Helene Cixous

12 Key excerpts on "Helene Cixous"

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  Filmspeak

  How to Understand Literary Theory by Watching Movies

  • Edward Tomarken(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX

  Post-feminism: Hélène Cixous

  Summary: The chapter begins by explaining that Cixous was chosen because in addition to her critical works her creative writings are an integral part of her influential feminist position. The main innovative element of Cixous’s theory is procedural, an aspect influenced by Derrida, but one which reaches an ethical resolution. The first axiom of Cixous’s theory, “writing with the body,” is explained by way of “Julie and Julia.” While the female body may serve as a form of communication, the next section, on “Made in Dagenham,” explains how feminism affects human behavior. The source of this power to change how people act is the libido, which is illustrated by “Marie Antoinette.” The female libido is to be distinguished for Cixous from its male counterpart, as is seen in the analysis of “Moulin Rouge.” In the next section, “Rosenstrasse” illustrates how the female libido alters the male power structure. But this type of change may be only temporary: “The Devil Wears Prada” shows how women can make a permanent change within the establishment. The conclusion distinguishes Cixous’s process from that of Derrida by its emphasis on care, affection, and love, all functions of the libido, that produce ethical results not only in larger social and political terms but also for individual love relationships

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  The decision to choose one feminist is difficult because the United States, Great Britain, France, and other countries are marked by distinct types of feminism, to say nothing of the individual differences within each country. But I have chosen Hélène Cixous because, as a Joyce scholar as well as a novelist and playwright, she is one of the most influential critics in the field and, unlike many feminists, both her critical and her creative work bear directly upon literary theory. Cixous deconstructs the very notion of literary theory while articulating an alternative theory: the manner in which she avoids what she calls the “male master theory” while positing her own theory can best be understood by proceeding through this chapter, that is, by following her procedure. The very fact that this view can only be understood by following it in process is crucial, for the alternative, an all-encompassing concept, would be another example of male mastery.

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  We Only Talk Feminist Here

  Feminist Academics, Voice and Agency in the Neoliberal University

  • Briony Lipton, Elizabeth Mackinlay(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The structure of this chapter then, is delib- erately fluid, circling around and swirling between only to return again to concepts and ideas which we may have already touched upon. WHY WRITE WITH CIXOUS AND AHMED? Of all of the wise women (and some men) whose words we have included here, the names of Cixous and Ahmed are perhaps those whom readers will remember most after reading this book. While we cannot make any claims to identities as philosophers or to a deep knowledge of psycho- analysis, we are both drawn to the subversive entanglement of poetics, politics, playfulness, and performativity in Cixous’s work. Notably absent from this book is a deep engagement with the feminist poststructuralist philosophies of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. While there are many similarities—and differences—in their work to that of Cixous’, we felt that Cixous would bring to bear a specific perspective on the question of writ- ing and speaking feminist, specifically through her enactment and explora- tion of the concept écriture feminine. Translated from French as ‘feminine writing’, écriture feminine is a theory which emerged predominantly from the writings of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to deconstruct the relation- ship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. However, it is not helpful to think of écriture feminine in the masculinist theoretical sense, bound as it is by fixed forms of representation and rigid structures, but rather one that places emphasis on feminine embodied experience, affective move- ment, material creativity, and fluid cycles of speaking-writing. Cixous lays 28 B. LIPTON AND E. MACKINLAY out this understanding of écriture feminine at the very beginning of her 1976 essay, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ when she writes, ‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do.

