White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics
Helene Cixous
Language: English
Pages: 215
ISBN: B00QRZE8IM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (The Wellek Library Lectures)
The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements
Feminist Poets (Critical Survey of Poetry)
in your case, since orality is very important in your profession — you lecture, comment orally on what you live and read, write plays for the Théâtre du Soleil — and in your family, in quite an exceptional way for a writer. Yet your work is a love hymn to the written text. RdC This could seem paradoxical, but it isn’t. When I let others speak or let my mother speak (not enough in my opinion, but I can’t do it more), my joy (I don’t simply mean earthly joy) is to apply myself to hear the secret
physical sense of course, but as terrorists, mouths full of curses, and so forth . . . That wasn’t at all what I observed, so I am reassured, with deeper sympathy. CM 73 978844651368_4_006.qxd 23/07/2008 15:57 Page 74 WHITE INK: INTERVIEWS ON SEX, TEXT AND POLITICS But once more on the subject of Faust, there is a passage which seems like a description of intrauterine space — at least I read it that way — with the suggestions of the process of menstrual nidification, and notations referring
the theatre as if there were a necessity, or a desire, for plurality. HC My move to the theatre? It was overdetermined. First of all, I have to say it wasn’t a decision on my part. I accepted it, which was maybe part of the decision. But everything I’ve written for the theatre has always been commissioned. I didn’t go looking for the theatre, if only because I don’t know how you could. Incidentally, I’ve never considered myself to be a playwright. Theatre’s such a particular genre, which
(Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1999). Or, les lettres de mon père [Gold, My Father’s Letters] (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1997). Neutre [Neuter/Neutral] (Paris: Grasset, 1972). The French wording ( je la traduirais, donc […] je la trahirais) evokes the same phonic juxtaposition as the well-known aphorism: “traduttore traditore”. See also p. 180, below. See also Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, “The Book That You Will Not Write: An Interview with Hélène Cixous”, New Literary History 37(1), 2006, for further
or Strindberg, who is an admirable playwright, and Chekhov here and there. So it’s not closed — and nor am I — although of course my hero is Shakespeare. I adore him. I know I share this opinion with the whole world. I don’t think anyone has gone further than Shakespeare, because he’s not only an artist in writing, he’s a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a psychoanalyst — he’s everything, really. So, as regards “crime and forgiveness”, yes, it’s true that theatre is there to allow us to
