Hélène Cixous

Critical Impressions

Lee A. Jacobus, Regina Barreca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135300241
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1999. Each volume in the Lit Book Series will contain a wide range of essays on a particular author, theme or genre. By offering a forum for oftentimes competing, but equally compelling, theoretical points of view within each volume, the editors hope to generate interest, debate, dissent, appreciation and attention for each volume's topic. The Lit Book Series will provide a valuable venue for scholars, writers and general readers to encounter, examine, produce and discuss insightful, sound scholarship about important fields of study. This international collection of essays regards the work of Hélène Cixous with all the complexity that she herself brings to her engagement with literature and psychology. Cixous is well known as an interpreter of Freudian and Lacanian theories, especially those connecting gender and the production of language. She is also a noted writer of fiction and drama as well as a distinguished theorist of literary feminism.

1
Life Makes Text from My Body: A Reading of Hélène Cixous’ La Venue à l’écriture

Sissel Lie

Why did Hélène Cixous’ text La Venue à l’écriture¹ from 1976 have such echoes, first in France and later in English-speaking countries? Can the cause be the creative potential and the power Cixous sees in women? “Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything!… Take to letters”(40) she writes and asks her readers to give themselves up to writing and to the flooding text to come. I read her texts, and this text in particular, as admonitions to me as a woman to use my own experience, listen to my own body and rethink old truths, and her faith in me has been of great encouragement to me as a reader and a writer of literary texts.

But first and foremost the essay talks about difference, complexity, plurality, in and between men and women, and between men and men, women and women. Sexuality is difference. “What is at stake is the definition of woman as otherthan a non-man,” says Rosi Braidotti (Brennan 91), about modern feminism. Cixous sees masculine and feminine in men and women; we are all different, with something in common.

Coming to Writing is not only a text for a specific historical situation. Its interest lies also in its poetical force, its ambiguity and playful, ironical attitude. Cixous herself recommends to both readers and writers to make love to their texts like she does. She mixes the genres of manifesto and autobiography, stressing the relationship between lived experience, rethinking and change. She is urging to action, illustrating her admonitions with examples from her own life, and she describes the transformational potential of the writing process departing from her own role as a writer, with one foot in psychoanalysis and one foot in the open.

Cixous attacks a language which maintains us in conventional concepts and dichotomies. A new way of writing can bring the body into the language, make us able to use our unconscious resources in a continuous exchange between conscious and unconscious. It is a question for both men and women of taking the plunge from what we know, what feels safe, but is oppressive, into the unknown, frightening and fascinating. Cixous’ project of liberation is necessarily double. She wants to liberate the individual from the tyranny of rationality and liberate women from the image of “woman” in our culture.

Dare what you don’t dare

The modernists tried from the end of the last century to extend the possibilities of the creative mind. Many artists saw their activity as revolutionary, as the new knowledge would create a new way of living. Cixous’ text addresses itself to the feminist movement of the 70s, but “Let yourself go” is at the same time in Cixous’ French version, “Lâche toi! Lâche tout!,” a play with André Breton’s text, when in 1924 he addressed himself to his male surrealist friends and asked them to let go of everything, especially of Dada. “Lâchez tout,” he said, “Let go of everything. Let go of Dada…. Let go of hope and fear…. Set out on the roads” (Breton 263). He urged his friends to liberate themselves from family relations, from career and petty bourgeois habitudes, but also from former targets and from their fear of the unknown. Man, the lonely wanderer, must leave for the future and wins by so doing an inner and outer liberty.

Most important for Cixous is not to set out on the roads. She focuses on an inner liberation, obtained by transgressing one’s own limits: “dare what you don’t dare” (40). Cixous agrees with the former avant-garde movements on this point. She is relating to a tradition of rupture and revolt against the rationality of the Establishment, against conventional ideas about art and society. “I believed—up to the day that writing came to my lips—in Father, Husband, Family; and I paid dearly for it in the flesh” (49). Cixous has felt “bodily” what is means to be exposed to an ideology preventing the woman from becoming a subject. A fundamental difference between Cixous’ text and the former avant-garde manifestoes is Cixous’ conscious focusing on gender and on the oppression of women in our culture as both an integrated part of us and something hindering us from without. Her text can thus be read as a commentary on the former texts’ blindness to gender.

Important thematic elements link, however, Cixous’ “manifesto” to texts like Tristan Tzara’s Dada-manifesto of 1918 and Breton’s “Manifeste surréaliste” from 1924. Dada proclaims a total rupture with the past; anything happening before Dada is denied. Cixous goes even further, no need for the old body any more: “Listen: you owe nothing to the past, you owe nothing to the law…shed the old body, shake off the Law…take off, don’t turn back: it’s not worth it, there’s nothing behind you, everything is yet to come” (40). What is new and unknown is a value in itself just as in Breton’s manifesto. Apparently Cixous herself has no knowledge, no connections, no models. As for the surrealists, the romantic unrest leaves its stamp on the quest, never stay where you are, never be contented with what you have.

