SOURCE: "Hélène Cixous: An Imaginary Utopia," in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Methuen, 1985, pp. 102-26.

[Moi is an American educator and critic who has written extensively about various issues in literature, film, and feminist critical theory. In the essay below, she provides an overview of Cixous's fundamental tenets, stating that despite flaws in her works they "nevertheless [constitute] an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of women."]

      Do I contradict myself?
      Very well then … I contradict myself;
      I am large … I contain multitudes.
                             (Walt Whitman)

It is largely due to the efforts of Hélène Cixous that the question of an écriture féminine came to occupy a central position in the political and cultural debate in France in the 1970s. Between 1975 and 1977 she produced a whole series of theoretical (or semi-theoretical) writings, all of which set out to explore the relations between women, femininity, feminism and the production of texts: La Jeune Née (in collaboration with Catherine Clément, 1975), 'Le Rire de la Méduse' (1975), translated as 'The laugh of the Medusa' (1976), 'Le Sexe ou la tête?' (1976), translated as 'Castration or decapitation?' (1981) and La Venue à l'écriture (1977). These texts are closely interrelated: thus 'Sorties', Cixous's main contribution to La Jeune Née, contains long passages of the separately published 'The laugh of the Medusa'. The fact that many central ideas and images are constantly repeated, tends to present her work as a continuum that encourages nonlinear forms of reading. Her style is often intensely metaphorical, poetic and explicitly anti-theoretical, and her central images create a dense web of signifiers that offers no obvious edge to seize hold of for the analytically minded critic. It is not easy to operate cuts into, open vistas in or draw maps of Cixous's textual jungle; moreover, the texts themselves make it abundantly clear that this resistance to analysis is entirely intentional. Cixous believes neither in theory nor analysis (though she does practise both—as for instance in her doctoral thesis L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'art du remplacement (1968), translated in 1972 as The Exile of James Joyce or the Art of Replacement, or in her Prénoms de personne from 1974); nor, indeed, does she approve of feminist analytical discourses: she is, after all, the woman who first flatly declared that 'I am not a feminist', and later went on to say that 'I do not have to produce theory'. Accusing feminist researchers in the humanities of turning away from the present towards the past, she rejects their efforts as pure 'thematics'. According to Cixous, such feminist critics will inevitably find themselves caught up in the oppressive network of hierarchical binary oppositions propagated by patriarchal ideology. Hopeful feminist analysts of Cixous's 'literary theory' might just as well not apply.

And yet this is not a wholly accurate picture of Cixous's position. The statements quoted, taken out of their contemporary French context, tend to fix her views in an altogether too rigid mould. Her refusal of the label 'feminism' is first and foremost based on a definition of 'feminism' as a bourgeois, egalitarian demand for women to obtain power in the present patriarchal system; for Cixous, 'feminists' are women who want power, 'a place in the system, respect, social legitimation'. Cixous does not reject what she prefers to call the women's movement (as opposed to the static rigidity of so-called 'feminism'); on the contrary, she is strongly in favour of it, and between 1976 and 1982 published all her works with des femmes to demonstrate her political commitment to the anti-patriarchal struggle. To many French feminists, as well as to most feminists outside France, however, this kind of scholastic wrangling over the word 'feminist' would seem to be politically damaging to the women's movement as a whole. In France it caused members of the collective 'politique et psychanalyse' to march in the streets on International Women's Day carrying placards reading 'Down with feminism!', thus generating a considerable amount of hostility and acrimony within the women's movement, much of which was displayed in public. The main effect of the 'anti-feminist' initiative of the 'politique et psychanalyse' group seems to have been the production of a general impression of rancour and disarray within French feminism. I have therefore no intention of following Cixous's lead on this point: according to accepted English usage, her indubitable commitment to the struggle for women's liberation in France, as well as her strong critique of patriarchal modes of thought, make her a feminist. Having said this, it is of course both relevant and necessary to go on to explore the kind of feminist theory and politics she represents.

