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savaging's review against another edition
5.0
This is the most important book I have ever read.
I read about her dog Fips on a plane leaving home, and wanted to shake the poor sap next to me and say LISTEN TO THIS DID YOU EVER HEAR SOMETHING THIS TRUE?
That is the blessing of Cixous, but she comes with a burden. When you do share a line from her with a person you love, you have around a 1 in 10 chance that this person will feel the same way. A greater likelihood, as I've sadly found, is that you'll only make people feel confused and uncomfortable.
This is not a normal book. In Cixous' own words:
"this book gives itself the freedom to escape from the laws of society. It does not fit the description. It does not answer the signals. It does not get a visa.
"For the the policeforce reader it seems to be an anarchic thing, an untamed beast. It incites the reflex to arrest. But the freedom my book gives itself is not insane. It exercises the right to invention, to research. We only search for what no one has yet found, but which exists nonetheless. We search for one land, we find another."
I read about her dog Fips on a plane leaving home, and wanted to shake the poor sap next to me and say LISTEN TO THIS DID YOU EVER HEAR SOMETHING THIS TRUE?
That is the blessing of Cixous, but she comes with a burden. When you do share a line from her with a person you love, you have around a 1 in 10 chance that this person will feel the same way. A greater likelihood, as I've sadly found, is that you'll only make people feel confused and uncomfortable.
This is not a normal book. In Cixous' own words:
"this book gives itself the freedom to escape from the laws of society. It does not fit the description. It does not answer the signals. It does not get a visa.
"For the the policeforce reader it seems to be an anarchic thing, an untamed beast. It incites the reflex to arrest. But the freedom my book gives itself is not insane. It exercises the right to invention, to research. We only search for what no one has yet found, but which exists nonetheless. We search for one land, we find another."
tamsinese's review against another edition
5.0
Writing is the study of options: as soon as you choose one option, you are presented with an array of others. It feels like following a thread in darkness, only you are creating the thread as you go: the thread of words you weave within the present moment. You dive into the present moment and come back up with the next piece. So that someone can see where you were. Words are like a trail of bread crumbs guiding us back to the Moment. But you have to choose which words to weave your thread with; there are so many ways to describe what Cixous calls “the eternal moment.”
What Cixous does is she tries to document every option, every choice of words, every variation of the idea that is swarming her within this present moment. You see it from all sides. She refuses to make that final decision. She does not choose sides and often disagrees with herself. This way, you can see the present moment circling her, drowning her. And you can see from her words how she has chosen to navigate it, document it. Hélène Cixous shows us what writing is—the process that is hidden from us. She talks a lot about this. How the writing we see is always the aftermath of this moment of drowning, searching, resurfacing; how we only see what has remained of it, what made its way to the page. But she shows us how overwhelmed she is with this chase. She shows us writing in the present moment. And we see that it’s a lot like death.
She shows us that writing is the impossible marriage between the Moment and the Word. And how one is always ahead of the other. Larger than the other. How the Word is devoted to being a mirror of something it can not properly capture. A mirror doomed to error. But Cixous reassures us that the transference between the two worlds of the Moment and the Word is where you find love, euphoria, the feeling of dying. Truth. Understanding in traveling, not in arriving.
What Cixous does is she tries to document every option, every choice of words, every variation of the idea that is swarming her within this present moment. You see it from all sides. She refuses to make that final decision. She does not choose sides and often disagrees with herself. This way, you can see the present moment circling her, drowning her. And you can see from her words how she has chosen to navigate it, document it. Hélène Cixous shows us what writing is—the process that is hidden from us. She talks a lot about this. How the writing we see is always the aftermath of this moment of drowning, searching, resurfacing; how we only see what has remained of it, what made its way to the page. But she shows us how overwhelmed she is with this chase. She shows us writing in the present moment. And we see that it’s a lot like death.
