The Hélène Cixous Reader [Paperback]

This reader is a diverse selection of Cixous' work. Beautifully translated, thoughtfully arranged and annotated. The foreword by Derrida is very helpful in understanding the translation and its difficulties.

The text maintains Cixous' poetic exploration of prose. From 'Angst' to 'Deluge' to the 'Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing', one feels they have entered this writer's mind and soul. Cixous's work is deeply psychological and her use of the power of words transcend language, at least in this translation for the most part. The french language is not something that can be transparently 'imported' as certain things are so inherent to the language itself, they cannot be understood by the monoligual psyche.

But even for those who never wish to delve into the french language in its original form, this book will do a fine job of throwing them into a pool of thought and mixed feelings.

This book of selected texts, arranged chronologically, includes poetry, fiction, essays and theatre pieces. Dense and not easily digested, it is filling fare, full of intricately wrought words and images. Most of the work is translated from original French texts. For me, the most beautiful, clear writing is in sections with Cixous' own revision of the English translation. If you love writing, internal exploration or feminist thought, please read "To Live The Orange", first published in 1979. Her words gave me tears, goosebumps, and a deep experience on many levels.

Helene Cixous is a literary theorist, poet, novelist, and playwright who has spent nearly all of her writing career trying to undo what she saw as the damage perpetrated by a millennia-long male patriarchy that has demonized women beginning with the Biblical Eve, relegating them to exist only as appendages to the overarching symbol of the phallus. In her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa," Cixous uses a weird blend of classic Greek myth, psychoanalysis, and semiotics to restore to women the right and the power to recreate a sense of "woman" using her body both in a literal and metaphorical mode.

The mid 1960s was a time of political, social, and revolutionary upheaval in Western culture, especially in France, where Cixous was just beginning to ally herself with the leading intellectuals of the time: Jacques Lacan, who modified Freud to include the Imaginary or pre-consciousness of infancy (related to the mother) and the Symbolic (related to the father), the social pre-language realm that infants "graduate" to after 18 months; Jacques Derrida, who popularized the theory of deconstruction that destabilizes the binary opposites that for centuries permitted patriarchy to marginalize women who saw themselves as no more than as subordinate to men; and Julia Kristeva, whose own theories on the relation of structuralism to feminism were revolutionizing how women could render themselves as potent equivalences of men. Cixous found herself at philosophical odds with many of her French feminist peers who insisted that women were the equals to men in every sense of the word. They were irate with her due to Cixous' view that men and women were fundamentally different in how they perceived each other on a power relation level.

Her feminist peers were not the only ones confused by Cixous' theories. Her readers could not follow how, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," Cixous could so fluidly move between "text, performance, unconscious, and biography." Part of their difficulty lay in their perception that Cixous was writing primarily as a theoretician, who incidentally also wrote poetry and drama. The truth was the reverse. The fluid meandering style that marked her imaginative writings also typified her theory. It is this hybridization of style to content that renders "The Laugh of the Medusa" as complex as it does enlightening.

Cixous' controlling focus was on the relation of writing to the complex of power issues that had long characterized male hegemony over the totalizing webbery that connected all aspects of womanhood. Writing, for Cixous, centers on its source and nature and how it involves a playful use of imaginative wordplay, the result of which is to destabilize the literal foreground while increasing the fluidity of the metaphorical background. This literal foreground is a holdover from Lacan, who wrote that the phallus forms the center of a patriarchal linguistic system that he termed "phallocentric," a combination of the phallus and Derrida's "logocentric" which suggests that all of western culture is based on polar binaries separated by a slash. Cixous united the two to form the "phallogocentric," which to her represented the ultimate domination of the female by the male who used the phallus as an anchor to align a system of language that places the male on the favored left side of the slash, relegating the female to the subordinate right side. Language thus tilts toward expressing a male-dominant world view using language of the phallus. Women--both their minds and their bodies--cannot then "speak" in terms that men can hear. Cixous does not stop with this limiting of female verbosity; she aligns these crippled verbal guttural cries with her equally suppressed sexuality, her jouissance, such that both are denuded of representational meaning. This connection of crippled speaking with an equally crippled sexuality comes from Freud, who wrote of women as being essentially passive, whose vaginas could be filled and fulfilled only by a penetrating penis. Thus, a Freudian would tend to stabilize the male/female binary by describing all sexual activity solely in terms of the thrusting male and the receiving female. Cixous argued that such a male dominant view of sex placed all women on the periphery of sexual and verbal intercourse with men.

It follows from her view of the Lacanian/Freudian hybrid that if the language that women use is clearly tilted toward the male then how can a woman ever hope to express herself on paper or in the spoken word? If a man writes with his penis then what does a women use? Cixous writes that women cannot compete linguistically with men if women are required to use the same or comparable tools. Rather, for women to be heard, they must think of their bodies on two levels: the physical and the metaphorical. Further, the act of being heard must be akin to the act of purposeful struggle, one in which women seek to escape the shackles imposed by men. What is required is for women to rethink and recreate the primal act of writing. If women are innately connected to child bearing by virtue of unarguable biology, then they must align themselves to writing using their own bodies. Cixous writes that women must use "white ink" to write. Clearly, this white ink is a metaphorical foray into the feminine thicket denied to men but will allow women to use language that is as appropriate to them as polar binaries are to men. Though it is tempting for the reader to view the white ink as the central metaphor of her essay, that reader would do well to consider the Medusa of the title.

When Cixous writes that men have "riveted us between two horrifying myths, between the Medusa and the abyss," she unites the Medusa of classical mythology with the Freudian view of women as the "dark continent," one that serves as a surrogate vagina hiding in a dark and mysterious chasm that defies entry. If Cixous can destabilize the myth of the Medusa as the icon of male fear of the lurid female archetype of the Siren, then that which had previously been the primordial visual objective correlative of mindless fear of and hatred of all things feminine would now be seen as no more terrifying than the Wizard of Oz whom Dorothy has just exposed as hiding behind a curtain endlessly pulling on the levers of fear. Through the adroit use of redundancy, badinage, fluidity of expression, and deliberate usage of multiple meaning, Cixous succeeds in transforming the snake-locks of Medusa's head from an overarching symbol of repression and fear to a restoration of the truly harmless and lovely form and soul of the original mythological Medusa before the male-like goddess Athena ripped away her femininity in a rage of pique. The laughter, then, of the Medusa can now be seen as a call to judge all such long-standing fear and loathing as irrelevant and non-binding on those women who have won the day by changing the rules of the game. The key, Cixous insists, is not to engage in binary opposition to men--a practice in which men are all too proficient--but rather to engage men in a fluid and metaphorical manner that will render useless the bludgeon of the phallus and elevate the mystery of women onto a level that will guarantee a more nearly even psycho-sexual playing field.