The Third Body [Paperback]

InThe Third Body,the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène 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 over, 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.

Jacques Derrida has called Cixous the greatest contemporary French writer.

 Hé lè ne Cixous is a professor emerita of literature and founder of the Centre d’ é tudes feminines, Paris VIII. Her numerous books includeStigmata, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, The Newly Born Woman,The Laugh of the Medusa,andManhattan: Letters from Prehistory.In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothè que nationale de France.