Overview

Helene Cixous chronicles the last six months of her mother's life, transgressing the mother-daughter relation in the experience of dying Mother Homer is Dead was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of the writer's mother in the 103rd year of her life. ve Cixous, nee Klein, has figured centrally in her daughter's writing since the publication of Osnabrck (1999). Since then, Cixous's work has turned in ever-tighter orbits around the relation to her mother's life as it tapers down toward death. The writer discovers a guide book for the task written in her mother's own hand, where the narrator comes to realise that she will have been midwife to her mother's death. In French, this substitutability or reversibility of birth and death is facilitated by the noun accouchement, childbirth or labour, but which literally says 'bedding, putting or going to bed'. The reversal also concerns the positions of mother/child. What is happening requires the child to become the mother of the mother. How then must she hear her child's repeated cry of 'Help me, help me'? Is it help dying that she wants? And how to know this is indeed her desire? The narrator/writer, when in doubt, opts always for life, for more life for her mother, but to the point that many of those around her-family, friends, doctors, nurses-warn that she has lost touch with 'reality'. Perhaps never has the agony of letting go of the dying one been so unflinchingly rendered. Cixous's exquisitely poetic prose has also never been put to a more harrowing test of its inventive capacities. Key Features The first translation into EnglishPrimary text by a celebrated French author and intellectualExtraordinary account of the experience of death and coping with bereavement

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9781474425124

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"Epic and fleeting, tender and excruciating, this is a beautifully strange account of the death of Cixous's centenarian mother. Everywhere in these pages we feel the urgency of writing and of life. In Peggy Kamuf's limpid and remarkable translation, this book constitutes an indispensable addition to Cixous's oeuvre on writing, love and the maternal unconscious.-- ""Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex"""

Author Information

Hélène Cixous is Director of the Centre d'Études Féminines at Université Paris VIII, Emerita. one of the foremost intellectuals and creative writers in France and a major figure in the emergence and global spread of postmodern literary theory, late-20th-century Continental Thought and Women's Studies. She is the author of more than 40 novels, 14 plays and 15 volumes of theory and essays. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages, including Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Urdu. Peggy Kamuf writes on literary theory and contemporary French thought, particularly that of Jacques Derrida. She has translated numerous texts by Derrida and several works by Hélène Cixous, including Insister of Jacques Derrida (EUP 2007). Director of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project, she also co-edits the series publishing Derrida's teaching seminars in English. She is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

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