Helene Cixous.
Hélène Cixous (b. 1937) is a writer and philosopher. Transgressing the limits of academic language by and with poetic language, she is widely lauded for both her experimental writing style and her experimental practice, which traverses many discourses. An influential theorist, as well as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Cixous is also noted for her role in initiating and developing new models of education. Much of her prominence developed around écriture feminine, a method and practice that addresses Cixous’s ongoing concern with the effects of difference, exclusion, the struggle for identity, and the overcoming of Western logocentrism. These ideas were prominently exposed in her widely influential essay Le rire de la Méduse from 1975 (The Laugh of the Medusa). This work is considered a key text within her concept ofécriture feminine, and informs her advocacy for the freeing of writing, and the freeing of the self through writing.
Excerpts from "Sorties"
Where is she?
Activity/passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos.
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, concave, ground – where steps are taken, holding- and dumping ground.
Man
____________
Woman
Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all
its figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same
thread or double braid is leading us throughout literature, philosophy,
criticism, centuries of representation and reflection.
Thought has always worked through opposition,
Speaking/Writing
Parole/Écriture
High/Low
Through dual, hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths,
legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary system,
related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman?
Nature/History
Nature/Art
Nature/Mind
Passion/Action
Theory of culture, theory of society, symbolic systems in general –
art, religion, family, language – it is all developed while bringing the same
schemes to light. And the movement whereby each opposition is set up
to make sense is the movement through which the couple is destroyed. A
universal battlefield. Each time, a war is let loose. Death is always at
work.
Father/son Relations of authority, privilege, force.
The Word/Writing Relations: opposition, conflict,
The Word/Writing Relations: opposition, conflict, sublation, return.
Master/slave Violence. Repression.
We see that ‘victory’ always comes down to the same thing: things
get hierarchical. Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization
subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between
activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the
question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition:
activity/passivity.
There are repercussions. Consulting the history of philosophy – since
philosophical discourse both orders and reproduces all thought – one
notices that it is marked by an absolute constant which orders values and
which is precisely this opposition, activity/passivity.
Moreover, woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy.
Whenever it is a question of woman, when one examines kinship structures,
when a family model is brought into play. In fact, as soon as the
question of ontology raises its head, as soon as one asks oneself ‘what is
it?’, as soon as there is intended meaning. Intention: desire, authority –
examine them and you are led right back . . . to the father. It is even
possible not to notice that there is no place whatsoever for woman in
the calculations. Ultimately the world of ‘being’ can function while
precluding the mother. No need for a mother, as long as there is some
motherliness: and it is the father, then, who acts the part, who is the
mother. Either woman is passive or she does not exist. What is left
of her is unthinkable, unthought. Which certainly means that she is
not thought, that she does not enter into the oppositions, that she
does not make a couple with the father (who makes a couple with the
son). [. . .]
And if we consult literary history, it is the same story. It all comes
back to man – to his torment, his desire to be (at) the origin. Back to
the father. There is an intrinsic connection between the philosophical and
the literary (to the extent that it conveys meaning, literature is under the
command of the philosophical) and the phallocentric. Philosophy is
constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement. Subordination of the
feminine to the masculine order, which gives the appearance of being the
condition for the machinery’s functioning. [. . .]
Once upon a time . . .
One cannot yet say of the following history ‘it’s just a story’. It’s a
tale still true today. Most women who have awakened remember having
slept, having been put to sleep.
Once upon a time . . . once . . . and once again.
Beauties slept in their woods, waiting for princes to come and wake
them up. In their beds, in their glass coffins, in their childhood forests
like dead women. Beautiful, but passive; hence desirable: all mystery
emanates from them. It is men who like to play dolls. As we have known
since Pygmalion. Their old dream: to be god the mother. The best mother,
the second mother, the one who gives the second birth.
She sleeps, she is intact, eternal, absolutely powerless. He has no
doubt that she has been waiting for him for ever.
The secret of her beauty, kept for him: she has the perfection of
something finished. Or not begun. However, she is breathing. Just enough
life – and not too much. Then he will kiss her. So that when she opens
her eyes she will see only him; him in place of everything, all-him.
– This dream is so satisfying! Whose is it? What desire gets something
out of it?
He leans over her . . . Cut. The tale is finished. Curtain. Once awake
(him or her), it would be an entirely different story. Then there would be
two people, perhaps. You never know with women. And the voluptuous
simplicity of the preliminaries would no longer take place.
