Hélène Cixous

wkiw

^^

finally found occasion to use accent grave and acute accent from character map bingo!!

literary theory is great, though. i guess everyone needs bangles

weird that you just started this thread—I checked out a bunch of Cixous from the library just yesterday (Selected Plays, Hyperdream, The Neuter, and a recent short book on Beckett)

Stigmata is obviously classic, especially the stuff about visual art

'The Laugh of the Medusa' kicks so much ass, inc some quality penis jokes iirc.

I went to see her give a talk about 3 or 4 years ago. I didn't know much about her and I still don't know really, but iirc it was based around a partially autobiographical anecdote about her early life in Algeria. She's a very comfortable speaker, it was more like listening to a storyteller at times. I wouldn't mind reading 'The Laugh of the Medusa', seems interesting, but not sure about her basic ideas tbh.

- Twelve Steps on the Ladder of Writing <------ probably one of the most important books about writing ever written, imo. so infuential.

- Dream I Tell You <------sort of a really weird dream journal, also endlessly fascinating in regards to how she treats her own psyche

- Manna <----- a book conflating/comparing the lives of Anna Akhmatova and Winnie Mandela. a lovely feminist romp through oppressive regimes.

totally classic, everything she writes is pretty rad.

i'm totally put off by her idea of a "feminine" kind of writing or w/e which does make it seem like she totally missed the point of simone de beauvoir but honestly there is no other contemporary critic/philosopher that i would rather read, she is a kickass *writer*

i will research this person , and also i apolijize for being flippan in this thread which tried t obring dignity to msgobrd!

t table: have you read "Black Sail White Sail", her play about Akhmatova? I read that one last night and really enjoyed it

plax - eh but i think that kind of notion is developed from a response to de beauvoir on the basis that there are material conditions (some of em pretty obvious) for why we can't really think of men and women as being potentially on absolutely the same plane, as de b would suggest is possible, no?

simone de beauvoir has kindof said that her notion of feminist writing is p bullshitty

feminine writing

eh i'm a fan of sexual difference, despite the booby traps of essentialism and crude oppositions it leaves everywhere.

Hehe, you said 'booby'.

I think the idea of a feminine writing is mostly rubbish, but it depends on how you approach the subject - from a socio-historical point of view it seems reasonable to theorise upon the spaces that female writing has co-opted as its own, as long as one repudiates any essentialist reading.

Anyway, I need to read more Cixous.

Also, balls, a bunch of non-corresponding verbs and prepositions in my original post, sorry.

hehe, you said "balls"

bernard, i should read that. what i really should do is raid my friend's bookshelf when i get back to oakland.

I think the idea of a feminine writing is mostly rubbish, but it depends on how you approach the subject - from a socio-historical point of view it seems reasonable to theorise upon the spaces that female writing has co-opted as its own, as long as one repudiates any essentialist reading.

― emil.y, Monday, August 22, 2011 9:11 PM (Yesterday)

like i think the basic gist is that its a reaction against debeauvoirs claims about femininity being the other of language and so she's like hey that's a pretty negative outlook, that there is no space that is uncolonised by masculinist hegemony, lets just build our own feminine writing and simone is all um did you even hear what i just said?

yeah but in that there's a kind of diagnosing of what it means that femininity is the other of language, what this means that language is, and then thinking through how that can be otherwise.

dunno what i'm talking about here rly, but i guess that's 1. ilx and 2. philosophical discussion for ya.

i mean, i don't know cixous very well so maybe she is avoiding the dirty work involved in that, but i know that e.g. irigaray does a lot in the way of looking at what exactly the linguistic figures of the exclusion of women are and developing alternative linguistic figures as a response to that.

yeah irigaray is a whole different ballgame

w also kiw

dunno the theory stuff but i've got the novel angst by cixous somewhere and it's rubbish

i really want to read julia kristeva's detective novels

I'm hoping to really and finally dive into both cixous and irigiray this year, specifically to use them in my research.

"use them"

Really? You've never heard that phrase?

I was just lolling at the... oh never mind

Always sorta look for a cixous novel when I'm out there...

Coincidentally two of her bks have been favourably reviewed in the latest issue of the TLS.