The Laugh of the Medusa

Autorentext

Hélène Cixous is a writer, philosopher, poet, playwright, and literary critic, widely considered one of the preeminent French intellectuals in the sign of deconstruction. Born in 1937 in French Algeria, Cixous has published more than 70 collections of philosophy, theory, poetry, plays, novels, and hybrid works.

Eric Prenowitz is a lecturer at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds in England. He completed his PhD at Paris 8 under the direction of Hélène Cixous. His research explores topics of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, semiotics and literary theory. He has translated and published widely on the work of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, including The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous (2004) and Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), complete with translator's note.

Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She is the author of Life Is Everywhere: A Novel, one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022, and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays, one of New York Magazine's best books of 2024, among other books. A former editor-in-chief of the online magazine and arts platform Triple Canopy, Ives writes frequently on the intersections of art, media studies, and literature. Her short prose has appeared in Aperture, Frieze, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and Vogue, among other journals. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD in comparative literature from New York University, served as the 2023-25 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and currently teaches fiction and nonfiction in Middlebury's Department of English.

Klappentext

Hélène Cixous' famous manifesto reemerges in a new definitive translation, articulating a feminist vision of writing both timeless and timely.

Originally published in 1975, The Laugh of the Medusa issued women an ultimatum: to be trapped by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or to move beyond the constraints and conventions of language into a new mode of expression. Hélène Cixous outlined a vision of écriture feminine: a practice of writing against the phallocentric tradition, which would go on to influence feminist thinking and writing for decades to come.

In Eric Prenowitz's new translation, conceived in close collaboration with Cixous herself, The Laugh of the Medusa stands as a rallying cry not just for women writers, but for all the "peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate." Both intellectually rigorous and accessible to philosophical newcomers, the manifesto is essential reading from one of the most famous and influential feminist philosophers of the past century.