Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous, Sept. 2011.
Born (1937-06-05) 5 June 1937
Oran, French Algeria
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School French feminism
Institutions University of Paris VIII
European Graduate School
Cornell University
Main interests
 Literary criticism

Hélène Cixous (French: [elɛn siksu]; born 5 June 1937) is a professor, Algerian/French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician.[1] Cixous is best known for her article ''The Laugh of the Medusa'', which established her as one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory. She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris (today's University of Paris VIII).[2]

She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College London in the UK; and Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014.

Life and career

Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria to Jewish parents.[3] She earned her agrégation in English in 1959 and her Doctorat ès lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English literature and the works of James Joyce. In 1968, she published L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'Art du remplacement (The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement) and the following year she published her first novel, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical work that won the Prix Médicis. She is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and the University of Paris VIII, 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 (French). Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). Her reading of Derrida finds additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level.[4] In addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, on Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is considered one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory.[5] In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship between sexuality and language. Like other poststructuralist feminist theorists, Cixous believes that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society. In 1975, Cixous published her most influential article "Le rire de la méduse" ("The Laugh of the Medusa")[6] translated and released in English in 1976. She has published over 70 works; her fiction, dramatic writing and poetry, however, are not often read in English.

Influences on Cixous' writing

Some of the most notable influences on her writings have been Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud.

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud established the initial theories which would serve as a basis for some of Cixous' arguments in developmental psychology. Freud's analysis of gender roles and sexual identity concluded with separate paths for boys and girls through the Oedipus complex, theories of which Cixous was particularly critical.

Jacques Derrida

Contemporaries, lifelong friends, and intellectuals, Jacques Derrida and Cixous both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"—not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision' but 'baptism,' not 'Bar Mitzvah' but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint."[7] Her book Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint addresses these matters.

Through deconstruction, Derrida employed the term logocentrism (which was not his coinage). 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 binary opposition is essential to Cixous' position on language.

Cixous and Luce Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea and Lacan's symbol for desire, creating the term phallogocentrism. This term focuses on Derrida's social structure of speech and binary opposition as the center of reference for language, with the phallic being privileged and how women are only defined by what they lack; not A vs. B, but, rather A vs. ¬A (not-A).

In a dialogue between Derrida and Cixous, Derrida said about Cixous: "Helene's texts are translated across the world, but they remain untranslatable. We are two French writers who cultivate a strange relationship, or a strangely familiar relationship with the French language -- at once more translated and more untranslatable than many a French author. We are more rooted in the French language than those with ancestral roots in this culture and this land."[8]

The Bibliothèque nationale de France

In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France after Cixous donated the entirety of her manuscripts to date. They then featured in the exhibit "Brouillons d'écrivains" held there in 2001.

In 2003, the Bibliothèque held the conference "Genèses Généalogies Genres: Autour de l'oeuvre d'Hélène Cixous". Among the speakers were Mireille Calle-Gruber, Marie Odile Germain, Jacques Derrida, Annie Leclerc, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ginette Michaud, and Hélène Cixous herself.

Major works

The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

This text, originally written in French as Le Rire de la Méduse in 1975, was translated into English by Keith and Paula Cohen in 1976.[7] 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. Cixous develops a type rhetoric that has the potential to expand on the purpose of feminist theory as discourse advocating for the rights of women. Écriture feminine is a style of writing that falls outside of the discourse of patriarchal systems and therefore allows women to address their needs and narratives by claiming her identity. This text is situated in a history of feminist rhetoric that separated women in terms of their gender and women in terms of authorship.[9] The “Laugh of the Medusa” works to bridge this gap by placing emphasis on the woman as individual, commanding her to write and use her body as source of power and inspiration. Cixous uses the term the Logic of Antilove to describe her criticism of the systematic oppression by patriarchal figures. She defines the Logic of Antilove as the self-hatred women have, “they have made for women an antinarcissism! A naracissim which loves itself only to be loved by what women haven’t got”, this idea persecutes women by defining them by what misogynistic tradition believes makes the female sex inferior.[10] Cixous commands women to focus on her self as an individual, particularly her body and write to redefine her identity in the context of her history and narrative. She believes writing is a tool women must use to advocate for themselves, in order to acquire the freedom women have historically been denied.

Dense with literary allusions, "The Laugh of the Medusa", is 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. The new way of writing Cixous employs is found in the techniques she uses to construct the text and how she instructs fellow women to use writing as a means of authority. Cixous is interested in the female body and how it is closing connected to female authorship. She conveys this message by employing a conversational dialogue in which she instructs her audience directly. She urges her audience to write using many direct conversational statements such as “Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it”.[11] Cixous' repetition in her message that women must write for themselves and claim their bodies bridges the gap between the physicality of the female body and their authorship. In doing so she challenges the distinctions between theory and practice expanding on the feminist rhetorical tradition.[12] The Laugh of the Medusa is successful in its creation of a writing style that allows women to claim authority because it was created on the foundation of the woman’s claim to herself and her body, therefore eliminating the oppressive affects of patriarchal control of rhetoric.[13] This text is also a critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, because it de-prioritizes the masculine form of reason traditionally associated with rhetoric, having much in common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought.[14] The essay also calls for an acknowledgment of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time.

In homage to French theorists of the feminine, Laughing with Medusa was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Bibliography

Unless otherwise indicated, the city of publication is Paris.

Fiction

Theater

Essays

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Hélène Cixous". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2014-01-17.
  2. ↑ http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/059529-000-A/vincennes-l-universite-perdue
  3. ↑ "Hélène Cixous". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2014-01-17.
  4. ↑ Not the same as puns, which play on the varied means of a word or phrase or the homonyms thereof.
  5. ↑ "How many of these great female thinkers have you heard of?". Daily Post (Liverpool). 11 December 2007. p. 12.
  6. ↑ https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:2ejPblYQ8IcJ:www.dwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/crs/e321/Cixous-Laugh.pdf+%22laugh+of+the+medusa%22&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESj4eAASbB4kJn89mWZNdze7a5GTBQtSAVzgJenWQKFPFOQr2XC0mxOSmiboiNN928ynkRGZNGf_85hzF4o8YDEtBzkMmTXZo7Xusj6WBzzszBF8Ufwe4g4JJF0PsXPkii9Oa10l&sig=AHIEtbTu7rPsB-ocVIXGsrIiVQBUTmKACQ
  7. ↑ "Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint - Description of Cixous's Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint". Columbia University Press. Retrieved 4 September 2014.
  8. ↑ Derrida, Jacques; Hélène Cixous; Aliette Armel; Ashley Thompson (Winter 2006). "From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous". New Literary History: Hélène Cixous: When the Word Is a Stag. 37 (1): 1–13. JSTOR 20057924.
  9. ↑ Jarrat (Winter 1992). "Performing Feminisms, Histories, Rhetoric" (22): 1–5.
  10. ↑ Cixous. The Rhetorical Tradition. Bedford/ St. Martins. pp. 1524–1536.
  11. ↑ Cixous. The Rhetorical Tradition. Bedford/ St. Martin's. pp. 1524–1536.
  12. ↑ Conley. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1–11.
  13. ↑ Buchanan. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press.
  14. ↑ Enos. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. Garland Pub. pp. 262–265.

Further reading

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