This article investigates and compares the motif of the “primal scene” in the writings of Maurice Blanchot and Hélène Cixous. It explores Blanchot's account of a child's experience of the void of nothingness while looking at the sky, and a comparable scene of threatening strangeness that Cixous writes about after she encounters a dead bird in the lattice-work of her balcony. While both writers are keenly sensitive to the challenges that these scenes present, they differ in their responses to them. For Blanchot, the scene heightens the child's sense of alienation and isolation as he safeguards its secret. Cixous, on the other hand, views the incertitude that the scene elicits as a vital opportunity to reach out to the other.
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