A tool for Breton as for Cixous in this quest is poetic writing, which creates contact with the unconscious, and is more than a tool—it is a way of living. Cixous exhorts her readers to write with one hand and experience pain with the other: “With one hand, suffering, living, putting your finger on pain, loss. But there is the other hand: the one that writes”(8). Life and writing become inseparable. She says in an interview in Le Monde in the same period that writing is as necessary as breathing: “When I don’t write, it’s as if I was dead” (Rambures).

Cixous’ project resembles more of surrealism than of Dada. Dada was preoccupied with razing the established culture. Dadaists were also very sceptical about psychoanalysis. Tzara saw it as a way of taming the bourgeois. Breton and Cixous are explorers in the inner and outer world, inspired by the split subject of psychoanalysis. In Breton’s first surrealistic manifesto the unconscious is the source of creative work, of understanding and change. Cixous emphasizes the necessary and continuous communication between the conscious and the unconscious. They both show us as capable of getting closer to a “truth,” an understanding, that reason alone cannot reach, precisely because this “truth” comes from elsewhere, from a place we cannot control rationally.

Contact with the unconscious is maintained mainly through dreaming: “a blood tongue, a night tongue, a tongue that traverses my regions in every direction, that lights their energy, urges them on and makes my secret horizons speak” (43). This “night tongue” is captured by the writer who is a medium for the unknown. Cixous’ description of the freely flooding text could indicate a resemblance to the automatic writing of surrealism, but Breton wants, in his first manifesto, the finished text to be an authentic document and therefore untouched by reason. Only Cixous describes a “double voice” where dream and consciousness alternately contribute to the writing process. In the cited interview from Le Monde she describes her writing process thus:

My good fortune is that I have a writing partner in my work who is no other than the dream. Immediately when I start on a book, a coupling is made automatically. I begin to dream in such a way that the dream and and the text are exchanged interminably…[I]t is as if I had a double voice…. The text that is on the point of becoming, writes effects in my unconscious. From here it is sent back to the text. It is like this that everything circulates between my life, my body, my unconscious, my history, my text, and it is all blended in me like my own blood.

In one of her later books, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, published in 1993, the “School of Dreams” is still one of writing’s three ladders. Here she maintains that “Our dreams are the greatest poets…. The problem is that we usually destroy our dreams the moment we wake up, or everyone would be a poet” (80). The essay from 1976 voices the firm belief that women are potential poets, even if the goal is liberty, not the status of literary genius.²

Love is central in Breton’s text as a force capable of contributing to a final harmonizing and transcending of oppositions between dream and reality, conscious and unconscious. Cixous accentuates that love is reaching towards the other, and towards writing and life in general Both stress the role of the woman. Breton sees her as a guide for man on his way to the sources of imagination; Cixous accentuates women’s strength to persuade her female readers to fight and write for themselves. If knowledge and poetical writing are closely connected to love, the male surrealists ponder erotic love, while Cixous idealizes maternal love and is preoccupied by the separation from the mother and its influence on all later love relationships. She makes writing an act of love and the maternal body the site of feminine subjectivity and poetic writing. Cixous describes the early mother-child dyad and the separation from it as her own relation to her mother, and as a basic psychic experience for everybody. In an interview from Le Quotidien de Paris from 1976 Cixous speaks of the universal themes related to women’s love and the first separation from the mother:

…the theme of separation, how a girl’s body or a woman’s body is marked by the separation, that is to say that another body disappears which is the nurturing body, the loved body which for the real little girl is the mother’s, and later becomes the body of all mother substitutes, this means that one of the things I am working on is what is repressed in all sexual or love relationships which is played anew, because the mother is always in the beloved, man or woman.

