Reading for the Revelation: Hélène Cixous, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and Tele-Lethe-Pathy

Abstract:This essay explores the twinship between the theories of reading articulated in Marcel Proust's "Journées de lecture" (1906) and Hélène Cixous's Philippines. Prédelles (2009). First, the author analyzes how both writers envision reading as an activity that can potentially open the floodgates of the reader's unconscious. Second, the essay advances that Philippines. Prédelles is itself the product of a series of telepathic revelations that befell Cixous over the course of her reading of Proust, Du Maurier, Freud, or Derrida. Third, the essay argues that Cixous's theory of reading as tele-Lethe-pathy provides a corrective to the psychic determinism at work in Freud's concept of phantasying.