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The Passion According to Cixous:From Human Blindness to Animots Irving Goh But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die (Genesis 2: 17) So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. . . . They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3: 6-8) Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3: 22) [End Page 1050] Introduction: An Other Bible On the question of religion in Derrida, John Caputo has remarked that "Jacques Derrida has religion, a certain religion, his religion, and he speaks of God all the time. The point of view of Derrida's work as an author is religious—but without religion and without religion's God" (xviii). Perhaps the same could be said of Cixous. The religious is never absent in Cixous's works. As Hugh Pyper has observed, "the range of [Cixous's] engagement with the Bible is considerable," and that "scattered throughout her writings are . . . often quite sustained engagements with particular biblical texts" (83). Or as Sal Renshaw has put it, "it would be hard to find a Cixousian text that does not in some way refer to the religious" (173). And yet, as in Derrida, one would not find in Cixous "religion's God." In the words of Charlotte Berkowitz, "For Hélène Cixous, . . . God embodies the sacred. But in Cixous's lexicon, God is not the Father" (176). Doing "without religion's God" however, especially in Cixous's early works, is not just refusing to acknowledge God as "the Father." Like many Cixous scholars, Berkowitz will point out that Cixous "disdains those parts of the Bible that represent Paternal Law," and explicitly challenges "religion's God," or the masculine, prohibitive law that it has come to represent (177).1 Claude Cohen-Safir goes further to suggest that Cixous as such inscribes a "counter-Bible" [contre-Bible], where "the known metaphors: the tree, virile elevation, and the fall, are subtly hijacked of their original meaning into a resolutely humanistic and feminine perspective" (361, my translation). For Cohen-Safir also, the consequence of Eve eating from the tree of knowledge in Cixous is no longer the apocalyptic "millennial deprivation of knowledge," but something creative, whose "conquering" and "exploratory" spirit ought to be celebrated (361). The affirmation of such "humanistic and feminine" transgression against "religion's God" has also been noted by Susan Sellers. Reading Cixous's La jeune née (1973), Sellers notes a "feminine willingness to risk [God's] prohibition" (3). "Eve," Sellers continues, "follows her desire and defies God's incomprehensible prohibition not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Eve's refusal, Cixous writes, creates for herself and the world the opportunity for knowledge, innovation and uncensored choice" (3). This present essay seeks to continue the project, initiated by the aforementioned Cixous scholars, of pursuing the question of religion in Cixous.2 I am particularly interested in the works of Cixous that appeared in the 90s, and I pose the question if they are as forcefully [End Page 1051] "without religion and without religion's God" as the earlier texts. I will argue that they remain no doubt "without religion's God." However, it cannot be said unequivocally that they are "without religion." In fact, it can even be said—especially if one follows Verena Conley's observation, if not prophecy, that Cixous's works of the 90s would bear "messianic tones"—that the point of view there takes on a religious turn, a turn from "without...
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