The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 46
the suggested presence (or marked absence) of the other. As Kuhn puts it,
‘meanings radiate, multiply, permeate the text, and finally go beyond it’
(Kuhn 1981: 40). Cixous moves away from characterisation and narrative
logic in the traditional sense, stripping the idea of narrative to something more fundamental, more elemental. The character then is the writerly self, a shape-shifting, protean being, producing constantly changing relationships
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with the other, and consequently ‘her texts are always, like a psychoanalysis, quests, readings of dreams and fantasies, a working-out and a crossing-over’
(Duren 1981: 49).
Given this polysemic, polymorphous nature of her writing, it is no wonder
that Cixous expresses her discomfort with novelists, ‘allies of representa-
tionalism’, and sees poetry as showing the way to the woman writer, whom
she formulates parenthetically as ‘I-woman, escapee’ (Cixous 1976: 879).
Poetry is the privileged medium because it is more directly linked to the
unconscious, ‘that other limitless country’ (Cixous 1976: 880), where the
repressed have managed to survive. In ‘The last painting or the portrait of God’, Cixous declares ‘I am only a poet’ (Cixous 1991b: 106). She goes on to explain: ‘I call “poet” any writing being who sets out on this path, in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know’ (Cixous 1991b:
114). This ‘second innocence’ is ‘not a question of not having understood
anything, but of not letting oneself get locked into comprehension’ (Cixous 2008: 161). This is what leads to the recognition of the self in the other, the stranger in the loved one, in the self.
While Cixous finds a euphoria in writing, there is also a fear that words
are not enough. On the one hand, extending the link between body and writ-
ing, between knowledge and sensual taste, she writes, ‘to see the world with fingers: isn’t this actually writing par excellence?’ (Cixous 2008: 161). On the other hand, she speaks of how she would like to write like a painter, to make words like a painting: ‘I am only a poet, I am only a poor painter without
canvas without brush without palette’ (Cixous 1991b: 106). A painter is a
‘bird-catcher of instants’ (Cixous 1991b: 104), but the writer has to work
harder to animate images:
There are mimosas in the garden. I want so much to give them to you to
see … If I were a painter! I would give you each mimosa-cluster whole. I
would give you my mimosa-soul, down to the most minute quivering of
the yellow spheres. I would put my mimosoul on the canvas, before your
eyes. But I don’t paint. I can only speak to you of mimosas. I can sing the word ‘mimosa’. I can make the magic name ring out, the mimosa word: I
can give you the music of the mimosa. I can swear to you that (the) mimosa
is a synonym for alleluia … But I can’t nourish your eyes with mimosa
light. (Cixous 1991b: 106–7)
The problematic here for Cixous lies along the axis of the visual and the
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unable to ‘nourish [the] eyes with mimosa light’. And yet there is a lure to the words. She calls herself ‘the awkward sorceress of the invisible’ (Cixous 1991b: 107), and the power of her sorcery, the magic of her words and her
rhymes, can only work in collaboration with her readers. The success of her invocation is dependent on the faith of the reader. The seductive, heady
nature of the painter’s skill is very different from the difficulties faced by the writer. In a freely moving rhapsody, Cixous beautifully and deliberately romanticises the act of painting in comparison to the act of writing which
must always rely on words that have already been used, words that always
stay on the surface of the page:
This is our problem as writers. We who must paint with brushes all sticky
with words. We who must swim in language as if it were pure and trans-
parent, though it is troubled by phrases already heard a thousand times.
We who must clear a new path with each thought through thickets of
clichés. We who are threatened at every metaphor, as I am at this moment,
with false steps and false words. (Cixous 1991b: 114)
And yet there is a visceral urge to write that goes hand in hand with the
knowledge that words can be accomplices, traitors and allies. It is this uncertain territory between words, visuality and physicality that Cixous is trying to negotiate in this essay. Words possess the power of invocation, the writer’s brush ‘sticky with words’, has a materiality that transfers itself onto the page.
These words not only create an imaginative visual realm but significantly
hold the possibility of carving out a new lived reality.
In her oeuvre, Cixous engages in a complex debate on the nature of
language. She recognises the cultural and historical burden that language
carries and the problem of disengaging from that and creating meanings that are entirely new. But she also recognises the powerful nature of words, and the real work they do in building new histories and stories. This dialogue
comes to the surface if we compare Cixous’ ideas about the ability of the
painter to give us the mimosa whole, to give us his mimosa-soul, and the
quote that I begin this chapter with. In that initial quote, Cixous (or the semi-fictional speaker) inhabits a garden different from that of the mimosa trees; this is the ‘garden of hell’ where she sits upon ‘a throne of fire’, where words function as her ‘fools’. The garden of Eden is transformed into the
garden of hell, tormented and eternal; the blazing throne is suggestive of the agonising nature of the writer’s task as well as being suggestive of a purifica-tion ritual, or a test by fire. The notion of the fool contains within it both the idea of someone who is simple-witted, silly, unwise, as well as the jester Untitled-2 298
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who has the license to critique and to analyse as well as to clown around. The words are what allow for knowledge, memory, sorrow and laughter; that is
why they have power over life and death, and that is why the writerly space is the garden of hell. The mimosa garden, on the other hand, speaks lyrically though equally despairingly about the difficulty of making words real, the
uncertain magic of words.
Explicitly linking the poet and politics, Cixous writes that ‘[a] poet will never be the president of a great state, no woman who is a woman, nobody
whose tongue is free, will ever be president’ (Cixous 1993: 204). This is
because a state will never accept a poet just as a poet will never accept a state, for there is something fundamentally irreconcilable between them. But at
the same time, this incompatibility does not mean an armistice:
Power is afraid of poetry, afraid of what has no strength, only the power
of words. How much the word is feared – as much as the people, more
than bombs – the history of our century has everywhere shown. It is the
whole history of the Soviet century. People with no strength other than
the secret strength of the poem have made tyranny quake … Mandelstam
was deported for the crime of poetry. Because the clandestine strength
of the poem is acknowledged. The metaphor exceeds us. The poem is
stronger than anything. The poem is stronger than the poet. (Cixous
1993: 204–5)
The power of the poet lies in changing the nature of language that is implicated in systems of meaning that maintain the status quo. And it is through writing that the other can merge with the self, and the people can come
together with the poet in ‘reconstituting an internal homeland’ (Cixous
1993: 207). There is a power in writing for this is where the dispossessed
can continue to live, for they can ‘work language, garden language, graft it, implant it’, here they can ‘excavate and build their palaces and their tombs, grow forests, gardens, and mountains’ (Cixous 1993: 209–10). The metaphor of the garden is noticeable again.
This preoccupation with language is a concern that Cixous shares with
many other poststructuralists, including Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault.
It is also an issue that is central to feminist theorists in France, beginning from de Beauvoir and including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Monique
Wittig, who provide increasingly complex accounts of language. Her writing
draws upon both poststructuralist theory and psychoanalysis in thinking
about notions of identity, selfhood and language, while also engaging with
contemporary feminist questions of sexual difference and the constructed
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nature of ‘woman’. But at the same time, Cixous’ ‘woman’ is a flexible, porous being, and her collective ‘women’ are also subjected to examination, for any collective feminism that seeks to speak on behalf of a multitude will necessarily become part of the very ideology that it is resisting. Cixous’s écriture féminine then, as Andrea Nye points out, needs to be re-examined as both a feminist
strategy as well as a contribution to philosophy of language (Nye 1986: 46).
Her challenge to linguistic structure, syntax, grammatical rules, narrative linearity, univocal clarity and genre are part of the larger resistance in her work to the established literary cannon and scholarship as well as to dominant cultural and ideological practices. Derrida too speaks of ‘her desperate love of language, the poetics of her verbal inventions, her still unheard-of vocabulary, her inspiration and her punctuation’ when he calls her ‘one of the great French poets and writers’ (Derrida 2006: xiv). These textual labyrinths are not devoid of political engagement, and the writing Cixous proposes is itself part of a political project that interrogates and undermines phallocentric economy by opening up, democratising, the role of the writer. She urges everyone to write, because it is only through writing that an authentic voice can be found, and it is this find that will generate the discovery of new desires and possibilities. But what pushes the boundaries of both writing and selfhood even further is the fact that this is not a static discovery. Rather, it is a discovery that is always in the process of unfolding, always exceeding the moment of
its revelation, constantly spilling over the margin of the page. This kind of writing unearths a space of interiority that will always be open to the other as well as to metamorphosis. The idea of metamorphosis itself is an enigmatic, elliptical one, suggestive of not just a transformation or reshaping, but also a sense of process. Deleuze emphasises the inseparableness of writing from
becoming: ‘in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable,
becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze 1998:
1). This indefinable, slippery notion of becoming is central to Cixous’ selfhood and as well as to her notion of écriture féminine. It is this imaginative political engagement combined with her mythical textual journeys that make
her texts ‘impossible projects, powerful projections, and the most exorbitant gifts’ (Duren 1981: 50).
Notes
1. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel disapprovingly, though acutely, describes Cixous’ style as a ‘stream of the unconscious’ (1981: 268).
2. Cixous revisits this idea of the inside in ‘The author in truth’ when she undertakes a reading of the ‘first fable of our first book’ (1991c: 150), a reading that insists on the link between knowledge and taste: ‘astonishingly, our oldest book Untitled-2 300
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of dreams relates to us, in its cryptic mode, that Eve is not afraid of the inside, neither of her own nor of the other’s. The relationship to the interior, to penetration, to the touching of the inside, is positive’ (1991c: 152). The inside then consistently appears in Cixous’ work as a space of creation and positivity.
3. Spivak connects this approach to the Derridian methodology of ‘reversing and displacing hierarchized binary opposition’, as well as to the notion of restance (remains) or minimal idealisation (1981: 170). Sean Gaston explains ‘ la restance’
as a remainder, an excess that resists teleological anticipation; it is an idea that contains both the sense of that which is left-over and resists reappropriation, as well as the sense of that which remains to come (2005: 96–7).
4. Ovid describes Medusa as the ‘snakey-haired monster’ (1955: 110), as the
‘snakey-tressed Gorgon’ (112), whose ‘horrid head’ (111) needs to be cut off.
5. Freud not only reads the terror of Medusa’s decapitated head as the terror of castration, but undertakes a more literal reading that pictures Medusa’s head as representative of female genitals (1940: 274).
6. Spivak sees this statement as directly addressing the arrogance of Lacan when he writes ‘you only have to go and look at the Bernini statue in Rome to understand immediately she [St. Teresa] is coming’ (Lacan quoted in Spivak 1981: 173).
7. Wenzel continues her criticism: ‘throughout Cixous’s works, a stream of the unconscious winds its way in long, breathless sentences evoking the essential woman through somewhat inaccessible meditations upon lovemaking, birth,
and nursing which employ hyperbolic metaphors constructed upon wombs and
mother’s milk’ (1981: 268). Wenzel’s critique of Cixous’ experimental style and her perceived essentialism as perpetuating a ‘neofemininity’ (266) are emblematic of the usual criticism targeted at Cixous. See, for instance, Crowder who is sceptical of Cixous’ writing, also seeing in it a ‘neofemininity’, and calls upon
‘the political need to resist in all its forms the siren song of “women’s nature” ’
(1983: 117). In a similar vein, Cecile Lindsay asserts: ‘I side with those critics, both French and American, who see in Cixous’s écriture féminine a dangerous version of a peaceful, oceanic future for females’ (1986: 52).
8. Interestingly, when asked about her thoughts on Cixous and écriture féminine in an interview, Beauvoir answered: ‘Oh, I am not in sympathy with that at all. We need to steal the tools, women have to take back the tool that is language, but women cannot remake the language. No more than the proletariat who want the state to wither away can remake our consciousness … We have to steal the tool, but not destroy it, in my opinion. And in any case, I find the word-games feminist writers play very feeble. Of course a woman will mark her work with her femaleness, because she’s a woman and because when one writes one writes with one’s entire being. So a woman will write with her whole being, and therefore with her femaleness too. But to feel the need to play games, to cut words up, for example, I don’t like that at all, I don’t find it the slightest bit interesting’ (de Beauvoir and Wenzel 1986: 11). It is curious that de Beauvoir speaks of the need to ‘steal’ language and to ‘mark’ writing, words identical to Cixous’ vocabulary.
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9. Deleuze’s book begins with the epigraph, ‘Great books are written in a kind of foreign language’, from Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve.
10. See George Sotiropoulos’ chapter (Chapter 18) in this volume.
11. ‘Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a spring-board for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’ (‘The laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous 1976: 879).
12. This typical verbal manoeuvre by which Cixous brings together racial, cultural and sexual difference in the term ‘Jewoman’ is central to the argument that she makes in ‘We who are free, are we free?’ It is a formulation that allows her to connect her personal story of exclusion and estrangement to a larger history: ‘I am not just me, I am a protagonist in a story much more important than mine.
I was born a survivor, I escaped by the skin of my teeth. I need not have been born a survivor. I resemble those who escaped, and those who did not escape. I am also the untolerated women, the women they are secretly afraid of, I am the orphan, sometimes I am the blind and the handicapped. I am always the Jews, I am still the Arabs, for I could have been born on either side of the wall. Often I think that I could have been born further East, further South, I could have been born more of a woman, more black, more alien, more prohibited, more illiterate, and so on. This is a thought, that we Jewomen have all the time, the thought of good and bad luck, of chance, immigration, and exile’ (1993: 204). This remark further heightens the connections I have pointed out between Cixous’ notion of woman (here Jewoman) and Deleuze’s ‘becoming minoritarian’. Suleiman also
draws a connection between Cixous’ Jewoman and Derrida’s dancer – both are
not only emblematic figures but also utopian, idealised models or myths (1994: 234). See Timothy K. Beal for an interesting application of this conceptualisation of the Jewoman. Beal uses Cixous’ poetic meditations, along with Judith Butler’s theoretical works, to present a new reading of the book of Esther.
References
Ainley, Alison (1994), ‘French feminist philosophy: de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, le Doeuff, Cixous’, in Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, ed. Richard Kearney, London: Routledge.
