Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive

by Jacques Derrida, Beverley Bie Brahic

Overview

Jacques Derrida argues that the feminist and intellectual Hélène Cixous is the most important writer working within the French idiom today. To prove this, he elucidates the epistemological and historical interconnectedness of four terms: genesis, genealogy, genre, and genius, and how they pertain to or are implicated in Cixous's work.

Derrida explores Cixous's genius (a masculine term in French, he is quick to point out) and the inspiration that guides and informs her writing. He marvels at her skillful working within multiple genres. He focuses on a number of her works, including her extraordinary novel Manhattan and her lyrical and evocative Dream I Tell You, a book addressed to Derrida himself and one in which Cixous presents a series of her dreams. Derrida also delves into the nature of the literary archive, the production of literature, and the importance of the poetic and sexual difference to the entirety of his own work.

For forty years, Derrida had a close personal and intellectual relationship with Hélène Cixous. Clever, playful, and eloquent, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius charts the influence these two critical giants had on each other and is the most vital work to address Cixous's contribution to French thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231139793
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/28/2008
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and influential philosophers. He was director d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Among the most recent of his many books to be translated into English are Eyes of the University; Rogues: Two Essays on Reason; and On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a translator and poet living in Paris.

What People are Saying About This

Kevin Newmark

For a reader well-versed in Jacques Derrida, as well as for the 'first-time' reader, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius offers an exhilarating encounter with the ways in which literature necessarily implies, albeit by problematizing them, some of our most compelling philosophical, political, juridical, and historical determinations. It is, yet again, an inimitable demonstration of Derrida's unique genius: his seemingly endless capacity to do justice simultaneously to the impossibly distinctive demands of philosophy and literature.

— Kevin Newmark, associate professor of French, Boston College

Julian Wolfreys

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius is a work of genius, about genius, about a genie, a feminine spirit who haunts a masculine genius. It is a work about the gift, about givenness, about the givenness of being and what Hélène Cixous gives, and what is given in the name of Cixous; that is to say, a certain otherwise unnamable, absolutely singular arrival that never stops arriving and to which Derrida bears witness here.

— Julian Wolfreys, professor of English, University of Florida

Editorial Reviews

No one has performed more learned yet more innocent pirouettes around words, letters, no one has ever managed to get French more joyously drunk, giving philosophy the full measure of its greatness once and for all, its tragic, its comic spell.

on Jacques Derrida - Helene Cixous

This book is a record of a talk philosopher Derrida (1930-2004) gave in 2003 at a symposium installing an archive of the work of feminist and intellectual H l ne Cixous-her letters, notebooks, dream texts, novels, and plays-in the French National Library. Derrida is well known for having developed the philosophical concept of deconstruction, a method for analyzing and understanding texts. Appropriately, he uses deconstruction here in dealing with central ideas in Cixous's corpus, concentrating on the four terms in the title. His analyses of these concepts go on and on as he picks apart in detail the various meanings and implications of each. There are two major problems with this approach: first, the original text was in French, with, as translator Brahic notes, Derrida's "parataxis, fragments, double negatives, asides, afterthoughts and digressions"; and second, the disjointed yet idiomatic French must be rendered in understandable and idiomatic English. The result is very tough-going and may well be off-putting for all but the very dedicated and committed. Nevertheless, Derrida's importance in the academic world makes this an essential purchase for most academic collections in philosophy and literature.-Leon H. Brody, Falls Church, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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