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  An Introduction to Modern Feminist Theory

  • Jennifer Rich(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Humanities E-Books

    (Publisher)

  As Derrida once famously said, ‘there is no outside of the text’ (‘il n’y’a pas d’hors du texte’) by which he meant that there is no ‘truth’ or reality outside of what is created by and through language. In his introduction to the Hélène Cixous Reader , Derrida remarks that Cixous was a master of uncovering the connotations of language—she made language ‘speak’ those secrets that lay hidden within familiar idioms or phrases. As he notes, ‘She [Cixous] knows how to make it [language] say what it keeps in reserve, which in the process also makes it come out of its reserve’ ( HCR vii). 1 For a detailed overview of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, see An Introduction to Critical Theory , also available through Humanities E-books. 46 Jennifer Rich For Cixous, it is only through language that women can break the binarisms that have condemned them to the negative side of this persistent duality. This language can not by necessity be of the old type—it must break through the male-dominated privileging of linear, rational argument (logocentrism) and instantiate a new kind of writing and hence, thinking. Cixous names her new model of writing ‘ écriture feminine ’ or feminine writing. What, however, makes feminine writing feminine? How does it differ from the everyday writing of both men and women? In answering this implied question, Cixous reveals her indebtedness to psychoanalytic theory—particularly the way in which the language of the body (its desires, its sex, its reproductive capability) is always already inscribed in writing.

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  Consuming Autobiographies

  Reading and Writing the Self in Post-war France

  • Claire Boyle(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 Hélène Cixous Autobiography, the Ethics of Knowledge and Strategies of Self-Writing Questions of identity, politics, the politics of identity and the identifications readers make with authors surface once more in latter works by Cixous. 1 A comparatively recent evolution in Cixous's writing career has been her turn, in a clutch of texts written in the 1990s, towards a more public exploration of her life in Algeria prior to her definitive emigration to France. 2 This treatment of the Algerian past enables an exploration of the significant effect that Cixous's hybrid, multifaceted ethnicity has on a personal identity which proves to have been indelibly marked by her experience of growing up in colonial Algeria as a non-Algerian, but also non-French, Jew. 3 For readers well acquainted with Cixous's œuvre, this autobiographical turn marks a significant thematic departure, as well as a reconciliation with a genre from which Cixous had previously kept her distance. 4 In literary and academic circles, Cixous's identity as a writer had previously been bound up with her academic and literary explorations of questions of gender: in particular the gender of writing, and the possibility of writing in the feminine gender, using an écriture féminine [femmine mode of writing]. 5 In her Hélène Cixous: photos de racines (hereafter abbreviated to Photos de racines), Les Rêveries de ¡a femme sauvage: scènes. primitives (hereafter Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage) and Le Jour où je n'étais pas là, this gendered identity takes a back seat as Cixous places questions of knowledge, lack of knowledge and faulty knowledge of the Cixousian self at the heart of her autobiographical endeavours. Whilst Cixous's complicated ethnic identity and her relationship to it is a particular object of this ignorance Ol-ili is-knowledge, the identity she has acquired as a feminist is implicated too

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  Literary Theory: The Complete Guide

  • Mary Klages(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  There are two levels on which “l’ecriture feminine” will be transformative, Cixous argues, and these levels correspond again to her use of the literal and the metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level, the individual woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her Literary Theory: The Complete Guide 72 body feels like, and how to write about that body in language. Specifically, women must find their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own bodies, and find ways to write about that pleasure, that jouissance. On the second level, when women speak/write their own bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become active subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as subject in language will shift. Women who write—if they don’t merely reproduce the phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and which excludes them)—will be creating a new signifying system; this system may have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid phallogocentric symbolic order. “Beware, my friend,” Cixous writes toward the end of the essay “of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified!” The woman who speaks, Cixous says, and who does not reproduce the representational stability of the Symbolic order, will not speak in linear fashion, will not “make sense” in any currently existing form. “L’ecriture feminine,” like feminine speech, will not be objective/objectifiable; it will erase the divisions between speech and text, between order and chaos, between sense and nonsense. In this way, “l’ecriture feminine” will be an inherently deconstructive language. Such speech/writing (and remember, this language will erase that slash) will bring users closer to the realm of the Real, back to the mother’s body, to the breast, to the sense of union or non-separation.

