Stigmata: Escaping Texts by Hélène Cixous

Stigmata: Escaping Texts Reviews

• 
  Jonfaith

  Take the living instant with the closest and the most delicate words. Without words as witnesses the instant (will not have been) is not. I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of words.
  
  One suspects that Cixous and Derrida do not pen their essays for the neutral, or accidental reader. There is a certain expected level of prior reading facility which is expected or required. Unfortunately, when said essays are collected, the prior reading for such preparedness is cumulatively beyond the pale of most layman. Consider me one of the inept. Wait, Jon, are you talking about core requirements for anyone approaching these essays? Yes, yes I am. When I was child my younger sister couldn't pronounce the J sound and instead called me Non. I've been preoccupied ever since with the Void.
  
  Most of the early essays in the book were generally opaque, given that I wasn't well versed in the examined texts. The collection then pivoted to a more autobiographical bend. I do not write to keep. I write to feel. These works sift through childhood and family genealogy, fingering the filaments of ethnicity and ritual. Cixous shines in such artful movements: the gravity of the themes explored is warped (refracted) by the adroit play of language and homonym. Identity is forever splintered.
  
  What I kept away from, in keeping my name and my nose, was the temptation of disavowal.
• 
  Tamsin

  Writing is the study of options: as soon as you choose one option, you are presented with an array of others. It feels like following a thread in darkness, only you are creating the thread as you go: the thread of words you weave within the present moment. You dive into the present moment and come back up with the next piece. So that someone can see where you were. Words are like a trail of bread crumbs guiding us back to the Moment. But you have to choose which words to weave your thread with; there are so many ways to describe what Cixous calls “the eternal moment.”
  
  What Cixous does is she tries to document every option, every choice of words, every variation of the idea that is swarming her within this present moment. You see it from all sides. She refuses to make that final decision. She does not choose sides and often disagrees with herself. This way, you can see the present moment circling her, drowning her. And you can see from her words how she has chosen to navigate it, document it. Hélène Cixous shows us what writing is—the process that is hidden from us. She talks a lot about this. How the writing we see is always the aftermath of this moment of drowning, searching, resurfacing; how we only see what has remained of it, what made its way to the page. But she shows us how overwhelmed she is with this chase. She shows us writing in the present moment. And we see that it’s a lot like death.
  
  She shows us that writing is the impossible marriage between the Moment and the Word. And how one is always ahead of the other. Larger than the other. How the Word is devoted to being a mirror of something it can not properly capture. A mirror doomed to error. But Cixous reassures us that the transference between the two worlds of the Moment and the Word is where you find love, euphoria, the feeling of dying. Truth. Understanding in traveling, not in arriving.
• 
  emily

  The ones I like, I like way too much. The ones I didn't quite get were also very good; so cleverly written, and so beautifully composed (beginning to end). My favourite bit is undoubtedly, 'Love of the Wolf'. My copy of the book is full of underlines/highlights, and personal notes. I've never read anything quite like 'Stigmata'. It doesn't really fit into any specific 'genre'. Strange, but wonderful. Cixous is a legend; and I kind of want to read everything she's ever written.
  
  

  'One day, I don’t know when, it was decided to call love a set of strange, indescribable physical phenomena, is it pain? —but from the moment that the name is given to that burning in one’s breast, the violence of the strangeness is interrupted and the ancient horror, hidden behind the new word, begins to be forgotten. Let’s go back to before language, that’s what Tsvetaeva does, let’s go back to that disturbing age, the age of myths and of folktales, the age of stone, of fire, of knives. Before language there is the fire that bites but doesn’t kill, the evil that, like all pain, separates us, the dehiscence that opens in us closed organs, making us seem strange to ourselves—and all that begins with: ‘when you don’t say anything to anybody—that’s it—it’s love.’ It begins with the kept secret, with the silent separation from the rest of the world. You love yourself [on s’aime]: you sow [on sème]. You throw the others off track. You go underground. You leave the world in broad daylight. You betray it. You’re cheating. It’s a crime. It’s a kind of glory. Love abjures in order to adore. It burns in your breast and the world is burned.'

  
  
  Also, it makes me scream a little inside when she references/quotes Clarice Lispector!
• 
  Emily Morgan

  I will let Cixous tell you what it is like to read Cixous: "I sense that in each book words with roots hidden between the text come and go and carry out some other book between the lines. Suddenly I notice strange fruits in my garden."
  
