Cixous' work as a playwright - working mainly with Theatre du Soleil and their director Ariane Mnouchkine - establishes her as a participant in some of the most adventurous European theatre making of the last 40 years.
This collection brings together for the first time, four translations into English of Helene Cixous' plays. It is a unique and extraordinary resource for scholars, students and theatre-makers.
The collection includes: *The Perjured City, translated by Bernadette Fort
*Black Sail, White Sail, translated by Donald Watson
*Portrait of Dora, translated by Ann Liddle
*Drums on the Dam, translated by Judith G. Miller and Brian J. Mallet
This exciting new anthology will disseminate her work to a wide and receptive English-speaking audience.

A genre-defying book from one of France's most well-known philosopher-writers. In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabruck. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabruck, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space-a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938-today known as Kristallnacht-when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabruck was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Helene Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition.

Cixous' work as a playwright - working mainly with Theatre du Soleil and their director Ariane Mnouchkine - establishes her as a participant in some of the most adventurous European theatre making of the last 40 years.
This collection brings together for the first time, four translations into English of Helene Cixous' plays. It is a unique and extraordinary resource for scholars, students and theatre-makers.
The collection includes: *The Perjured City, translated by Bernadette Fort
*Black Sail, White Sail, translated by Donald Watson
*Portrait of Dora, translated by Ann Liddle
*Drums on the Dam, translated by Judith G. Miller and Brian J. Mallet
This exciting new anthology will disseminate her work to a wide and receptive English-speaking audience.

Helene Cixous -- author, playwright and French feminist theorist -- is a key figure in twentieth-century literary theory. Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time.
Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work:
* love's labours lost and found
* feminine hours
* autobiographies of writing
* the prehistory of the work of art
Stigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.

A 'wilful extremist' according to the London Times, Helene Cixous is hailed as one of the most formidable writers and thinkers of our time. Acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, to a surprising extent. With the inclusion of Stigmata, one of her greatest works into the Routledge Classics series, this is about to change. Questions that have long concerned her - the self and the other, autobiographies of writing, sexual difference, literary theory, post-colonial theory, death and life - are explored here, woven into a stunning narrative. Displaying a remarkable virtuosity, the work of Cixous is heady stuff indeed: exciting, powerful, moving, and dangerous.

"In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides," wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous's life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, Tombe is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provocatively calls the "all-powerful-other of all my books, it sparks them off, makes them run, it is their Messiah." Masterfully translated by Laurent Milesi, Tombe preserves the sonic complexities and intricate wordplay at the core of Cixous's writing, and reveals the struggles, ideas, and intents at the center of her work. With a new prologue by the author, this is a necessary document in the development of Cixous's aesthetic as a writer and theorist, and will be eagerly welcomed by readers as a crucial building block in the foundation of her later work.

These interviews with H?l?ne Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, "White Ink" collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous's critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

The interviews in "White Ink" span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book's editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, "French feminist theorist." Sellers organizes "White Ink" in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous's commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in "White Ink" provide an excellent introduction this thinker's brave and vital work--each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous's intellectual and poetic force.

Hélène Cixous is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary thinkers. Published here in English for the first time Hélène Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable persipicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide.
Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography, as Cixous's own creative reflections on the past provide occasion for scintillating forays into the future.
The text includes:
* an extended interview with Cixous and Calle-Gruber, exploring Cixous's creative and intellectual processes
* a remarkable collection of photographs taken from Cixous's family album set against a poetic reflection by the author
* selections from Cixous's private notebooks
* contribution by Jacques Derrida
* original 'think-pieces' by Calle-Gruber.

Helene Cixous is arguably the most insightful and unbridled reader of Jacques Derrida today. In "Insister," she brings a unique mixture of scholarly erudition, theoretical speculation, and breathtaking textual explication to an extremely close reading of Derrida's work. At the same time, "Insister" is an extraordinarily poetic meditation, a work of literature and of mourning for Jacques Derrida the person, who was a close friend and accomplice of Cixous's from the beginning of their careers.
In a melodic stream-of-consciousness Cixous speaks to Derrida, to his memory and to the words he left behind. She delves into the philosophical spaces that separated them, filling them out to create new understandings, bringing Derrida's words back to life while insisting on our inability to ever truly communicate through words. "More than once we say the same words," Cixous writes, "but we do not live them in the same tone."
"Insister of Jacques Derrida" joins "Veils," the two loosely autobiographical texts of Derrida and Cixous published together by Stanford in 2001.