Patriarchal binary thought

One of Cixous's most accessible ideas is her analysis of what one might call 'patriarchal binary thought'. Under the heading 'Where is she?', Cixous lines up the following list of binary oppositions:

        Activity/Passivity
        Sun/Moon
        Culture/Nature
        Day/Night
        Father/Mother
        Head/Emotions
        Intelligible/Sensitive
        Logos/Pathos
                                [La Jeune Née]

Corresponding as they do to the underlying opposition man/woman, these binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the 'feminine' side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance. For Cixous, who at this point is heavily indebted to Jacques Derrida's work, Western philosophy and literary thought are and have always been caught up in this endless series of hierarchical binary oppositions that always in the end come back to the fundamental 'couple' of male/female.

       Nature/History
       Nature/Art
       Nature/Mind
       Passion/Action
                            [La Jeune Née]

These examples show that it doesn't much matter which 'couple' one chooses to highlight: the hidden male/female opposition with its inevitable positive/negative evaluation can always be traced as the underlying paradigm.

In a typical move, Cixous then goes on to locate death at work in this kind of thought. For one of the terms to acquire meaning, she claims, it must destroy the other. The 'couple' cannot be left intact: it becomes a general battle-field where the struggle for signifying supremacy is forever re-enacted. In the end, victory is equated with activity and defeat with passivity; under patriarchy, the male is always the victor. Cixous passionately denounces such an equation of femininity with passivity and death as leaving no positive space for woman: 'Either woman is passive or she doesn't exist'. Her whole theoretical project can in one sense be summed up as the effort to undo this logocentric ideology: to proclaim woman as the source of life, power and energy and to hail the advent of a new, feminine language that ceaselessly subverts these patriarchal binary schemes where logocentrism colludes with phallocentrism in an effort to oppress and silence women.

Difference

Against any binary scheme of thought, Cixous sets multiple, heterogeneous difference. In order to understand her arguments at this point, however, it is necessary first to examine Jacques Derrida's concept of difference (or, rather différance). Many early structuralists, as for instance A. J. Greimas in his Sémantique structurale, held that meaning is produced precisely through binary oppositions. Thus in the opposition masculine/feminine, each term only achieves significance through its structural relationship to the other: 'masculine' would be meaningless without its direct opposite 'feminine' and vice versa. All meaning would be produced in this way. An obvious counterargument to this theory is the many examples of adjectives or adverbs of degree (much—more—most, little—less—least), which seem to produce their meaning in relation to the other items in the same series, not in relation to their binary opposites.

Derrida's critique of binary logic, however, is more far-reaching in its implications. For Derrida, meaning (signification) is not produced in the static closure of the binary opposition. Rather it is achieved through the 'free play of the signifier'. One way of illustrating Derrida's arguments at this point is to use Saussure's concept of the phoneme, defined as the smallest differential—and therefore signifying—unit in language. The phoneme can in no way be said to achieve signification through binary opposition alone. In itself the phoneme /b/ does not signify anything at all. If we had only one phoneme, there would be no meaning and no language. /b/ only signifies in so far as it is perceived to be different from say /k/ or /h/. Thus /bat/:/kat/:/hat/ are all perceived to be different words with different meanings in English. The argument is that /b/ signifies only through a process that effectively defers its meaning on to other differential elements in language. In a sense it is the other phonemes that enable us to determine the meaning of /b/. For Derrida, signification is produced precisely through this kind of open-ended play between the presence of one signifier and the absence of others.

This, then, is the basic significance of the Derridean term différance. Spelt with an 'a' to distinguish it—in writing, not in speech—from the normal French word for difference (différence), it acquires the more active sense of the ending '-ance' in French, and can therefore be translated both as 'difference' and as 'deferral' in English. As we have seen, the interplay between presence and absence that produces meaning is posited as one of deferral: meaning is never truly present, but is only constructed through the potentially endless process of referring to other, absent signifiers. The 'next' signifier can in a sense be said to give meaning to the 'previous' one, and so on ad infinitum. There can thus be no 'transcendental signified' where the process of deferral somehow would come to an end. Such a transcendental signified would have to be meaningful in itself, fully present to itself, requiring no origin and no end other than itself. An obvious example of such a 'transcendental signified' would be the Christian concept of God as Alpha and Omega, the origin of meaning and final end of the world. Similarly, the traditional view of the author as the source and meaning of his or her own text casts the author in the role of transcendental signified.

