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Philippines
Philippines is Hélène Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.
- GenresFranceLiterature
244 pages, Hardcover
First published January 22, 2009
2 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Hélène Cixous
197 books877 followersHélène 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 11, 2011
Last night, my wife and I brought my 16-y/o daughter to the hospital. When we picked her up late in the afternoon from her weekend leadership training at school, she was crying as she could not move her right shoulder. She had an accident in the obstacle course. I drove us right away to St. Luke’s QC.
Since the emergency room only allowed 1 companion per patient, I had no choice but to wait for them outside. After I parked the car, I sat down on one of the chairs in front of the ER. I waited for 4 hours communicating only via text with my wife. During the full duration of the ordeal, I saw patients and their relatives being rushed to the hospital. Patients asleep, grimacing in pain or staring blankly while on stretchers or wheel chairs. Their relatives donned the worried, the frantic and the sad faces while their hands were full of bags, blankets, thermos bottle, etc. Do you remember the opening airport scene in the 2003 movie Love Actually? This experience was the complete opposite. The people in each frame in my mind were completely sad. At the airport, people are either sad or happy. Sad to part ways. Happy to see each other again. In front of the emergency room, arriving people are only sad. There is only one reason: the possibility of losing.
Very much like this book amusingly entitled Philippines by the professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician (whew!) the Helene Cixous (born 1937). This is a thin slim and densely printed book and supposedly good for a few hours of reading but… intensive, full concentration reading. They say that reading is like connecting and getting into the mind of the writer. If this is true, I liked what I saw inside her brain. I was glad I got connected into it. It’s like having a glimpse into the mind of a genius. Spectacular nothing-compares-to-it experience. Where was I that I did not come to know about Cixous all these years?
Her prose is like a brilliant professor delivering her innermost thoughts to you. When she talks, you listen. It is not about getting an A but you know that you will bring those stuffs with you many years after stepping out from the school’s gate. When she talks about Philippines and her thoughts about Sigmund Freud (and his favorite childhood book being Kipling’s The Jungle Book), her favorite “secret” book – George de Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson and Jacques Derrida and his theory on telepathy, you pay attention, you read each word and you digest what she’s saying. Her words are profound and insightful. You don’t know where she’s heading at but you are compelled to follow and know more. Example is this opening lines of the book:
When we arrived at the hospital, the security guard at the entrance of the ER opened the door of our car. He asked me who, among the three of us, was the patient. I froze. Few seconds. Then I pointed to my daughter who was sitting next to me on the front seats. For awhile, it did not make sense. Every parent knows this. We rather spare our kids from pain and it would make more sense if we are the ones suffering.
Same as what I see in the faces of the arriving people. Sad. They think about losing. Are they forgetting hope?
Just like Philippines and I think now I am not referring only to this book. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper and freeze to reflect and to understand. Some things don’t make sense but they are just the facts of life.
Since the emergency room only allowed 1 companion per patient, I had no choice but to wait for them outside. After I parked the car, I sat down on one of the chairs in front of the ER. I waited for 4 hours communicating only via text with my wife. During the full duration of the ordeal, I saw patients and their relatives being rushed to the hospital. Patients asleep, grimacing in pain or staring blankly while on stretchers or wheel chairs. Their relatives donned the worried, the frantic and the sad faces while their hands were full of bags, blankets, thermos bottle, etc. Do you remember the opening airport scene in the 2003 movie Love Actually? This experience was the complete opposite. The people in each frame in my mind were completely sad. At the airport, people are either sad or happy. Sad to part ways. Happy to see each other again. In front of the emergency room, arriving people are only sad. There is only one reason: the possibility of losing.
Very much like this book amusingly entitled Philippines by the professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician (whew!) the Helene Cixous (born 1937). This is a thin slim and densely printed book and supposedly good for a few hours of reading but… intensive, full concentration reading. They say that reading is like connecting and getting into the mind of the writer. If this is true, I liked what I saw inside her brain. I was glad I got connected into it. It’s like having a glimpse into the mind of a genius. Spectacular nothing-compares-to-it experience. Where was I that I did not come to know about Cixous all these years?
