Research Catalog

Title

Love itself in the letter box / by Hélène Cixous ; translated by Peggy Kamuf.

Author

Cixous, Hélène, 1937-

Publication

Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity, c2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

142 p.; 22 cm.

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"--Publisher description.

Uniform Title

Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres. English

Alternative Title

• Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres.
• Love itself

Subjects

• Translations
• Love

Genre/Form

Translations

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Language (note)

• Translated from the French.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

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 -- Notebook Life -- Faithfully Forever -- When I Become a Frenetic Keeper -- On February 12th I Committed an Error.

ISBN

• 0745639887 (hbk.)
• 9780745639888 (hbk.)
• 0745639895 (pbk.)
• 9780745639895 (pbk.)

OCLC

• 214307521
• SCSB-11854031

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library