Love Itself: In the Letter Box

by Hélène Cixous, Peggy Kamuf (Translator)

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.

Genres: Fiction, Feminism, Contemporary, Novels

148 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2005

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

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t say to you I’m terribly afraid of losing the most precious thing in the world (1) that you have forgotten you gave me (2) that you perhaps never gave me (3) that I possess alone and in secret (4) that I enjoy thanks to your phantom, what if I said it to you […] I was afraid you would confiscate this moment, so brief and frail, thanks to which I have lived a crowned life, my very sweet and very fine improbable glory. […] I said these cherished words that I’m not sure I did not dream and there is nothing left of them from now on except a withered breath expiring in the impermanent air. I lower my head, I look between my feet, all is nothing, I am dispossessed. […] You said nothing. You got up.
[...]
Now all the years that come will be afters and never-agains.

[Zoë · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not so much a novel, but a breaking free from that genre. It seems to mingle memoir, philosophy and poetry. When reading this kind of text by Cixous, I find that I have to simply read and see which comments appeal the most to me: wait for the maxims that strike a chord for me. In this way, it is rather like reading poetry - feeling that you are not quite understanding everything, yet slowly accumulating meaning almost in an unconscious way.

[Amy Stretch-parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

possibly the best book I've ever read