  ---
  
  "I want the beforehand of the book...I want the forest before the book, the abundance of leaves before the pages."
  
  "What is this moment called when we suddenly recognise what we have never seen? And which gives us a joy like a wound?"
  
  "Now I know that one can weep continuously for thirteen years...who would have believed that we have so many tears?"
  
  "Why do we read books that make us weep? Undoubtedly because we never have, in reality, enough to lament."
  
  "all poems are doors"
  
  "And the poem or poet is the hope for this meeting with ourselves at the hour of our most intimate foreignness, at our last minute. And then?--Then."
  
  "We, we are always interiorly our secret age, our strong-age, our preferred age, the age when we were for the first time the historians or the authors of our own lives, when we left a trace, when we were for the first time marked, struck, imprinted, we bled and signed, memory started, when we manifested ourselves as chief or queen of our own state, when we took up our own power, or else we are twenty years old or thirty-five, and on the point of surprising the universe."
  
  "and if I quiver it's because I feel what I do not know."
  
  "because we are just big enough to cry for our dog, but never big enough to cry for our mother."
  
  "The great griefs come to us disguised, long after, as ghosts, when we believe them far removed, it is then they come, slip, unrecognisable, anguishing, in incomprehensible forms, changed into vertigo, into chest pains."
  
  "There is an outside in me."
  
  "I want to suffer and I don't manage."
  
  "The worst part of grief is the grief that doesn't let itself be suffered...(one can't even suffer one's suffering) one can't even eat the bread of suffering, and drink one's own tears...the worst part of mourning is that we must mourn grief. (One can't even enjoy one's own suffering.)...We are deprived of our pains."
  
  "I want ways of holding on to what surpasses me, of adding to myself a mother or other."
  
  "I don't know how to explain it scientifically, but the fact is that joy lasts limitlessly as long as it lasts."
  
  "I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words."
  
  "I must write, or else the world will not exist."
• 
  Kate Savage

  This is the most important book I have ever read.
  
  I read about her dog Fips on a plane leaving home, and wanted to shake the poor sap next to me and say LISTEN TO THIS DID YOU EVER HEAR SOMETHING THIS TRUE?
  
  That is the blessing of Cixous, but she comes with a burden. When you do share a line from her with a person you love, you have around a 1 in 10 chance that this person will feel the same way. A greater likelihood, as I've sadly found, is that you'll only make people feel confused and uncomfortable.
  
  This is not a normal book. In Cixous' own words:
  
  "this book gives itself the freedom to escape from the laws of society. It does not fit the description. It does not answer the signals. It does not get a visa.
  "For the the policeforce reader it seems to be an anarchic thing, an untamed beast. It incites the reflex to arrest. But the freedom my book gives itself is not insane. It exercises the right to invention, to research. We only search for what no one has yet found, but which exists nonetheless. We search for one land, we find another."
• 
  Dylan

  "All literature is scarry."
  
  This collection of “essays” (fugues? ruminations? critical-theoretical-partly-autobiographical experimentations?) is an essential introduction to the meta-fictional, critical writings of Cixous. Stigmata defies genre. It is a book obsessed with wounds, wound(ing), being seen, mothers, language, rhetoric, limited bodies, absences, grafts, slits, strikes, scars, and marks. Highly recommend.
  
  
• 
  Yvonne Rambeau

  Hélène Cixous is so brilliant and her maîtrise of language is astounding. Love her play on words and the ones that she weaves together, so matter-of-fact they might as well just already exist. There’s something almost instinctive about the way that she writes; it comes straight from the throat or the stomach, something buried deep being dug up & out.
  
  Annotated in abundance but here’s an excerpt I liked which perhaps conveys the feeling of reading it -
  “When I close my eyes the passage opens, the dark gorge, I descend. Or rather there is descent: I entrust myself to the primitive space, I do not resist the forces that carry me off. There is no more genre. I become a thing with pricked-up ears. Night becomes a verb. I night.”
• 
  Carrie Lorig

  bloodmagic.
• 
  Olivia Weaver

  “Ah! so that’s what was gripping my heart. This young woman is in the process of aging. The future is spreading through her limbs”
  
  Another 3.5 stars from me. This book made me feel empowered and provoked some nice internal conflicts for me but damn it took emotional and intellectual focus to get through this.
  
