Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous, (born June 5 1937), is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician.

Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, to a German Ashkenazi mother and Algerian Sephardic father. She earned her agrégation in English in 1959 and her Docteur en lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English literature, and the works of James Joyce. In 1968 she published James Joyce ou l'art de replacement (English translation: The Exile of James Joyce). The following year she published Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel, her first, that won the Prix Médicis. She is a professor at the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes - Saint-Deni, which she helped to found, and whose center for women's studies, the first in Europe, she founded. She has published widely, including twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential articles. She published Voiles (Veils) with Jacques Derrida and her work is often considered deconstructive. In introducing her Wellek Lecture, subsequently published as Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Derrida referred to her as the greatest living writer in his language (i.e. the French language). Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). In addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Cixous is considered one of the mothers of Poststructuralist Feminist Theory. This rhetorical movement was fueled by the teachings and writings of three "French feminists:" Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous.

In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the realtionship between sexuality and language. Like the other Poststructuralist Feminine Theorists, Cixous believes that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society. In 1975, Cixous published her most influential article "La rire de la mèduse." "The Laugh of the Medusa" was translated and released in English in 1976. She has published over 40 works, however her fiction, dramatic writing, and poetry are not often read in English, due to the fact that most of it has not been translated from the French version. The difficulty of translating her work may be minimally exemplified even by examining the title just discussed. Her reading of Derrida proceeds along similar lines, finding additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level (these are not quite the same thing as puns, which play on the varied means of a word or phrase or the homonyms thereof, even though they bear some resemblance to them).

Influences on Cixous Writing

Due to her wide variety of interests, Cixous pulls ideas from all realms of academia. Some of the most notable influences on her writings have been: Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud. In order to truly understand all the layers that exist within Cixous writings, we must understand the fundamentals principles that she is drawing on, or more importantly attempting to destroy.

Sigmund Freud

Psycho-analyst, Sigmund Freud, laid the initial theories that would provide the center for Cixous works. Freud has two Developmental/Oediphus Theories, one for females and one for males.

Female Oedipus Theory

For this developmental theory, Freud posed the question: What do women want? In Freud's mind all aspects of life centered around the penis, so Freud believed that everything would be fulfilled with the presence of a penis--thus coining the term "penis envy." This Oediphus theory follows the young girl until she realizes that she does not have a penis, he believes this happens around the age of four. At this point, the young girl will reject clitoral stimulation because it does not require a penis. Prior to this discovery the young girl will prefer the company of her mother, however after she will reject her mother because she blames her for not being born with a penis.

In Freud's mind, girls must make the transition from clitoris to vagina in order to become a functioning adult woman. They will reject their mother, therefore redirect their desire from females to males and willingly choose the passive sexual role. Freud believes that a "normal" adult woman's sexual pleasure comes from that of being penetrated with a penis.

Male Oedipus Theory

This theory examines the transformation of a male child's natural love for his mother into sexual desire. Due to the oral stage of development, a male child will become fixated with his mother due to breast feeding. However the child sees his father as a rival for his mother's body, so Freud believes that the males child will feel resentment and aggression towards his father.

This theory is closely tied to Freud's Castration Complex which examines how the young boy will turn to pleasuring himself because he cannot sleep with his mother. The young boy will also be fearful of repercussions by his father if he is caught masturbating because he will know that he is doing it in substitution of his mother. This complex is expanded upon by another psycho-analyst, Jacques Lacan.

Jacques Lacan

In his Law of the Father, Lacan re-reads Freud's Castration Complex to understand how we obtain this image of "self" and where our desires come from.

Lacan believes that when we enter into language, which he terms the Symbolic, there is a deep 'split' that occurs in our unconscious self. This split will cause a gap between the language and our emotions. Therefore the Symbolic (language) will always occur outside of the self, so the subject will never be in control of it. According to Lacan, we will be perpetually seeking a way to fill or bridge that gap between our 'self' and the Symbolic. If we are never able to bridge the gap, we can never return to a state of "pure bliss" in which no split occurred. This gap is what Lacan defines as desire. We can never fill/reject our desires in order to become happy again because the 'self' can never exist outside of language.

Jacques Derrida

Through Derrida's deconstruction, he coined the neologism logocentrism. This is the concept that explains how language relies on a hierarchical system that values the spoken word over the written word in Western culture. The idea of binaries is essential to Cixous' postion on language. The binary oppositions must have a term with more value in culture than the other.

Cixous and Lucé Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea with Lacan's symbol for desire to coin the term Phallogocentrism. This term focuses on Derrida's social struture of binary opposites to explore the male-domination of culture. Just as the Freud's penis and Lacan's phallus are viewed as the only significant sexual organ, phallogocentrism explains how the masculine is the center of reference for language and how women are only defined by what they lack.

Major Works

The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

This text, Le Rire de la Medusa, was first written in French in 1975 and was later translated into English by Leith and Paula Cohen in 1976. Cixous is issuing her female readers an ultimatum of sorts: either they can read it and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use their bodies as a way to communicate.

"The Laugh of the Medusa," an extremely literary essay, is well-known as an exhortation to a feminine mode of writing (the phrases "white ink" and "écriture féminine" are often cited, referring to this desired new way of writing). It is a strident critique of "logocentrism" and "phallogocentrism," having much in common with Jacques Derrida's slightly earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgement of universal bisexuality, or polymorphous perversity, which is clearly a precursor of queer theory's later emphases; and it swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.

Sorties (1975)

References

"The Laugh of the Medusa". Orig. English pub. Signs, Summer 1976. Anthologized in:
- New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. ISBN 0-87023-280-0.
- The "Signs" Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Abel and Abel. ISBN 0226000753.
- Literature in the Modern World, ed. Dennis Walder. ISBN 0-19-925301-3.
The Hélène Cixous Reader. ISBN 041504930X.

Bibliography of Works

External links

Cixous page from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
An introduction to Cixous by Julie Jaskin
Stanford Presidential Lectures' Cixous page
Links on the "French Feminists"
Strategies of Difference and Opposition by Elmer G. Wiens. Hélène Cixous' writing strategy of écriture féminine.

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