Cixous, Hélène (1937—)
French feminist philosopher, poet, playwright, and novelist. For Cixous, language is trapped in a male or more specifically patriarchal economy, but within it there is the possibility of a female economy, which can be accessed via experimental writing she calls *écriture féminine. It is another form of writing, a writing both of and in the space of the Other (a space Cixous defines as that of the real and the body). Cixous does not offer a specific theory of écriture féminine; indeed she says écriture féminine is precisely the untheorizable, the uncodifiable, the almost but not quite unsayable. Rather, écriture féminine, is a practice, or an experiment. It depends, too, Cixous insists, on what one might term a freely bisexual (in Freud’s sense) attitude to both sex and gender, i.e., an openness towards the simultaneous presence of both sexes in the mind at all times. Creativity, she says, is impossible without this openness to ambiguity and insofar as women are more willing to admit to psychic bisexuality than men, creative writing itself is feminine. Women are more open to otherness than men, according to Cixous, by virtue of their bodies, or rather the gender specific experiences their bodies make available to them, e.g. birth, lactation, and so on. Writing the body, as Cixous puts it, is woman’s way of overcoming the shame women have historically been made to feel with regard to their bodies, exemplified---she says---by the various stupid modesties they are expected to adhere to. Liberation is attained by attending to all the nonverbal, unconscious, and instinctual affect and sensations produced by the body and finding the means of expressing them. Men are not intrinsically excluded from this process: Cixous allows that writers such as Shakespeare and Kleist are able to attain a kind of becoming woman in their writing by virtue of their willingness to push language to its limits of expressivity and invent news ways of thinking and saying. As recent commentators have pointed out, Cixous’s emphasis on the body runs the risk of being essentialist (and thus excluding transsexual women, among others), but avoids that trap by emphasizing the experimental dimension. Moreover Cixous’s point is not that only women can write but that only feminine writing---which can be written by both men and women---is really writing. In this sense the focus on the body is not so much an essential or essentialist step as a strategy for achieving the goal of écriture féminine. One can see in Cixous’s creative works, particularly her plays, an attempt to produce examples of écriture féminine. Her works often contain highly sophisticated and therefore virtually untranslatable wordplay as well as improvisational punctuation, textual spacing, and so on. Her friend Derrida, Jacques aptly described her as a ‘poet-thinker’, meaning both that she is a poet and a thinker and that her thinking and poetry are inseparable. She repaid the compliment by writing a book about Derrida entitled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (2001), translated as Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2004). It is undoubtedly La Jeune née (1975), translated as The Newly Born Woman (1986), co-written with Catherine Clément, which best exemplifies this generic ambivalence in which poetry and philosophy cease to be different from one another. Probably her most famous and widely known play is Portrait de Dora (1976), translated as Portrait of Dora (1983), which explores Freud, Sigmund’s famous case study from the perspective of the patient. Cixous frequently collaborates with Ariane Mnouchkine’s improvisational Théâtre du Soleil. Her 1969 novel Dedans (Inside) won the Prix Médicis. Further Reading: I. Blyth and S. Sellers Hélène Cixous: Live Theory (2004). A. Bray Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (2004). J. Dobson Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scenes of Writing (2002).