Her prose is like a brilliant professor delivering her innermost thoughts to you. When she talks, you listen. It is not about getting an A but you know that you will bring those stuffs with you many years after stepping out from the school’s gate. When she talks about Philippines and her thoughts about Sigmund Freud (and his favorite childhood book being Kipling’s The Jungle Book), her favorite “secret” book – George de Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson and Jacques Derrida and his theory on telepathy, you pay attention, you read each word and you digest what she’s saying. Her words are profound and insightful. You don’t know where she’s heading at but you are compelled to follow and know more. Example is this opening lines of the book:
”"Every one of us has a secret book. It is a cherished book. It is not beautiful. Not great. Not so well written. We don't care. For it is goodness itself for us. The absolute friend."It almost did not make sense to me but I remembered Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince (1943), my favorite children’s book. Then I just could not help myself but agree. There is something, I cannot clearly explain what it is; in that book that I really like so that it remains among my favorite books ever list.
When we arrived at the hospital, the security guard at the entrance of the ER opened the door of our car. He asked me who, among the three of us, was the patient. I froze. Few seconds. Then I pointed to my daughter who was sitting next to me on the front seats. For awhile, it did not make sense. Every parent knows this. We rather spare our kids from pain and it would make more sense if we are the ones suffering.
Same as what I see in the faces of the arriving people. Sad. They think about losing. Are they forgetting hope?
Just like Philippines and I think now I am not referring only to this book. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper and freeze to reflect and to understand. Some things don’t make sense but they are just the facts of life.
July 19, 2013
What at first seemed like an essay about Cixous's first loves in literature turned out to be a complex network of remembrances/allusions about her concept of the Philippine (i.e., twin almonds -- which reminded me of her thoughts on William Wilson in Ourang-Outang), reincarnation, gates, gardens, telepathy, etc. Even though I really liked it, I don't feel like I gave this the reading it deserved. But the reading it deserved would have required:
a. reading Peter Ibbetson by George du Maurier
b. reading Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen
c. reading all of Freud
d. reading all of Proust
e. everything else by Cixous
f. learning French and reading this book in its original language (the translator tried to convey the dizzying level of punning and wordplay going on here using footnotes and original french words in parenthesis, but it only served to remind me how little of the real experience I was getting)
a. reading Peter Ibbetson by George du Maurier
b. reading Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen
c. reading all of Freud
d. reading all of Proust
e. everything else by Cixous
f. learning French and reading this book in its original language (the translator tried to convey the dizzying level of punning and wordplay going on here using footnotes and original french words in parenthesis, but it only served to remind me how little of the real experience I was getting)
Well, I am saying it to you today, if you want to go further on the narrow path which leads to discovery, you must lose your head, yes, there's a head which must be lost, the head that knows, that is to say, that thinks it knows, too fast, the one Proust denounces and runs away from, this intelligence head which prevents the sensation from finding its name and the trees with arms stretched out entreatingly from resurrecting. For it is the ones who believe they know who are truly credulous, the believers, the arrived, the immobile. Whereas those who are on a walk and do not know, and are tempted by the sirens of oblivion and of memory, and scrutinize the piece of green curtain hung in front of the broken glass screen, wondering what is happening to them, those come near the point of apocalypse. An intoxication whispers to them it is going to take place, it is going to take place... The times are near. As follows: the prisons crumble. The gates throw their bars wide open.
February 18, 2026
"I am writing all this telepathically with Aletheia my magic cat. She mimes everything I think at the very moment. While with a beating heart I sink deeper into the sublime path leading to the Dreaming True, I can see her truedreaming with a beating heart and quivering nostrils by my side, she never stopped looking at me in the eyes I was still holding the hand, she was squeezing my hand in hers, and felt the warmth of it through her white fur glove. We were in the same dream."
