Love Itself: In the Letter Box - Hardcover

Cixous, Hélène

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745639887 ISBN 13: 9780745639888

Publisher: Polity, 2008

Synopsis

Love's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous's writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous's narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l'amour meme, l'amour m'aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

About this title

About the Author

Hélène Cixous is one of the world's leading writers. She is the founder and former director of the Centre de Recherche en Études Fémininesat the Université de Paris VIII.

Review

"A rarefied examination of love, passion and the intermittences of the heart, beautifully translated by Peggy Kamuf."
Times Literary Supplement

"Hélène Cixous is today the greatest writer in what I shall call, if I may, my language, French. And I weigh my words in saying this. For a very great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet."
Jacques Derrida

"A profoundly intense, individual and brilliant piece of work."
David Marx Book Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0745639887
• ISBN 13: 9780745639888
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148