Harmony, desire, exploit, search – all these movements are preconditions
– of woman’s arrival. Preconditions, more precisely, of her arising.
She is lying down, he stands up. She arises – end of the dream – what
follows is socio-cultural: he makes her lots of babies, she spends her youth
in labor; from bed to bed, until the age at which the thing isn’t ‘woman’
for him any more. [. . .]
Already I know all about the ‘reality’ that supports History’s progress:
everything throughout the centuries depends on the distinction between
the Selfsame, the ownself (– what is mine, hence what is good) and that
which limits it: so now what menaces my-own-good (good never being
anything other than what is good-for-me) is the ‘other.’ What is the ‘Other’?
If it is truly the ‘other’, there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized.
The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn’t
settle down. But in History, of course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity
that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other
in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules,
names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that
orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before
my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle:
the reduction of a ‘person’ to a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’ – the
inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some ‘other’ – no master
without a slave, no economico-political power without exploitation, no
dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no ‘Frenchmen’ without
wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion – an exclusion
that has its limits and is part of the dialectic. If there were no other,
one would invent it. Besides, that is what masters do: they have their
slaves made to order. Line for line. They assemble the machine and keep
the alternator supplied so that it reproduces all the oppositions that make
economy and thought run.
The paradox of otherness is that, of course, at no moment in History
is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated,
recap-tured, and destroyed as other. Even the exclusion is not an
exclusion. Algeria was not France, but it was ‘French’. [. . .]
The empire of the selfame
(empirically from bad to worse)
[. . .] All the ways of differently thinking the history of power, property,
masculine domination, the formation of the State, and the ideological
equipment have some effect. But the change that is in process concerns
more than just the question of ‘origin’. There is phallocentrism. History
has never produced or recorded anything else – which does not mean that
this form is destinal or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone.
Men’s loss in phallocentrism is different from but as serious as women’s.
And it is time to change. To invent the other history.
There is ‘destiny’ no more than there is ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ as such.
Rather, there are living structures that are caught and sometimes rigidly
set within historico-cultural limits so mixed up with the scene of History
that for a long time it has been impossible (and it is still very difficult)
to think or even imagine an ‘elsewhere’. We are presently living in a transitional
period – one in which it seems possible that the classic structure
might be split.
It is impossible to predict what will become of sexual difference –
in another time (in two or three hundred years?). But we must make no
mistake: men and women are caught up in a web of age-old cultural
determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. One can
no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within
an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images,
reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change
everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization.
Nothing allows us to rule out the possibility of radical transformation
of behaviors, mentalities, roles, political economy – whose effects on
libidinal economy are unthinkable – today. Let us simultaneously imagine
a general change in all the structures of training, education, supervision
– hence in the structures of reproduction of ideological results. And let
us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is to say, a transformation
of each one’s relationship to his or her body (and to the other
body), an approximation to the vast, material, organic, sensuous universe
that we are. This cannot be accomplished, of course, without political
transformations that are equally radical. (Imagine!) Then ‘femininity’ and
‘masculinity’ would inscribe quite differently their effects of difference,
their economy, their relationship to expenditure, to lack, to the gift. What
today appears to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ would no longer amount to
the same thing. No longer would the common logic of difference be organized
with the opposition that remains dominant. Difference would be a
bunch of new differences.
But we are still floundering – with few exceptions – in Ancient
History.
Activity/passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother
Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos.
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, concave, ground – where steps are taken, holding- and dumping ground.
Man
____________
Woman
Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all
its figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same
thread or double braid is leading us throughout literature, philosophy,
criticism, centuries of representation and reflection.
Thought has always worked through opposition,
Speaking/Writing
Parole/Écriture
High/Low
Through dual, hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths,
legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary system,
related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman?
Nature/History
Nature/Art
Nature/Mind
Passion/Action
Theory of culture, theory of society, symbolic systems in general –
art, religion, family, language – it is all developed while bringing the same
schemes to light. And the movement whereby each opposition is set up
to make sense is the movement through which the couple is destroyed. A
universal battlefield. Each time, a war is let loose. Death is always at
work.
Father/son Relations of authority, privilege, force.
The Word/Writing Relations: opposition, conflict,
The Word/Writing Relations: opposition, conflict, sublation, return.
Master/slave Violence. Repression.
We see that ‘victory’ always comes down to the same thing: things
get hierarchical. Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization
subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between
activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the
question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition:
activity/passivity.