It is the women in surrealism, not Breton, who are interested in the mother figure, both in texts and pictures. Some of them elevate the mother to a goddess (Bjørhovde). As does Cixous, they seem to seek a new definition of the female subject. Perhaps the strategy needed is idealization, necessary to counterbalance the misogyny of our culture? If Cixous in Coming to Writing makes ideals out of stereotypes of femininity, she presents maternal love as a dream of total and impossible abandonment, and this is all a part of the same strategy of making us think differently and means a valorization of what has been negated in our culture. The maternal can also be found in everyone to remind us of the hope and the goodness in the world:

How would you survive that armed bestiality, Power, if you didn’t always have for yourself, with yourself, in yourself, a bit of the mother to remind you that evil doesn’t always win out; if there weren’t always a bit of the mother to give you peace, to keep a little of the milk of life through the ages and wars, a little of the soul’s pleasure that regenerates? A taste of books, a taste of letters, to revive you? (48)

Breton describes how imagination is strangled through socialization, the adult having no contact any more with his creative powers. For both writers the child is the image of the free human being. In Coming to Writing Cixous focuses on the girl’s education and describes how the young girl becomes edible:

They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derrière, they stuff you in a pot, they sauté you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage. And now, lay. How difficult they make it for us to become women, when becoming poultry is what that really means! (27–28)

Naturally a role such as this is impossible to combine with the urge to write. Cixous calls her desire to write “madness,” but uses the word ironically. She wants “To be taken by surprise. To find in myself the possibility of the unexpected” (10–11), but this is considered as madness by the “Superuncles,” who make the norms. The only alternative proposed to her is a form of realism which resembles the realism Breton was so harsh towards in 1924. She thus criticizes realism in the tradition of surrealism and of le Nouveau Roman from the 50s and the 60s. This realism she links to capitalism, and to the rulers’ fear of the unknown, making any exploration and improvement dangerous and important to prevent. Cixous, on the contrary, seeks new ways of thinking, as Breton explored the real functioning of thought. The project in both cases is transformation, different thinking that could change the world.

The writing Cixous describes is different from the way of writing she designates as the norm, linked to works of scholars and the knowledge and thinking of the Enlightenment. She herself wants to communicate knowledge, but this is knowledge about the “forbidden” writing (45). The forbidden writing is, contrary to the other, lifegiving and liberating. It permits communication between inner and outer space, between the world, History and the individual, between the unconscious and the conscious.

Coming to Writing can be read as a manifesto, but is far from a copy of former manifestoes. Breton used a small part of psychoanalytic knowledge for his inspired proclamations. Cixous reads Freud and Lacan with a woman’s perspective. In her effort to show us how we go about liberating our bodies by writing, Cixous can use the insights of psychoanalysis to describe the psychic development of the subject and at the same time let her story give examples of the innumerable obstacles a woman meets who wants to be a subject, and of how they can be overcome. She makes herself exemplary and studies herself with psychoanalysis as a model for explanation. The understanding, reached through her own experience, is the basis for a program valid for all her female readers. She, however, uses psychoanalysis no more than she needs and often makes fun of it. She challenges fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis and asks, for instance, if the castration complex concerns women at all.³

The jewelry box

Cixous wants to communicate to her readers not only what she comes up with, like Breton, but the hows and whys of this exploration to enable other women to do as she does. The women she talks about are her readers, women like herself, and the “woman” she is deconstructing is the definition of woman in our culture.

It is not uncommon in a manifesto to speak on behalf of others. In the quoted interview from Le Monde we can see how she also considers these women as her readers, writing being a way to share joy and energy with friendly readers:

In fact I have a feeling that I am not alone, but that I write to the other and in the name of others. It is a kind of dialogue with the nearest: those who belong to memory and culture, on one side, those I love now and in the future on the other (and now especially, the women). Those with whom I want to share a special joy, a special energy.

This declaration is marked by generosity and by the wish to influence her readers. She does not address herself to her adversaries. Cixous’ text appeals to the reader to identify with the writer’s real history. She has learned something of importance that she wants to share. Her female readers can undergo the same metamorphosis as she does. These are the ones she admonishes in Coming to Writing, these are the ones who can be persuaded to do as she wants: “You are you too, a Jewwoman, trifling, diminutive, mouse among the mouse people, assigned to the fear of the big bad cat” (7). Man can also be integrated in her dialogue with the readers, but only if his femininity is not repressed: “Because he doesn’t fantasize his sexuality around a faucet” (57). She ends up with a “we” where she is integrating these “feminine” men. Anatomical differences do not correspond with phantasmal representations of sexuality. In 1976 she uses “feminine” and “masculine” to make us think about their contents, but also to fill them with new meaning, whereas she later feels these concepts so laden by conventional ideas that she prefers to talk about “poetic” writing instead of “feminine” writing.

Writing seems a radical solution to the need in women to become subjects, so much discussed in the 70s. Women’s possibilities are indefinite: “These pearls, these diamonds, these signifiers that flash with a thousand meanings, I admit it, I have often filched them from my unconscious. The jewelry box. We all know what it is. Every woman has one” (46). But her experience with poetic writing, a volcanic breath wanting to be born, should encourage every person with a closeness to the feminine in themselves, to write.

