[Jenson edited "Coming to Writing," and Other Essays and contributed to it the essay excerpted below. In the following, she provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Cixous's works collected in the volume.]

In Hélène Cixous's 1976 essay "Coming to Writing," a remarkable "capitalist-realist superuncle," an "Anti-other in papaperson," rehashes the sober facts of the narrator's failure to allow herself to be captured within a recognizable literary tradition: "We think you're here," he says, "and you're there. One day we tell ourselves: this time we've got her, it's her for sure. This woman is in the bag. And we haven't finished pulling the purse strings when we see you come in through another door." Today, in the 1990s, Cixous's writing has become a part of recognizable literary history. But her texts still manage to lead the expectant reader on a chase—and not only the capitalist-realist super-reader, but the other reader, the one who is willing to accompany the narrator on her path to writing. "Am I here?" the reader might ask, "or am I there? And what is in that bag?" Pursuing the elusive author not only in her trapdoor escapes into the new, but in her wanderings back into the fairytale forest of the familiar, the reader strays deeper and deeper into the question of how to read one's way to writing …

"Coming to Writing" and Other Essays groups together much of Cixous's work in the essay form from 1976 to 1989. The collection's coherence rests less in any one thematic than in the development of Cixous's readings of artistic sources—literature, opera, and painting—over the years, and in the way her writing changes according to the nature of her readings. The style of "Coming to Writing," an essay which followed "The Laugh of the Medusa" by less than a year, is exuberant, polemical, filled with wordplay and parodic inventions rooted in the works of the "masters" (Freud's lecture on "Femininity," for instance, becomes "Requiemth Lecture on the Infeminitesimal"). Here sexual difference is directly explored in personal terms, and in opposition to certain cultural, psychoanalytic, religious, and political sources. In comparison, "Clarice Lispector: The Approach," from 1979, shows the influence of Lispector's work in its strikingly meditative tone. Elements from Cixous's earlier work are approached here with a simple, poetic, and ultimately philosophical vocabulary. Ironically, this pared-down vocabulary may be more opaque for the American reader than the complex wordplay of "Coming to Writing." The subject of sexual difference is difficult to locate in a line like this one from the beginning of the essay: "Loving the true of the living, what seems ungrateful to narcissus eyes, the nonprestigious, the non-immediate, loving the origin, interesting oneself personally with the impersonal, with the animal, with the thing." And yet, through a careful reading of the subsequent text, one comes equipped with new resources to the question formulated without fanfare in the final passage: "And woman?" The text is structured like an enigma.

The third and fourth essays in this collection, "Tancredi Continues" and "The Last Painting or the Portrait of God," were both published in 1983. They show Cixous's interest in the sources and motivating forces of artistic work in genres not limited to writing. Unlike much literary work on the arts in the United States, however, Cixous's interest in music and the visual arts remains tied to the figurative, to the language of the story in its different vocabularies. "The Last Painting or the Portrait of God" takes as its point of departure Clarice Lispector's fascination with the instant ("Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing's is.") to explore differences between the gestures of writing and painting. One such difference lies in the possibility of "fidelity" to the instant, a concept that could be confused with realism but that is more accurately approached as the problem of making figurative the "vision" of the writer. What the painter makes visible, the writer offers to the imaging capacities of the reader: "I am the awkward sorceress of the invisible: my sorcery is powerless to evoke, without the help of your sorcery. Everything I evoke depends on you, depends on your trust, your faith." "Fidelity" is also illustrated here in terms of the cultural permission (or lack of it) to "contemplate a woman's real nudity" in writing.

The other piece from 1983 is "Tancredi Continues," a fragment of a longer, unpublished fiction called Jerusalem Continues, which Cixous wrote in 1981–82. This is her reading of Tasso's epic Jerusalem Delivered and Gioacchino Rossini's opera version, Tancredi. The intensely poetic language of this text condenses several kinds of struggles and several kinds of bodies into one space: the poetic space of contested Jerusalem. Two camps fight over (the gender of) this "beloved body." On one level they are religious/national camps (this is one of the first works to reveal Cixous's growing interest in the problematic of nationalities), but Cixous's use of the startling gender portrayals of Tasso's epic highlights them above all as the camps of the two sexes, in their lethal, passionate dispute over the masculinity or femininity of the body of the beloved.

