SOURCE: "Politics and Writing," in Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, Routledge, 1991, pp. 6-37.

[In the following excerpt, Shiach analyzes the development of Cixous's ideas about the relationships between writing, subjectivity, sexuality, and social change.]

Despite the range of her fictional and dramatic texts, it is as a literary theorist that Hélène Cixous is best known in the English-speaking world. Her essays on writing and sexual difference have been a crucial point of reference for feminist theorists and critics, and her insistence on the transformative and broadly political dimensions of writing has constituted an important challenge to the unfocused aestheticism of much of literary studies. In this [essay] I will analyse the development of Cixous's ideas about the relations between writing and subjectivity, sexuality, and social change. Many of Cixous's arguments are developed in the context of close reading of literary texts, and I have thus returned to such texts where it seems helpful to do so, in order to identify the specificity of Cixous's readings.

Cixous's theorization of the politics of writing begins with an examination of the philosophical, political, and literary bases of patriarchy. In 'Sorties', an essay published in 1975, Cixous describes the set of hierarchical oppositions which, she argues, have structured western thought, and governed its political practice. She cites oppositions such as 'culture/nature'; 'head/heart'; 'form/matter'; 'speaking/writing', and relates them to the opposition between 'man' and 'woman'. In each case, her critique of these rigid oppositions does not amount simply to an argument against dualism but rather to a political and philosophical rejection of the dialectical relation between each of these 'couples', which privileges one term of the opposition:

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. ('Sorties')

Cixous does not invent these systems of oppositions: she reads them off a series of literary, mythical, and philosophical texts, finding their purest articulation in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The danger, for Cixous, in such philosophical and social categories, lies in their absolute dependence on strategies of power and exclusion. Each couple is based on the repression of one of its terms, yet both terms are locked together in violent conflict. Without 'nature', 'culture' is meaningless, yet culture must continually struggle to negate nature, to dominate and control it, with obviously deadly results.

Cixous's earliest recognition of the effects of such hierarchical opposition took place in relation to the mechanisms of colonialism. Her experience of French rule in Algeria led her to identify a basic structure of power: the Arab population was both necessary to, and despised by, the French colonial power. Algeria, she argues, could never have been 'France': it was perceived as different and as dangerous. Yet the mechanisms of colonial rule necessitated its identification as 'French', as tied in a relation of dependence to the French state. Cixous thus identifies colonialism as a prime example of a dualist structure of unequal power, visited by the constant threat of violence. Both sides of the opposition are locked together, and the autonomy of one—in this case, Algeria—must constantly be negated by the other.

Such dialectical structures, Cixous argues, also dominate the formation of subjectivity, and thus of sexual difference. Cixous uses Hegel's 'master/slave' dialectic as the paradigm of a form of subjectivity which is both limited and destructive: 'a subjectivity that experiences itself only when it makes its law, its strength, its mastery felt'. Here, subjectivity requires the recognition of an Other, from whom the individual differentiates him- or herself. Yet this recognition is experienced as threatening, and the Other is immediately repressed, so that the subject can return to the security and certainty of self-knowledge: 'the dialectic, the subject's going out into the other in order to come back to itself, this entire process … is, in fact, what is commonly at work in our everyday banality'.

This structure of subjectivity is related to the other 'couples' which Cixous has described: particularly 'man/woman'. Woman, within a patriarchal social and cultural formation, becomes figured, represented, as the Other, necessary to the constitution and recognition of identity, but always threatening to it. Sexual difference is thus locked into a structure of power, where difference, or otherness, is tolerated only when repressed. The movement of the Hegelian dialectic depends on an inequality of power between the two terms of opposition. Such inequality is then understood as the very basis of desire, that relation to the Other that is organized round the fear of castration, of loss and of otherness: 'It is inequality that triggers desire, as a desire—for appropriation. Without inequality, without struggle, there is inertia…'. Thus is constructed a desire that, Cixous argues, offers women the choice between 'castration' and 'decapitation': between internalization of a structure of desire based on loss, or deadly violence.

Cixous's identification of this strategy of sexual differentiation is derived from the consideration of literary texts, of cultural representations. The story of the Sleeping Beauty seems to her typical of this structure of desire. The woman is represented as sleeping, as possessed of negative subjectivity, until her encounter with male subjectivity, with the kiss. The kiss gives her existence, but only within a mechanism that immediately subordinates her to the desire of 'the prince'. Cixous's reading of Joyce's Ulysses leads her to similar conclusions. Here the socio-cultural construction of women characters intersects with the structure of desire Cixous has described, to produce the figure of woman as confined to the marriage-bed, to childbirth, and to the death-bed: 'as if she were destined—in the distribution established by men … to be the nonsocial, nonpolitical, nonhuman half of the living structure'.

It is important, here, to recognize the complexity of the relations that Cixous describes between the figure of 'woman', and women as historical subjects. Her argument depends on the importance of literary, philosophical, and mythical discourse to the formation of subjectivity. Such discourses do not exhaust the possibilities of subjectivity for individual women, but they do provide the structures in terms of which such subjectivity must be negotiated. The description of the construction of the figure of 'woman', and of its relation to mechanisms of desire, is thus of more than academic, or even philosophical, interest for women: it is the space in which they are placed by culture, and against which they must negotiate their own subjectivity.

Cixous describes her own historical recognition of this fact. Having first identified herself in terms of a common struggle, against colonialism and oppression, she comes to recognize that her gender makes such identification with a shared historical struggle problematic: 'No longer can I identify myself simply and directly with Samson or inhabit my glorious characters. My body is no longer innocently useful to my plans … I am a woman'. She comes to see her own struggle as necessarily complicated by her gender, which cuts across available narratives of collective identity:

'We' struggle together, yes, but who is this 'we'? A man and beside him a thing, somebody … someone you are not conscious of, unless she effaces herself, acts the man, speaks and thinks that way. For a woman, what I am saying is trite. It has often been said. It is that experience that launched the front line of the feminist struggle in the U.S. and in France; discovering discrimination, the fundamental unconscious racism in places where, theoretically, it should not exist! A political irony …'

Cixous's strategies for transforming this dual, hierarchized structure of philosophical and political thought, and of cultural representations, are twofold. The first procedure amounts to a deconstructive reading, which is presented as a critique of the narrative of origins, of the 'Dawn of Phallocentrism'. This reading is intended to question the naturalness or inevitability of such structural hierarchies. The second involves an exploration of the subversive, and the political, possibilities of a writing practice that sets itself up in opposition to such cultural categorization: a writing practice that Cixous describes as 'feminine'.