Helene Cixous is arguably the most insightful and unbridled reader of Jacques Derrida today. In "Insister," she brings a unique mixture of scholarly erudition, theoretical speculation, and breathtaking textual explication to an extremely close reading of Derrida's work. At the same time, "Insister" is an extraordinarily poetic meditation, a work of literature and of mourning for Jacques Derrida the person, who was a close friend and accomplice of Cixous's from the beginning of their careers.
In a melodic stream-of-consciousness Cixous speaks to Derrida, to his memory and to the words he left behind. She delves into the philosophical spaces that separated them, filling them out to create new understandings, bringing Derrida's words back to life while insisting on our inability to ever truly communicate through words. "More than once we say the same words," Cixous writes, "but we do not live them in the same tone."
"Insister of Jacques Derrida" joins "Veils," the two loosely autobiographical texts of Derrida and Cixous published together by Stanford in 2001.

"Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing" is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: "The School of the Dead" -- the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; "The School of Dreams" -- the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and "The School of Roots" -- the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing.

Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka.

In writing "Le Livre de Promethea" Helene Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory.

In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in "The Book of Promethea," works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing."

A "wilful extremist" according to the "London Times, " Helene Cixous is hailed as one of the most formidable writers and thinkers of our time. From collaborating with acclaimed performance company Theatre du Soleil, to producing a weighty body of both fiction and non-fiction, Cixous is celebrated for her brilliant contributions to contemporary culture. Acclaimed by luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, her writing has nonetheless been misunderstood and misread, to a surprising extent. With the inclusion of "Stigmata," one of her greatest works into the "Routledge Classics "series, this is about to change.
Questions that have long concerned her - the self and the other, autobiographies of writing, sexual difference, literary theory, post-colonial theory, death and life - are explored here, woven into a stunning narrative. Displaying a remarkable virtuosity, the work of Cixous is heady stuff indeed: exciting, powerful, moving, and dangerous.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabruck were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabruck counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Helene Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabruck Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabruck's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Eve, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Eve's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Eve's uncle, Onkel Andre. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabruck, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabruck in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabruck Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Helene Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs "savoir" (to know) and "voir" (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs--including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.
"Veils" suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: "la voile" (sail) and "le voile" (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here--in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.
However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the "imminence" of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

"Leaves an indelible impression. [The Loved Ones] is rich with family and neighbors and [Alia Mamdouh] notes all of their subtle interactions and secrets."-Library Journal

"Ferocious, visceral descriptions . . . give a powerful sense not only of Suhaila's world but also of the way we make and understand memories."-Booklist

"Often intense and lyrical."-Kirkus Reviews

This winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Literature mingles memories of the past with the shifting voices of the present when the estranged son of an Iraqi exile flies from his home in Toronto to visit her in Paris. As his ailing mother, the once-vibrant Suhaila, lies in a hospital bed, he acquaints himself with her constellation of close friends. Immediately, he becomes immersed in the complex relationships he has fought so hard to avoid: with his mother and his war-torn homeland. Alia Mamdouh weaves a magical tale of the human condition in this stunning and beautifully written novel of faith, family, and hope.

Alia Mamdouh is the author of essays, short stories, and four novels, including the most widely translated, Naphtalene. Born in Iraq, she now lives in exile in Paris.

Marilyn Booth is a translator of Middle Eastern fiction and autobiography. She received her BA from Harvard-Radcliffe and her DPhil from Oxford University, and has taught at Brown University and The American University in Cairo. Currently, she is visiting associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

HA(c)lA]ne Cixous is a world-renowned French feminist theorist, critic, essayist, novelist, and playwright.

"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?" -- HA(c)lA]ne Cixous, from "Dream I Tell You"

For years, HA(c)lA]ne Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams immediately after awaking. In "Dream I Tell You," she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness.

Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz.

The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on manyof the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in conversation: the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship.

H?l?ne Cixous is more than an influential theorist. She is also a groundbreaking author and playwright. Combining an idiosyncratic mix of autobiographical and fictional narrative with a host of philosophical and poetic observations, Cixous's writing matches the kaleidoscopic nature of her thought, offering new ways of conceptualizing sex, relationships, identity, and the self, among other topics.

Yet, as Jacques Derrida once observed, a "profound misunderstanding" hangs over the accomplishments of Cixous, with many believing the intellectual excelled only at theoretical exploration. Providing a truly liberal selection of her writings from throughout her career, Marta Segarra rediscovers Cixous's acts of invention for a new generation to enjoy. Divided into thematic concerns, these works fully capture Cixous's genius for merging fiction, theory, and the experience of living. They discuss dreaming in the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater. They defy classification, locking literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into thrilling new patterns of engagement. Whether readers are familiar with Cixous or are approaching her thought for the first time, all will find fresh perspectives on gender, fiction, drama, philosophy, religion, and the postcolonial.