(pg. 65)
(pg. 65)
January 21, 2022
Every one of us has a secret book. It is a cherished book. It is not beautiful. Not great. Not so well written. We don't care. For it is goodness itself for us. The absolute friend. It promises and lives up to what it promises. We forget it but it never forgets us. It knows everything about us but it does not know it knows.
- Author's Note, pg. ix
- Author's Note, pg. ix
September 9, 2024
A slim volume, but ranging across a diverse array of fixations, including telepathy, dreams, gates, gardens, and Peter Ibbetson.
November 18, 2015
Lucid and eloquent. Helene Cixous brings he skill as a literary theoretician to the creation of a fiction where the borders between dream and ‘reality’ are presented as something more porous and permeable than we might ordinary think. The window ‘pane’ that separates dream and reality is what ‘pains’ us. The ‘page’ and what’s written on it constitutes the ‘pane’ and causes the ‘pain’. In Cixous’ novel pain is a prison. One at times figured as a man: Peter Ibbetson or PeteRIbbetSON or in words themselves — our signs, those ‘half-loving half-words.’ Yet, we’re forced to ask: are signs never swans on the waters surface? We know them as signs, we have our desires and are inescapably attached to them both — in one way or another, but is this indeterminably the case forever?
For Cixous, the situation is presented as something heartrendingly impossible yet the possible somehow remains. For every situation we’d need to say there is a beginning. Take her desire to return to her dead father. A tortuous desire. We read, ‘I want to pass into the side of trees which stretch out to me the passionate, powerless arms of my father leaving us, which I stretched out, o powerful powerlessness, to my father while the distance resounded increasingly strongly between us.’ The trees here speak, in a way, but it is she who has attributed the words. In them she searches for her departed father, but can’t find words enough to broach the divide that the words created. No words it seems can ever do so.
But how to free ourselves from this prison? For Cixous it is possible through fiction and particularly in and through a fiction that figures as an exploration of the minds, thoughts and philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust. Of particular concern to her, is the idea of telepathy. A concern that was shared by both Derrida and Freud and explored in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time with its impossible narrative points of view and dream-like vision.
The idea of telepathy is to say that there is some part of ourselves, which are ‘simultaneously outside and inside; communicated and secret: shared and yet always enigmatic.’ It is a shared medium of unconscious interconnectivity that explodes our subjectivity — which our words and their expression and representation of ourselves and worlds are the cornerstone of. Cixuous delineates what is and is not possible in words in order for that which is delineated to be overcome.
What threw me at first is the idea that telepathy should indicate a kind of thought transference, that is the occult, to be able to mind read, but rather Freud is concerned with the idea that ‘telepathy’ is a level of unconscious interconnectivity that binds us all together. The unconscious is must be stressed, is not something that can ever be known as such.
Cixous acknowledges Frued’s understanding but builds on it. It is not simply an oedipal complex of suppressed desires that is to be determined by the reading of peoples dreams, it is, rather, the basis of the dreamlike quality of our entire existence.
Freud’s idea is quite extraordinary because if we are to accept the notion of telepathy it must follow that we depart from any singular and coherent idea of the psyche as one centred on the individual. Rather, an understanding would require a much messier conception whereby our ‘telepathic’ selves are open to the vicissitudes of other subjects, objects and trajectories.’ We would need to say that we do not think in the places where we think we think: thought is distributed, spatially, in and beyond the body, and over distance. This is thought that can’t be defined, but that guides us.
To escape the prisons that these contribute to it seems only by averting to a childlike or animal state of existence; pre-lingual or other than human. Derrida considers one such possibility when he explores that ‘strange moment’ when, ‘before even wanting it or knowing it myself, I am passively presented to… [a cat] as naked, I am seen and seen naked, before even seeing myself seen by it’. Derrida, naked before it, summarises: ‘thinking perhaps begins there.’ But as Derrida here, explores the idea of subjectivity as entirely constituted in an animal or individual it is necessary — for our purposes — to build on this idea further. I think to escape the prison and worlds that our words construct for us it is necessary to think in terms of the Deluzean notion of ‘becoming’ by which we are constantly becoming the beginning of new thoughts and selves constantly rebuilding the world that it is we surround ourselves in. It is to acknowledge the dreamlike quality of all that is established.