Cixous's representation of her project relies heavily on spatial metaphor. It thus amounts not simply to description, but to a writing practice that depends on allusion, metaphorization, and intertextual reference. Cixous compares her attack on the origins of patriarchy to a mining of foundations: 'We are living in an age where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined by millions of a species of mole … never known before'. The actions of this mole include the unearthing of the myths that sustain the logic of patriarchy, undoing their 'naturalness', and opening up the energies buried within them. This image of burial, and of possible mining and reworking, is reminiscent of Freud's observations on female sexuality. Freud comments on the surprise of his belated discovery of a period in the development of female sexuality that precedes the Oedipal in the following archaeological terms:

Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery in another field of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.

Cixous's archaeological researches lead her to an engagement with the mythical narratives surrounding the figure of Electra, through which she aims to provide a deconstructive reading of the 'Dawn of Phallocentrism', as she explores the possibilities of mining beneath the fixed structures of hierarchical dualities. She is also concerned with origins, with the recapturing of plurality in the face of teleology, and with 'the Law'.

The Law is understood as an abstract structure of prohibition and exclusion, and Cixous dramatizes what she sees as the dominant relation to the Law within patriarchy, through a reading of Kafka's short story, 'Before the Law'. This story deals with a man who arrives before a doorway which gives access to the Law. When he arrives, the door is lying open, but the bearded doorkeeper convinces him that he cannot gain entry. Many years pass, as the man still stands in front of the door, apparently unable to enter. Eventually, however, 'before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper'. He asks the doorkeeper why no-one else has come to the door seeking entry to the Law. The doorkeeper replies, 'No-one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.' There had been no barrier, no exclusion, except in the man's own perception of his relation to the Law. The knowledge of this fact, however, will die with him. Cixous uses this story as a compelling metaphor for women's relation to patriarchy: a social structure in which women submit to the Law, and die of it. Like Kafka's hero, women under patriarchy redirect the power of which they are a source against themselves.

Cixous supports this analysis with a reading of the figure of Electra, as dramatized by Aeschylus and Sophocles. She starts with what might seem an unhelpfully teleological narrative: 'The Dawn of Phallocentrism' ('Sorties'). Cixous's analysis begins with a quotation from Freud's Moses and Monotheism:

it came about that the matriarchal social order was succeeded by the patriarchal one—which, of course, involved a revolution in the juridical conditions that had so far prevailed. An echo of this revolution still seems to be audible in The Oresteia of Aeschylus. But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality—that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss.

Freud's argument about the development of patriarchy was not new: he was clearly indebted to the earlier theories of Bachofen, developed by Engels, which analysed the importance of this moment of transformation from matriarchy to patriarchy. Both writers had argued for the existence of an earlier social formation based on the principles of matriarchy, with Engels relating the development of patriarchy explicitly to the growth of private property. We do not, of course, have to understand such analyses of matriarchy as literally, or historically, true: we can read them instead as a mythological positing of origins, or as narratives that seek to represent the development of patriarchy as progress, a movement from the sensual to the spiritual, and thus as emblematic of civilization. Such narratives always risk, however, being read against the grain: that is to say, they can be read for the extent to which they make a structure other than patriarchy conceivable, and bring such a structure within the sphere of representation. We do not have to believe in the historical existence of matriarchy in order to make it sound like a good idea.

Cixous reads the Oresteia as a narrative of the formation of patriarchy. Seeing Orestes as placed at a turning point in history, Cixous focuses on the debate in the Eumenides over the relative claims of revenge for murder of a husband and murder of a mother. She draws attention to Apollo's ruling that 'the woman you call the mother of the child / is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed … / the man is the source of life', an account of reproduction that diminishes the gravity of matricide, and thus seems to license the development of patriarchal social relations.

Cixous's interest in the Oresteia, and in the figure of Electra, does not, however, lie simply in the ways in which it dramatizes the origins of patriarchy: her aim is not to reprimand Aeschylus. Instead, she wants to read what is repressed in this myth of origins, to recapture the violence, the excess, and the death, that are an inescapable part of this putting-in-place of patriarchy; her project in reading the Oresteia is to challenge the seamless teleology of the narrative, and its apparent equation with progress. She explores the importance of deceit: the ways in which Orestes' pretended death is elaborately set up and developed, particularly in Sophocles' text:

Under disguise and deviously hidden-hiding-disclosing in himself more than one nonhuman being, as being more than human, the shifty brother sets time ticking and exploded the feminine nucleus. ('Sorties')

This deceit is set alongside the disproportionate power given to the dead:

The dead-father, Agamemnon (was he ever anything other than dead, except the day he was killed? Clytemnestra asks, but no-one hears the question), is in the strongest position: the position of death.

Cixous is fascinated by the active role of the dead, and by the different relations Electra and Orestes develop with their dead father. Electra calls to him to return, and asks him to take pity, but Orestes tries to blackmail him, saying that in return for intervention Orestes will keep his father alive. This relation between Orestes and his father, implicated as it is with blackmail and with death, is represented by Cixous as paradigmatic of the relations of patriarchy:

In a certain way the father is always unknown. Coming from outside, he has to enter and give proof. Outsiders, absolutely other, strangers, ghosts, always capable of coming back…. Coming out of the earth to go back into the mother, into the palace, to reappropriate bodies and goods.

That is what is called civilization.

Progress, says Freud, whose logic thus expresses his self-interest in circular performances: 'Father, prefer me, so that feeling I am preferred, my self-confidence will grow so that I can call you "father" all the more loudly.'

About this progress in 'spirituality' Cixous is scathing, focusing on its deathly, tomb-like location, and on its negation of much of the energy that has circulated around the figure of Electra. Electra is seen by Cixous as the leader of the phallocrats: her voice is the loudest in the demand for the death of her mother, Clytaemnestra. As such, Cixous contrasts her with the one last Great Woman, the one no man could 'keep', the inalterable Helen, or Hélène, whose departure 'left her land chaos, clanging shields / companions tramping, bronze prows, men in bronze'. Yet Helen is banished from the text of the Oresteia, and only Electra remains as the source of disruption. Archphallocrat, she is none the less disruptive in her excess. She generates a kind of 'Electricity', which lightens up the twilight of matriarchy. She manifests an 'infernal libido', and nothing can silence her voice; although, of course, Aeschylus silences her effectively by simply dropping her from the play with her final line containing the ironic demand 'hear us'. Sophocles has Electra say, 'I will never cease my dirges and sorrowful laments', and this ceaselessness, Cixous argues, takes her outside the circuit of exchange between father and son, outside the Law.