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  Slow Philosophy

  Reading against the Institution

  • Michelle Boulous Walker(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It is revolutionary in that it summons forth new possibilities, new ways of thinking and saying what we seldom hear. 20 This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in poetic writing, where grammatical subversion devours language from within. 21 Cixous’s own writing aims to devour the silence imposed on language and thought by a relentless return to the repressed forces that usher in a new art and a new culture. 22 Such social, political and cultural change is very much tied, for Cixous, to the question of a feminine writing, an écriture féminine that challenges the restrictions imposed by a masculine symbolic imaginary. This kind of poetic writing carries the pre-Oedipal body into language, referring back to the undisciplined jouissance of the child’s relation with the mother’s body, its excessive pleasures of play and passion. It inscribes the body in defiance of Oedipal law, drawing directly on the resources of the uncensored unconscious realm. In this sense, Cixous’s writing works in defiance of Lacanian attempts to relegate the mother to a pre-symbolic, prelinguistic and silent domain. Here the mother’s body writes, and is in turn written. This feminine writing is an intimate discourse that moves towards the other, breaking with the conventions of a patriarchal language structured by distance, separation and denial. Cixous’s discussion of feminine writing refers back to the distinction she draws between masculine and feminine libidinal economies. For her, these represent possible responses to law and authority with different relations to pleasure, rather than fixed biological categories. In addition, they point to different ways of responding to generosity and the gift. A feminine economy finds INTIMATE READING: CIXOUS’S APPROACH 161 itself at odds with authority and thus inscribes a language that subverts the existing order.

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  Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation

  • Alan D. Schrift(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  15 CIXOUS, KRISTEVA, AND LE DOEUFF: THREE “FRENCH FEMINISTS” Sara Heinämaa

  The concept of French feminism emerged in the USA and Britain in the 1970s when selections of the works of French theoreticians were translated into English. The writers included in this category are all feminists in the sense that they work to question traditional misogynistic conceptions of femininity and masculinity, women and men. They operate, however, with different theoretical and practical interests and within different disciplines: philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, literature, and history. The critical attacks of the French feminists are directed at the tradition of Western thinking and writing, at its androcentric concepts, metaphors, and questions, but these theorists also problematize the prevailing forms of feminist theory by historical and conceptual-critical inquiries.

  The aim of this article is to clarify the concepts and methods that French feminist thinkers have used in analyzing, interpreting, and criticizing traditional philosophies of human existence and in developing new alternatives to these accounts. I will proceed in a systematic manner and study the central themes and arguments of three French feminist thinkers: Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Michèle Le Doeuff. I will also compare their discourses to those of Luce Irigaray and Simone de Beauvoir, who are presented separately in this volume but who both are usually classified among the French feminists.

  I will begin, however, by questioning the unity of the category itself and by arguing that French feminism cannot be pinned down by any necessary or sufficient features. Rather than forming a closed totality, French feminism

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  Out of Africa

  Post-Structuralism's Colonial Roots

  • Pal Ahluwalia(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In her early plays, Cixous was interested in exploring women’s relations to patriarchy while her new plays seem to be increasingly concerned with issues of ethnicity and nationalist struggle. Hence, her work on Cambodia and India become metaphors for the ‘competition between different conceptions of personal and social relations’ (cited in Sarup 1993: 115). It also illustrates her interest in resistance. As Sarup points out, writing for the theatre has opened up new avenues for Cixous’s project, allowing her to explore ‘different relations to otherness, to develop her theorisation of the bodily dimensions of language, to posit the existence of alternative social and subjective economies, and to tie her theoretical work to the mechanisms of historical change’ (cited in 115). This transformation has meant that Cixous’s work is now directed at understanding women’s struggle as part of a larger movement, ‘to realise the subjective and collective dimensions of a feminine economy, to preserve cultural diversity in the face of homogenisation, and to resist the different forms of social domination’ (cited in 116). As Cynthia Running-Johnson has pointed out, the transition to the theatre was a turning point for Cixous where she moved the focus from ‘the body to history, from the self to others’ (1999: 247). However, it is important to note that Cixous’s work on the cultural other has not escaped criticism on the grounds that it borders on a kind of orientalism that homogenises and silences the other woman (Aneja 1993; Davis 1999; Manners 1999; Sellers 1996; Shiach 1991: 65–66; 122–23).

