Promised Cities

As an author of fiction, a playwright, a professor, a theorist and a critic, Hélène Cixous (b. 1937 in Oran, Algeria) has been a central figure in the profound reassessment of prevailing intellectual paradigms that has swept through virtually every domain of the humanities since the 1960s. Cixous is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris 8, where she founded France's first Women's Studies doctoral program in 1974. Her seminar has been co-sponsored by the Collège International de Philosophie since 1984. She is also Honorary Professor at the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff. She has also been working since 1984 on several theater productions directed by Ariane Mnouchkine with "Le Théâtre du Soleil" in Vincennes.

She was one of the founding members of the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) in 1968, where she created the Doctorate in Women's Studies in 1974. After completing a thesis on James Joyce in 1968, she specialized in English literature. With Michel Foucault, she created the Group Information-Jail and worked with Jacques Derrida at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris.

Her books available in English translation include: The Third Body (Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, 1999), Firstdays of the Year (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Rootprints (London : Routledge, 1997), The Terrible but unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), The Name of Oedipus (University of Michigan Press, 1991), Stigmata (London : Routledge, 1998), The Exile of James Joyce (John Calder, 1976), and many others. Her most recent books include Veils (with Jacques Derrida; 2001), Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous (2003), Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2004), The Writing Notebooks of Hélène Cixous (2004/06), Dream I Tell You (2006), Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006) and The Day I Wasn't There (2006).

"If biography means the writing of (a) life, if it means life in writing, then all of Hélène Cixous' writing is biographical. Indeed doubly autobiographical: not just the writing of the self, an author's written account of her life, but life itself writing itself as it lives, such that the reader can never separate the written from the lived, the life written from the writing of life. Hélène Cixous' dates, for example, have all been fictionalized in her writing: even when they seem to correspond to dates in her personal history ("She was born in...," etc.), they have invariably been changed, transmuted into bits of text, poems, and offered up to dissemination. Her family history too, her father, her mother, her brother, her cats and dogs, her friend Jacques Derrida, even certain flowers, have all gained new lives in and as literature through her writing."

-- Eric Prenowitz

"[In this seminar and publication, Hélène Cixous] takes displacement and exile as points of departure in exploring the relation of art and literature to cities and their destruction. We can begin to read this meditation by remembering that cities are more than just habitats or geographical entities. They extend beyond networks of communication, commerce, sociality, or politics. Cities often exist in the form of memories and aspirations, and these cities are no less real despite their intangible nature. We always carry with us the memories of the cities that we have lived in or lost, abandoned or destroyed. These memories permit us to rebuild them from their ruins; we build new cities upon the memories of others."

-- Aaron Levy