Reviews for Excursions

The average rating for Excursions based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-16 00:00:00 Nicholas Staub Take the living instant with the closest and the most delicate words. Without words as witnesses the instant (will not have been) is not. I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of words. One suspects that Cixous and Derrida do not pen their essays for the neutral, or accidental reader. There is a certain expected level of prior reading facility which is expected or required. Unfortunately, when said essays are collected, the prior reading for such preparedness is cumulatively beyond the pale of most layman. Consider me one of the inept. Wait, Jon, are you talking about core requirements for anyone approaching these essays? Yes, yes I am. When I was child my younger sister couldn't pronounce the J sound and instead called me Non. I've been preoccupied ever since with the Void. Most of the early essays in the book were generally opaque, given that I wasn't well versed in the examined texts. The collection then pivoted to a more autobiographical bend. I do not write to keep. I write to feel. These works sift through childhood and family genealogy, fingering the filaments of ethnicity and ritual. Cixous shines in such artful movements: the gravity of the themes explored is warped (refracted) by the adroit play of language and homonym. Identity is forever splintered. What I kept away from, in keeping my name and my nose, was the temptation of disavowal.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-06 00:00:00 Nick Atherton Writing is the study of options: as soon as you choose one option, you are presented with an array of others. It feels like following a thread in darkness, only you are creating the thread as you go: the thread of words you weave within the present moment. You dive into the present moment and come back up with the next piece. So that someone can see where you were. Words are like a trail of bread crumbs guiding us back to the Moment. But you have to choose which words to weave your thread with; there are so many ways to describe what Cixous calls "the eternal moment." What Cixous does is she tries to document every option, every choice of words, every variation of the idea that is swarming her within this present moment. You see it from all sides. She refuses to make that final decision. She does not choose sides and often disagrees with herself. This way, you can see the present moment circling her, drowning her. And you can see from her words how she has chosen to navigate it, document it. Hélène Cixous shows us what writing is'the process that is hidden from us. She talks a lot about this. How the writing we see is always the aftermath of this moment of drowning, searching, resurfacing; how we only see what has remained of it, what made its way to the page. But she shows us how overwhelmed she is with this chase. She shows us writing in the present moment. And we see that it's a lot like death. She shows us that writing is the impossible marriage between the Moment and the Word. And how one is always ahead of the other. Larger than the other. How the Word is devoted to being a mirror of something it can not properly capture. A mirror doomed to error. But Cixous reassures us that the transference between the two worlds of the Moment and the Word is where you find love, euphoria, the feeling of dying. Truth. Understanding in traveling, not in arriving.