  Although Cixous argues that it is not possible to define feminine writing, it is proximate to speech. Speech is important, because it is related to song and the unconscious. Indeed, speech ‘is a powerfully transgressive act for women, and writing is a privileged space for transformation’ (cited in Sarup 1993: 112). Writing, however, is best understood and produced in relation to the body. The separation between mind and body comes at the expense of hystericising the body. Through the use of myth and dream Cixous explores the repressed and seeks to unsettle the notion of subjective autonomy and conscious control. For Cixous, moving beyond the rational and that which can be known ‘towards the site of creation, multiple subjectivity and the bodily roots of human culture derives from a close study of Nietzsche’ (cited in Sarup 1993: 112).

  Ann Rosalind Jones has characterised Cixous’s writing as a ‘growing collection of demonstrations of what id-liberated female discourse might be’ (1985: 365). Her texts are fictions in which ‘tableaux, poems, fables, images intermingle endlessly’ (Micha 1977: 115). Cixous’s texts are replete with myth. She uses and rewrites myths so that female mythic figures reappear breaking down the dominant patriarchal portrayal of women. Cixous uses myth, because in earlier times it took the place of analysis. She notes:

  I am passionately interested in the myths, because they are always (this is well known) outside the law, like the unconscious. Only afterwards there is the story, which signifies that there has been a clash between the in-law and the out-law … What happens? Interpretation, of course, because we do have myths and their interpretations. One never questions enough the traditions of interpretation of myth, and all myths have been referred to a masculine interpretation. If we women read them, we read them otherwise. That is why I often nourish my texts, in my own way, at those mythic sources.

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  Helene Cixous

  Writing and Sexual Difference

  • Abigail Bray, Julian Wolfreys(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Hers is not simply a dilettante’s indulgence with pretty words or a romantic mystification of the maternal, but a serious ethical and philosophical investigation into the grounds of thought. The stress Cixous places on the importance of a creative meta-physics and not a sterile repetition of previous thought also resonates with Nietzsche. In a section from Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche offers a passionate critique of what he perceives to be the dominance of scientific objectivity within philosophy. Such a philosophy is uncreative, it is ‘an instrument, let us say a mirror ’ (1973: 115). ‘The objective man’, he goes on to argue, ‘is an instrument, a precious, easily damaged and tarnished measuring instrument and reflecting apparatus’ (116). We might argue, with a nod towards the previous chapter, that such thinkers belong to the tradition of analytic realism, in the sense that this form of philoso-phy is grounded upon a type of empiricism and is about how to most accurately reflect reality. For Nietzsche, the philosophers of the future must embrace their own subjectivity and forge an exper-imental ethics in order to ‘create values’ (123). In this Nietzschean sense, we can understand Cixous as a philosopher of the future – she embraces her own subjectivity as a thinker and forges new 46 Hélène Cixous values, creates new future possibilities for thought. Her autobio-graphical reflections are not so much a feminist confessional narrative but a meditation on the metaphysics and the materiality of her own subjectivity which provides a passage into thinking through subjectivity in general. Like Nietzsche and his philoso-phers of the future, Cixous recognizes the importance of testing concepts against the self. We might also approach Cixous as a dissident. In an insightful essay, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, Julia Kristeva offers the following definition of dissidence. For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been: thought .