There are repercussions. Consulting the history of philosophy – since
philosophical discourse both orders and reproduces all thought – one
notices that it is marked by an absolute constant which orders values and
which is precisely this opposition, activity/passivity.
Moreover, woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy.
Whenever it is a question of woman, when one examines kinship structures,
when a family model is brought into play. In fact, as soon as the
question of ontology raises its head, as soon as one asks oneself ‘what is
it?’, as soon as there is intended meaning. Intention: desire, authority –
examine them and you are led right back . . . to the father. It is even
possible not to notice that there is no place whatsoever for woman in
the calculations. Ultimately the world of ‘being’ can function while
precluding the mother. No need for a mother, as long as there is some
motherliness: and it is the father, then, who acts the part, who is the
mother. Either woman is passive or she does not exist. What is left
of her is unthinkable, unthought. Which certainly means that she is
not thought, that she does not enter into the oppositions, that she
does not make a couple with the father (who makes a couple with the
son). [. . .]
And if we consult literary history, it is the same story. It all comes
back to man – to his torment, his desire to be (at) the origin. Back to
the father. There is an intrinsic connection between the philosophical and
the literary (to the extent that it conveys meaning, literature is under the
command of the philosophical) and the phallocentric. Philosophy is
constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement. Subordination of the
feminine to the masculine order, which gives the appearance of being the
condition for the machinery’s functioning. [. . .]
Once upon a time . . .
One cannot yet say of the following history ‘it’s just a story’. It’s a
tale still true today. Most women who have awakened remember having
slept, having been put to sleep.
Once upon a time . . . once . . . and once again.
Beauties slept in their woods, waiting for princes to come and wake
them up. In their beds, in their glass coffins, in their childhood forests
like dead women. Beautiful, but passive; hence desirable: all mystery
emanates from them. It is men who like to play dolls. As we have known
since Pygmalion. Their old dream: to be god the mother. The best mother,
the second mother, the one who gives the second birth.
She sleeps, she is intact, eternal, absolutely powerless. He has no
doubt that she has been waiting for him for ever.
The secret of her beauty, kept for him: she has the perfection of
something finished. Or not begun. However, she is breathing. Just enough
life – and not too much. Then he will kiss her. So that when she opens
her eyes she will see only him; him in place of everything, all-him.
– This dream is so satisfying! Whose is it? What desire gets something
out of it?
He leans over her . . . Cut. The tale is finished. Curtain. Once awake
(him or her), it would be an entirely different story. Then there would be
two people, perhaps. You never know with women. And the voluptuous
simplicity of the preliminaries would no longer take place.
Harmony, desire, exploit, search – all these movements are preconditions
– of woman’s arrival. Preconditions, more precisely, of her arising.
She is lying down, he stands up. She arises – end of the dream – what
follows is socio-cultural: he makes her lots of babies, she spends her youth
in labor; from bed to bed, until the age at which the thing isn’t ‘woman’
for him any more. [. . .]
Already I know all about the ‘reality’ that supports History’s progress:
everything throughout the centuries depends on the distinction between
the Selfsame, the ownself (– what is mine, hence what is good) and that
which limits it: so now what menaces my-own-good (good never being
anything other than what is good-for-me) is the ‘other.’ What is the ‘Other’?
If it is truly the ‘other’, there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized.
The ‘other’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn’t
settle down. But in History, of course, what is called ‘other’ is an alterity
that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other
in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules,
names, defines, and assigns ‘its’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that
orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before
my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle:
the reduction of a ‘person’ to a ‘nobody’ to the position of ‘other’ – the
inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some ‘other’ – no master
without a slave, no economico-political power without exploitation, no
dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no ‘Frenchmen’ without
wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion – an exclusion
that has its limits and is part of the dialectic. If there were no other,
one would invent it. Besides, that is what masters do: they have their
slaves made to order. Line for line. They assemble the machine and keep
the alternator supplied so that it reproduces all the oppositions that make
economy and thought run.
The paradox of otherness is that, of course, at no moment in History
is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated,
recap-tured, and destroyed as other. Even the exclusion is not an
exclusion. Algeria was not France, but it was ‘French’. [. . .]
The empire of the selfame
(empirically from bad to worse)
[. . .] All the ways of differently thinking the history of power, property,
masculine domination, the formation of the State, and the ideological
equipment have some effect. But the change that is in process concerns
more than just the question of ‘origin’. There is phallocentrism. History
has never produced or recorded anything else – which does not mean that
this form is destinal or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone.
