Hélène Cixous. Secret cities

Seminar

Hélène Cixous is one of the best-known contemporary French writers and thinkers and has a huge influence within the world of postmodernism and gender studies. Born in Oran (Algiers) to a Sephardic Jewish family, she experienced the exclusion and the anti-Semitism of colonial Algiers which drove her to reject any fixed identifier (be it "woman", "jew", or "feminist"), though that has not stopped her from reflecting on the meaning of those identities and dedicating herself politically to a variety of causes related to them.

Since the end of the 1960s, Cixous has published more than sixty books of essay, fiction and theatre, questioning the borders that exist between those genres. Her famous essay The Laugh of the Medusa is a fundamental work of feminist theory. It is also one of the one of the principal theories of the differences that exist between the sexes and the creator of the first research center in that field in Europe (Centre d'Études Féminines, Université de paris 8. Vincennes). Jacques Derrida, one of her most illustrious commentators, has dedicated many texts that explain the complicity between their thoughts and theories.

In preparation for the seminar, we recommend you read the following: Manhattan (Paris: Galilée, 2002), Sa(v) (Velos. Mexico: SigloXXI, 2001), Las ensoñaciones de la mujer salvaje (Madrid: Horas y horas, 2003), El Gran Teatro de Oklahoma contrata (Autodafé, nº 3⁄4. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003) and A Barcelona somiant Barcelona (Rels. Revista d'idees i cultura, nº 5, spring 2005) y Ver con Hélène Cixous (Barcelona: Icaria, 2006).