Derrida's analysis of the production of meaning thus implies a fundamental critique of the whole of Western philosophical tradition, based as it is on a 'metaphysics of presence', which discerns meaning as fully present in the Word (or Logos). Western metaphysics comes to favour speech over writing precisely because speech presupposes the presence of the speaking subject, who thus can be cast as the unitary origin of his or her discourse. The idea that a text is somehow only fully authentic when it expresses the presence of a human subject would be one example of the implicit privileging of voice or speech over writing. Christopher Norris provides an excellent summary of Derrida's views on this point:

Voice becomes a metaphor of truth and authenticity, a source of self-present 'living' speech as opposed to the secondary lifeless emanations of writing. In speaking one is able to experience (supposedly) an intimate link between sound and sense, an inward and immediate realization of meaning which yields itself up without reserve to perfect, transparent understanding. Writing, on the contrary, destroys this ideal of pure self-presence. It obtrudes an alien, depersonalized medium, a deceiving shadow which falls between intent and meaning, between utterance and understanding. It occupies a promiscuous public realm where authority is sacrificed to the vagaries and whims of textual 'dissemination'. Writing, in short, is a threat to the deeply traditional view that associates truth with self-presence and the 'natural' language wherein it finds expression.

In order to grasp Derrida's distinction between writing and speech, it is important to realize that writing as a concept is closely related to différance; thus Norris defines writing as the 'endless displacement of meaning which both governs language and places it for ever beyond the reach of a stable, self-authenticating knowledge'. Derrida's analysis undermines and subverts the comforting closure of the binary opposition. Throwing the field of signification wide open, writing—textuality—acknowledges the free play of the signifier and breaks open what Cixous perceives as the prison-house of patriarchal language.

Ecriture féminine 1) masculinity, femininity, bisexuality

Cixous's concept of feminine writing is crucially related to Derrida's analysis of writing as différance. For Cixous, feminine texts are texts that 'work on the difference', as she once put it, strive in the direction of difference, struggle to undermine the dominant phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality.

However, Cixous is adamant that even the term écriture féminine or 'feminine writing' is abhorrent to her, since terms like 'masculine' and 'feminine' themselves imprison us within a binary logic, within the 'classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women'. She has therefore chosen to speak either of a 'writing said to be feminine' (or masculine) or, more recently, of a 'decipherable libidinal femininity which can be read in writing produced by a male or a female'. It is not, apparently, the empirical sex of the author that matters, but the kind of writing at stake. She thus warns against the dangers of confusing the sex of the author with the 'sex' of the writing he or she produces:

Most women are like this: they do someone else's—man's—writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that's in effect masculine. Great care must be taken in working on feminine writing not to get trapped by names: to be signed with a woman's name doesn't necessarily make a piece of writing feminine. It could quite well be masculine writing, and conversely, the fact that a piece of writing is signed with a man's name does not in itself exclude femininity. It's rare, but you can sometimes find femininity in writings signed by men: it does happen. ['Castration or decapitation?']

Indeed one of the reasons why Cixous is so keen to get rid of the old opposition between masculine and feminine, and even of terms like male or female, is her strong belief in the inherently bisexual nature of all human beings. In 'The laugh of the Medusa' (and also in La Jeune Née—some of the passages dealing with these themes are reproduced in both texts) she first attacks the 'classic conception of bisexuality', which is 'squashed under the emblem of castration fear and along with the fantasy of a "total" being (though composed of two halves), would do away with the difference'. This homogeneous conception of bisexuality is designed to cater for the male fear of the Other (woman) in so far as it allows him to fantasize away the ineluctable signs of sexual difference. Opposing this view, Cixous produces what she calls the other bisexuality, which is multiple, variable and ever-changing, consisting as it does of the 'non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex'. Among its characteristics is the 'multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body, indeed, this other bisexuality doesn't annul differences, but stirs them up, pursues them, increases them'.

