The Third Body

In ""The Third Body"", the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Helene Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a 'third body' out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover.

HELENE CIXOUS is an internationally renowned French feminist philosopher, writer, playwright, and activist. Among her books recently published in English are The Third Body (Northwestern, 1999), Veils (with Jacques Derrida) (Stanford, 2001), Stigmata: Escaping Texts (Routledge, 1998), Root-prints (Routledge, 1997), and The Helene Cixous Reader (Routledge, 1994). BRIAN MALLET is also the translator of portions of Cixous' other works including texts from Stigmata (Routladge, 1998) and The Plays of Helene Cixous (forthcoming from Routledge). He died in December 2000.