First Days of the Year

by Hélène Cixous, Catherine A. F. Macgillivray (Translator)

An inner journey across space and time linking the "author" to other poets, this lyrical essay-poem continues Helene Cixous's rewriting of notions of boundary, self, other, and author. Cixous here interrogates the status of the author, connecting distant instances of herself with other writers who traverse genders, generations, and national boundaries. First Days of the Year is a celebration of beginnings and future possibilities, based on necessity and hope, constantly mediating writing and living, life and death. Like all of Cixous's profoundly original works, it seductively leads the reader into a new way of thinking by disrupting fixed ideas of psychic identity, subjectivity, and language.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, France, Literature, Feminism

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

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

[Benjamin de Boer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butoh Guide:

vessel maintains a hollow position

bones want dust
bones want dust

muscles pull forward
but bones want dust
to be still
collapse in a heap
motionless
tenseless

still
muscles
dust

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

swims around my brain; it's magical and confusing.
and a pigeon shat on the last page while I was reading this outside.

[Cory · Rating 3 out of 5]

"This is how we tell the truth, on the condition of not telling it." Hélène!!!

[ghreys · Rating 5 out of 5]

i deeply feel this is a book i will revisit again in many years
& weep about the same way i did reading it now

[Yalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a gift for writing so wonderfully, why not write a novel? It's disgraceful, to masturbate in this way. Just like when director's make films about making films.

[Jesse Farmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A swift current that finds the body stretching the bonds of language to their fullest extent. Begins before you start reading, continues on after the final page. Cixous in top form.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know yet how far the author will have to go in order to obey this book. Where are we going? (132)

I detest nostalgia, and I love its name so much. (157)

"Death," what a story! And to think we invented her, invented her so well we don't even know anymore that we are ourselves the authors of her stories. (172)

This is a ravenous book, out of breath, then fully oxygenated, a map with strange coordinates flowing like a river with rapids, and all trails are blazed. I can't say much about it because it is not "over," still happening, still on the verge of being impossible, still avoiding being demystified.

[Jake · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty much what one would imagine a French avant garde book to be like. Some interesting passages, but it felt pretty forced and pretentious.

[Amanda]

excellent, inspiring, well-crafted

[Jonathan Wichmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Helene Cixous's exploration of authorship.