The texts that comprise this volume were selected from Helene Cixous's seminars on the work of Clarice Lispector. They reflect Cixous's own meditations on problems of reading and writing, and on related themes such as exchange and the gift, love and passion, as well as trace the influence of Lispector's work on her own development. Reading the Brazilian writer from the vantage point of modern theory, Cixous aims to draw her into the mainstream of current debates which question the concept of the so-called rational "Cartesian" individual and which note the increasing power of the social and applied sciences that seek to establish control over the individual. The book includes extracts of Clarice Lispector's prose writing, such as "The Apple in the Dark - The Temptations of Understanding" and "The Hour of the Star:How Does One Desire Wealth or Poverty?".

A searching meditation on "authorship" by an eminent theorist.

An inner journey across space and time linking the "author" to other poets, this lyrical essay-poem continues Helene Cixous's exhilarating rewriting of notions of boundary, self, other, and author. The renowned source of the notion of ecriture feminine, Cixous here interrogates the status of the author, connecting distant instances of herself with other writers who traverse genders, generations, and national boundaries. In doing so, she pursues the rhythms of a mind thinking, tentatively following each thought from its enigmatic inception through all its twists and turns into the next thought's mysterious beginnings. Here, then, is the "flux full of silent words flowing from one community to the other, from one life to the other, the strange legend, inaudible except to the heart of one or the other, the narrative weaving itself on high".

By turns thrilling and chimerical, hypnotic and startling, this first-person meditation -- or, in Freud's term for a dream-text, theorie-fiction -- does not aspire to reflect reality so much as transform the ways in which we perceive it, creating new terms for subjectivity and the "real". Above all, First Days of the Year (published originally in French as Jours de l'an) is a celebration of beginnings and future possibilities, based on necessity and hope, constantly mediating writing and living, life and death. Like all of Cixous's profoundly original works, it seductively leads the reader into a new way of thinking by disrupting fixed ideas of psychic identity, subjectivity, and language.

Helene Cixous chronicles the last six months of her mother's life, transgressing the mother-daughter relation in the experience of dying Mother Homer is Dead was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of the writer's mother in the 103rd year of her life. Eve Cixous, nee Klein, has figured centrally in her daughter's writing since the publication of Osnabruck (1999). Since then, Cixous's work has turned in ever-tighter orbits around the relation to her mother's life as it tapers down toward death. The writer discovers a guide book for the task written in her mother's own hand, where the narrator comes to realise that she will have been midwife to her mother's death. In French, this substitutability or reversibility of birth and death is facilitated by the noun accouchement, childbirth or labour, but which literally says 'bedding, putting or going to bed'. The reversal also concerns the positions of mother/child. What is happening requires the child to become the mother of the mother. How then must she hear her child's repeated cry of 'Help me, help me'? Is it help dying that she wants? And how to know this is indeed her desire? The narrator/writer, when in doubt, opts always for life, for more life for her mother, but to the point that many of those around her--family, friends, doctors, nurses--warn that she has lost touch with 'reality'. Perhaps never has the agony of letting go of the dying one been so unflinchingly rendered. Cixous's exquisitely poetic prose has also never been put to a more harrowing test of its inventive capacities. Key Features The first translation into English Primary text by a celebrated French author and intellectual Extraordinary account of the experience of death and coping with bereavement

These interviews with H?l?ne Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, "White Ink" collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous's critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

The interviews in "White Ink" span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book's editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, "French feminist theorist." Sellers organizes "White Ink" in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous's commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in "White Ink" provide an excellent introduction this thinker's brave and vital work--each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous's intellectual and poetic force.

This major new collection of texts by Helene Cixous brings together a range of important untranslated as well as four previously unpublished essays. These essays deal with literature, politics, history, Algeria, and the university and include works from Cixous' most significant contributions to literary criticism (Joyce, Kleist, Stendhal, Kafka, Shakespeare) as well as her contemporary writing on human rights and geo-politics. They are all informed by Cixous' unique gift for combining a writer's love of idiom and life with a scholar's acute deconstructive reading. These texts present an extended account of what Cixous calls here 'autobibliography' in which writing, theory, politics and life combine to open up the world through critical reading and self-reflection. 'I am on the side of life', says Cixous. These essays affirm Cixous' reputation as one of our greatest readers and sources of critical light in the world today. Key Features *Author is a leading French theorist and writer *Essays cover a wide range of topics and contemporary issues

No contemporary French feminist has made a bigger impact in America than Helene Cixous. Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the University of Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive.

Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam.

Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues.

First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.