The last two essays, from 1989, represent Cixous's most recent work on Clarice Lispector. The brief "By the Light of an Apple" serves as a prelude to the final essay in this collection, "The Author in Truth." It plays on the title of a novel by Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark, to convey Lispector's illuminating force: she is the "Watch-woman, night-light of the world." Cixous compares Lispector with Kafka, Rilke, Rimbaud, and Heidegger, but only on conditional feminine terms: if Kafka had been a woman, Rilke a Jewish Brazilian, Rimbaud a mother, Heidegger the author of a Romance of the Earth. Despite the murmurings of philosophers "in her forests," Lispector is a writer who "knows nothing," because her work is not the stasis of cognition; it is the journey of "re-cognition." As such, her work "puts us back in the worldschool" of unceasing, "equal" attention. For Cixous, the political quality of Lispector's work lies in the absence of a hierarchy of artistic objects. ("Political" in a qualified sense, clearly; Cixous asks the question whether The Hour of the Star is a political text, and answers: "Subreptitiously. If there is a politics of spirituality.")

In "The Author in Truth," Cixous plunges into the question of identification between reader, author, and character. She proceeds with all the complexity of Bakhtinian analysis of speech acts, but without a specialized theoretical vocabulary. The class position of the character Macabea is at the heart of the identificatory labyrinth in The Hour of the Star: "We, character, reader, author, circulate between 'I am not her,' and 'I could be her,' as we advance along the most powerful path of meditation that we can take in thinking of the other." Here we find echoing in "The Author in Truth" the same question of the reader's position that reverberates in "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays as a whole.

The opening paragraphs of the title essay locate the problematic of reading as a heartbeat-like trace audible inside as well as outside the text. The initial "I" who narrates is the child-reader who scans the Face—the Face as the maternal geography that is the signature of life for the infant. The child's act of reading is as inevitable as her primal attraction to the (m)other: the other signifies; the child reads. Reading the Face is necessary for the child in order to keep the connection with the other alive, and in fact to keep the other alive at all, since otherness denotes existence in relation to the subject. The Face serves also as a beacon of light that makes it possible to name the shadowy world around the child. In the relationship to this other, the child-narrator is at once the most helpless and most powerful of readers—depending on the other, and creating the other. Hélène Cixous pointed out in the recent colloquium "Readings of Sexual Difference" at the International College of Philosophy that in the act of reading, one chooses one's subject of reading; and in doing so, one becomes the author of the reading. So reading is a not-quite-authorized coming to writing. In this way, the reader of "Coming to Writing" coincides with the elusive narrator on her dizzying trail through the forest.

The narrator of "Coming to Writing" is herself unable to authorize her writing until the "souffle"—most simply, the breath, the intake of life, but also the current of inspiration—sets her body in motion and inscribes her desire in the flesh. By then, it is too late to turn back; the body will function as a source. Cixous has described the womanbody as the "place from which": from which birth occurs, metaphorically and organically, from which the passage is made from the inside to the outside, from which a new body emerges to read otherness in its turn. In this text Cixous's fascination with, and her gratitude for, sources, makes the question of writing into a celebration of its places of emission and its places of incorporation. On her journey to and through the "places from which," she sends a stream of correspondence, her "Letters from the Life-Watch," and other bodily chronicles.

To achieve her readings of life, Cixous practices a politics/poetics of attention articulated through her readings of the work of Clarice Lispector. Compared to "Coming to Writing," which is often as vigorous and wet as a newborn struggling for its first breath, or as a fish splashing in water, "Clarice Lispector: The Approach" is composed with philosophical restraint, panther steps, respect for the fragility of an egg. That is because the interventions of this essay are directed to a stage of life in which the urgency of reading the Face has been forgotten, and in which we allow what Cixous refers to as the media forcibly to read us, the erstwhile reader. "We are living in the time of the flat thought-screen, of newspaper-thinking, which does not leave time to think the littlest thing according to its living mode. We must save the approach that opens and leaves space for the other." In this jaded time we are, passively, the "other" of the advertising executive, for instance. By contrast, in the world-readings of Clarice Lispector, "names are hands she lays on space, with a tenderness so intense that at last smiles a face, o you."

