Ronit Matalon Research Articles

Reorienting Visual Reading

AbstractThis essay explores visual reading and its colonial aspects by analyzing the novel Ze ʿim ha-panim elenu (The One Facing Us, 1995), by Ronit Matalon, an Israeli Jewish author of Egyptian descent. In this novel Matalon displaces the dramas of Mizrahi Jews (Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world) to Cameroon, thus stressing her protagonists’ uneasy positioning within the colonizer-colonized, West-East divides and connecting Zionist racialization to broader, global processes of colonial capitalism. By exploring her elaborate readings of photographs in the novel, the essay reveals two rival traditions of reading the visual: the first involves what might be described, following Matalon, as a certain “intending toward” the photograph—a colonial reading practice through which a subject converts her absence from the photographic moment into a visionary, intentional presence. In this Barthesian tradition, the image is an empty land to be colonized, and Oriental subjects are racialized by being fetishistically associated with both authentic matter and theological aura. The second tradition, typified in the novel by the protagonist’s Egyptian mother, is a laborious collective practice of reading photographs that is attentive to subtext, nonverbal communication, and social codes. The essay argues that this reading practice has nothing to do with postcolonial or Levantine hybridity or with a “migratory state of mind”—concepts that govern scholarship on Matalon—and that its subsistence requires in fact a solid, counterdiasporic sense of home.

בעקבות האב הנעדר: הגיבורה כסובייקט כותב ביצירתה של רונית מטלון

The article addresses the literary development of the young female protagonist in Ronit Matalon’s early writing, and the character’s relationship with her absent father. Despite the prevalence of this theme, little research has been dedicated to the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work and its influence on the daughter’s decision to become a writer. The article examines this theme in Matalon’s young adult novel, A Story that Begins with a Snake’s Funeral (1989). My main argument here is that the father-daughter relationship in Matalon’s work is central to the construction of the daughter’s ’decision to write‘, and points to the issue of inter-generational accountability, in which the daughter is entitled to an inheritance from her father despite her critical view of him. As I will show in my reading of the novel, the fictional representation of this relationship bears an autobiographical imprint, particularly in light of Matalon’s choice to quote her father, Felix Matalon, and to lend his voice to the father figure in her writing. As part of the exploration of this theme, which consists of both fictional and autobiographical aspects, I suggest that the heroine’s efforts to place her absent father in the context of her life and to cope with his absence through her writing point to Matalon’s own efforts to deal with her father’s legacy by writing about him and giving him a place in the Israeli literary canon, while maintaining a critical attitude towards him.

Memory and space in the autobiographical writings of Amos Oz and Ronit Matalon

ABSTRACT This article discusses the autobiographical writings of Amos Oz and Ronit Matalon and focuses on A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002) and The Sound of Our Steps (2008). Although the novels differ in terms of era, language, ethnic background, and the gender of the narrator/protagonist, the core plot of mother and child, the spatial concepts of home, garden, and land, and other shared structural elements invite comparison. This reading nevertheless pinpoints their disparity: whereas Oz’s own trajectory elicits empathy, redefines the notion of personal life stories and their ideological role in Israeli society, and eventually justifies the Zionist ideology, Matalon’s poetics of rupture creates unease that subverts the possibility to voice one’s personal story and challenges the national narrative and its validity.

The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility

The Materiality and Embodiment of Violence: Ronit Matalon’s Poetics of Responsibility

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine

The Sounds of Memory in Writing: A Conversation with Ronit Matalon

The Sounds of Memory in Writing: A Conversation with Ronit Matalon

The Sounds of Memory in Writing: A Conversation with Ronit Matalon

The Sounds of Memory in Writing: A Conversation with Ronit Matalon

ANOTHER HISTORY: FAMILY, NATION AND THE REMEMBRANCE OF THE EGYPTIAN JEWISH PAST IN CONTEMPORARY ISRAELI LITERATURE

In this article I will focus on how Egyptian Jews who migrated to Israel after 1948 and their descendants remember Egypt and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis Israeli society and culture. I will base my analysis on three semi-autobiographical novels published between 2003 and 2011 by Israeli writers of Egyptian descent belonging to three subsequent generations: Baderekh la'itztadion by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, Kol tze‘adenu by Ronit Matalon, and Yolanda by Moshe Sakal. By analysing specific passages from these books, I will argue that even after the decline of the Jewish presence in Egypt in the 1950s, the cultural and social worlds to which their families belonged did not vanish completely but, rather, struggled for survival at a very intimate level. This ultimately produced a multifaceted archive in which the written narrative of the family's past became an alternative homeland where historical memories and fictional details are inextricably blended.