Electra occupies an ambiguous space, stretched between inside and outside, in relation to the family and the Law. She is at the threshold, but unlike Kafka's anonymous man she is not silent. She delivers 'a stream of cries, that won't run out, torment's spring that won't go dry' ('Sorties'). She is compared by Cixous to the effects of yellow amber when rubbed—that is, to Electricity. She interacts with the Chorus, Clytaemnestra, Chrysothemis, 'light bodies, attracted by magnetic Electra: an intense system of exchange, attraction, particle loss fed by Electra'. Only Orestes is doggedly immune from the power of this electricity. Electra, Cixous argues, is both not woman and too much woman. She 'blazes the trail' to patriarchy, but in doing so generates energy and anger, which cannot easily be contained. Orestes recommends caution and silence, and struggles desperately to domesticate Electra.

The putting-in-place of patriarchy, which we can just as well understand as a metaphor for its continued operation, thus generates anger, excess, a voice that seems to escape control and instead goes underground, presumably to join the moles. The subjective and social 'splitting' this process involves is dramatized in the Oresteia, whose characters live their relation to the forms of patriarchy and matriarchy in their simultaneous presence:

In this time of reversal everything is two-faced: one face still looks towards and old order; one face envisages the new power. The promised cutting works away on the body of each one.

Clytaemnestra is pulled to the past, haunted by dreams. Orestes lives a doubly double life: having died and notdied, and being doubled by Pylades, his 'silent shadow'. This image of subjectivity torn between two cultural orders, disputing possession of the body, is one that will recur frequently in 'Sorties' as Cixous theorizes the political potential of writing within her own history.

Her deconstructive reading of the Oresteia leads Cixous to challenge the notion that Aeschylus simply reinforces the hierarchical opposition 'feminine/masculine'. After all, she argues, the Oresteia is a mixed and undecided site, wherein active and passive forces clash, without being absolutely attributed to sexual difference. We can see examples of this in some of the unexpected attributions of 'femininity' and 'masculinity' in the text: Agamemnon complaining that in his homecoming he is treated like a woman; or Clytaemnestra becoming the bull who gores Agamemnon according to Cassandra's prophecy. None the less, Cixous argues, there is an attempt at closure in the text, and one which seeks to eradicate the echoes of Electra's voice. The patriarchal order is set in place ('patriarchy—politicaleconomy—sexualeconomy—it has all sorted itself out since they checkmated those great screeching females') and the electricity disappears from the text.

In looking at this narrative of 'The Dawn of Phallocentrism,' then, Cixous sought to open out the myth of Electra. She wanted to undermine the naturalness of the narrative, to set in play the violence, excess, splitting, and death that surround the moment of transformation from matriarchy to patriarchy, or rather that reverberate beneath the structures of patriarchal social relations. There are no feminist heroines in these texts of antiquity (except perhaps Hélène), and Electra is certainly not held up as the ideal of femininity. She is, however, seen as the site of articulation of much that is excluded from accounts of subjectivity that are based on a relation of power over the other, and also as a troubling complexity in the mythic origins of patriarchy.

Cixous's deconstructive reading of the origins of patriarchy shows great awareness of her own embeddedness in such narratives: their power is precisely the point of her analysis. Yet as feminist critique the reading is often frustrating, leading to qualifications, tentative propositions, and ambiguous conclusions. The feeling of swimming in cultural mud is almost palpable, and it is with some relief that one turns to the other element of her strategy—the construction of an alternative practice of writing. As Cixous says: 'What I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.'

The first element of Cixous's theorization of the practice of feminine writing can be found in her discussion of alternative representations of sexual difference. She rejects the Freudian and Lacanian models, which she sees as condemning women to negativity in their privileging of the phallus as the organizing point of sexual identity and desire. Instead, she argues for the possibility of sustaining not as a denial of sexual difference, but as a lived recognition of plurality, of the simultaneous presence of masculinity and femininity within an individual subject. Such bisexuality is open to all subjects who can escape from the subjective and social effects of the dominant structures of desire. Yet, Cixous argues, it is of particular relevance to women, since they have been the greatest victims of patriarchy:

For historical reasons, at the present time it is woman who benefits from and opens up within this bisexuality beside itself, which does not annihilate differences but cheers them on, pursues them, adds more. ('Sorties')

Cixous further argues that writing is a privileged space for the exploration of such non-hierarchically arranged bisexuality. Writing, she believes, can be the site of alternative economies: it is not obliged simply to reproduce the system. This argument is developed in the context of close readings of a series of texts, by Kleist, Shakespeare, and Genet, which she sees as dramatizing the limitations and violence of the propre, a term suggesting propriety, property, and homogeneity, which is generally translated as 'the selfsame'. She favours texts that are excessive in their characterization, that undermine the fixed categories of sexual identity. Thus, for example, Kleist's Penthesilea, the drama of an Amazon queen, attracts Cixous's attention. She charts the unsettling of economies of war caused by the passionate love between Achilles and Penthesilea, and follows their relationship through to its catastrophic end: Penthesilea literally devours Achilles, consumes his flesh. Such violence, she argues, is both terrible and inevitable, revealing as it does the stakes invested in the economy of opposition and war.

From a commitment to the possibility of bisexuality, and its political importance for women, and a belief in the disruptive potential of writing, Cixous moves towards the production of a form of writing that would embody such bisexuality and operate in the interests of women. Her best-known statement of this project is contained in 'The Laugh of the Medusa'. This essay was published in 1975, in an issue of the journal L'Arc dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir. Much of the material in the essay is also contained in 'Sorties', but is presented in 'The Laugh of the Medusa' in more polemical fashion: most of the deconstructive argument is absent, leaving a seemingly less tentative, and perhaps less careful, but much more bracing version of her writing project. The rhetorical power of this essay is perhaps clearer in French, where a passage such as

Nous, les précoces, nous les refoulées de la culture, les belles bouches barrées de bâillons, pollen, haleines coupées, nous les labyrinthes, les échelles, les espaces foulés; les volées,—nous sommes 'noires' et nous sommes belles.

with its alliteration, its measured rhythm, its exploitation of the gendered nature of the French language, and its allusion to the 'Song of Songs' produces a more powerful effect than its English equivalent:

We, the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies—we are black and we are beautiful.

This essay has undoubtedly provoked strong reactions, and has been the focus of many of the frequent charges of 'essentialism': the claim that Cixous reduces women to an essence, specifically an anatomical essence, and thus negates the possibility of the very change which she seeks to promote. It is thus worth considering the dimensions of her argument in some detail.

