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This chapter introduces Hélène Cixous, a known authority in the world of politics, of so-called feminist theory, of theatre, and of literature. It discusses Jacques Derrida's readings of Cixous' work and determines how to read and resist her work in modern times. It shows how to look into Cixous' work for more insight on French feminist theory. The discussion also studies cixousian ‘language’, the differentiation between the various genres of her work and writing, and the selection of her essays for this book. The chapter also considers Derrida's prediction that Cixous' work would continue to be read in the future.

This chapter discusses Derrida's, Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie (Geneses, genealogies, genres and genius), the text of a lecture given in 2003 to mark the gift made by Hélène Cixous of her archive to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. One year after the publication of the third volume of Kristeva's Le Génie féminin, genius and gender are once again associated in relation to an individual figure—in this case, the writer Hélène Cixous. As Derrida's compound title indicates, genius is not the sole topic of his discussion, but the occasion is the pretext for a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the notion as exemplified by Cixous herself and, in particular, as implied by the narrative of her past affair with an American boyfriend and self-proclaimed genius. The chapter examines Derrida's rethinking of the concept of genius, as well as the associations between genius and imposture.

According to Hélène Cixous, the very concept of ‘character’ is a straitjacket: promising subtlety, it is in the end always a reductive puzzle whereby the subject exists in order ‘to be figured out, understood, read’. Drawing on the thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, this chapter explores re-visions that excavate and chart an almost wholly inner landscape: Demeter Beneath the Sand was created and performed in 1986 by Serena Sartori and Renata Coluccini, artists from Milan's Teatro del Sole; Cixous's The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body was originally performed in Avignon in 1978. Both plays depict mythical worlds and adopt archetypal imagery in studies of identity and subjecthood that make no explicit reference to a social frame. The chapter also considers The Perjured City, or The Awakening of the Furies, also by Cixous, produced in 1994 by the Théâtre du Soleil; the piece echoes some of the concerns of Cixous's earlier play, but uses myth to resituate the self and individual ethical choices within an overtly political realm.

This chapter moves forward in time to the contemporary “postsecular” condition, which has witnessed the militant rise of local religions in a world that has supposedly become-reason. It brings to attention how Badiou has somewhat intervened in the “postsecular” through his call for the Pauline Subject. Badiou argues that the figure of St. Paul may end all violence issuing from particular “postsecular” differences, since Paul’s universalist perspective is indifferent to differences. However, this chapter shows that Badiou’s Pauline Subject, which militantly declares his faith and demands all to follow him in his trajectory, means that it still stands very much as a symbolic violence against others and their differences. This chapter calls, therefore, for a reject to counter Badiou’s Pauline Subject. This reject can be found in Cixous’s animal-messiahs in her “messianic” fiction of the 1990s such as Messie and “Conversation avec l’âne.” These animal figures lead toward a future free from the dictates of an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric subject, and in ways that go beyond a faith/ knowledge dichotomy. More importantly, they also do so in ways where the articulation of one difference does not come at the expense of another.

Hélène Cixous’s 1975 ‘Le Rire de la méduse’, later expanded into ‘Sorties’, represented a defining moment in both feminism and literary criticism/theory. When for the first time the French text was republished in 2010, Cixous speculated that the text was – disappointingly – still timely after all those years, contrary to her hopes at the original time of writing. This chapter explores Cixous’s text in relation to time in a number of different respects. It examines the significance of its very particular reception over time, and the implications that the signal failure to read it may have for both feminism and literary criticism/theory. But the chapter also considers the significance of Cixous’s work on time. The very notion of an anniversary, which simultaneously marks both a movement forward and a return to the past, is at odds with the linear, teleological idea of progress that remains dominant in discourses of political struggle. Yet the term ‘revolution’ indicates the importance of a cyclical movement of turning around or returning in effecting political change. This chapter therefore also studies the political dimension of Cixous’s approach to temporality.

This chapter examines the part that identification plays in specifically feminist engagements with texts and how it has enabled mythical characters to provide such a potent resource for women. It uses a Kleinian model of identification to understand the trans-historical power of myth. In particular, it looks at the phenomenon of cross-gendered identification and explores its manifestation in a variety of poetic and theoretical contexts. The chapter focuses on one mythological character, the Homeric hero Achilles, and four very different texts: Elizabeth Cook's poetic novel Achilles; a letter of the poet John Keats in which he explains to his brother and sister-in-law why he hopes he will never marry; the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous's ‘Sorties’ section of The Newly Born Woman; and Melanie Klein's extension of Freud's concept of phantasy, particularly as it relates to the unconscious.