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  Queer Writing

  Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction

  • E. Stephens(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  For Cixous, as for Genet, this is what writing itself is understood to be and to do: writing is the term both use to designate the strategies by which they can reclaim their cultural construction as ‘improper’ and transform that impropriety into a line of flight out of the systems that would entrap and silence them. Cixous’s engagement with Genet’s work thus elucidates the cen- tral question we have been examining throughout this book: how might a marginal subjectivity that is itself a product of the dominant language represent itself otherwise within it? Towards an Écriture Homosexuelle 157 At the same time, however, while the importance Cixous attributes to writing provides a productive framework within which to consider the potential of a queer writing to address this issue, her analysis of Genet’s writing under the rubric of écriture féminine is not an unproblem- atic part of her work, appearing to reinforce a heternormative tendency to conflate homosexuality with femininity. 12 As we saw in the previ- ous section, however, the term femininity does not simply designate for Cixous a biological category or natural essence (although it does remains strongly associated with these concepts, which are central to its cultural significance), but rather a particular condition or quality of linguistic and cultural exclusion. The significance of this reconceptualisation of femi- ninity for the practice of écriture féminine she theorises is that, rather than a fixed and stable referent that must be directly brought into language, femininity signifies for Cixous a transformative and fluid dynamic that can be mobilised in and through language. That is to say, femininity is for Cixous as perversion is for Genet, and as I am arguing of queer, itself understood as a mode of writing.

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  Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought

  • Stephen Linstead(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Kristeva is Bulgarian by birth and upbringing. Cixous was born and raised in Algeria under French occupation and Irigaray was born in Belgium (Oliver, 1993: 164). Moreover, as Oliver (1993: 164) points out, it is also the case that just as the three are not French, neither are they specifically feminist. Indeed, Kristeva has been extremely outspoken in her criticism of feminism and what she has regarded as their desire to take over phallic power (Kristeva, 1980: 208). She arrived in Paris around Christmas 1965. She was 25 years old, Bulgarian and supported by a French government scholarship (Lechte, 1990: 91; Moi, 1986: 1). She was already disposed to an ambivalence towards French language and literature from her Bulgarian education, already had an awareness of oscillating positions and exclusions. These two constructions alone have had a significant influence on her work. She had come to Paris to study and was at first committed to the communist cause and a supporter of Maoism but she later remained in Paris as an exile from Bulgarian-Soviet communism. Within a year, she was contributing to the most influential and prestigious journals, Critique, Langages and Tel Quel. In the subversive mood in the Paris of the mid-1960s, Kristeva found a fertile site for her ideas and no doubt gained insights from her own experiences of exile and of difference which gave impetus to her prolific writing during this period. From the start of her studies in Paris, she was to work with some of the leading figures in French structuralism. She was particularly influenced by Roland Barthes who, as one of the foremost champions of structuralism, had sought to reveal the ways in which bourgeois ideology was embedded in French language and literature. Barthes was one of the ‘ New Critics ’ and a semiotician.

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  Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory

  • Robin Truth Goodman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The cry that gushes forth at the articu- lation of times. One must cry it out in writing [le crier par écrit]. Print the laughter. (Laugh, 27–8) And even as she yields to the necessity of reissuing these one-time texts in their original form, she protests, “I am not an author of manifestos. Do you hear me? I write. I am someone quiet, withdrawn” (Laugh, 30). 9 Cixous has published forty-eight novels or fictions to date (2015), and more than thirty other major works including literary essays, plays, long interviews, and collaborations with other artists. That is more than one book for every year of her life (she was born in 1937) but compressed into the lifetime of the author who was newly born fewer than fifty years ago, in 1967. Many of her initial writings appeared under the designation of novels, no doubt at the insistence of publishers who needed to soothe readers’ suspicions about this very unconventional prose. 10 The concession to generic convention conventionalized her first “novel,” Dedans, enough to win a prestigious French literary prize in 1969. In 1975, however, the same year as “The Laugh of the Medusa” and “Sorties,” the designation “novel” was dropped as Cixous began publishing with the feminist press Éditions des femmes. From thereon out, she will refer to these books as “fictions,” but the books themselves appear without any generic marker. 11 From here on, Cixous’s oeuvre makes its own mark as feminine writing. Recall that, for Cixous, the concept of writing has been deconstructed and displaced by the more generalizable, even universalizable idea of what Derrida calls (after Freud and Emmanuel Levinas) the “trace.” Writing, in the restricted or so-called literal sense, is but one kind of trace, which is to say, one kind of repeatable mark that remains readable in the absence of any origin or originator.

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