Philippine philippine, or the Tropics in Cixous’s Dreaming True

Abstract

Hélène Cixous’s oneiric ideation of the philippine (twin almond)—and by extension, her text Philippines (2009/2011)—primarily evokes love, or that force of attraction between two beings in which one can never say where each begins or ends. It is by the virtue of this entanglement that another philippine can be offered to this discourse: the Philippines that is that archipelago which encloses and opens up a particular location and reality within the tropics. This essay attempts to reconsider Cixous’s philippine via the Philippine, through dwelling on the stroke of homophony between these two signifiers and encountering them as materials in and of themselves. As such, these words are recognized here not simply as objects of the critique, but as its very method, a material poetics through which a comparative reading can be initiated and pursued. Through this reading, despite the absence of any explicit referentiality between the words being coincided here, the loving promise of ‘telepathic philippine’ is practiced, and perhaps more faithfully so, by expanding Cixous’s exclusively Euro-Western and temperate ideation to the Philippine tropics. In decolonially yoking Cixous’s Philippines and the Philippines together, the essay ultimately intimates their being twin kernels, too, dwelling in a single shell—that same shell that is this planet.