ReadingCamera Lucidain Gaza: Ronit Matalon's Photographic Travels

Following the 1988 translation of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida into Hebrew, Ronit Matalon, an Israeli writer of Egyptian extraction, began interpolating Barthes into her writing, in part through unacknowledged quotations. This essay explores how Camera Lucida “traveled,” as a piece of both visual theory and personal reflection, to the Israel of the first Intifada and its aftermath. Drawing on Matalon's use of Barthes, the essay seeks to highlight Camera Lucida's theoretical tensions and to show how these tensions were productive for an experimental mode of critical writing. In her short fiction, Matalon uses the elevated Hebrew of Barthes in translation as a surreal device of linguistic and narrative estrangement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the predictable script of an Israeli journalist's visit to a mourning family in Gaza. Parodying Barthes's discovery of the famous “Winter Garden” image of his deceased mother, Matalon questions Camera Lucida's relevance and significance for situations of mourning in which inequality prevails and the deceased subject does not function as the Barthesian unique and irreplaceable other. Reading Matalon's novel The One Facing Us (1995), I contend that here, in the fictionalized framework of neocolonial Cameroon, the author addresses the racial implications of Barthes's idea of photographic “contingency,” anticipating American criticism of his work by more than a decade. Matalon treats the light captured in the photograph itself as a means of disrupting photography's contingency and introducing indeterminacy into the black/white order of Africa, as well as the racial orders of Israel and Palestine.

“He is missing. You were missing. Home is missing”: Formation, Collapse and the Idea of the Home in the Later Poetics of Ronit Matalon

This essay explores one of the central issues in Ronit Matalon's writing from its inception: the home, especially as it manifests itself in her recent novel, Kol tse'adenu (2008). Matalon is known as one of the dominant voices in the Israeli literary sphere following the disintegration of Israel's hegemonic centers of power in the late 1970s. However, her position in the critical domain concerning Zionist identity in the 1980s and 1990s is extremely complex. On the basis of a philosophical analysis of the interrelated concepts of home, identity , and alterity , this essay considers the political implications of a perception of home that attends to the chaotic as an integral part of the domestic sphere, and approaches the tense inner dialectic by which Matalon puts the category of home and its necessity on one line with her incisive critique of Zionists' notions of identity.

Photography, Home, Language: Ronit Matalon Facing Joseph Conrad's Colonial Journeys in the Heart of Darkness

This article examines the poetic and visual representations of the novel The One Facing Us by Ronit Matalon via reading the famous novella of Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The importance and originality of The One Facing Us lie in the development of a representational language, and hence of original and daring coping mechanisms that define identities within a post-colonial situation that has residual colonial aspects.

“Location, not identity”: The Politics of Revelation in Ronit Matalon's <em>The One Facing Us</em>

This article traces the profound ambivalence toward religion in Ronit Matalon's novel, Ze im ha-panim eleinu (The One Facing Us) . The novel tells the story of Esther, sent by her Israeli family to Cameroon, to her maternal uncle Jacques Sicourelle and his family, perhaps in order to marry her cousin Erouan or simply to reunite with distant relatives. Spreading over large geographical expanses, it is the story of the national identity of Mizrahi Jews. The novel strongly criticizes the rigidity of identity politics, and Matalon suggests replacing it with politics of location; location is fluid and may change frequently without our becoming fixed in any one particular identity. The photographic images in the novel grant their subjects identifying visual features; and the exposure of the photographic process is in and of itself an exposure of the process of identity building. Roland Barthes depicts photography as an intense experience of union with the reality " beyond" the photograph: an experience that crosses the boundaries of the photograph to move toward the reality it represents. In this light, it is possible to examine the extraordi- nary process Matalon offers in her novel, which seeks to reconstruct the aura—that is, the revelation, after it has disappeared—through the means of photographs. She breaks the photograph down to its constituent parts, pointing to the source of its aura, its revelatory effect, even though the revelation is invisible in the finished image as a whole. The opposite action—emphasis on the photograph's artifici - ality—externalizes and reveals a contradiction. It fixes and freezes a unique moment, but also freezes the disturbance and so recalls for us both the status of a photo as a reproduced signifier lacking an aura as well as the unique moment it seems to memorialize. From her Mizrahi stance, Matalon refuses to completely participate in the theological-Zionist enterprise: that is, on the one hand she is attracted to the revelatory effect of the photographs, but on the other she will not take on religious identity as an essentialist and fixed component of selfhood.