This tender naming, and its ability to coax the face into bloom, is the product of a patience, a reserve, an attention, that Cixous characterizes as soul. "Soul" is one of many terms that are generally banished to the metaphysical broom closet these days but that Cixous gifts with a reincarnation, in the sense of a reconstituted relationship to the body. The soul for her is an ultrasensual substance: "The soul is the magic of attention. And the body of the soul is made from a fine, fine ultrasensual substance, so finely sensitive that it can pick up the murmur of every hatching, the infinitesimal music of particles calling to one another to compose themselves in fragrance." This reading-soul is inseparable from the experience of the senses, but it is not conflated with the senses: it is a sensory / sensual attention. A sensist capacity for reading. A sensualism of readings via the senses.

The reading-soul raises the question of the politics of poetic rhetoric. Cixous takes on the trope of the rose: Is a woman a rose or is a woman a woman? Do we know a woman best as a rose or as a woman? When does a rose become a mask for woman, and vice versa? This touches on the question of the mimetic relation between text and object, which, like the question of masculinity or femininity in its relation to the body, is not easily resolved in Cixous's work, or in Lispector's work. (Lispector's story "The Imitation of the Rose" can be read, for instance, as the mad radicality of mimetic structure in the religious classic The Imitation of Christ when applied to the housewife and her sanctum, the domestic environment.) The attention Lispector applies to the organic is not so much a transformational logic as a respect that explores the form of its object, that tries to greet each "species" with an attention of a similar "species." And so when she considers that archipoetic object, the rose, she might examine its elements by replacing it with a turtle, a cockroach, an oyster; whereas Rilke "could replace it only with a unicorn," or "in lacework."

But what prevents this approach from turning into a mimetic code is the strict ambiguity of Cixous's use of terms such as "species" in the first place. In "The Author in Truth" she writes, "Yes, Clarice's project is to make the other human subject appear equal—and this is positive—to the roach. Each to her own species." The roach (which is far from anthropomorphized in The Passion) and the human subject as mimetic partners? Clearly, realism is not at the bottom of this mystery. Cixous suggests a comparison of Gertrude Stein's approach to the rose with Lispector's. Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose …" is subversive "hyperlinguistics." Through repetition, Stein reveals "the fact that the signifier always represses." Lispector, on the other hand, presents a "story" of the rose, of which "'I write you this facsimile' is one of the definitions." But there are always further definitions of the rose (other than that of the inevitable facsimilitude of representation) which have to do with the rose's organic life. In the end, imitation in Cixous's work has less to do with mimesis than with the mimosa, the flower that takes its name from the Latin botanical term mimus.

Listening with the "ultrasensual substance of the soul," the writer reads the object into existence. And so woman is represented not only as the story of a historical, literary facsimile, with which all feminists are familiar, a rose-text, but as a body to be explored. This body belongs to character, author, and reader. Cixous rediscovers Lispector through the eyes of Macabea, for instance, and catches a glimpse of her own double: "Reading this narrative I sometimes almost forgot her, I did forget her. Later I remembered. And for one second, through Macabea's eyes, I saw Clarice Lispector heavily made up, coming out of the salon where having her hair done had cost a month's worth of sausage sandwiches. Or was it myself I saw?"

The reader author-izes a reading, the writer reads woman into writing, the reader becomes writer, the writer becomes reader—in which direction are we going? In French, the word sens signifies both "meaning" and "direction." And in French, the titles of the first three essays in this book all contain terms of movement that can be read in more than one meaning-direction at a time. "La Venue à l'écriture" hinges on the various possible meanings of la venue: the path of growth or development, the coming (as in "the advent"), or the (feminine) one who has arrived. (La venue is also a homophone of l'avenue.) The syntax of "L'Approche de Clarice Lispector" suggests either "Clarice Lispector's Approach," or, on the contrary, "Approaching Clarice Lispector." It could even be read as "The Approach—from (the Point of Departure of) Clarice Lispector." In "Tancredi Continues," the lack of an object for the verb "continues" leaves the reader to wonder: what, where, and whom does Tancredi continue to do, go, and be? Does all this circulation simply lead the reader in the direction of movement for the sake of avoiding stasis, and if so, what does this have to do with "truth," as in "The Author in Truth?"

