Eric Prenowitz
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748639038
- eISBN:
- 9780748653638
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639038.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Ann Jefferson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691160658
- eISBN:
- 9781400852598
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691160658.003.0020
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Brigitte Weltman-Aron
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231172561
- eISBN:
- 9780231539876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172561.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on ...
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Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus. In a rare comparison of these authors’ writings, Algerian Imprints shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous’s inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar’s narratives concern the colonial separation of “French” and “Arab,” self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.Less
Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus. In a rare comparison of these authors’ writings, Algerian Imprints shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous’s inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar’s narratives concern the colonial separation of “French” and “Arab,” self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.
Elissa Marder
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240555
- eISBN:
- 9780823240593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240555.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores three recent fictional texts by Hélène Cixous (Or: Les lettres de mon père, Osnabrück, and Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage: scènes primitives) and shows how she invents, ...
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This chapter explores three recent fictional texts by Hélène Cixous (Or: Les lettres de mon père, Osnabrück, and Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage: scènes primitives) and shows how she invents, discovers, and uncovers a forgotten, primal language that lies embedded within the French language through acts of naming and un-naming. The literary readings in the chapter call attention to the way that Cixous gives birth to new poetic, political, social, and familial relations by opening the French language up to foreign elements of all kinds. For her, words come “before” the beginning; writing itself begins in the name. Like the well-spring of words from which writing draws its source, the name is never “proper”: each name that gives birth to writing calls the other into being in the act of naming. All of Cixous's writings (albeit each uniquely and in its own singular idiom) bear the mark of this “original translation” and are born from it. All are signed with this primal “Birthmark.”.Less
This chapter explores three recent fictional texts by Hélène Cixous (Or: Les lettres de mon père, Osnabrück, and Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage: scènes primitives) and shows how she invents, discovers, and uncovers a forgotten, primal language that lies embedded within the French language through acts of naming and un-naming. The literary readings in the chapter call attention to the way that Cixous gives birth to new poetic, political, social, and familial relations by opening the French language up to foreign elements of all kinds. For her, words come “before” the beginning; writing itself begins in the name. Like the well-spring of words from which writing draws its source, the name is never “proper”: each name that gives birth to writing calls the other into being in the act of naming. All of Cixous's writings (albeit each uniquely and in its own singular idiom) bear the mark of this “original translation” and are born from it. All are signed with this primal “Birthmark.”.
Elissa Marder
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240555
- eISBN:
- 9780823240593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240555.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores mourning in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. For both Derrida and Cixous, mourning is an interminable event that defies closure, undermines presence, and has ...
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This chapter explores mourning in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. For both Derrida and Cixous, mourning is an interminable event that defies closure, undermines presence, and has an intimate relationship with literary language. The chapter shows how both Derrida and Cixous challenge psychoanalytic models of the work of mourning by their reworking of the concept of mourning through the figure of all of the multiple forms, homonyms, and meanings that are associated with the French word “mordre” (to bite): these include the words “mort” (death) and “mors” (bit). The “bit” is a figure of incalculable and irrecuperable loss.Less
This chapter explores mourning in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. For both Derrida and Cixous, mourning is an interminable event that defies closure, undermines presence, and has an intimate relationship with literary language. The chapter shows how both Derrida and Cixous challenge psychoanalytic models of the work of mourning by their reworking of the concept of mourning through the figure of all of the multiple forms, homonyms, and meanings that are associated with the French word “mordre” (to bite): these include the words “mort” (death) and “mors” (bit). The “bit” is a figure of incalculable and irrecuperable loss.
Frances Babbage
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719067525
- eISBN:
- 9781781701782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719067525.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Irving Goh
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262687
- eISBN:
- 9780823266371
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262687.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Elissa Marder
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823240555
- eISBN:
- 9780823240593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823240555.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines Roland Barthes' gloss on Charles Clifford's nineteenth-century photograph “Alhambra” in Camera Lucida and explores how, via this image, Barthes conjures up an alternative model ...