'The Laugh of the Medusa' begins by explaining that Cixous is trying to explore what feminine writing 'will do'. She is not trying to analyse what women have actually written, nor is she describing a writing technique that is natural to, or inevitable for, women. Her tentativeness is an important part of her argument, despite its polemic. In 'Sorties' Cixous is very careful to distinguish her analysis of sexuality from what she sees as the essentialism of Freud or Ernest Jones. Their theories, she says, rely on the visible: on the presence or absence of the penis, or of an essential femininity. They are thus, she argues, 'voyeur's theories', tied to the metaphysics of presence. Instead, Cixous tries to locate sexual difference at the level of sexual pleasure, of jouissance. To some extent, this is clearly a strategic move. It removes any possibility of identifying femininity and masculinity with the certainties of anatomical difference. It also places sexual difference in the realm of the unknowable. Apart from Tiresias, a figure to whom Cixous will return in Le Nom d'Oedipe, no-one, after all, is in a position to speak definitively about the dimensions of feminine and masculine jouissance. The insistence on libido as the location of sexual difference thus offers to Cixous the possibility of theorizing an alternative economy, of proposing an economy in which women, for historical and cultural reasons, have a particular investment, without allowing anyone the possibility of proving her wrong. Of course, it is also true that her theory cannot be confirmed, but since its function is strategic, intended to offer a political site of identification and shared struggle, this does not concern her unduly.

The location of sexual difference at the level of jouissance, however, does certainly return Cixous to the bodily; and that is where she wants to be:

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. ('The Laugh of the Medusa')

She does not, however, equate the bodily with nature. She sees it as distinctly cultural, as caught up in representation, in language. As Barbara Freeman has argued:

It is precisely the assumption of a non-textual body outside of language, of a linguistic domain which is not itself corporeal that Cixous's reformulation of mind-body relations in a feminine economy calls into question.

Cixous argues that women's relations to their bodies are culturally inscribed, are related to the placing of women in the sphere of the domestic, and to their lesser social possibilities for sublimation. She speculates on the possibility that the capacity to give birth may mean that women have a specific relation to their bodies, but is always aware of the dangers of being too dogmatic. Her most unambiguous statement of the power of sexual difference in 'Sorties' is followed by a painstaking articulation of the difficulties such a claim faces:

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…. But we are still floundering—with a few exceptions—in Ancient History.

Cixous's return to the body is not an idiosyncratic move. She is writing at a moment when many philosophers and literary critics were returning to the bodily as the location of pleasure. The following extract:

To write the body, neither the skin, nor the muscles, nor the bones, nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward fibrous, shaggy, raveled thing, a clown's coat

is not from Cixous but from Roland Barthes, in a text where he explores the bodily, as well as the discursive, constitution of his subjectivity. None the less, Cixous's commitment to the experience of writing as bodily has caused particular problems for feminist critics. Jane Gallop has written very interestingly about this problem: about the reluctance within feminist theory to accept 'the body as metaphor, a demand that metaphors of the body be read literally.' Gallop attributes this reluctance to an association of the bodily with the natural, to a refusal to think through the extent to which the bodily, and experiences of sexuality, are cultural, are mediated by discourse: the extent to which we know and experience our bodies in relation to representation and narrative. To some extent, she is clearly correct, yet the worry is more substantial. Writing of the body, we fear appropriation at the point where, historically, we have been most vulnerable, and where we have been so ruthlessly placed.

The most considered and careful analysis of the dilemmas of a return to the bodily, and particularly to images of maternity, is contained in Domna C. Stanton's 'Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva'. Stanton's argument shares many of the reservations of Alice Jardine's Gynesis, which explores the difficulties for feminist theorists of taking over the deconstructive project, with its privileging of the 'feminine', and its silence about women. Stanton's reading is powerful, and refers in considerable detail to Cixous's fiction as well as to her theoretical writings. Her basic anxiety is that Cixous is returning to a metaphysics of identity and presence. The use of metaphor itself, she argues, alludes to an economy of similitude, rather than one of difference. Cixous's choice of the maternal as the strategic point of engagement with the politics of sexual difference, however, raises particular issues for Stanton, threatening as it does to return to the certainties of biology, and the 'naturalness' of motherhood.

To this dilemma there is, it seems, no answer, at least not within the political discourse of feminism. To evade the bodily is to reproduce a structure of oppression which has made of women's bodies their point of vulnerability and of guilt. To speak of the bodily risks a similar reproduction. At a fairly trite level, it is clear there is no escape. Yet this should not surprise us: one cannot simply walk out of patriarchy and shake off its effects. What Cixous tries to do is to subvert the discourse of patriarchy, to open it up to contradiction and to difference, while still retaining the possibility of shared recognition which would make a political movement of and for women possible. To what extent she succeeds cannot be answered in any totalizing or definitive way. For me,… some of her projections and mythical reworkings remain powerful, others produce unease. For others, such as Claudine Guégan Fisher or Verena Conley, the project as a whole is clearly both compelling and empowering. What is, however, clear, is that Cixous cannot be accused of naïveté, or epistemological ignorance. She knows the dangers of essentialism—'if one subscribes to … "anatomy is destiny", one participates in condemning woman to death'—and recognizes both 'the mother' and 'the body' as profoundly embedded in the cultural. What she does insist on, however, is that that 'cultural' is organized differently for men and women, and that a writing practice that will reformulate the cultural will be of particular importance for women.

Cixous theorizes an alternative economy of femininity in relation to the concept of 'the gift'. She describes two possible attitudes to giving and to the intersubjective relations involved in the gift: one, which she describes as 'masculine', is caught up in the mechanisms of exchange, and will give only with a certainty of immediate return. Exchange relations assume, by definition, abstract equality, at least for the moment of exchange, and thus exclude the recognition of difference. Cixous's alternative, or feminine, economy of giving seems to be derived to some extent from the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, and from the development of Mauss's ideas by Georges Bataille, and by Jacques Derrida. Mauss's work was concerned with forms of social exchange that preceded 'the purely individual contract of the market place'. His research into the social relations of other societies, and of earlier historical periods, led him to produce a theory of 'the gift', as a form regulating intersubjective relations which was both morally loaded and socially implicated. His text came to be read as a form of critique against the individualism and moral irresponsibility of abstract market relations. In adopting the concept of 'the gift', in advocating a form of giving that is not reducible to a single act of exchange, Cixous is not, as is often suggested, adopting the discourse of idealism, but is rather mobilizing a materialist account of social relations which constitutes a critique of 'mass society'. This particular coincidence of modernist aesthetics and an opposition to the cultural and political implications of 'mass culture' will be discussed further [elsewhere].

Having described the limitations of the masculine economy of giving, and related this structure to the structure of dual hierarchized oppositions and murderous subjectivity described in 'Sorties', Cixous goes on to posit an alternative:

Can one speak of another spending? Really, there is no 'free gift'. You never give something for nothing. But the difference lies in the why and how of the gift, in the values that the gesture of giving affirms, causes to circulate; in the type of profit the giver draws from the gift and the use to which he or she puts it.