Between Perspectives of Space: A Reading in Yehuda Amichai's "Jewish Travel" and "Israeli Travel"

Between Perspectives of Space:A Reading in Yehuda Amichai's "Jewish Travel" and "Israeli Travel" Vered Shemtov (bio) "My body is in the East, my heart in the extreme West" The Land knows where the clouds come from and whence the hot wind Where hatred and whence love. But its inhabitants are confused, their heart is in the East And their body in the far West. Like migratory birds who lost their summer and winter, Lost in the beginning and the end, and they migrate To the end of pain all their days.1 Amichai's poetic sequences "Jewish Travel: Change Is God and Death Is His Prophet" and "Israeli Travel: Otherness Is All, Otherness Is Love"2 seem to touch a controversial issue regarding Jewish space. To what extent did the Zionist movement succeed in creating a Jewish identity that bridges the gap between physical and [End Page 141] mental space? Does this new identity completely replace the concept of "the wandering Jew" with a new Jew who is rooted in his land? Is there really a substantial difference between a Jewish and an Israeli- Jewish concept of place? In his introduction to A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, Eli Barnavi claims that the Jewish consciousness "constantly shifts between awareness of physical spaces (the birth place, for example) to spaces of reference (the ancestral homeland, Hebrew, etc.), a shift which actually constitutes the Jewish spatial experience." This definition, he argues, includes the perspective of the Israeli Jew, "My body is in the East, my heart in the extreme West—an inversion of Halevi's verse seems most appropriate to the inhabitants of Israel" he writes. "The present protagonist in the mental drama created by a differential and discontinuous space is no longer the Diaspora Jew but the Israeli."3 Since the 1990s, we find that—even among the many scholars who claim that the establishment of a Jewish center in Israel created a fundamental shift "from an existence outside time and space to an existence with space"4there have been growing tendencies to view Israeli culture (especially after the 1970s) as reflecting a tension between a nomad identity and a "native's identity." Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, in their oft-quoted article "Al ha-makom" (About the Place), revealed the gap between mental and physical place in Jewish and Israeli culture.5 Risa Domb looked at the increasing number of novels in which the Israeli protagonist travels abroad in search of self. These journeys reflect more than the "state of mind of the modern humanity, which has lost the sense of belonging." Domb puts these travels also in the specific context of the Jewish-Israeli search for locus, and she refers to works by Dan Miron and others, including A. B. Yehoshua, who, as she claims, argues that "Zionism failed to tie Jewish consciousness to one place."6 A number of recent novels written by authors who were born in Israel (or who are second or third generation) also question the existence of one personal and national geographical center. Ronit Matalon's novel The One Facing Us takes place outside Israel, following pictures from a family album, and does not locate "home" necessarily in Israel. Maya Arad's Makom aher ve-ir zarah (A Different Place) ends with the protagonist's acknowledgment that his home is not in Israel.7 Sidra DeKoven Ezrakhi argues that "there are growing signs of dislocation, shifts in the center of gravity corresponding to increasingly mobile boundaries of the Hebrew self. 'Exile' as the repressed other becomes the critique of a culture of the static and the whole. The stagnant waters and mirrors that reflect an ossified relationship to sacred space are beginning to show ripples and cracks."8 Although Israeli literature [End Page 142] has always reflected the tension between different (and often conflicting) definitions of identity and homelessness/home/homeland, these recent cracks expose a more critical version of the issue. Thus, though it is probably much too early to conclude whether Zionism succeeded in establishing a wholly new perspective of place in the Israeli-Jewish consciousness, we can already witness the process of rethinking "Jewish Space" in Israeli...