This chapter explores the role of myth in the construction of the nation and looks in particular at the experience of America. It argues that, for the founding fathers, the New World was no place for myth. However, Hélène Cixous's influential essay, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, takes as its dominant metaphor a notion particularly relevant to America: that of woman as unknown land waiting to be discovered and explored. This trope of discovering new worlds is central to Cixous's account of woman's quest because America offered a model for how those on antiquity's margins could critique the centre, a model already followed by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia. Here, More associated the very idea of utopia with the new world. Cixous catalogues her mythic readings in a section of The Newly Born Woman titled ‘Sorties’, in which her mythic antiland has an ideology that sounds much like that of America.

Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign volume 1 explores above all the political philosophical figure of the animal, and, while sexual difference is repeatedly evoked, little sustained attention is paid to women writers or to the ramifications of woman occupying the place of the animal in a hierarchy with man. This chapter starts with Derrida’s intertexts for the figure of the wolf in a domestic context: Plautus (Asinaria), Montaigne and Rousseau’s Confessions. It then supplements these by focusing on writing of the twentieth century by Cixous, Vivien (The Lady with the She-Wolf), Duffy (The World’s Wife) and Carter (The Bloody Chamber) which evokes the love of the wolf as both desirable and frightening. Tsvetaeva’s writing comes in as an intertext in Cixous’s ‘Love of the Wolf’, in particular her long poem ‘Le Gars’ and her essays on Pushkin. Fairy tales, notably Red Riding Hood, are also key intertexts. The chapter also returns to Derrida’s analysis of Deleuze and Lacan in their specification of the animal against man.

This book explores how classical myth has been central to the development of feminist thought rather than focusing on feminist interpretations of specific myths. It is written under the sign of the Medusa. Its title combines a reference to Hélène Cixous's seminal essay ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ with a figure from ancient myth who has become an archetype through her multiple receptions. ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ is regarded as one of the foundational texts of the movement known as écriture feminine, perhaps the most sustained exploration of myth's inspirational potential for feminism. Hélène Cixous has been associated predominantly with a group of French feminists, but is distinctive in her determination not to lose sight of the poetic qualities of myth in her theoretical work. This book looks at the relationship between myth and politics, myth and psychoanalysis, myth and history, myth and science, and myth and poetry.

This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of movements through which gender, philosophy, and the erotic have pursued their minutely choreographed dance from the dawn of the philosophical tradition to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. This introduction, after an initial excursus that sketches the basic problematic, looks at: Simone de Beauvoir, for whom antiquity yields a moment of sublime transcendence analogous to the concepts of woman and liberté ; Hélène Cixous, who coined the term écriture féminine; and Marguerite Duras, whose novels and films elaborate a uniquely feminine style that looks forward to the textual practices of Cixous and Irigaray.

The French idiom has had no more consistently or ardently inventive practitioners over the last forty years than Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. This chapter focuses not just on the work of the one, the other, or both, but rather the one reading and writing on or about the other; one may begin to imagine how the appeal to the idiom has not merely to be doubled but raised exponentially. Although both Cixous and Derrida had signaled in various ways their attention to each other's writing since the early 1960s, it was several decades before they began lifting the seals on these reading relations in published texts.

Developing the book's examination of the relationship between writing, touching and not-touching, this chapter presents a theory of ‘tactile poetics’. Discussing Jacques Derrida's account of Hélène Cixous's writing as a ‘poem of touch’, it considers the ways that her language simultaneously interrogates and enacts contact, touching the reader in strange and sometimes startling ways. Reading the material surface of Cixous's autobiographical novel, So Close, it discusses the connection between touching and feeling, and explores the ways that different literary textures circulate affect. Drawing on the work of Renu Bora in order to distinguish between literary ‘texture’ and ‘texxture’, it analyses how different texts can touch each other, and when this contact might be read as tampering.

How does breathing relate to the punctuation, or absence of punctuation of writing, and in particular of poetry? That question is examined through the work of Hélène Cixous and in Paul Celan’s Meridian address.

The author supplied a list of the provisional titles of the pieces in this book that have been imagined. At the end, after ‘Forgetting Well’, he defined the addition of something called ‘Last’. In line with this, this chapter seeks to investigate various kinds of duplicity and uncertainty in the English word and the conviction that there would be no ‘last word’ or ‘last words’. It tries to acknowledge the force of Hélène Cixous' suggestion that ‘no dead person has ever said their last word’. It is imagined that Jacques Derrida was alive again.

Chapter 2 examines plays that turn to Greek tragedy in response to collective predicament and catastrophe in the contemporary world. The discussion focuses on Steven Berkoff’s Greek, after Oedipus the King, Hélène Cixous’s La Ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies), and Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, an adaptation of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis. While in the first two examples the adaptation of tragic themes and patterns involves a critique of tragedy and its histories of reception, Crimp’s play challenges Western perceptions of tragedy in a more overt manner, resisting the polarizing discourses of tragedy reproduced by the mainstream media in the aftermath of 9/11. The rewriting of the Greek tragic texts in these plays provides a frame that challenges established definitions of tragedy and, at the same time, proposes a renewed more egalitarian understanding of tragedy.