This different relation to giving is what Cixous sees as characteristic of an alternative, feminine, practice of writing. Such writing would not be afraid to go outside narrative structures, or to create subjectivities that are plural and shifting. It would not need to return to the security of fixed categories, of stable identity. It would dépense: a pun suggesting both the undoing of thought and a liberal spending of energies. It would be on the side of excess.

Cixous is very clear that feminine writing cannot be defined. She tries, particularly in 'The Laugh of the Medusa', to enact it. One characteristic which she does ascribe to it, however, is its proximity to voice. Partly, this is done in order to disrupt the opposition between speech and writing, by suggesting not only the presence of writing in speech, but also the potential presence of living speech in writing. It is also done in order to produce both individual and social change. Speaking, Cixous argues, is a powerfully transgressive action for women, whose bodies cannot be erased from their speech in the way that they have been from their writing. A woman speaking in public is seen first and foremost as a woman, not as a speaker. Finally, however, Cixous privileges speech because of its proximity to song, and thus to the unconscious: she wants to explore the associative logic of music over the linear logic of philosophical and literary discourse.

The specificity of feminine writing is also described in terms of spatial metaphor: 'If woman has always functioned "within" man's discourse … now it is time for her to displace this "within," explode it, overturn it, grab it, make it hers'. Similarly, Cixous talks of feminine writing as happening in the 'between', in that space which is uncertain, dangerous in its refusal to ally itself with one side of an opposition. Stepping outside, negotiating the between, feminine writing is to carve out a new space of representation that will not fit into old grids.

Producing this form of writing is, for Cixous, a political act, and is related to the desire to 'liberate the New Woman from the Old'. The gesture that characterizes the relation of women to the cultural is one of flying and stealing [voler]. Women, Cixous argues, must steal what they need from the dominant culture, but then fly away with their cultural booty to the 'in between', where new images, new narratives, and new subjectivities can be created.

The call to writing for women is most marked in 'The Laugh of the Medusa'. Here Cixous speaks on behalf of women, and uses the pronoun 'we' with an ease and confidence that few of her other texts demonstrate. She knows, however, that many people will condemn her for this polemical strategy: 'Once more you'll say that all this smacks of "idealism," or what's worse, you'll splutter that I'm a "mystic"'. She has, indeed, been accused of both. As we have seen, however, the argument of Cixous's early theoretical texts, is more complex, more careful, and more strategic, than such charges acknowledge.

Cixous began by theorizing the possibility of a model of sexual difference not based on exclusion or hierarchy, and relating this to a model of subjectivity based on openness to the Other rather than obliteration of the Other. She then argued for the possibility of understanding such sexual difference, not at the level of possession or absence of the penis/phallus, but at the level of jouissance. Such libidinal difference was then related to particular practices of writing, since writing was seen as a privileged space for transgression and transformation. The style of writing which Cixous describes as 'feminine' was then derived from a reading of a variety of literary texts, most of them written by men. Finally, in the last stage of her argument, Cixous introduced women, as historical subjects, arguing that women have had most to lose in patriarchy, and have most to gain from its defeat: 'It is in writing, from woman and towards woman … that woman will affirm woman somewhere other than in silence'.

This focus on writing as a political strategy has very clear personal, and indeed biographical, significance for Cixous. This much is clear in reading Cixous's contribution to the volume entitled La Venue à l'écriture, which was published in 1977. Cixous's article in this volume amounts to a biographical and theoretical explanation of her own relation to writing. The volume also contains an article by Madeleine Gagnon, who tries to reclaim women's history through a reconsideration of the relations between sexuality and writing, and one by Annie Leclerc, who analyses problems of doubling, possession, and maternity through a reading of a painting by Vermeer. Echoing Cixous's project in 'Sorties', Leclerc again likens women's strategies in writing to the burrowing of a mole:

Ce sont les fondations que nous minons peu à peu … nous les taupes innombrables, obscures et malicieuses. (La Venue)

[These are the foundations which we are mining little by little … we the moles who are beyond reckoning, dark and mischievous.]

Cixous's account of her relation to writing begins with her childhood, and in particular with the death of her father. She describes the ways in which writing seemed to offer the means to counteract the finality of death, a theme which also preoccupies her in Prénoms de personne, as well as in novels such as Dedans and Tombe. She also describes her entry into the texts and knowledges of the dominant culture, and the extent to which she felt they excluded her history and her experiences:

Toutes les raisons pour lesquelles je croyais n'avoir pas le droit d'écrire, les bonnes et les moins bonnes, et les vraies fausses:—je n'ai pas de lieu d'où écrire. Aucun lieu légitime, ni terre, ni patrie, ni histoire à moi. (Entre l'écriture)

[All the reasons for which I believed that I did not have the right to write, good reasons, less good reasons, and those that were true and false: I had no place from which to write. No legitimate place, no land, no homeland, no history of my own.]

Despite her early passion for writing, then, what she experiences in her encounter with the dominant culture is loss and exclusion.

This sense of exclusion is related by Cixous to her identity as both woman and Jew: both tending to exclude her, to make her vulnerable to the Law. Her relation to language is marked by the complexity of her national identities. Her father was a Sephardic Jew, whose family came originally from Spain, but moved first to Morocco, and then to Algeria, where Cixous grew up and was educated within the French educational system. Her mother was an Ashkenazi Jew, whose family came from various regions of what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Cixous's 'mother tongue' was thus German, although the languages that surrounded her in Algeria were French and Arabic. She considers the effects of such linguistic diversity on her attitude to writing. For example, she stresses the musicality of German, and its profound bodily resonances for her—an observation that can perhaps be linked to her interest in the voice as part of writing. Similarly, she observes that she has always been fascinated by the resources of different languages, and has approached each language delicately, in order to respect its specificity. The theoretical importance of this sense of linguistic distance and strangeness is stressed again by Cixous in a recent article where she writes that: 'the most important thing is that you never become too familiar and you never come to the point when you can hear it speak to you and you think you speak it'. Such a detached, but emotionally charged, relation to language gives us an interesting insight into Cixous's capacity to exploit the power of the signifier to exceed any fixed meaning, and into her tendency to push the resources of language to their limits.

As 'La Venue à l'écriture' develops, what we experience is a sense of frustration, of urgency, and of anger. Again and again Cixous is confronted by the importance to her of writing, and by her incapacity to write. She is convinced that writing is the space of truth, and that truth is singular. Yet she experiences herself as heterogeneous, as made up of various identities, of many and varied desires, and concludes that she cannot be in the place of truth, or of writing. In reading this text we share Cixous's sense of frustration as she is repeatedly turned away from writing towards the restraint and the homogeneity in which she is culturally placed.

