The Portable Cixous by Marta Segarra (review)

170Women in French Studies Segarra, Marta. The Portable Cixous. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Pp. [v]-ix; 310. $39. Marta Segarra, director ofthe Center for Women and Literature, University of Barcelona, also associated with the University of Paris VIII Center for Women's Studies (funded by Hélène Cixous in 1974) has given Englishspeaking students an excellent, user-friendly book in The Portable Cixous. It updates Susan Sellers' 1994 The Hélène Cixous Reader, which offered a solid overview of Cixous' selected readings and pertinent explanations. Segarra goes beyond Sellers in presenting a number of more recent texts and explores other developments of Cixous' oeuvre. Segarra focuses on six fields when prefacing Cixous' translated passages: sexual difference; origins; relation to the other; animals; the Cixous/Derrida link; and theater as reshaping memory. In her introduction, "Blood and Language," Segarra summarizes her analytical process, looking at Cixous' linguistic plurality. She gives background on Cixous' path in relation to her philosophical, poetical and fictionalized production. Each section is accompanied by a critical introduction and three texts (four excerpted plays in the last section) covering periods from the seventies to 2007. Beginning with "Writing and Dreaming the Feminine," Segarra chooses "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "Coming to Writing" to illustrate Cixousian feminine writing and "writing the body," widely disseminated texts but ones that are essential for students new to Cixous' theoretical praxis. The third text emphasizes the difficulty ofdefining what "sexual difference" really is. The second part, "The Origins: Algeria and Germany," deconstructs concepts of interior geographies through Cixous' personal life attached to written representations of mental landscapes. The first text is about the Algerian garden of Cixous' childhood. Translated as "A Real Garden," by Beverley Bic Brahic, this 1971 Cixous' piece was previously translated, appearing in the Edinburg University Press journal 'Paragraph' in 2000, under the title "A True Garden." (It would have been appropriate to reference this 2000 version.) The middle text, a fiction excerpt from the 1999 fictional work, Osnabrück, deals with Cixous' maternal Germanic ancestry. It is with the third text that The Portable Reader starts to cover new grounds. It is a philosophical questioning around "Algeriance" with the liminal fluidity between belonging and exile in the incarnation of two young girls, the Arab Zohra, and the narrator as a youth in two exact faces ofthe same but inversely symmetrical beings. The following chapter, "Love (and) the Other," foregrounds the question of alterity, capability of gift to the other, and the cannibalistic power of love: three themes central to Cixous' reflections. "The Animal" chapter gives a new slant to the symbolic role of animals in Cixous' thought whereas chapter five analyzes links between Cixous and "Derrida," in personal experiences and thought processes. The final section, devoted to Cixous' theater, offers an excellent introduction by Judith G. Miller, "Rememberings, Refashionings and Book Reviews171 Revenants." Miller points out crucial distinctions between the two genres of plays that Cixous composes: the chamber plays favoring a language-centered theater and other plays that are mythic in scope and epic in nature. In the four excerpted plays, Miller foregrounds Cixous' mission to recall the past (remember) and refashion (re-member) history by undoing, recasting and debunking myths. The quality of the French/English translations is of an excellent level in all excerpts. Some passages are newly translated. Several of the translations have appeared previously (for example, the well-known translation of Keith and Paula Cohen for "The Laugh of the Medusa"). In the selected bibliography, Cixous' oeuvre is under original French titles and the English editions of Cixous' books are recorded to date. Some critical works on Cixous are also mentioned. But all critical articles in English on Cixous have been totally omitted from this bibliography. This is a regrettable choice since Segarra continually alludes to texts and themes that have been critically discussed and published before. These resources will be sorely missed by new students of Cixous, especially since those basic articles deal directly with the corresponding translated selections by Segarra and make their absence from The Portable Cixous all the more conspicuous. For specialists, the first half ofthe book brings nothing new; its second part stands as more...