Stigmata: Escaping Texts

Stigmata brings together Helene Cixous's most recent essays for the first time in any language. It is a collection of texts that get away–escaping the reader, the writers, the book–by one of the greatest authors and intellectuals of our times.

Signifying through a tissue of philosophical metaphor, poetic power, critical insight and disarming lightness, Cixous's writing is taken up in a reading pursuit, chasing across borders and through languages on the heels of works by authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, Lispector, Tsvetayeva, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso–works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences.

Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have long been circulating in the Cixousian universe: love's labours lost and found, feminine hours, autobiographies of writing, animal-human family ties, the prehistory of the work of art… woven into a performance of writing at the intersection of contemporary Western history and a singularity named Helene Cixous.

Evoking her writing "origins", the economy of a departure from Algeria (so as) never to arrive, and the psychomythical events that are engraved as fertile wounds into the body's many bodies, this book is an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.