Eventually, however, Cixous describes her entry into writing: her first published volume of short stories came out when she was 30. The inner need to write is finally stronger than the pressures on her to silence. Women must have lost everything, have been driven to their limit, before they can risk the taboo of writing, Cixous argues. When they begin to write, they must remain in a critical relation to the languages and the narratives they inherit: they must invent new beginnings, remove themselves from the fixed categories and identities they have inhabited, explore the 'third body': which is neither the inside nor the outside, but the space between.

Only through such exploration, Cixous argues, can women challenge the culturally produced category of 'woman'. The figure of 'woman' is a representation, projected by the Law, formed by exclusion and censure and by modes of thought based on hierarchy and opposition. In writing, Cixous argues, women can explore other identifications, other images, can rediscover some of what has been unexpressed, actively repressed. She suggests that a new form of shared identity is possible for women, formed not in relation to 'woman', but rather in terms of shared unconscious patterns and forms, which are the product of shared histories worked out across shared bodies.

'La Venue à l'écriture' ends on the positive invocation of an identity for women that might not be caught in the negativities of 'woman'. It has a happy ending: Cixous, after all, has clearly 'come to writing'. Yet this triumphant conclusion remains remarkably fleeting, and slippery. Cixous's final image of women's relations to writing is of fish swimming in water: reassuring, but hard to pin down.

Cixous's writings on writing, and on its political potential, are, then, a compound of the biographical, the strategic, and the theoretical. She offers her own history as part of her writing, as part of bringing other women to writing. She always reads this history in negotiation with theoretical and literary texts that seem to give it a more generalizing power: the power to explain, and to produce recognition, however tentative. She is aware of the dangers inherent in trying to speak or write as a woman, and aims to pick her way through the minefield of cultural stereotype, literary figure, and lived history. If she does not always succeed, we can perhaps more usefully reflect on the tendency of mines to explode, than rush to conclude that the field was never worth crossing.

Discussion of Cixous's writing in the 1970s would not be complete, however, without some reference to the institutional and political contexts in which her work was produced, and read, since these contexts clearly overdetermined responses to Cixous's work, both in France and in the United States. The French feminist movement of the 1970s was unhappily divided. The movement had grown very significantly since 1968: frustration and anger at the exclusion of women from the political structures of '68 led to a variety of opposing analyses of the appropriate strategies and theories to adopt. To some extent, the divisions seem very familiar to anyone involved in the history of feminist struggle in Britain or the USA. Radical feminists stressed the priority of women's oppression to any political analysis. Socialist feminists worked to integrate feminist struggle into the agenda of the Left. One particular movement, however, was fairly specific to the French political and intellectual scene—the group called 'Psychanalyse et Politique' (Psych et Po) who struggled to develop revolutionary theories of the oppression of women on the basis of psychoanalytic theory. The most prominent member of this group was Antoinette Fouque, and it was the group with which Cixous was most clearly identified.

Psych et Po set up the des femmes publishing house: an organization committed to the publishing of work by women, and in particular of contemporary work which seemed to fit within the parameters of 'feminine writing'. The bookshop des femmes was established in 1974, and the publishing house has continued to the present day. Despite its primary commitment to the publication of writing by women, des femmes does publish some work by men, and even appointed a man as commercial director in 1988. The political strategy of Psych et Po was based on the necessity of challenging the unconscious structures of patriarchal oppression, and their policy was the by-now familiar one of working like 'moles' to disturb the dominant cultural and political order. They were very hostile towards groups that described themselves as 'feminist', seeing such groups as reformist, and as working, simply to gain access to, and to reproduce, the structures of masculine power. They preferred to speak instead of the 'women's movement', and their outlook was resolutely internationalist, preferring to work on the possibilities of international support for women struggling against oppression, rather than to concentrate on domestic French politics. They were also committed to the importance of writing as a point of political struggle.

The single greatest area of conflict between Psych et Po and other feminist groups lay in their attitude towards 'difference'. Feminists associated with the journal Questions Féministes, including Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig, and Simone de Beauvoir, believed that any discussion of 'difference' in relation to women was bound to reproduce existing hierarchies, and could only play out the existing stereotypes of 'woman's nature'. Psych et Po rejected this analysis, claiming that the fear of 'difference' within feminism led to reformism and homogeneity, instanced, for example, by the failure of US feminism to address the question of race.

This disagreement is profound, with clear implications for political strategy. It continues to provide one of the pivotal points of debates within feminist theory, as books like The Future of Difference make clear. This theoretical difference, however, became overlaid with personal conflicts, displayed at conferences and in published texts and pamphlets. Tensions increased in the wake of legal actions initiated by des femmes against others involved in the women's movement, violent attacks on the bookshop des femmes, and the decision by Psych et Po to register 'MLF', the acronym of the Women's Liberation Movement, as their own trademark.

The passion and anger that went into these debates and conflicts is now, more than ten years later, rather hard to recapture. Their usefulness for the feminist movement is certainly hard to determine. Yet they are important in the context of this [essay], since they affected the ways in which Cixous's work was read. Cixous published her fictional work exclusively with des femmes between 1976 and 1982, and has recently begun publishing with them again. This relationship with des femmes placed her inside the parameters of the struggle over difference, and tended to produce an attitude either of total loyalty or complete rejection—neither tending to aid discussion of the range of her work.

The other context which is important to the reception of Cixous's work is her association with the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). This section of the University of Paris was set up after 1968, and Cixous was involved with it from the beginning. Vincennes was established in conscious opposition to existing institutions of higher education. It admitted students with 'non-standard' entrance qualifications, including many overseas students; it was interdisciplinary; it strove to diminish hierarchies between teacher and student; it rejected examinations in favour of continuous assessment. It was also profoundly disliked by sections of the French establishment. It was at Vincennes that Cixous established the Centre d'Etudes Féminines, a centre committed to interdisciplinary research on the space of femininity within modernity. This development was explicitly attacked by the government, who took action in 1980 to prevent the awarding of higher degrees by the Centre. This action did not succeed in the long term, but it was an indication of the hostility with which Cixous's work was met by large sections of the political and literary establishment.

Throughout the 1970s, Cixous continued to produce large numbers of fictional texts which set in play her ideas about femininity and writing, and explored subjectivity and intertextuality…. Her next important statement of the theoretical issues crucial to her work, however, appeared in the journal Etudes Freudiennes in 1983. This took the form of an exploration of the figure of Tancredi, as represented by Torquato Tasso in Jerusalem Delivered, and by Rossini in the opera Tancredi. Cixous used the figure of Tancredi as a means to dramatize the complexity of sexual difference, and as a linking point between textual, unconscious, and biographical explorations of such difference.

