Hélène Cixous's Semi-Fictions: At the Borders of Theory

Hélène Cixous writes fiction at the edge of theory: her writing is informed by it, her texts open onto the questions which interest it and unmistakably mark its limits.Through an in-depth reading of five of Cixous' fictional texts, Mairead Hanrahan engages closely with the idiomatic specificity of individual works and highlights the extent to which their unreadability is productive. She addresses the need to reconcile the conspicuous absence of a clear, logical discourse in Cixous' texts with the way they forcefully inscribe the difference between poetry and theory. Each text is therefore approached in relation to a particular theoretical question or discourse to show both how it practises a kind of thinking with theoretical implications, and exceeds the assumptions and categories of the theory in question.