Cohen, Ralph, 1917- , Acknowledgments
Prenowitz, Eric, Introduction: Cracking the Book--Readings of Hélène
Cixous
Armel, Aliette.
Derrida, Jacques.
Cixous, Hélène, 1937-
Thompson,
Ashley, 1965-, tr., From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques
Derrida and Hélène Cixous
Cixous, Hélène, 1937-
Kamuf, Peggy, 1947-, tr., The Flying
Manuscript
Abstract: Hélène Cixous's "The Flying Manuscript" turns around the
chance rediscovery of a handwritten draft of the text by Jacques Derrida that
would eventually become "A Silkworm of One's Own" and be published with Cixous's
own "Savoir" in the volume titled Veils in 1997. Written after the
disappearance of Derrida in 2004, the text is a moving tribute to the friend
whom the author continues to address in the ongoing present of their long and
rich dialogue.
Kamuf, Peggy, 1947-, Afterburn: An Afterword to "The Flying
Manuscript"
Abstract: "Afterburn: An Afterword to 'The Flying Manuscript'"
reflects, in its aftermath, on the seering experience of translating Cixous's
essay. Through a close reading of several passages in the text, it seeks to
analyze some traits of the Cixousian writing practice as these can best be
isolated by the impossible demands that this practice makes on translation.
Mamduh, Aliyah.
Cobham, Catherine, tr., Untitled
Milesi, Laurent, Portraits of H. C. as J. D. and Back
Abstract: The essay sets out to explore in three interrelated thematic
scenes or tableaux, and in the light of the increasingly numerous textual
crossings between them, how Derrida (J. D.) and Cixous (H. C.) write
(self-)portraits of themselves as other in their fictional encounters, one of
whose central restagings is the inaugural, asymmetrical first-time meeting "face
to back" (H. C. seeing J. D. with his back turned, not seeing her). Working
through convoluted threads of linguistic play in French involving seeing (or
blindness) [voir], knowing [savoir], (not) having [avoir] and being, the Jew as
foreign or other being [autre, être] "to the letter" [lettre], etc., this study
analyzes how these textual portraits can be framed within, or read against, a
broad philosophical tradition (Descartes, Hegel) linking them to withdrawal
[retrait] of being and of themselves as impossible gifts for the other in
substitution.
Michaud, Ginette.
Crevier Goulet, Sarah-Anaïs, tr., Derrida &
Cixous: Between and Beyond, or "what to the letter has happened"
Dubreuil, Laurent, The Presences of Deconstruction
Abstract: This article focuses on literature's response to philosophy
and provides a reading of Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. If Cixous's
novel evokes specters in its poetical composition and its writing, it is due to
an analysis of a presence of absence largely indebted to Derrida's philosophy.
However, there is more than that and more than the official difference Cixous
and Derrida have acknowledged publicly. Cixous's difference is also able to
differ from Derrida's difference itself. In Cixous, the exercise of a thought
ruining dualism is not anchored in a hole of presence nor is the only resistance
to the solidity of the concept. It prepares an affirmation of being without any
restoration of positive plenitude, and, thus, exceeds Derrida's own
philosophical exercise of deconstruction.
Segarra, Marta, Hélène Cixous's Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog
Abstract: Hélène Cixous has extensively written about cats, her
real cats, and on the cat's figure as the privileged other of the
subject. This article focuses on another animal, the dog called "Fips," a
significant character in Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage, and in an
earlier and shorter text, "Stigmata, or Job the Dog." It also takes into account
"Mon chien à trois pattes" ("My Three-legged Dog," in Le Jour où je n'étais
pas là), a text entwined with Clarice Lispector's "The Crime of the
Mathematics Professor." These texts are the best examples of what Jacques
Derrida called "la pensée de l'animal," a "poetical" and "prophetic" way not
only to think about animality and humanity, but also to begin to consider the
world differently.
Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 1945-
Crevier Goulet, Sarah-Anaïs, tr., Hélène
Cixous's Imaginary Cities: Oran-Osnabrück-Manhattan--Places of Fascination,
Places of Fiction
Abstract: Cities have a very special status in Hélène Cixous's
writings. The writer was born in Oran, grew up in Algiers, studied both in Paris
and New York, lived a few years near Montaigne, the city of the famous
philosopher Michel de Montaigne, heard a lot about the city of Osnabrück in
Germany through her mother who was born and spent her childhood there. Cixous's
imagination is consequently filled with highly diverse geographical elements
coming from the numerous cities she directly and indirectly knows, and for each
of which she has a very specific attachment. This article focuses on three major
cities in the writer's work and imagination: Oran, Osnabrück, and Manhattan—
three places of fascination and of magical transmission. For a city is not
simply, in Cixous's work, a given and localizable spot with precise
characteristics (what is a "real place"), but is also a place about which to
fantasize, a starting point for dreaming, for fiction, and for writing.
Prenowitz, Eric, Make Believe: Manhattan's Folittérature
Gibbons, Reginald, To Write with the Use of Cixous
Abstract: Cixous has written extensively about the act of writing. Far
from being limited to theoretical formulations, Cixous's writing on writing is
of a kind that is of great use in the practice of writing—especially her ideas
about the play of language; the unconscious; how writing produces a sense of the
self as other; writing as a departure and as death. It is also useful for an
American writing in English to consider the contrast of English-language and
French-language colorations of language play and trope. This essay is not an
analysis of Cixous's Rootprints, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing,
and a few of her essays, but rather a discussion of using them.
Hanrahan, Mairéad, Where Thinking Is Not What We Think
Abstract: This article offers a reading of Hélène Cixous's Jours de
l'an (First Days of the Year), the first of many texts by Cixous to feature
the problematic of an unwritten book which would be at the origin of all her
other books. In particular, it examines the relationship between the text as a
whole and its final chapter, "An Ideal Story," in the light of Heidegger's
notion of thinking as digression, arguing that for Cixous the search for truth
takes a necessarily oblique, indirect form. After consideration of the detours
the text takes via Clarice Lispector and Marina Tsvetaeva, it contends that the
story Cixous ends up telling runs counter to the one it set out to tell,
simultaneously taking its place and reaffirming the need to tell it yet
again.
Thompson, Ashley, 1965-, Terrible but Unfinished: Stories of
History
Hilfrich, Carola, "The Self is a People": Autoethnographic Poetics in
Hélène Cixous's Fictions?
Abstract: This article argues that Hélène Cixous's fictions develop a
poetics of autoethnography. It argues further that this poetics explores
undersides of the modern discourse of the sublime as well as limits of the
authorial "I" that has been engendered by this discourse. Through a metafiction
of "ghostwriting," on the one hand, and a fiction of the peopled "I," on the
other, Cixous rearticulates justice and authority in ways that can reinform our
understanding of these frames of reality.
Royle, Nicholas, 1957-, Portmanteau
Abstract: Noting that the reception of Cixous's work in an Anglophone
context has, to date, been principally and in some respects misleadingly
filtered through issues of feminist theory, this essay proposes the notion of
the uncanny as an alternative way of exploring the significance and effects of
her writings. Royle focuses on the relatively early "Fiction and Its Phantoms"
(on Freud's "The Uncanny") and her essay on Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking-Glass in order to elucidate their crucial relationship with the
writings of Jacques Derrida. Royle expounds a detailed reading of the figure of
the portmanteau as a way of apprehending the remarkable complexity and
strangeness, as well as the beauty and humor of Cixous's work.
Jeannet, Frédéric-Yves.
Cixous, Hélène, 1937-
Dutoit, Thomas, tr.,
The Book That You Will Not Write: An Interview with Hélène Cixous
Abstract: Interweaving threads such as the secret, an eleventh
commandment (thou shalt not write . . .), the real and the true, stanching and
mutilation, haunting and Orpheus, Frédéric-Yves Jeannet and Hélène Cixous turn
in the orbit around that book that Cixous does not write and is not writing all
the while visiting the many books—or satellites—which receive some of their
energy and movement from this enigmatic and fabulous book, in such a way that
the reader accompanies the questioner in this thorough journey while also
hearing, as if by echo, how the respondent replies askance from that place not
yet or never to be written.