Cixous's attitude to Tasso's Tancredi has clearly changed since she wrote 'Sorties'. In 'Sorties' she compared Tasso unfavourably with Kleist, arguing that Penthesilea and Achilles represented a much more transgressive form of desire than that represented by the relationship between Tancredi and Clorinda: 'Tancredi passionately reuniting with Clorinda the moment he destroyed her aspect as a warrior. No jouissance then …' But perhaps this shift should alert us to the dangers of claiming any 'definitiveness' for Cixous's readings of any given text. Cixous's readings are often related to a much wider project, aimed at opening up theoretical and political difficulties, rather than at summing up a text.

The figure of Tancredi with which Cixous engages is derived from two different sources. Tasso's poem, written in the late sixteenth century, deals with the struggles of the Crusader army during the last few months before the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The Christian forces include Tancredi:

       With majesty his noble count'nance shone
        High were his thoughts, his heart was bold in fight
        … His fault was love.

Tancredi meets by chance, and falls in love with, a Muslim warrior, Clorinda:

       This lusty lady came from Persia late,
         She with the Christians had encountered eft,
         And in their flesh had opened many a gate
         By which their youthful souls their bodies left.

During the course of a battle, Clorinda and Tancredi fight, unaware of each other's identity. Tancredi knocks off her helmet, recognizes her as the woman with whom he has fallen in love, and refuses to fight any more. Nine books later, they are once again locked in combat. By now we have heard Clorinda's life history, and have learned that she was actually born a Christian. Once again Tancredi is ignorant of his opponent's identity, and assumes he is fighting with 'some man of mickle might'. The struggle takes place at night, and continues with an intensity that lends to it an air of unreality, of dream. Eventually

       His sword into her bosom deep he drives,
         And bath'd in lukewarm blood his iron cold

and Clorinda dies, begging in her final moments for baptism. Only now does Tancredi realize what he has done. He

                              'gan to tear and rend
         His hair, his face, his wounds: a purple flood
       Did from each side in rolling streams descend.

Tancredi expresses horror at what he has done, and proclaims his wish to die. He is then 'rescued' by a priest, who accuses him of having been in thrall to a non-Christian, and threatens him with damnation. Finally, Clorinda returns to Tancredi in a dream, thanks him for saving her soul, and talks passionately of her love for him.

This brief summary cannot do justice to the epic dimensions of Tasso's poem, nor to the power of the transgression represented by Tancredi and Clorinda's love. The fusion of passion and violence, the continual postponement of questions of identity, the enormity of the stakes between Christianity and Islam combine to give this element of Tasso's poem a resonance that disturbs the seeming neatness of its conclusion.

Rossini's Tancredi is also a warrior, and is also involved in fighting against Islam. The story is adapted from a tragedy by Voltaire. Tancredi's lover in this story is Amenaide, a woman who is wrongly suspected by her lover, and by all those around her, of being a traitor. Confusions of identity are, once more, important: a letter sent by Amenaide to Tancredi is assumed to have been sent to the leader of the enemy forces. Amenaide is condemned to death by her own father for her treachery, but saved by Tancredi who defends her honour in single combat, despite believing in her guilt. Tancredi is then fatally injured in the battle against the Saracens, but lives long enough to learn of Amenaide's innocence, and to be reunited with her.

The coincidence of names has led many critics to conclude that Rossini derived the plot of his opera from Tasso. This is not, in fact, the case. The source is Voltaire's Tancrède, which is derived from a number of sources, including Ariosto. The confusion is not perhaps surprising. C. B. Beall notes:

Tancrède, sujet qui vient de l'Arioste, mais dont l'esprit chevaleresque, la conception de l'amour et la scène de la mort prèsentent aussi des analogies avec le poème du Tasse.

[Tancrède, a subject derived from Ariosto, but one in which the spirit of chivalry, the conception of love, and the death scene are also to some extent analogous to elements of Tasso's poem.]

Cixous is not at all concerned, however, to claim that these two Tancredis are, in fact, 'the same'. Instead, she exploits the confusion surrounding their relations: 'there are several Tancredis, which is why I am having such a hard time trying not to mislead us…. I am swimming between two Tancredis' ('Tancredi Continues'). Her aim is to develop an argument about sexual difference and its representation across these Tancredis, across Clorinda and Amenaide.

Perhaps the most important fact about Rossini's hero is that the part is sung by a woman. It is a Travesti role, originally, of course, destined for a castrato, but now providing a powerful and challenging role for singers of the calibre of Marilyn Horne. Cixous's argument is closely related to the fact of operatic performance, to the presence of the woman's body and voice within the heroic man.

Cixous begins by stating her fascination with Tasso's Tancredi and Clorinda, who move outside the rigid categories of opposition and war, driven on by the power of their love. What interests her is 'the movement of love', its inherent grace, which she describes as a 'gracious exchange' between pleasures. This grace is set against the paralysis and limitations of fear. The abyss, the Law, is invented by our fear, and Cixous recommends the strategy of the acrobat, who leaps over the abyss with lightness and with grace.

When she turns to Rossini, Cixous tries to unravel the significance of the casting of Tancredi as a woman, a 'Tancreda'. Here, she argues, Rossini has perceived something essential to the character of Tancredi: his capacity to engage with the Other placing him firmly on the side of the feminine. This presence of the feminine in the masculine Cixous designates as 'Enigma', but also as her 'life work'.

Cixous then moves towards a recreation of the power of Tancredi in performance: remembering the physical presence of women, one in blue and one in white, singing of the power of their love. She is convinced that the force of that performance embodies an important secret about subjectivity and sexual difference, but is also tortured by her own inability to give form to this secret: 'I saw their secret. What I am telling of it is no more than light turned to dust'.

The importance of this 'secret' leads her to reproduce it in the form of a dream. She describes her dream of a turquoise, luminous, beautiful, hanging above her, just out of reach: inside the turquoise is a pearl. The turquoise embodies the secret, but it cannot be grasped. Here then in this fusion of blue and white, this 'inside' and 'outside', this transparency and opacity, is a symbol of the complexity of sexual difference. The blue and white, echoing the costumes of Tancredi and Amenaide, can then be read as figures of masculinity and femininity, clearly different, but hard to open up, or to separate.

The dream imagery gives way to a description of Cixous's own desire for a relationship of love that would not be limited and paralysed by the rigid hierarchies of masculinity and femininity. In some powerfully lyrical passages, Cixous describes her love for another person, a person who has suffered from the distortions of gender identity, yet who remains plural: 'In any case she is not a woman. She is plural. Like all living beings who are sometimes invaded, sometimes populated, incarnated by others'. 'She' also listens to Tancredi, which thus becomes something of a symbol of resistance to rigid categorization of sexual difference.

The point of Cixous's moving between text, performance, unconscious, and biography, lies in her unease about the capacity of words to hold out against the power of opposition. Tancredi, she argues, takes us to 'l'autre côté' [the other side] of hierarchies of sexual difference, another spatial metaphor which recurs in Cixous's texts, from her reading of Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass to her exploration of the Kingdom of the Dead in La. The problem, however, is how to describe this other side without making it simply a mirror image of what we already have.

