White Ink

by Hélène Cixous, Susan Sellers

Helene Cixous is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential feminist writers and thinkers. "White Ink" brings together her most revealing interviews, available in English for the first time. Spanning over four decades and including a new interview with the editor Susan Sellers, this collection presents a brilliant, running commentary on the subjects at the heart of Cixous' writing. Here, Cixous discusses her books and her creative process, her views on and insights into literature, philosophy, theatre, politics, aesthetics, faith and ethics, human relations and the state of the world.As she responds to interviewers' questions, Cixous is prompted to reflect on her roles and activities as poet, playwright, feminist theorist, professor of literature, philosopher, woman, Jew. Each interview is a remarkable performance, an event in language and thought where Cixous' celebrated intellectual and poetic force can be witnessed 'in action'. The accessibility of the interview format provides an excellent starting-point for readers new to Cixous, while those already familiar with her work will find unexpected insights and fresh elucidations of her thought.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Feminist Theory

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[Jonfaith]

I have always played with God. For me, the signifier Dieu, as I have always said, is the synonym of what goes beyond us, of our own projection towards the future, towards infinity.

White Ink is a collection of interviews culled from over 20 years. Despite the interest of my coworkers in the subtitle - Interviews on sex, text and politics - there is little reflection on the erotic or libidinal. Cixous has become nearly a necessity for me as of late. Her thoughts spiral and glisten. There is an abundance of strange poetry in these theoretical sorties. It is dreamish and incisingly cerebral. Shakespeare and Joyce are partitioned and ruminated upon. I revel in such.

Today was the Champions League Final in Berlin and it was an excellent match. It also marks the end of the football season as well as a forthcoming long hot summer of nervous twitching. Just after the final whistle, I read the text's penultimate exchange between Cixous and longtime counterpart Jacques Derrida. I nearly swooned: where's my hankie, I purred? Perhaps the season won't be as interminable as I feared.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Cixous hits just beautifully I need more of her in my life and thankfully she's written hundreds of everything - Wikipedia claims 'twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays' but that doesn't seem to include more dedicated theoretical Books nor her novels nor her multiple autobiographies. This is a highly astute selection of interviews with HC from Susan Sellers across decades and, as one would expect from her bibliography, a grotesquely huge variety of topics. delicious

The dialogue with Foucault in here is v funny since he comes across rather relaxed & admits to have not seen a variety of Duras' films - the objects of discussion. The Derrida trialogue is beautifully sweet and also works wonders as an intro to Derrida, unexpectedly. Still probably the most demanding of the pieces but much love this is a recommend post-Medusa

[Josephine Ensign]

A lovely and thought-provoking collection of interviews, with titles such as "When I do not write, it is as if I had died." One of my favorite quotes of Cixous' in the book is, "If a writer is drawn to power it is because he is not, or is no longer, in love with writing."

[Basma Abdallah Uraiqat]

Fantastic and inspiring book!

This is my first encounter with Helen Cixous and it is a pleasant one. Although I had never read any of her novels or text before, this was a great introduction to her thought and to what really forms her work. From it I was able to explore some of her texts and understand the true Cixous behind the works.

This is a book for all those who love to consume and produce texts as in it she speaks with passion and complete transparency. I highly recommend it also for women writers and creatives as she shines with a contagious confidence.

[Zoë]

This collection of interview offers an alternative route to encountering Cixous's theories about language and gender. There are also some interesting dialogues at the back between Cixous and Foucault, as well as Cixous and Derrida.

[M.]

At first I was intrigued by the possible insights of a writer, but then it is filled with the postmodern commonplaces, the discussion of femininity and masculinity from a purely psychological standpoint. Yawned and it took forever to finish

[Artemide]

From the first book I read by Hélène Cixous— “Veils”—her language paralyzed me with its synthesis of mythology, dream, thirst, unlike any other voice. This trail of interviews speaks of politics, literature, family, feminism. Even in interviews the voice of Hélène Cixous comes forth as a dream. A heterogenous, sea-like voice.

For her, she says, “writing is the breath, the respiration, it is a necessity as imperious as the need to wake up, to touch, to eat, to kiss, to progress. When I do not write, it is as if I had died.”

Cixous' does not quite differentiate literature from a breath, as is the case of a number of great authors - a quality which, I believe, intensifies a book, makes it open and present, but also more vulnerable. How weary a task—how nearly impossible—to make a text dynamic. Yet here is a voice, a kind of sea, in Cixous' texts, alive and telling.

[Marta]

Helene Cixous is so thought provoking. Its great.