Helene Cixous - Tumblr Posts
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts
“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else I’m 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 there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be 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.”
— Helene Cixous, “The Love of the Wolf” (via fleurishes)
The dissection of a madwoman, pictured by Notari, speaks of the effort to make female mental illness a medical issue. Throughout the nineteenth century, pathological anatomy attempts an inquiry into the female malady to map out a distribution of symptoms. However, madness confronts anatomy like a sphinx and falls into the blanks of dialectics of the visible/invisible. As this peculiar malady cannot be localized in any particular spot, it ultimately escapes anatomical exploration. Hysteria is malum sine materia: evidence of it lies only in the spectacle of its symptoms, in the bodily catastrophe enacted as mise-en-scene. Grounded in a process of representation, acting out fantasies translated into motion or lack of motion, the female malady escapes actual anatomical analysis but ends up anatomized by the photographic apparatus. St the turn of the century the pathology of insanity was made visible, locatable, by the dispositif of mechanical reproduction. Photography became instrumental in the construction of a clinical physiognomy of insanity. Furthermore, both the photographic and the filmic camera were essential tools in the analysis of hysteria and its grounding in a theory of mimesis. Enacted as a visual mise-en-scene of bodily configurations, directed by a doctor, hysteria, performed for a camera and a public, exhibits a libido spectandi, a crossing of voyeurism and fetishism, which is not just a simulation but a fiction. This paradigm, inscribed in a proleptic representational movement, points to the scopic regime of the cinematic apparatus and its fictional mode. As Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement put it: “With… the cinema we have moved into the institutionalization of hysteria.” Documented as seen, the elusive female body could now be captured, framed, frozen and cut.
Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. (via batarde)
“You begin to adore a god that nobody else bows down to. A very powerful and very fragile god, very threatening and very threatened.”
— Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata; Love of the Wolf.
Random Collection of Essays, Poems, and Books
Clarice Lispector “Love” “One Day Less” Alejandra Pizarnik Excerpt from Diana’s Tree Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber Helene Cixous “Coming to Writing” Stigmata Alice Notley “Iphigenia” Julia Kristeva “On the Melancholic Imaginary” Excerpt from Black Sun The Kristeva Reader Franz Kafka Letters to Milena
Ingeborg Bachmann Collected Poems Simone Weil The First and Last Notebooks “The Iliad, of the Poem of Force” Velimir Khlebnikov Collected Works Vol I Vol II Vol III
Maggie Nelson The Argonauts Bluets
Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor “Against Interpretation”
Roland Barthes The Pleasure of Text Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Vol 1
Random Collection of Essays, Poems, and Books
Clarice Lispector “Love” “One Day Less” Alejandra Pizarnik Excerpt from Diana’s Tree Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber Helene Cixous “Coming to Writing” Stigmata Alice Notley “Iphigenia” Julia Kristeva “On the Melancholic Imaginary” Excerpt from Black Sun The Kristeva Reader Franz Kafka Letters to Milena
Ingeborg Bachmann Collected Poems Simone Weil The First and Last Notebooks “The Iliad, of the Poem of Force” Velimir Khlebnikov Collected Works Vol I Vol II Vol III
Maggie Nelson The Argonauts Bluets
Susan Sontag Illness as Metaphor “Against Interpretation”
Roland Barthes The Pleasure of Text Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time Vol 1
“She who looks with the look that recognises, that studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle restlessness, contemplates and reads, caresses, bathes, makes the other gleam. Brings back to light the life thats been buried, fugitive, made too prudent. Illuminates it and sings it its names.”
— Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays
“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 don’t 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.”
— Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing, from Coming to Writing and Other Essays (via intraducibile)
Hélène Cixous, from Poetry in painting: writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics
What I am giving you is nothing that belongs to me, Promethea. It is just yourself, you running through me throwing off sparks, your eyes blazing with fear, blazing with hope, I am giving you your own fire. All I do is breathe very gently on your night embers and handfuls of stars fly out.
- Hélène Cixous, "The Book of Promethea"
“And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great — that is for “great men”; and it’s “silly.” Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty — so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
— Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”