Новинки Элен Сиксу

"Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic" is a compelling new volume in Helene Cixous's search for lost time. Readers of earlier volumes - "Hemlock" and "Hyperdream," among others - will reconnect with familiar characters: Eve, the elderly mother now in her hundredth year, Helene, the daughter, who never expected to become a mother at 70, and the brother, childhood companion and rival. She has almost no time to write."You hate me! You hate me!" someone shouts. "You want me dead!" Is that a revolver on the table? Bang! Shot or door slammed? The brother storms out.The Family is destroying itself."Twists and Turns," like all Cixous's books, is a many-faceted text, whose narrative spins its webs in corners familiar to Cixous readers: corners with books and writers - Montaigne, Proust, Kafka, Derrida; a theater and plays; friendship, and love. It is a tale on the scale of Greek myth, about the inescapable entanglements of family relationships, that can lead one, in hyperbolic mode, to envision murder and suicide, for, as Cixous writes, "with love's force one hates." And yet, "everything twists and turns": this is a tale with profoundly touching reversals.

"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.

A collection of six essays, translated from the French, in which Cixous explores how the problematics of the sexes - viewed as a paradigm for all difference, the organizing principle behind identity and meaning - manifest and write themselves in texts.

Of Helene Cixous's many and diverse writings, few have been translated into English. This collection presents six essays by one of France's most remarkable contemporary authors. Cixous is known for her work on sexual difference and its relations to literary text. Here she explores the problematics of a "feminine" mode of writing, basing her method on the premise that differences between the sexes - viewed as a paragdigm for all difference, which is the organizing principle behind identity and meaning - manifest themselves, write themselves, in texts. "Tancredi Continues" and "The Last Painting or the Portrait of God" question the enigma of sexual difference and the origins of writing through artistic practices analogous to writing (music and painting). The title essay explores Cixous's decision to become an author and the problems raised by a woman's writing herself into history and into a particular literary and cultural tradition. The remaining essays examine another aspect of her her ongoing dialogue with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. "By the light of an Apple" and "Clarice The Approach" are celebrations of Cixous's Brazilian contemporary. In "The Author in Truth" Cixous quotes passages from Lispector and discusses them in detail, providing a sense of why Lispector has assumed such importance in her life. This volume aims to be of interest not only to scholars who are engaged in the task of understanding Cixous as writer and theorist but to all readers seeking a unique and exciting voice.

Dedans est une autobiographie romancée d'Hélène Cixous publié en 1969 aux éditions Grasset et ayant reçu la même année le prix Médicis.

Cixous is issuing her female readers an ultimatum of sorts: either they can read it and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use their bodies as a way to communicate.

"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an extremely literary essay and well-known as an exhortation to a "feminine mode" of writing; the phrases "white ink" and "écriture féminine" are often cited, referring to this desired new way of writing. It is a strident critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.