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This chapter examines Roland Barthes' gloss on Charles Clifford's nineteenth-century photograph “Alhambra” in Camera Lucida and explores how, via this image, Barthes conjures up an alternative model of temporality that he calls “utopian time” and which he associates with a return to the body of the mother. Following Barthes' photographic response to this image, it explores what happens when photography loosens its grasp on its various referential conscious powers: (to know, to prove, to document) and gives itself over instead to become a form of writing. As writing, photography calls for a mode of reading (of events, texts, and the world) that is neither conscious nor unconscious as conventionally understood. In this sense, photographic writing operates at the very limits of what can be imagined as “visible” or even “possible.” The final section of the chapter engages in a reading of some recent fictions by Hélène Cixous to show how, in the photographic images of déjà vu that come to us in dreams and in writing, we might by chance discover latent traces of as yet unwritten future histories.Less
This chapter examines Roland Barthes' gloss on Charles Clifford's nineteenth-century photograph “Alhambra” in Camera Lucida and explores how, via this image, Barthes conjures up an alternative model of temporality that he calls “utopian time” and which he associates with a return to the body of the mother. Following Barthes' photographic response to this image, it explores what happens when photography loosens its grasp on its various referential conscious powers: (to know, to prove, to document) and gives itself over instead to become a form of writing. As writing, photography calls for a mode of reading (of events, texts, and the world) that is neither conscious nor unconscious as conventionally understood. In this sense, photographic writing operates at the very limits of what can be imagined as “visible” or even “possible.” The final section of the chapter engages in a reading of some recent fictions by Hélène Cixous to show how, in the photographic images of déjà vu that come to us in dreams and in writing, we might by chance discover latent traces of as yet unwritten future histories.
Vanda Zajko
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199237944
- eISBN:
- 9780191706455
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199237944.003.0003
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Religions
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Gregory Staley
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199237944
- eISBN:
- 9780191706455
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199237944.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Religions
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sal Renshaw
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719069604
- eISBN:
- 9781781702956
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719069604.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This book is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred, often ...
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This book is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred, often reserved only for God and rarely thought of as a human achievement. The book is a substantial engagement with Cixous's philosophies of love, inviting the reader to reflect on the conditions of subjectivity that just might open us to something like a divine love of the other. It follows this thread in this genealogy of abundant love: the thread that connects the subject of love from fifth-century-b.c.e. Greece and Plato, to the twentieth-century protestant theology of agapic love of Anders Nygren, to the late twentieth-century poetico-philosophy of Hélène Cixous.Less
This book is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred, often reserved only for God and rarely thought of as a human achievement. The book is a substantial engagement with Cixous's philosophies of love, inviting the reader to reflect on the conditions of subjectivity that just might open us to something like a divine love of the other. It follows this thread in this genealogy of abundant love: the thread that connects the subject of love from fifth-century-b.c.e. Greece and Plato, to the twentieth-century protestant theology of agapic love of Anders Nygren, to the late twentieth-century poetico-philosophy of Hélène Cixous.
Judith Still
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748680979
- eISBN:
- 9781474412469
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748680979.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199237944
- eISBN:
- 9780191706455
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199237944.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Ancient Religions
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Paul Allen Miller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199640201
- eISBN:
- 9780191811470
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640201.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sarah Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748685318
- eISBN:
- 9781474412360
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748685318.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Peggy Kamuf
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641543
- eISBN:
- 9780748652136
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641543.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
David Wills
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816698820
- eISBN:
- 9781452954301
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816698820.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Nicholas Royle
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748632954
- eISBN:
- 9780748671625
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748632954.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Eleftheria Ioannidou
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199664115
- eISBN:
- 9780191833380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664115.003.0003
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Sarah Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748685318
- eISBN:
- 9781474412360
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748685318.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
While the field of haptic aesthetics has received significant critical interest in recent years, the intimate connection between touching and writing remains neglected. Contributing to current ...
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While the field of haptic aesthetics has received significant critical interest in recent years, the intimate connection between touching and writing remains neglected. Contributing to current debates in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this book offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between text and tact. Through close readings of authors such as John Berger, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, H.D., Siri Hustvedt and Michael Ondaatje, and the director Fritz Lang, the volume proposes a theory of ‘tactile poetics’ in order to examine the co-implication of touch and writing in a range of genres including the novel, poetry, short fiction, autobiography and film. Drawing on insights from Didier Anzieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Luc Nancy, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing examines the ‘skin-effects’ of language and the ‘law of tact’ that always interrupts contact. Celebrating the intersections between creative and critical writing and exploring diverse literary textures, the book deviates from grasping and licking to false hands and phantom limbs, considering the effects of spectral contact on how we ‘hand on’ ways of thinking about reading and writing.Less
While the field of haptic aesthetics has received significant critical interest in recent years, the intimate connection between touching and writing remains neglected. Contributing to current debates in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, this book offers a new critical perspective on the relationship between text and tact. Through close readings of authors such as John Berger, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Carson, Hélène Cixous, H.D., Siri Hustvedt and Michael Ondaatje, and the director Fritz Lang, the volume proposes a theory of ‘tactile poetics’ in order to examine the co-implication of touch and writing in a range of genres including the novel, poetry, short fiction, autobiography and film. Drawing on insights from Didier Anzieu, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Luc Nancy, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing examines the ‘skin-effects’ of language and the ‘law of tact’ that always interrupts contact. Celebrating the intersections between creative and critical writing and exploring diverse literary textures, the book deviates from grasping and licking to false hands and phantom limbs, considering the effects of spectral contact on how we ‘hand on’ ways of thinking about reading and writing.
