South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

Philippine Philippine, Or The Tropics In Cixous’S Dreaming True, Christian Jil Benitez, Phrae Chittiphalangsri

Filipino Faculty Publications

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 …