For Cixous, the situation is presented as something heartrendingly impossible yet the possible somehow remains. For every situation we’d need to say there is a beginning. Take her desire to return to her dead father. A tortuous desire. We read, ‘I want to pass into the side of trees which stretch out to me the passionate, powerless arms of my father leaving us, which I stretched out, o powerful powerlessness, to my father while the distance resounded increasingly strongly between us.’ The trees here speak, in a way, but it is she who has attributed the words. In them she searches for her departed father, but can’t find words enough to broach the divide that the words created. No words it seems can ever do so.
But how to free ourselves from this prison? For Cixous it is possible through fiction and particularly in and through a fiction that figures as an exploration of the minds, thoughts and philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust. Of particular concern to her, is the idea of telepathy. A concern that was shared by both Derrida and Freud and explored in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time with its impossible narrative points of view and dream-like vision.
The idea of telepathy is to say that there is some part of ourselves, which are ‘simultaneously outside and inside; communicated and secret: shared and yet always enigmatic.’ It is a shared medium of unconscious interconnectivity that explodes our subjectivity — which our words and their expression and representation of ourselves and worlds are the cornerstone of. Cixuous delineates what is and is not possible in words in order for that which is delineated to be overcome.
What threw me at first is the idea that telepathy should indicate a kind of thought transference, that is the occult, to be able to mind read, but rather Freud is concerned with the idea that ‘telepathy’ is a level of unconscious interconnectivity that binds us all together. The unconscious is must be stressed, is not something that can ever be known as such.
Cixous acknowledges Frued’s understanding but builds on it. It is not simply an oedipal complex of suppressed desires that is to be determined by the reading of peoples dreams, it is, rather, the basis of the dreamlike quality of our entire existence.
Freud’s idea is quite extraordinary because if we are to accept the notion of telepathy it must follow that we depart from any singular and coherent idea of the psyche as one centred on the individual. Rather, an understanding would require a much messier conception whereby our ‘telepathic’ selves are open to the vicissitudes of other subjects, objects and trajectories.’ We would need to say that we do not think in the places where we think we think: thought is distributed, spatially, in and beyond the body, and over distance. This is thought that can’t be defined, but that guides us.
To escape the prisons that these contribute to it seems only by averting to a childlike or animal state of existence; pre-lingual or other than human. Derrida considers one such possibility when he explores that ‘strange moment’ when, ‘before even wanting it or knowing it myself, I am passively presented to… [a cat] as naked, I am seen and seen naked, before even seeing myself seen by it’. Derrida, naked before it, summarises: ‘thinking perhaps begins there.’ But as Derrida here, explores the idea of subjectivity as entirely constituted in an animal or individual it is necessary — for our purposes — to build on this idea further. I think to escape the prison and worlds that our words construct for us it is necessary to think in terms of the Deluzean notion of ‘becoming’ by which we are constantly becoming the beginning of new thoughts and selves constantly rebuilding the world that it is we surround ourselves in. It is to acknowledge the dreamlike quality of all that is established.
February 5, 2017
Read for Advanced Critical Reading.
Having read Cixous before, I was really looking forward to coming back to her - particularly to a less theoretical and more memoir-esque work. Cixous' style is evocative and captures small instances of ideas, one after the other, building up a large collection of possibilities for a reader to discover. She's somewhat challenging to read, but I think after I go over this a couple of times I'll hopefully gain a better sense of her word-play, and what it is she is trying to capture.
Having read Cixous before, I was really looking forward to coming back to her - particularly to a less theoretical and more memoir-esque work. Cixous' style is evocative and captures small instances of ideas, one after the other, building up a large collection of possibilities for a reader to discover. She's somewhat challenging to read, but I think after I go over this a couple of times I'll hopefully gain a better sense of her word-play, and what it is she is trying to capture.
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