Hélène Cixous - Volleys of Humanity

Volleys of Humanity

The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer

Timothy Clark

Dream I Tell You

Hlne Cixous

Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius

Jacques Derrida

Insister of Jacques Derrida

Hlne Cixous

Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida

Geoffrey Bennington

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art

Robert Rowland Smith

Of Jews and Animals

Andrew Benjamin

Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces

Derek Attridge

To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida

Peggy Kamuf

Volleys of Humanity: Essays 19722009

Hlne Cixous

Veering: A Theory of Literature

Nicholas Royle

The Post-Romantic Predicament

Paul de Man

The Paul de Man Notebooks

Paul de Man

Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at www.euppublishing.com/series/tfot

Volleys of Humanity

Essays 19722009

Hlne Cixous

Edited by Eric Prenowitz

Edinburgh University Press

Hlne Cixous, 2011

Editorial material and arrangement, Eric Prenowitz, 2011

Translations, the translators, as listed

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 3903 8 (hardback)

The right of Hlne Cixous
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Sources

1. Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny)

French: La fiction et ses fantmes: Une lecture de lUnheimliche de Freud, Potique (vol. 10), 1972, pp. 199216. Reprinted in Hlne Cixous, Prnoms de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp. 1338.

English: New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3, Thinking in the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, Spring 1976, pp. 52548, trans. Robert Denomm. Translation revised here by Eric Prenowitz. Copyright 1976 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission.

2. The Character of Character

French: A version of subsections IIIV appeared in Hlne Cixous, Prnoms de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp. 10621.

English: New Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 2, Winter 1974, pp. 383 402, trans. Keith Cohen. Copyright 1974 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission.

3. Missexuality: Where Come I Play?

French: La Missexualit, o jouis-je?, Potique (no. 26), 1976, pp. 240249. Reprinted in Hlne Cixous,Entre lcriture (Paris: Des femmes, 1986), pp. 7395.

English: published for the first time in this volume, trans. Laurent Milesi.

4. The Pleasure Reinciple or Paradox Lost

French: Freincipe de plaisir ou Paradoxe perdu, Le temps de la rflexion (vol. 4), October 1983, pp. 427433. Reprinted in Hlne Cixous,Entre lcriture (Paris: Des femmes, 1986), pp. 97112.

English: published for the first time in this volume, trans. Laurent Milesi.

5. Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman

French: unpublished.

English: first delivered at Portland State University in 1984. Published in New Literary History, Vol. 19, No. 1, Feminist Directions, Autumn 1987, pp. 121, trans. Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell. Copyright 1987 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission.

6. Letter to Zohra Drif

French: Lettre Zohra Drif was delivered at the conference Hlne Cixous, croises d'une uvre, Cerisy-La-Salle, 30 June 1998. Published in a bilingual version (FrenchItalian) in Leggendaria (Rome, Italy), 14, April 1999, pp. 49.

English: Parallax, Issue 7 (Vol. 4, No. 2), 1998, pp. 189196, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis).

7. The Names of Oran

French: Les Noms d'Oran, in Le Sphinx (Revue de l'Association Franco-Hellnique de Psychiatrie, Psychologie et Psychanalyse), No. 4 (Athens: Electronikes Technes, November 2000, D'une langue l'autre), pp. 2331. Reprinted in Langues et Linguistique (Fes, Morocco), No. 9, 2002 (Langues et Genre dans le Monde Arabe), pp. 110.

English: Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (ed.), Algeria in Others Languages (New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 184194, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Copyright 2002 by Cornell University. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Cornell University Press).

8. The Book as One of Its Own Characters

French: excerpts were published as Le livre personnage du livre, Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, No. 16, Lvnement + Penser la guerre, April 2002. The full text, in a version very slightly different from the one translated here, was published in Hlne Cixous, L'amour du loup et autres remords (Paris: Galile, 2003), pp. 10780.

English: New Literary History, Vol. 33, No. 3, 2002, pp. 403434, trans. Catherine Porter. Copyright 2002 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted by permission.

9. How Not to Speak of Algeria

French: unpublished.

English: a version of this essay was delivered at Narrating and Imagining the Nation: Gender, Sexuality and the Nation, SOAS, UCL, June 2002. Published for the first time in this volume, trans. Eric Prenowitz.

10. The Oklahoma Nature Theater Is Recruiting

French: Autodaf (Paris: Denol) (Vol. 34), 2003, pp. 7594.

English: Autodafe (New York: Seven Stories Press) (Vol. 34), 2003, pp. 6378, trans. Jane Metter. Translation revised here by Eric Prenowitz. Reprinted by permission.

11. The Book I Don't Write

French: Le Livre que je ncris pas, delivered at the conference Genses, Gnalogies, Genres: Autour de luvre d'Hlne Cixous held at the Bibliothque Nationale de France in May 2003. The text was published in Mireille Calle-Gruber and Marie Odile Germain (eds), Genses, Gnalogies, Genres: Autour de luvre d'Hlne Cixous (Paris: Galile/Bibliothque Nationale de France, 2006), pp. 22963.

English: Parallax, Issue 44 (Vol. 13, No. 3), 2007, pp. 930, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis).

12. The Unforeseeable

French: Petit imprvisible, delivered at the 9th conference of the association Psychanalyse et Recherches Universitaires (L'imprvisible), Hpital Sainte-Anne, Paris, 24 January 2004; unpublished in French.

English: Oxford Literary Review (Vol. 26), 2004, pp. 173195, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. Reprinted by permission.

13. Passion Michel Foucault

French: A slightly different version of this text was delivered at the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, Paris, 27 November 2004. It was published, along with the ensuing discussion, in Roger Chartier and Didier Eribon (eds),