Byun Young-joo, jeune réalisatrice coréenne, filme avec beaucoup de pudeur, de tact et même de tendresse le visage des vieilles dames, anciennes victimes de l’esclavage sexuel de l’armée japonaise. La réalisatrice s’est rendue pendant un an à la « Maison de Nanum » à Séoul, où certaines survivantes vivent ensemble, jusqu’à ce que six d’entre elles acceptent d’être filmées. Le film montre le quotidien sobre et discret de ces femmes recelant le passé douloureux et leur évolution, devant la caméra. Hélène (...) Cixous a invité Byun Young-joo à son séminaire en mars 2000 lors de sa visite à Paris pour présenter son film au Festival International des Films des Femmes de Créteil. (shrink)

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance (...) of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

A kaleidoscopic portrait of Derrida's life and works through the prism of his Jewish heritage, by a leading feminist thinker and close personal friend. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being Jewish.

_Hyperdream_ is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end – and that’s the end. For you, for me. But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life? _Hyperdream_ invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic (...) telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed. It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption. _Hyperdream_ is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend “J.D.”. (shrink)

In Insister, Hlne Cixous brings a unique mixture of theoretical speculation, breath-taking textual explication and scholarly erudition to an extremely close reading of Derrida's work, always attentive to the details of his thinking. At the same time, Insister is an extraordinarily poetic meditation, a work of literature and of mourning for Jacques Derrida the person, who was a close friend and accomplice of Cixous's from the beginning of their careers.

This book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous is an account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia; Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" muses on a host of motifs, including his varied responses to "Savoir.".

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing. Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, (...) philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world.As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing.Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, (...) theatre, politics, aesthetics, faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world. As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought. (shrink)

"Instead of suicide, [Hélène Cixous] began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous's life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored"--Jacket.

"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?" -- Hélène Cixous, from Dream I Tell You For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of (...) her dreams immediately after awaking. In Dream I Tell You, she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness. Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz. The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in conversation: the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship. (shrink)

A compelling work of autobiographical fiction, Hélène Cixous's Hemlock weaves tragedy and comedy, narrative and meditation in its exploration of various human attachments: between an elderly but still truculent mother and her writer-daughter, between the mother and her sister, and between the writer and her vanished but nonetheless intensely present friend, Jacques Derrida, whose death is movingly evoked. "I have in mind two lovely faces, old women in bloom," writes the author with a backwards nod to Proust's ‘jeunes filles.' (...) "Here," she says in her preface, "the criss-crossing paths of my mother and my aunt will come to an end at last. When one old flower is left, what becomes of the other face?" Socrates is conjured up, along with the poisonous plants of Hamlet, the human comedies of Balzac and Proust, and other literary and philosophical ghosts who find themselves drawn into the fabric of Cixous's text: "I'm not sleeping," writes the protagonist. "A worm is drilling my brain. It's a phrase I heard in the hellish juice of the jusquiame. I pour it into my own ear. ‘I'm afraid Mama will die'." In this new work Hélène Cixous continues to explore and expand the boundaries of narrative, slipping from thought to thought and from image to image, so as to render every action, fear and thought palpable to the reader. (shrink)

"I get up every day with one day more," says Eve, the writer's 97-year-old mother. She is escaping into the New Life and the writer must race to catch up. As things slip away and fall into oblivion, as her mother's world and thus her own relentlessly shrinks, the writer is stunned to see for the first time the vestiges of a prison scene in her beloved Tower of Montaigne, which she has been visiting for fifty years. It represents the (...) story of Cimon and Pero, a daughter's act of charity that saved her father from certain death. How extraordinary that it should only now appear to this other daughter who dreams of nothing less for her parent and thus for herself. A different prison scene draws the writer to reflect on Freud's remark "that the dream of a prisoner can have nothing other than escape as content," a comment he illustrates with Moritz von Schwind's painting _The Prisoner's Dream_. But it is Freud's own dreams of escape from the prison of declining powers in his old age that the writer channels through her telepathic connection to the one she calls her "nuncle." She knows that the worst, worse even than the effects of the disease eating through his body, would have been the obliteration of his dreams upon waking, a sensation of theft that is "like a rug one pulls from beneath the head's feet, bam, bam! like a tapestry of life folded up in a flash." And yet life's tapestry has never seemed more richly colored, more elaborately woven, more abundantly endowed with the gifts of Eve, the mother, the midwife, the irrepressible story-teller, the great escape artist, and the indomitable heroine of this book. (shrink)

French Feminism Reader is a collection of essays representing the authors and issues from French theory most influential in the American context. The book is designed for use in courses, and it includes illuminating introductions to the work of each author. These introductions include biographical information, influences and intellectual context, major themes in the author's work as a whole, and specific introductions to the selections in this volume. This collection includes selections by Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Colette Guilluamin, Monique (...) Wittig, Michele Le Doeuff, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixious. (shrink)