  ‘Love of the wolf’ & ‘Shared at dawn’ are tied for my favorite essays in the book. There is one thing Cixous talks about that really spoke to me though; this compulsion to feel sorry for bad people, especially men.
  “I’m very often caught in the act of being the mother of a son…I felt pity for someone for whom I have no pity. And I felt that it was this bizarre person in me, ‘mother of a son,’ who was moved to pity.”
  
  Above all else discussed in the book, this and the story of her cat and the dead bird struck me the most. My copy of this book is full of highlights & dog ears. I’m positive I will find myself referring back to this in the years to come
• 
  Peyton

  "Writing is the movement to return to where we haven’t been ‘in person’ but only in wounded flesh, in frightened animal, movement to go farther than far, and also, effort to go too far, to where I’m afraid to go, but where, if you give me your hand, I’ll endure going."
• 
  Konrad

  I admire Cixous & her style -- her practice of closing her eyes while writing, to muzz up the mark between outside & inside, to 'write at the pace of the present.' What better way to "wrest one's prey from forgetfulness" (194), than to speed on just as quickly. [Is her revision just as much a dash?] Lucidity may become a bit blurred at times, & the worst induces a vertigo familiar to much french lit. theory, but the general feeling reaches a cruising, pleasing littéraire buzz. & in such a style, avowing fault for the death of a dog never read so well.
• 
  LYS.

  "The wolf’s love for the lamb is such a renunciation, it’s a Christ-like love, it’s the wolf’s sacrifice—it’s a love that could never be requited." —Cixous, page 93
  
  actually 4.75 stars!
  
  my brain capacity is too small to follow this 100% but everything that i did understand made me scream into the ether. what the fuck. like HELLO??? my fav piece was definitely "the love of the lamb" but my copy is riddled with highlights so obviously i did like this an unhealthy amount
• 
  Daniela M

  "The poison is not hate, it is weak love. We were poisoned. I poisoned him." p.259. <3
• 
  Helen McClory

  So much stuff underlined and pondered. I love how Cixous assumes an intelligent reader (often wrongly in my case, but). Wandering and chancy and discoursive. Love.
• 
  Ella Frances

  Hélène is a very good writer. She writes in a way that captures the shock of action - enough to pull one towards animated images and scenes, mainly centred around galleries and observers. I admire her lack of a fixed narrative. Fixed narratives and I do not warm to one another. So, this work seemed, to me, to function as a graceful literary opening which allowed for words to speak freely, to be unchained from logic. Now, I am not saying logic does not abound here - this is a highly intelligent collection of essays - but rather, I am suggesting that Stigmata has a rare ability to express the contours and sensitivities of material, without acquiring that awfully dreary habit some writers have of stringently convincing readers to get somewhere or be someone else.
  
  She is very interested in the uncertain space lingering in paintings. A pull towards diaphanous things. Indirect passages. We do not share the same fascination with Rembrandt; though, I must admit, I did think her comments on his art were unusual. On the pursuit of drawing, she questions, ‘what are we trying to grasp between the lines, in between the strokes, in the net that we’re weaving, that we throw, and the dagger blows?’
  
  I have been so busy of late that I have barely had a moment to scratch the surface of a proper book, albeit a few words on Greek theatre. So, I am delighted to have come across a charming text such as this; witnessing her ideas play out on paper seems to have refuelled my love for collections of short essays.
• 
  june

  i got out clarice lispectored.
  
  devoured each chapter with how whimsical every essay becomes, or unbecomes in a weird mix of sentences that felt like incantations while bearing the same genius of the literary/philosophical scholar cixous is. i enjoyed the first chapter about rembrandt, then i got enamored with the love letter to literature w the latter parts (especially the ones with paragraphs of random lispector analysis), tho i did feel a little distant with the last chapter—i bit off more that I can chew, which is to say its finals weeks and i don’t think my mind is ready to indulge itself w these enchanting essays. will revisit this as soon as i can, maybe next week so I wont scare the librarians w my exceeding borrows.
• 
  Mamie Heldman

  This book is going to be one I refer to often and have annoyed nearly everyone in my life about all summer. The door and love of the wolf were among my favorite chapters. It was refreshing to ready multiple interpreters of Cixous within the same collection. A lot to chew off, but taking my time with this one went a long way. I’d like to read more of her references now, genet and joyce and derrida. This idea of departure as arrival is cemented forever and always amen.
• 
  The Book Addict

  "i urge you: bite me. sign my death with your teeth."
  
