The Book I Do Not Write

Hélène Cixous

October, 2009
Cloth, 272 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-3903-8
Edinburgh University Press
$90.00

This major new collection of texts by Hélène Cixous brings together a range of important untranslated and previously unpublished essays. Cixous addresses literature, politics, history, Algeria, and the university, and shares her influential critiques of such authors as Joyce, Kleist, Stendhal, Kafka, and Shakespeare, as well as her contemporary writing on human rights and geo-politics. All essays are informed by Cixous's unique gift for combining a writer's love of idiom and life with a scholar's acute deconstructive eye. Her work constitutes an extended account of what Cixous calls "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," writes Cixous. These essays affirm the intellectual's reputation as one of our greatest readers and sources of critique.

Related Subjects

• Continental/Feminist Philosophy

About the Author

Hélène Cixous is professor of literature at the Université Paris VIII. One of today’s most important writers and theorists, her recent publications in English include Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, White Ink and Hélène Cixous: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics, and The Writing Notebooks.

top of page