This article examines the place of human and animal subjectivity in two autobiographically informed texts by Hélène Cixous. It takes her view on the word ‘human’ and the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family, as a point of departure. By thinking through this figure, I argue, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and anti-Semitism in Algeria and develops her own response to such kinds of political evils, arguing for human relationality and animal corporeality. (...) The article shows that Cixous’ meeting with Fips creates a stigma that, belatedly, breaks through the barrier between herself and the dog; the reopening of the wound takes place in a poetical writing that reveals an intense ‘animal humanity’ formed by communal suffering, finiteness, and love. The lesson Cixous learns from the memory of Fips the dog is how to become ‘better human’. This becoming is also an assault on the false humanism of the colonial project and on racialized social exclusion. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ La problématique de l’écriture et la vie sera abordée dans le présent article, où je soulignerai que, dès ses débuts, la position d’Hélène Cixous suppose une distanciation de l’auteure par rapport à l’écriture autobiographique. En centrant mon analyse sur une scène de Si près, je constate que l’expérience de la narratrice faite chez les écrivains publics à Oran démontre cette même position: c’est l’écrivain qui est l’inventeur de l’écriture et la fiction ne reproduit pas le réel. J’établis une (...) comparaison entre Cixous et Cervantes: dans Don Quichotte I, chapitre 9, il y a une scène métafictive qui, d’une manière semblable, nous incite à réfléchir sur « la vérité » de la fiction et sur le rôle de l’écrivain. Puisant l’énergie créatrice au rêve et à l’inconscient, Hélène Cixous crée à partir des traces autobiographiques qui parcourent son œuvre un « miracle littéraire ». Les fragments personnels, tirés de notre histoire commune, prennent une valeur universelle. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous has written a substantial body of writings about art. This article borrows Derrida's conception of the countersignature to explore the relationship she envisages in them between the plastic arts and writing. It argues that the works to which Cixous is drawn, many of which involve copying words, are driven by the desire to capture what is essentially uncapturable in the artist's idiom. Recognizing in them a displacement of her own concerns, Cixous suggests in these texts (...) that all art speaks a common language in so far as it represents the same attempt to pass beyond its own limits, visual or verbal. Writing and painting are thus as much translations of each other as one language is of another. In particular, their status as translations or copies profoundly troubles the possibility of determining the signatory of the text. (shrink)

This article explores the relations between autobiography, fiction and history in the recent texts of Hélène Cixous. It examines the uses and limits of a range of generic categorizations in accounting for these relations. We suggest that most categorizations tend to rely on an underlying oppositionary and exclusive dynamic between autobiography and fiction in which one or the other may be privileged. Our contention is that Cixous's work should rather be understood within an inclusive dynamic in which all (...) three elements, the fictional, autobiographical and the historical coexist in a complex relation which cannot be disentangled. This inclusive dynamic, we suggest, is not only central to an understanding of the texts’ generic dimensions, but also to the specifics of the pact which Cixous establishes with her readers, as well as to the ethical thinking which underlies her oeuvre. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous is perhaps best known for her paper, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) and her literary contributions outside academia. In this paper, we pick up a lesser known Cixous text, ‘Le Sexe ou la tête?’ that offers an interesting and provocative perspective on the traps associated with being feminine in a masculine environment. As we converse with Cixous, weaving our own words and experiences with hers, we link her work more closely with the feminine in (...) modern-day academia. We suggest that Cixous’s remarks on decapitation and voice offer a way forward for academic women to be; to speak; to recognise the double jeopardy of decapitation in the university; and to use laughter as a strategic, powerful, political act of resistance and subversion against oppressive masculine power structures. We draw on and seek to enact Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine—a disruptive style of writing that provides a mode of being, speaking, and writing that subverts the power of masculine norms in order to be heard and to bring possibilities for change. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Hélène Cixous a écrit de nombreux essais, consacrés pour la plupart à l’écriture, la sienne et celle d’autres auteurs. Pourtant la place que le genre de l’essai occupe dans l’œuvre de l’auteure est loin d’être claire. Face aux fictions cixousiennes appréciées comme étant les véritables “essais” au sens montaignien du terme, se trouvent les essais en question, souvent écrits à la suite d’une demande extérieure. L’essai même constitue-t-il un genre cixousien à part entière? Une analyse diachronique, qui nous (...) mènera des grands textes qu’Hélène Cixous a écrits en réponse aux urgences de son époque aux textes plus récents dédiés à l’intimité du processus de l’écriture, situera l’essai et son évolution à l’intérieur du développement de son œuvre. (shrink)

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. (shrink)