Love Itself In the Letter Box

by Cixous, Hé; lène

• ISBN13: 9780745639895
• ISBN10: 0745639895
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-11
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature Chair, Department of Comparative Literature

Table of Contents

Olivier de Serres—A Single Passion, Two Witnesses

The Cauliflower of the Lautaret

The First Lucidity

One Time, Avenue de Choisy, Echo, My Love

First Letters

Faithfully Forever

When I Become a Frenetic Keeper

On February 12th I Committed an Error

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