Men’s loss in phallocentrism is different from but as serious as women’s.
And it is time to change. To invent the other history.
There is ‘destiny’ no more than there is ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ as such.
Rather, there are living structures that are caught and sometimes rigidly
set within historico-cultural limits so mixed up with the scene of History
that for a long time it has been impossible (and it is still very difficult)
to think or even imagine an ‘elsewhere’. We are presently living in a transitional
period – one in which it seems possible that the classic structure
might be split.
It is impossible to predict what will become of sexual difference –
in another time (in two or three hundred years?). But we must make no
mistake: men and women are caught up in a web of age-old cultural
determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. One can
no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within
an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images,
reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change
everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization.
Nothing allows us to rule out the possibility of radical transformation
of behaviors, mentalities, roles, political economy – whose effects on
libidinal economy are unthinkable – today. Let us simultaneously imagine
a general change in all the structures of training, education, supervision
– hence in the structures of reproduction of ideological results. And let
us imagine a real liberation of sexuality, that is to say, a transformation
of each one’s relationship to his or her body (and to the other
body), an approximation to the vast, material, organic, sensuous universe
that we are. This cannot be accomplished, of course, without political
transformations that are equally radical. (Imagine!) Then ‘femininity’ and
‘masculinity’ would inscribe quite differently their effects of difference,
their economy, their relationship to expenditure, to lack, to the gift. What
today appears to be ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ would no longer amount to
the same thing. No longer would the common logic of difference be organized
with the opposition that remains dominant. Difference would be a
bunch of new differences.
But we are still floundering – with few exceptions – in Ancient
History.
COMMENT
This
text is an extract from the essay “Sorties”, which is very likely the most
well-known essay Helene Cixous has ever written. In it, we can see many
features that are recurrent in the author, being the problem
of the binary thinking the easiest to spot. Regarding
binary thinking, she was one of the first writers to focus on the importance of
breaking those binary oppositions, which were so common in logocentrism, where a term is considered good and the other
is seen as bad.
In this case, those terms related with women would be considered
the ones with a negative connotation while those related to males are considered
positive. Some of the examples in the excerpt include “mother/father”, “head/heart”,
“logos/pathos” and others which we find in the opening lines. Actually, the
whole text is full of these binary relations, these set of pairs where a term
is privileged over the other: father over mother, head over heart and so on. There
is always one within the pair which is repressed. The pair activity/passivity
happens to be one of the most important oppositions in the extract, since
passivity is straightforwardly related to women in classic literature. This is
due to the fact that, as Cixous mentions in this work “woman is passive or she
does not exist.” We should bear in mind that the author is also a philosopher and
psychoanalyst, which makes us easy to understand the reason why the unconscious
and the imaginary (considered central for the consciousness), are meaningful within
the text. Besides, Helene Cixous always tries in her writing to deconstruct the
logocentrism and, what is more important, the phallocentrism; something we can
see in this text when she says “Phallocentrism is the enemy.”
In
this sense, we should be aware of the significance of what the author posed as
“ecriture feminine” (or writing-the-power), an alternative form of language
which rejects fixed categories. This greatly helps when blowing the fixity of
language, bringing many signifiers into play, thus being a type of deconstruction
of the established narrative. In “Sorties” the writer mentions what traditional
literature looks like, and the passive as well as secondary role of the female
characters in it. However, she explains how we should create literature from now
on, giving a voice to women, making us see what things are wrong and should be
changed, all that, while leading us to a solution. Furthermore, women are presented
as the Other in patriarchal societies, and thus in their literature. They are
trapped in a position where they have no voice and are inferior, all of that
due to their body, due to being women. There is a clear example of this when
Helene Cixous mentions the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, who needs a man’s kiss
to wake up, that is, she is subjected to a man’s decision/desire. It’s the man’s
figure who validates the very existence of women, without him, she would not
even exist.
Summarizing, due to the many taboo issues it deals with, together with the new ideas it introduces such as the “ecriture feminine”, the role of the conscious-unconscious and the relevance of binary opposition, we can draw the conclusion that this essay is extremely important when it comes to highlight the role of female characters within literature in the future. It shows us the upcoming path.
Summarizing, due to the many taboo issues it deals with, together with the new ideas it introduces such as the “ecriture feminine”, the role of the conscious-unconscious and the relevance of binary opposition, we can draw the conclusion that this essay is extremely important when it comes to highlight the role of female characters within literature in the future. It shows us the upcoming path.
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