Find Coming To Writing And Other Essays Penned By Hélène Cixous Textbook

is our problem as writers, We who must paint with brushes all sticky with words, We who must swim in language as if it were pure and transparent, though it is troubled by phrases already heard a thousand times, We who must clear a new path with each thought through thickets of clichés, ” p.

Reading Cixous is a dialectic experience unfortunately for every gem such as the above, one has to wade through turgid quagmires such as:

“So the truth, which appears inside of the night, in the warm depths of a dream, and then only, peacefully undresses before me and smiling comes slipping I do not know how over my innermost body, and caresses my heart, andthenthe sweet softness of her breastsand this is what absolute knowledge isit isnt surprising if what I am writing is not sufficiently clear, since not a single word ever returns from the luminous depths where our truth lives.
The few words that come close are transformed into sighsso the truth which only lives in the shelter of silence is forced to appear, and then is like a fish pulled from the water, thinking in a final convulsion of the sea, then, the end.
” pp.

I admire Cixouss willingness to take chances with her writing, and Im sure she works marvelously for what she sees as her audience, but writing is oneway communication, achieved one reader at a time, and as Nietzsche seemed to prove, the line between enlightenment and insanity is not always apparent.
Cixouss style is too heavy on the rant,
rec'd by Jes KastKeat for women's history month The best paper I wrote is about this book, I bought it again recently to have it on the shelf, somewhat exhausted from reading this for like ten hours straight and the effect was this lyrical but repetitive meditation on writing, on clarice lispector, etc, thus i feel drained: blind underwater when will this be over but oh wait i think i like this: the whole time, to know how to not know, yes. will come back to this later,

meditation needs no results, meditation can have itself as an end, i meditate without words and on nothingness, what tangles my life is writing,

I had to clear the decks and just focus all of my teeny brain on Cixous' "Coming to Writing, " Writing is to die/Writing is to live, Ontvankelijkheid is de toestand vanwaaruit Cixous probeert te schrijven en die ze hoopt op te roepen bij haar lezers, Ontvankelijkheid voor de parelachtige schoonheid van de gewone dingen des levens, Clarice Lispector, aan wie ze twee essays heeft gewijd, is daarin haar grote voorbeeld,

Heideggeriaanse filosofie met een feministische insteek, If Kafka had been a woman, If Rilke had been born a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine, If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty, If Heidegger had been able to stop being German, if he written the Romance of the Earth,

Thus Cixous waxes on Clarice Lispector, Lispector is a recurring theme throughout this collection of essays, Her first bane becomea becalmed verb, I have always wanted to read Lispector and these essays didn't really affect that, I liked Stigmata much more than Coming To Writing, though the titular piece does reach the incredible, Cixous broaches other arts here, music and painting and I was left unable to prosper, Underfunded and footsore. So it goes. When you're down and out,

There appears to be two thrusts of Cixous' work: the "fictional" narrative pieces and these more abrupt meditations, I am not sure where to place her works on Derrida: somewhere outside of genre walls, clinging to hyphens entwined in great vats of distilled bliss, That would be my technical assessment, anyway,
When in France Gorgeous. Brainbreaking. Lyrical. Lifechanging. 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.
Coming to Writing is a wonderful and inspiring essay, a little like The Laugh of Medusa, published only a year before, It's a cosmogony of love, Love as a force, language and source of selfexpression, resulting from an alienating reality: intimately, the experience of the author as a jewish german expatriate in Algeria, universally, as being a woman.

"There is a language that

I speak or that speaks to me in all tongues, A language at once unique and universal that resounds in each national tongue when a poet speaks in it, In each tongue, there flows milk and honey, And this language I know, I dont need to enter it, it surges from me, it flows, it is the milk of love, the honey of my unconscious.
The language that women speak when no one is there to correct them, "

The other essays instead are a little less evocatively strong, even if written with the same hypnotical prose, I found them a bit confusing, A great variety of themes are analyized in all the texts: religion, music, writing, medioeval epics, painting, bodies and sexuality some of which I have a rather small knowledge of.
For exemple: Clarice Lispector and her works are frequently cited, not only in the essay dedicated to her, Clarice Lispector: The Approch, but also in By the Light of an Apple and The Author in Truth, and since I haven't read her yet I doubt I grasped all the references rightly.
Although, I greatly appreciated the latter essay cited, which offers an interesting comparison between the different but almost interchangeable entities of the writer, the reader and the character, and The Last Painting or the Portrait of God, which compares figurative art, in particular, citing the works of Rembrandt, Monet, but also Van Gogh, with the art of writing, in a quest for fidelity and the pure notidealistical rappresentation.

"Reading, I discovered that writing is endless, Everlasting. Eternal. Writing or God. God the writing. The writing God. I had only to break in and train my appetites, "

Cixous truly is THE Goddess of formally disrupted feminist essays! Que la carne escribe y es dada a leer y a escribir, swoon. this woman has changed the way I read and see forever, there is no turning back after this, Bro, I'm dumb DUMB. will write something later, maybe, Hélène Cixous is a Jewish French, Algerian born feminist well known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in, She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism, Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre, .