Barthes's Punctum

Next article No AccessBarthes’s PunctumMichael FriedMichael Fried Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 31, Number 3Spring 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/430984 Views: 1462Total views on this site Citations: 36Citations are reported from Crossref © 2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Olivia Barry Tracing the felt image to thought: A somatic turn towards the nature of the creative process in country dance choreography, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 14, no.22 (Dec 2022): 249–261.https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00083_1Andrew Osborne An Esthetic of the Meaningless: The Problem of Knausgaard’s Readability, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63, no.55 (Dec 2020): 513–522.https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1858749Larita Engelbrecht The Attempt to Be Here Now: “Storying” Time through a Virtual Audiovisual Archive, de arte 57, no.22 (Jan 2023): 4–32.https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2022.2145762Kristiina Eskelinen, Ulla-Maija Salo Writing and theorising with photographs taken by children, Ethnography and Education 17, no.22 (Feb 2022): 142–159.https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2022.2039258Dor Fadlon Deleuze and the Traumatic Temporalities of Digital 3-D Cinema, (Dec 2022): 149–174.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12821-9_8Natalie Farrell Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”, Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no.33 (Sep 2021): 104–124.https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.3.104Fatmir Haskaj (Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53, no.55 (Dec 2020): 1051–1075.https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20977872Geoffrey Alan Rhodes Waiting for the Augmented Reality ‘Killer App’: Pokémon GO 2016, (May 2019): 3–14.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15616-9_1George F. (Guy) McHendry Instagrams that wound: Punctum , visual enthymemes, and the visual argumentation of the Transportation Security Administration, Argumentation and Advocacy 53, no.44 (Sep 2017): 310–326.https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2017.1375758Daniel Rubinstein Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum, Journal of Visual Culture 16, no.11 (Apr 2017): 43–55.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970Ágnes Harasztos Photographic origins of postmemory in Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog, Neohelicon 43, no.11 (Mar 2016): 181–200.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0323-3Garnet C Butchart The communicology of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida : reflections on the sign–body experience of visual communication, Visual Communication 15, no.22 (May 2016): 199–219.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357215624308Michael Meneghetti Anamnesis in acts: documentary performance as intercession in Italianamerican and American Boy, Studies in Documentary Film 9, no.33 (Nov 2015): 201–219.https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2015.1104139Kim Soo Hwan Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”, Semiotica 2015, no.207207 (Jan 2015).https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0050Jesse Hoffman ARTHUR HALLAM’S SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPH AND TENNYSON’S ELEGIAC TRACE, Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no.44 (Sep 2014): 611–636.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150314000229Maya Barzilai Reading Camera Lucida in Gaza: Ronit Matalon's Photographic Travels, Comparative Literature 65, no.22 (Jun 2013): 200–219.https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2143172Eric S. Jenkins Another Punctum: Animation, Affect, and Ideology Eric S. Jenkins, Critical Inquiry 39, no.33 (Jul 2015): 575–591.https://doi.org/10.1086/670046Rachel Holmes, Liz Jones Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no.11 (Jan 2013): 75–99.https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2011.605083Elaine Campbell Landscapes of Performance: Stalking as Choreography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no.33 (Jan 2012): 400–417.https://doi.org/10.1068/d13510By Adélékè Adéè̇ó From Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and Photography in Contemporary Lagos, Nigeria Adélékè Adéè̇ó, Critical Inquiry 38, no.22 (Jul 2015): 330–361.https://doi.org/10.1086/662745Elaine Campbell Reading/Writing Autopsy: A Dirty Theory of the Science of Death, Science as Culture 18, no.33 (Sep 2009): 313–331.https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430903122810Karen Beckman Nothing to Say: The War on Terror and the Mad Photography of Roland Barthes, Grey Room 34 (Jan 2009): 104–134.https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.34.104 From Nomos to Nomad, (Jan 2009): 21–44.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-001 The Piazza, the Edicola , and the Noise of the Utterance, (Jan 2009): 45–73.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-002 Machiavelli’s Theory of Sensation and Florence’s Vita Festiva, (Jan 2009): 74–95.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-003 The Viewing Subject, (Jan 2009): 96–122.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-004 “You’re Eating Too Fast!”, (Jan 2009): 123–148.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-005 “The Photographs Tell It All”, (Jan 2009): 149–154.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-006 Notes, (Jan 2009): 155–187.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-007 Bibliography, (Jan 2009): 189–200.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-008Jan Baetens Sémiotique et photographie: 1961-2006, Recherches sémiotiques 28, no.1-21-2 (Oct 2010): 15–27.https://doi.org/10.7202/044585arMartin Donougho Must it Be Abstract? Hegel, Pippin, and Clark, Hegel Bulletin 28, no.1-21-2 (Jun 2015): 87–106.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263523200000653Joanna Lowry Putting painting in the picture (photographically), Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no.33 (Nov 2006): 215–227.https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.5.3.215_1Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell F. R. Ankersmit and the historical sublime, History of the Human Sciences 19, no.44 (Jul 2016): 91–102.https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695106072868Petra Rau Beyond punctum and studium, Journal of European Studies 36, no.33 (Jul 2016): 295–325.https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244106067482George Baker Photography's Expanded Field, October 114 (Oct 2005): 120–140.https://doi.org/10.1162/016228705774889574