She shows us that writing is the impossible marriage between the Moment and the Word. And how one is always ahead of the other. Larger than the other. How the Word is devoted to being a mirror of something it can not properly capture. A mirror doomed to error. But Cixous reassures us that the transference between the two worlds of the Moment and the Word is where you find love, euphoria, the feeling of dying. Truth. Understanding in traveling, not in arriving.
e333mily's review
5.0
I will let Cixous tell you what it is like to read Cixous: "I sense that in each book words with roots hidden between the text come and go and carry out some other book between the lines. Suddenly I notice strange fruits in my garden."
---
"I want the beforehand of the book...I want the forest before the book, the abundance of leaves before the pages."
"What is this moment called when we suddenly recognise what we have never seen? And which gives us a joy like a wound?"
"Now I know that one can weep continuously for thirteen years...who would have believed that we have so many tears?"
"Why do we read books that make us weep? Undoubtedly because we never have, in reality, enough to lament."
"all poems are doors"
"And the poem or poet is the hope for this meeting with ourselves at the hour of our most intimate foreignness, at our last minute. And then?--Then."
"We, were are always interiorly our secret age, our strong-age, our preferred age, the age when we were for the first time the historians or the authors of our own lives, when we left a trace, when we were for the first time marked, struck, imprinted, we bled and signed, memory started, when we manifested ourselves as chief or queen of our own state, when we took up our own power, or else we are twenty years old or thirty-five, and on the point of surprising the universe."
"and if I quiver it's because I feel what I do not know."
"because we are just big enough to cry for our dog, but never big enough to cry for our mother."
"The great griefs come to us disguised, long after, as ghosts, when we believe them far removed, it is then they come, slip, unrecognisable, anguishing, in incomprehensible forms, changed into vertigo, into chest pains."
"There is an outside in me."
"I want to suffer and I don't manage."
"The worst part of grief is the grief that doesn't let itself be suffered...(one can't even suffer one's suffering) one can't even eat the bread of suffering, and drink one's own tears...the worst part of mourning is that we must mourn grief. (One can't even enjoy one's own suffering.)...We are deprived of our pains."
"I want ways of holding on to what surpasses me, of adding to myself a mother or other."
"I don't know how to explain it scientifically, but the fact is that joy lasts limitlessly as long as it lasts."
"I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words."
"I must write, or else the world will not exist."
---
"I want the beforehand of the book...I want the forest before the book, the abundance of leaves before the pages."
"What is this moment called when we suddenly recognise what we have never seen? And which gives us a joy like a wound?"
"Now I know that one can weep continuously for thirteen years...who would have believed that we have so many tears?"
"Why do we read books that make us weep? Undoubtedly because we never have, in reality, enough to lament."
"all poems are doors"
"And the poem or poet is the hope for this meeting with ourselves at the hour of our most intimate foreignness, at our last minute. And then?--Then."
"We, were are always interiorly our secret age, our strong-age, our preferred age, the age when we were for the first time the historians or the authors of our own lives, when we left a trace, when we were for the first time marked, struck, imprinted, we bled and signed, memory started, when we manifested ourselves as chief or queen of our own state, when we took up our own power, or else we are twenty years old or thirty-five, and on the point of surprising the universe."
"and if I quiver it's because I feel what I do not know."
"because we are just big enough to cry for our dog, but never big enough to cry for our mother."
"The great griefs come to us disguised, long after, as ghosts, when we believe them far removed, it is then they come, slip, unrecognisable, anguishing, in incomprehensible forms, changed into vertigo, into chest pains."
"There is an outside in me."
"I want to suffer and I don't manage."
"The worst part of grief is the grief that doesn't let itself be suffered...(one can't even suffer one's suffering) one can't even eat the bread of suffering, and drink one's own tears...the worst part of mourning is that we must mourn grief. (One can't even enjoy one's own suffering.)...We are deprived of our pains."
"I want ways of holding on to what surpasses me, of adding to myself a mother or other."
"I don't know how to explain it scientifically, but the fact is that joy lasts limitlessly as long as it lasts."