When writing deriving from the feminine in us, is delivered, it is flooding forth, a gift without any demand of a return, a real gift which will not create dependence, but freedom. A woman gives, protects and escapes with what she wants to steal from culture, she is the guardian of love in a world where love is threatened, but she also takes care of herself. So Cixous gives us back the best of maternity, but we are not to loose ourselves in sacrifice as the “perfect” mother was supposed to.

The dissolution of the preverbal mother-child dyad as described by psychoanalysis, is necessary to enter the symbolic order; but at the same time, to keep contact with the part of oneself that this dyad represents, as described by Cixous, is a condition for women of becoming a subject. Thus, if separation is necessary, it is not absolute. The song of the mother is a synonym of something fundamentally feminine in the unconscious of every individual, transmitted as a rhythm to the text.

Cixous is concerned by the capacity of language to transgress loss and lack by giving them a name, but also by the capacity of language to communicate traces of what is lost, because separation from the unconscious is neither definitive nor absolute. Memory of the separated maternal body is found in the unconscious as “the honey of my unconscious” (21) and can be delivered through a way of using language which comes naturally to women when they are not being watched and controlled. Thus the goal she puts up for women is the recovering of the “natural” flooding of words which is actually already there.

Be wary of names

Cixous’ text can be seen as a contribution to a deconstruction and a rethinking of obsolete dichotomies of man/woman, female/ male, feminine/masculine. If Lacan does not grant woman a position in the symbolic order, but sees her as a product of a collective male phantasm, Cixous does not consider this description neither as natural nor as final. Cixous’ solution is to see woman as marginal, but not necessarily excluded from language. The woman is freer than the man because she has no responsibility for the norms; she can be more radical because she has an ironical position towards them. It does not cost her too much to reject norms that exclude her anyway. It is possible to write oneself through the norms, out of the concepts, the codes, to new freedom of the mind.

The text is raising the reader’s consciousness of how concepts can prevent thinking: “I write ‘mother/What is the connection between mother and woman, daughter? I write ‘woman/What is the difference? This is what my body teaches me: first of all, be wary of names; they are nothing but social tools, rigid concepts, little cages of meaning assigned…” (49). Concepts give capitalistic society a hold on the individual mind. The most important goal for Cixous seems to be eliminating the “names,” “to unname” (49).

Women need to liberate themselves from the significations of what our culture calls “woman” to be able to discover a positive femininity, Cixous says. Only in this way will it be possible to feel love for oneself and for the Other. Cixous fills “woman” with the following content: “And woman? Woman, for me, is she who kills no one in herself, she who gives (herself) her own lives: woman is always in a certain way ‘mother’ for herself and for the other” (50).

The feminine is no fixed essence, but fleeting, not defineable, whereas masculinity is linked both to rationality and power, often in a negative sense. Masculinity, “helmeted phalloses” (48), means wars and oppression. It would be easy to see this as a polarization between man and woman, yet every individual can get a grasp on “maternal goodness” (50) when he or she has written himself out of conventional thinking. A part of this rethinking is giving all of us the responsibility to liberate the feminine in ourselves, and at the same time exhorting the historical women to battle against a way of thinking that is maintaining them in oppression.

Is there a contradiction in the fact that Cixous exhorts women to battle for a position as subjects in language, stating that they are different from men, and the wish to eliminate the rigid limits of gender? Oppression of women exists; it is our way of thinking which has to chan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Series
• Forword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Life Makes Text from My Body: A Reading of Hélène Cixous’ La Venue à l’écriture
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 2 Le Père de Le Père de l’Ecriture: Writing Within the Secret Father
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 3 The Medusa’s Slip: Hélène Cixous and the Underpinnings of Écriture Féminine
• Works Cited
• Works Cited
• 4 Hélène Cixous: Music Forever or Short Treatise on a Poetics for a Story To Be Sung
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 5 Reading and wrighting the other: Critism as Facility
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 6 Cixous’ Concept of “Brushig” as a Gift
• Works Cited
• 7 The Gift: Hélène Cixous and Jaques Derrida
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 8 Hélène Cixous Names Woman, Mother, Other: “a feminine plural like me”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 9 Cixous, Spivak, and oppositional Theory
• Note
• Works Cited
• 10 Hélène Cixous: A Space Between— Women and (Their) Language
• Works Cited
• 11 Hélène Cixous and the of Portraying: on Portrait du Solei
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 12 Ariane Mnouchkine/Hélène Cixous: The Meeting of Two chimaeras
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 13 The Self and “Other(s)” in Cixous’ Sihanouk
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted
• 14 Bringing a Historical Caracter on Stage: L’Indiade
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 15 Men More Than More
• Notes
• Works Cited
• 16 The Critic as Playwright: Performig Hélène Cixous’ Le Nom d’Oedipe
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Contributors