"Truth" is a term of movement as it relates to the constantly self-displacing yet ultimately irreducible nature of the author's signature, the trace of the body writing. For Cixous, the signature of the author tells the whole story of The Hour of the Star and its multiply impoverished heroine, Macabea: "I, Rodrigo S.M., I am in truth Clarice Lispector put in parentheses, and only the author '(in truth Clarice Lispector)' can approach this beginning of a woman. This is the impossible truth. It is the inexpressible, indemonstrable truth, which can be said only in parentheses … It is the truth, a woman, beating like a heart, in the parenthesis of life." In the parenthetical truth of the creation of the female character by the female author within the male narrator lies a mystery: "The identity of the 'I' who cannot answer." In witnessing existence in the parentheses of the text, Cixous seeks freedom from the confining authorizations of names: "We are much more than what our own name authorizes us and obligates us to believe we are … We are possible. Anyone. We need only avoid closing up the parentheses in which our 'why-nots' live."

Our "why-nots" are often the unprivileged, who are often women. In "Coming to Writing," Cixous describes an idealized vision of what a writing-voyage would be for the elite: "for this elite, the gorgeous journey without horizon, beyond everything, the appalling yet intoxicating excursion toward the never-yet-said." But for woman, devoured by "the jealous Wolf, your ever-insatiable grandmother," there is the "vocation of the swallowed up, voyage of the scybalum." In a social structure hungry to consume them, women are limited to the voyage of the digestive tract, to literal incorporation. The world of the fairy tale is a maze of lost paths filled with dangerous encounters: "For the daughters of the housewife: the straying into the forest." In this forest, the wolf is the site of the legendary struggle with the enigma: "Instead of the great enigmatic duel with the Sphinx, the dangerous questioning addressed to the body of the Wolf: What is the body for? Myths end up having our hides. Logos opens its great maw, and swallows us whole."

But in the writing-voyage, the (domestic) forest resonates as more than the haunted site of the fairy tale. It is also the paradigm for the "Claricewege," Cixous's adaptation of the Heideggerian Holzwege to Lispector's writing: "Thinking according to Clarice, I immediately come to think of Heidegger and his Holzwege: 'Trails in the wood, trails that lead nowhere, that trail.'" The Holzweg has, significantly, been used to pinpoint the end of philosophy, the point at which it no longer moves ahead. Louis Althusser claimed that the only possible contemporary philosophy would be theoretical discourse on philosophy, because philosophy had become limited to "a path leading nowhere, a 'Holzweg.'" But for Cixous, the Claricean Holzweg allows the reader to live the path as source. "The Clarice-voice gives us the ways. A fear takes hold of us. Calls us: 'There are nothing but ways.' Gives-takes our hand. A deeply moved, clairvoyant fear—we take it. Leads us. We make ways." The trails that trail give the gift of the present in its infinity of possible forms; they teach vulnerability to "the two great lessons of living: slowness and ugliness." Entering the forest of the Claricewege, the writing body is the subject of a movement that is not logomotion but love of motion, trust of fear, trust of slowness. In the dark trails, we encounter Hélène Cixous, a philosopher—in Red Riding Hood's clothing—of an ongoing feminine tradition. She helps the reader make her way to the question: What is the reader in truth?

Translating the resonant poetics of Hélène Cixous's work into anything but her particular language—which is not French, not German, but poetry—is a difficult (Promethean?) task in which the reader must participate for full effect. The gathering connotative force of Cixous's wordplay resists any word-for-word equivalence.

And no truly appropriate explanatory apparatus has ever been found for poetry. Endnotes are one way of documenting the necessarily unstable process of translation, which Barbara Johnson has called "an exercise in violent approximation." However, since endnotes do interrupt the musical flow of the text, I have tried to minimize their intervention.

Among previous translators of her work, Betsy Wing in The Newly Born Woman chose to render words that were "too full of sense" in the original through "a process of accretion" in the translation. Yet the explicit presentation of a series of terms in answer to the poetic multiplicity of one term bypasses the relationship between the reader and the French text, in which several meaning may be called into action at once or allowed to lie dormant. The present translators have more frequently chosen a one-to-one relationship of the English terms to the French, although these terms may function simply as signposts to other possible readings. In the end, it is hoped the reader of this collection will accept the author's invitation to lend it a little "soul."