“Permanent Immigration”: Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon,and the Impetus of Levantinism

“Permanent Immigration”: Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon,and the Impetus of Levantinism

Joel Beinin. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp. @T2first: During the past three decades, several major scholarly studies and personal accounts of Egyptian Jewry have been published in Europe, Israel, and the United States. The most noted scholarly publications include Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yoram Meital, 'Atarim yehudiyim be-Miṣrayim (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995); Zvi Zohar , Tradition and Change: Halachic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Changes [Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920]. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993); and Yosef Algamil, Pirqei Tuvia ben Simḥa Levi Babovitch: 'Aḥaron ḥakhmei ha-kara'im be-Miṣrayim, 2 vols. (Ramlah: Center for Karaite Jewry, 1998). Some of the best personal accounts are Maurice Mizrahi, L'Egypte et ses Juifs: Le Temps revolu, xixe–xxe siecles (Geneva: Imprimerie Avenir, 1977); Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, Blanche [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Jacqueline Kahanoff Mi-mizrah. shemesh (Tel-Aviv: Yariv Hadar, 1978); Ronit Matalon, Zeh ‘im ha-panim 'eleynu (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); Rachel Maccabi, Mitzrayim sheli (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat ha-Poalim, 1968); and Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). Joel Beinin's book is the product of several years of research in Israel, Egypt, France, and the United States, in which he consulted not only books but also newspaper articles in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as archives, among them the YIVO Institute records; the Haganah, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, and the Central Zionist archives (Israel); the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection of Yeshiva University (containing the records of the Cairo community); and the U.S. National Archives . He also interviewed Egyptian Jews and non-Jews.

NATIONAL TIMES AND OTHER TIMES: RE-THINKING CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon. While it conceptually located in a legal, territorial entity, within which it is associated with the privileges of sovereignty and the rights of individuals, it is also understood is terms of the historical process by which peoples develop shared characteristics. However, the attempt to code citizenship interms of shared cultural backgrounds belies the ways in which citizen-subjects are temporally disjunctive. Beginning with attention to the way some writing practices challenge the state system's monopoly over the meaning of citizen presence in time and space, this essay turns to a reading of an Israeli woman's novelistic treatment of a geographically and culturally diverse Jewish family, whose characteristics challenge the State of Israel's myth of national homogeneity. Ronit Matalon's, The One Facing Us, which juxtaposes a version of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘women's time’ with the historical time of the state, restores the diverse forms of co-presence that are denied in the discourses of nation-state legitimation. Her novel, along with the other genres treated in this analysis, encourages an understanding of politics that resists the identity-fixing effect of a state-oriented model of political space and the homogenizing of the temporal presence of citizen-subjects. More generally, the writing performances treated in this essay cast political interaction as a continuous negotiation of co-presence among those with diverse ways of being-in-time.

The Laugh of the Medusa

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l'ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project. I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses