[Kuhn is an English critic and educator who has written or edited numerous works on feminism, including The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (1985) and The Feminist Companion Guide to Cinema (1990). In the essay below, she provides background information on Cixous and places her essay "Castration or Decapitation?" in the context of linguistic theory. Kuhn also notes that while Cixous simply attacks male-centered theories of language in this essay, her later works offer an alternative feminist view.]

Hélène Cixous is a writer, a professor, and the initiator of the women's studies program at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. She is the author of numerous texts—novels, plays, works of criticism, poetry, essays—and has become quite widely known in recent years among feminist theorists in the United States: however, very little of her writing is currently available in English translation. The most obvious reason for this is that it is very difficult for translation to do full justice to Cixous's writing, which is actually organized around a pervasive play with, and subversion of, linguistic signifiers. At the same time, since this practice in her writing is crucial to the interrogation of meaning that is at the heart of Cixous's work, it is important that it be attended to in translation and flattened out as little as possible by it. Moreover, increasing concern among English-speaking feminists with questions around language—the relation between a "patriarchal" order and language, and the possibility of questioning the one by working on the other—not only provides a climate for interest in the work of Cixous and other French feminist writers who engage head-on with these issues, but also renders all the more urgent the task of translating that work.

The French approach to these questions is distinctive in that it tends to be informed by theories concerning the place of "woman" in language and the question of a feminine relation to language that have had relatively little currency within Anglophone feminist thought. These theories are founded in Jacques Lacan's variant of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, which draws on some of the insights of structural linguistics to advance a model of human subjectivity as organized by unconscious relations constituted both developmentally and structurally in relation to language. According to the Lacanian model, the human subject is not only a speaking subject with an Unconscious, but also a masculine or feminine subject in relation to the Oedipus complex. Sexual difference is seen as structured by the subject's relation to the phallus, the signifier which stands in for the play of absence and presence that constitutes language. Because the oedipal moment inaugurates sexual difference in relation to the phallus as signifier, men and women enter language differently, and Lacan's argument is that the female entry into language is organized by lack, or negativity.

Because of the importance of Lacanian thought in the intellectual context in which they operate, feminist theorists in France have felt very keenly the need to engage directly with its arguments about sexual difference: many of their critiques of Lacanian theory in fact started out as criticisms from within. Feminist psychoanalysts (Luce Irigaray, for one) have been highly skeptical of the attribution of a negative value to woman's relation to language and of the sexism implicit in the elevation of the phallus to the place of Transcendental Signifier.

This is the background against which we have to understand the general preoccupation of French feminists with phallocentrism, and also their specific critique of the privileged place accorded the phallus in psychoanalytic accounts of language and sexual difference. In line with this critique, Hélène Cixous in "Castration or Decapitation?" aims a blow at "phallologocentric" culture where it hurts the most, and attacks it for marking woman as "other," as difference and negativity. She says no to the fathers, cheekily reminding them of the very thing they have most to fear—the threat of castration posed by the female body. As she says in "The Laugh of the Medusa": "Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts! Too bad for them if they fall apart on discovering that women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one." Here Cixous is suggesting that certain aspects of feminist/feminine practice may constitute a challenge to phallologocentrism. Her specific concern is with the "feminine" approach to writing (or writing/reading) that is implied by the neologism "sexts": she wants to write, and to write about, a "writing that inscribes femininity."

When "Castration or Decapitation?" first appeared in 1976, the author's primary concern was to open up the question of the "repression of the feminine" in culture, and at the same time to challenge that repression by provocatively questioning the structures of masculinist language and thought—its dualisms, its hierarchical orderings, and so on. To these structures, the feminine comes as "other," a riddle that is finally insoluble within the terms of a masculine (libidinal) economy. Freud's unanswered question "What do women want?" articulates the puzzle that the feminine poses for a patriarchal order. For Cixous, female sexual pleasure (jouissance) constitutes a potential disturbance to that order, and a "womantext"—a text that inscribes this jouissance—is a return of the repressed feminine that with its energetic, joyful, and transgressive "flying in language and making it fly" dislocates the repressive structures of phallologocentrism. And Cixous's own work offers an écriture—a practice of writing—that aims to do this by posing plurality against unity; multitudes of meanings against single, fixed meanings; diffuseness against instrumentality; openness against closure.

As the same time, however, despite its intent to question phallocentric discourse by means of a writing that subverts it, "Castration or Decapitation?" like other writings by Cixous of the same period, perhaps still constitutes a yearning toward, rather than a grasping of, an alternative practice: "There has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity." Her more recent writings seem to pose something of a break in this respect. The vocality, tactility, resonance, and exhilaration to be found in "Castration or Decapitation?" are still there, but because the direct challenge to phallocentrism is no longer an explicit focus, these qualities structure the texts in a more thoroughgoing manner; meanings and readings are denser, more complex, more focused.

Vivre l'orange, for example, echoes with voices and resonates with textures. Its central image of the orange that the writer/reader ("I") reaches toward and grasps condenses and generates an almost infinite number of personal and cultural associations. The orange's juiciness, sensuousness, texture, and brightness are present in the writing itself, which is as tactile as the fruit being held and weighed in the hand. The sound association with Oran, the writer's birthplace, implies a return to sources, but the shape of the orange, the O, tells us that the route will not be a linear one. The shape also suggests the roundness of femininity, the shape and weight of a breast, a full and positive sign of sexual difference to replace the Lacanian Lack:

From far away, from outside of my history, a voice came to collect the last tear. To save the orange. She put the word in my ear. And it was nearly the nymph of the orange that awakened in my breast and surged forth streaming from the heart's basin. Certain voices have this power. I had always been sure of it. She put the orange back into the deserted hands of my writing, and with her orange-colored accents she rubbed the eyes of my writing which were arid and covered with white films. And it was a childhood that came running back to pick up the live orange and immediately celebrate it. For our childhoods have the natural science of the orange. There was originally an intimacy between the orange and the little girl, almost a kinship, the exchange of essential confidences. The orange is ever young. The influx of orange propagated itself to the ends of my bodies. The orange is the nearest star. With all of my life I thought it, with all of my thought I went toward it, I had the peace in my hands. I saw that the world that held the answer to the questions of my being was gold-red, a globe of light present here and tomorrow, red day descended from green night.

I asked: "What have I in common with women?" From Brazil a voice came to return the lost orange to me. [Kuhn explains in a footnote that the "voice from Brazil is that of Clarice Lispector, a contemporary Brazilian writer, author of Agua Viva."] "The need to go to the sources. The easiness of forgetting the source. The possibility of being saved by a humid voice that has gone to the sources. The need to go further into the birthvoice."

And to all of the women whose voices are like hands that come to meet our souls when we are searching for the secret, we have needed, vitally, to leave to search for what is most secret in our being, I dedicate the gift of the orange. And to all of the women whose hands are like voices that go to meet the things in the dark, and that hold words out in the direction of things like infinitely attentive fingers, that don't catch, that attract and let come, I dedicate the orange's existence, as it has been given to me by a woman, according to the entire and infinite bringing-together of the thing, including all that is kin of the air and the earth, including all of the sense relations that every orange keeps alive and circulates, with life, death, women, forms, volumes, movement, matter, the ways of metamorphoses, the invisible links between fruits and bodies, the destiny of perfumes, the theory of catastrophes, all of the thoughts that a woman can nourish, starting out from a given orange; including all of its names, the silent name, laid upon my almost white leaf, the name as proper to it as god's name to god; its family name; and its maiden name; and the singular name, unique, detached from the dark-green air in which the voice of Clarice went to gather an orange among all of the oranges to lay it young and sound on the toile of a text prepared for it: she called this one "Laranja."

It was almost a young girl. It was an orange regained. Through the fine skin of the word, I sensed that it was a blood-orange. By a fine vibration in the toile, I sensed that Clarice closed her eyes to touch the orange better, to hold it more lightly, let it weigh more freely upon her text, she noted eyes closed to hear more internally the secret song of the orange. Every orange is original. And to all of the women for whom the need of fruit reflexion is a task of life, I dedicate the juice-filled fruits of meditation. To all women then. My ears of meditation.

And so on: meanings radiate, multiply, permeate the text, and finally go beyond it. If "Castration or Decapitation?" is readable as saying no to the fathers, then the next move must be a positive approach to the mothers, a "need to go to the sources and enjoy together."