.” The rules of society – the rules of Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon – are a façade, according to the Joker, a reaction to the chaos that is the essential force of reality. So then is the Joker the “man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism” (96)? It is the Joker – not Batman – who ultimately defeats the mob, but is not the Joker’s morality based on the syllogism “I am evil therefore you are evil?” The Joker sees in Harvey Dent the embodiment of society’s ideals and sees that through corruption of Dent he can bring Gotham down as well. And he succeeds, because Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face – the man of ressentiment – as a result of his failure to mourn Rachel Dawes. He embraces the Joker’s chaos: “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent world. You thought we could lead by example. You thought the rules could be bent but not break … you were wrong. The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance.”


Batman answers Dent by taking responsibility: “We decided to act. We three. We knew the risks and we acted as one. We are all responsible for the consequences.” Batman has only one rule, the rule he makes for himself, perhaps as the ascetic priest to Gotham City, giving meaning to the city by taking the crimes of Harvey Dent upon himself. He can do this without seeking revenge because in the end it is the Batman who is strong enough, who can take it.