  T H O U G H T S:
  
  a collection of cixous' shorter texts and essays, brilliantly and brashly written, wandering and conjuring, compelling you to read and reread and draw out a tapestry of meaning.
• 
  Andy Cass

  Cixous is incredible. This is the first full work I've read by her, but now I'm eager to read more. The only essay I struggled to get through was "Mamae, Disse Ele". I usually read each essay once high and once sober, so if weed is your thing then I recommend that!
• 
  Steve Chisnell

  This is my first deeper-drive into the too-neglected Cixous, and I could not be more happy to (re)discover her here, uncomfortably settled into her subcortical reveries into language and self, into a series of unexpected revelations on politics and art, Joyce and childhood, theology and the richness of what lies beneath, suspiciously connecting it all. While "Laugh of the Medusa" may be the most anthologized of her works (and perhaps her most staunch), here one feels that the essays are compelled by her personal questions; and it is where they come up for air that we feel relief and a purchase on understanding.
  
  But Cixous rarely writes these meanings, of course, in summarized expositions. Instead, it is the process of connecting she makes betwixt and beneath, the language in the sub-ether, where we find (along with her, if we are lucky), the experience to take away.
  
  

  The force that makes me write, the always unexpected Messiah, the returning spirit or the spirit of returning--it is You.

  
  
  As thick as each of these essays fair (though some are quite readable stylistically), I only wished they could go on further. She left that task to the rest of us.
• 
  dormarch

  Chapter 2 and 6 were my favourite chapters. The essays we're entrancing and there are some lovely lines to take away that seem to hold a wisdom within themselves without needing the essay context.
  
  "Our mistakes are leaps in the night. Error is not lie: it is approximation. Sign that we are on track.
  And: To not become gloomy from not 'attaining' We don't lose anything by erring, to the contrary. The unhappy thing would be to believe we had found."
  - Ch. 2 Without end, no, state of drawingness, no, rather: the executioner's taking off
  
  
  "But happiness is when a real wolf suddenly reframes from eating us. The lamb's burst of laughter comes when it's about to be devoured, and then, at the last second, is not eaten. Hallelujah comes to mind. To have almost been eaten yet not to have been eaten: that is the triumph of life."
  - Ch.6 Love of the Wolf
• 
  joy彡

  j'ai lu ce livre en anglais et n'ai donc pas pu apprécier toute la richesse de l'écriture de cixous même si les traducteurices se sont efforcé.e.s de retranscrire certaines subtilités de sa langue.
  heureusement, ses textes ne perdent rien de son intelligence ; on sent la vacillation des mots, parfois saisissants et d'autres fois très élusifs, on lit chacun des essais en ayant l'impression d'être sur le fil, à bout de souffle, et en même temps complètement immergé.
  si je ne devais retenir qu'un texte, je dirais que ce serait hour of the wolf parce que je suis devenue très sensible à tout ce qui est languissement d'une autre personne, mais tous en valent la lecture !
• 
  Maja

  "Eat me up, my love, or else I am going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows that there is no greater proof of love than the other's appetite, who is dying to be eaten up yet scared to death by the idea of being eaten up, who says or doesn't say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won't eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth."
• 
  Arif K.

  8.4
  
  The wolf says to the child: I'm going to eat you up. Nothing tickles the child more. That's the mystery: why does the idea that you're going to eat me up, fill me with such pleasure and such terror? It's to get this pleasure that you need wolf. The wolf is truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude of ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment
  ― Love of the Wolf
• 
  gabrielė

  "And besides I have a particular affection for the present because it's the time of the theatre."
  
  -
  
  "Now we must flee on both feet or be devoured. It's comedy - or it's tragedy.
  We wouldn't miss this hour before the mouth and the teeth for anything."
  
  -
  
  "His true name? We will know on the last day, it's promised."
• 
  Rebecca

  beautiful, intriguing and poetic stream of thought. the translations are, at times, a bit stiff and i do wish a french copy was more accessible but i believe "stigmata" was originally published with such translations.
• 
  Chloe Deschamps

  who then can make for us cosmic flesh? The being who says: go ahead
  
  Impossible to define within any particular discipline but Cixous’ writing always reminds me of why I love literature and why I want to spend my life reading and writing about literature <3
• 
  j.

  love of the wolf is the most glorious piece of literature