"I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words."
"I must write, or else the world will not exist."
emsemsems's review
5.0
The ones I like, I like way too much. The ones I didn't quite get were also very good; so cleverly written, and so beautifully composed (beginning to end). My favourite bit is undoubtedly, 'Love of the Wolf'. My copy of the book is full of underlines/highlights, and personal notes. I've never read anything quite like 'Stigmata'. It doesn't really fit into any specific 'genre'. Strange, but wonderful. Cixous is a legend; and I kind of want to read everything she's ever written.
Also, it makes me scream a little inside when she references/quotes Clarice Lispector!
'One day, I don’t know when, it was decided to call love a set of strange, indescribable physical phenomena, is it pain? —but from the moment that the name is given to that burning in one’s breast, the violence of the strangeness is interrupted and the ancient horror, hidden behind the new word, begins to be forgotten. Let’s go back to before language, that’s what Tsvetaeva does, let’s go back to that disturbing age, the age of myths and of folktales, the age of stone, of fire, of knives. Before language there is the fire that bites but doesn’t kill, the evil that, like all pain, separates us, the dehiscence that opens in us closed organs, making us seem strange to ourselves—and all that begins with: ‘when you don’t say anything to anybody—that’s it—it’s love.’ It begins with the kept secret, with the silent separation from the rest of the world. You love yourself [on s’aime]: you sow [on sème]. You throw the others off track. You go underground. You leave the world in broad daylight. You betray it. You’re cheating. It’s a crime. It’s a kind of glory. Love abjures in order to adore. It burns in your breast and the world is burned.'
Also, it makes me scream a little inside when she references/quotes Clarice Lispector!
motifenjoyer's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
4.0
"Writing is the movement to return to where we haven’t been ‘in person’ but only in wounded flesh, in frightened animal, movement to go farther than far, and also, effort to go too far, to where I’m afraid to go, but where, if you give me your hand, I’ll endure going."
rebeccaalexis's review against another edition
5.0
beautiful, intriguing and poetic stream of thought. the translations are, at times, a bit stiff and i do wish a french copy was more accessible but i believe "stigmata" was originally published with such translations.
steveatwaywords's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
This is my first deeper-drive into the too-neglected Cixous, and I could not be more happy to (re)discover her here, uncomfortably settled into her subcortical reveries into language and self, into a series of unexpected revelations on politics and art, Joyce and childhood, theology and the richness of what lies beneath, suspiciously connecting it all. While "Laugh of the Medusa" may be the most anthologized of her works (and perhaps her most staunch), here one feels that the essays are compelled by her personal questions; and it is where they come up for air that we feel relief and a purchase on understanding.
But Cixous rarely writes these meanings, of course, in summarized expositions. Instead, it is the process of connecting she makes betwixt and beneath, the language in the sub-ether, where we find (along with her, if we are lucky), the experience to take away.
But Cixous rarely writes these meanings, of course, in summarized expositions. Instead, it is the process of connecting she makes betwixt and beneath, the language in the sub-ether, where we find (along with her, if we are lucky), the experience to take away.
The force that makes me write, the always unexpected Messiah, the returning spirit or the spirit of returning--it is You.
As thick as each of these essays fair (though some are quite readable stylistically), I only wished they could go on further. She left that task to the rest of us.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Antisemitism
maya_irl's review against another edition
4.0
"Eat me up, my love, or else I am going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows that there is no greater proof of love than the other's appetite, who is dying to be eaten up yet scared to death by the idea of being eaten up, who says or doesn't say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won't eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth."
mrsdalloways's review against another edition
5.0
who then can make for us cosmic flesh? The being who says: go ahead
Impossible to define within any particular discipline but Cixous’ writing always reminds me of why I love literature and why I want to spend my life reading and writing about literature <3
Impossible to define within any particular discipline but Cixous’ writing always reminds me of why I love literature and why I want to spend my life reading and writing about literature <3