The dilemma Cixous faces is that 'the more I try to say, the more I feel I have wandered astray far from what, beneath appearances and secretly and obscurely, I am sure I have understood'. She feels the pressure to produce formulae and solutions which are more dogmatic, more rigid, than her understanding of the 'movement' of sexual difference allows. She contemplates the possibility of giving up altogether on the project of trying to talk about sexual difference, about women and the economy of the feminine, since the pressure within this project to reproduce the dominant figure of the 'feminine' is so intense:

But perhaps what is hardest and most necessary, is to positively forget these judges who make us answer their stupid summons stupidly, justify the non-justifiable, speak silence, crush the music under the millstone of words, lie by swearing to tell only their truth, plead guilty to a lack of absence.

She talks once more of feeling oppressed by the 'word police', who demand fixity of meaning and of purpose. The word 'woman', she argues, carries such cultural weight, exists within so many historically embedded discourses, that by saying it again we are perhaps simply enclosing ourselves once more.

The solution to this problem cannot be simple: it persists with urgency throughout the whole of Cixous's writing. In the end, she admits, it cannot be run away from: 'nowadays there are so many clandestine massacres of women that a woman has to say "woman" a dozen times a day in order to protest'. 'Tancredi Continues' is a contribution to the project of rethinking sexual difference. In it, Cixous tries to avoid the programmatic and the dogmatic, in favour of the allusive and the impressionistic. Her argument amounts to an insistence that we cannot determine the nature of 'femininity' once and for all, but can only hope, across a range of texts, to glimpse the possibility of a different economy of sexuality.

Cixous's continuing unease about the capacity of language to escape from cliché, and from the habitual, her frustration with its tendency towards reproduction of the status quo, has led her finally to consider the transgressive potential of painting as a form of representation. In an essay entitled 'Le dernier tableau ou le portrait de Dieu' ['The Final Painting or the Portrait of God'] Cixous considers the potential of painting as a site of representations that challenge the cultural-embeddedness of language. The principal object of her analysis is Post-Impressionism. At first, what she detects in the paintings of Monet, or of Van Gogh, seems to be a kind of immediacy of visual and emotional impact. She describes her own desire to write like a painter: to communicate the full force of the instant, the colours and textures of the present moment. The same desire to express the intensity of the instantaneous is embodied in the concept of 'quasacles' ('quasi-miracle-instants') which Cixous describes, in a manner reminiscent of Woolf's 'moments of being' or Joyce's 'epiphanies', in her novel With ou l'art de l'innocence. This intensity and instantaneousness is, she suggests, something Clarice Lispector achieves, in a form of writing which has the force of a concentration of images, a series of paintings.

Cixous's attitude towards the painter at this point is one of jealousy: 'le peintre peut vous briser le coeur avec l'épiphanie d'une mer' [the painter can break you heart with the epiphany of a sea], while she herself can only name, or describe. This consideration leads her to a reflection on the emotional power of language, which she sees as necessarily intersubjective. Thus she speculates on whether the very limitation of language, its inability to capture the visual force of the present, may not be its strength: its power depending absolutely on the active contribution of the reader.

The opposition at this point seems to be between the instantaneous plenitude of painting and the temporal intersubjectivity of writing. Like all such oppositions, however, this one is soon challenged. Cixous turns to a consideration of the phenomenon of repetition: a phenomenon important to the argument of Prénoms de personne. When she turns to the series of Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral, plenitude disappears, to be replaced by time and deferral:

Voir la vérité de la cathédrale qui est vingt-six, et la noter, c'est-à-dire voir le temps. Peindre le temps. Peindre le mariage du temps et de la lumière.

[To see the truth of the cathedral that is twenty-six cathedrals, and to record it, that is to say to see time. To paint time. To paint the marriage of time and light.]

Painting then becomes a struggle against change and time, an attempt to capture the temporal within the instantaneous. The agonies of this process lead painters like Van Gogh to the necessity of speed in painting, as if quick execution could negate temporality, or even capture its form. Again Cixous sets up an opposition: between the slowness, the necessary deferral, of writing and the rapidity of visual representation.

What is at stake in this 'rapidity', for Cixous, is its power to force the painter outside the secure boundaries of the self, outside the categories of cultural expectation and cliché. Again the argument is one about 'grace': the audacious movement by the painter which refuses to acknowledge fear, in which the painter 'devient femme' [becomes woman]. The possibility of such agility leads Cixous to a consideration of how it might be achieved in writing, how the false step and the false word could be avoided. Her object is the rediscovery of simplicity, a concept whose theoretical weight is developed through readings of Kleist, Heidegger, and Lispector.

Kleist introduces the possibility of rediscovering innocence through knowledge. Heidegger stresses the power of visual representation to communicate the being of Being: 'Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being.' Lispector provides the example of a form of writing that is painterly in its fidelity to the identity of individual things. The writer, Cixous argues, should imitate the painter in her refusal to stigmatize 'the ugly', in her capacity to see the possibility of significance and meaning in all objects.

The final turn against the 'plenitude' of representation comes when Cixous argues that the most important meaning of painting arises when all possibility of fixed meaning has been erased by repetition. Thus Monet's waterlilies, reappearing in so many different forms, point towards the infinite, the impossibility of closure in representation. The difficulty of painting points, however, towards the human importance of the attempt: the necessity to record the fact of impossibility, of repetition. In this project, Cixous states her alliance with the painter.

Yet one important difference remains. The painter deals with surfaces; Cixous wants to explore the inside, the underneath, the taste and the texture. When he was sent an apple as a gift, Monet could not bear to bite into it, and gave it away. This is an action Cixous rejects:

Moi je l'aurais mangée. En cela je suis différente de ceux auxquels j'aimerais ressembler. Dans mon besoin de toucher la pomme sans la voir. De la connaître dans le noir. Avec mes doigts, avec mes lèvres, avec ma langue.

[For myself, I would have eaten it. In that way I am different from those I would like to resemble. In my need to touch the apple without seeing it. To know it in darkness. With my fingers, with my lips, with my tongue and my language.]

Finally, then, in this dialogue between the writer and the painter, the writer holds her own. She asserts the possibility of transforming knowledge and experience through writing, and writes herself out of the trap of 'the habitual' which has threatened so many theorists of modernism. The unease continues, however, about the complicity of writing with the hierarchical oppositions whose analysis was so important to 'Sorties'. It is perhaps for this reason that Cixous turns, in the 1980s, to theatre: a space that seems to embody the troubled relations between temporality, repetition, and immediacy which so fascinated her in painting.