Today, according to Cixous, it is 'for historico-cultural reasons … women who are opening up to and benefiting from this vatic bisexuality', or as she puts it: 'In a certain way, "woman" is bisexual; man—it's a secret to no one—being poised to keep glorious phallic monosexuality in view'. She denies the possibility of ever defining a feminist practice of writing:

For this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. ['The laugh of the Medusa']

She does, however, supply a definition that not only echoes Derrida's concept of écriture, but also seems to be identical with her own concept of the 'other bisexuality':

To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death—to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of one and the other, not fixed in sequence of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. ['The laugh of the Medusa']

Here it would seem that for Cixous writing as such is bisexual. However, she also argues that, at least at present, women (which clearly indicates biological females as opposed to males) are much more likely to be bisexual in this sense than men. Bisexual writing is therefore overwhelmingly likely to be women's writing, though some exceptional men may in certain cases manage to break with their 'glorious monosexuality' and achieve bisexuality as well. This position is clearly logical enough. In keeping with this anti-essentialist vein, Cixous, in 'The laugh of the Medusa', argues that in France only Colette, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet really qualify as feminine (or bisexual) writers. In La Jeune Née she also points to Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Kleist's Penthesilea as powerful representations of the feminine libidinal economy.

So far, then, Cixous's position would seem to constitute a forceful feminist appropriation of Derridean theory. Antiessentialist and anti-biologistic, her work in this field seems to displace the whole feminist debate around the problem of women and writing away from an empiricist emphasis on the sex of the author towards an analysis of the articulations of sexuality and desire within the literary text itself. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story. As we shall see, Cixous's theory is riddled with contradictions: every time a Derridean idea is evoked, it is opposed and undercut by a vision of woman's writing steeped in the very metaphysics of presence she claims she is out to unmask.

The gift and the proper

Cixous's distinction between the gift and the proper provides the first signs of a slippage away from Derridean antiessentialism. Though she refuses to accept the binary opposition of femininity and masculinity, Cixous repeatedly insists on her own distinction between a 'masculine' and a 'feminine' libidinal economy. These are marked, respectively, by the Realm of the Proper and the Realm of the Gift. Masculinity or masculine value systems are structured according to an 'economy of the proper'. Proper—property—appropriate: signalling an emphasis on self-identity, self-aggrandizement and arrogative dominance, these words aptly characterize the logic of the proper according to Cixous. The insistence on the proper, on a proper return, leads to the masculine obsession with classification, systematization and hierachization. Her attack on class has little to do with the proletariat:

There's work to be done against class, against categorization, against classification—classes. 'Doing classes' in France means doing military service. There's work to be done against military service, against all schools, against the pervasive masculine urge to judge, diagnose, digest, name … not so much in the sense of the loving precision of poetic naming as in that of the repressive censorship of philosophical nomination/conceptualization. ['Castration or decapitation?']

Theoretical discourse is in other words inherently oppressive, a result of masculine libidinal investment. Even the question 'What is it?' is denounced as a sign of the masculine impulse to imprison reality in rigid hierarchical structures:

As soon as the question 'What is it?' is posed, from the moment a question is put, as soon as a reply is sought, we are already caught up in masculine interrogation. I say 'masculine interrogation': as we say so-and-so was interrogated by the police. ['Castration or decapitation?']

Linking the Realm of the Proper to a 'masculine libidinal economy' is of course impeccably anti-biologistic. Defining it essentially as the male fear of castration (here labelled the 'masculine fear of the loss of the attribute'), however, is not:

One realizes that the Realm of the Proper is erected on the basis of a fear which as a matter of fact is typically masculine: a fear of expropriation, of separation, of the loss of the attribute. In other words: the impact of the threat of castration. [La Jeune Née]

In her article 'Castration or decapitation?' Cixous elaborates on this idea of the proper as proper to the male:

Etymologically, the 'proper' is 'property', that which is not separable from me. Property is proximity, nearness: we must love our neighbors, those close to use as ourselves: we must draw close to the other so that we may love him/her, because we love ourselves most of all. The Realm of the Proper, culture, functions by the appropriation articulated, set in to play, by man's classic fear of seeing himself expropriated, seeing himself deprived … by his refusal to be deprived, in a state of separation, by his fear of losing the prerogative, fear whose response is all of History. Everything must return to the masculine. 'Return': the economy is founded on a system of returns. If a man spends and is spent, it's on condition that his power returns.

The now male Realm of the Proper seems a textbook illustration of Derrida's 'metaphysics of presence'. One might therefore expect its opponent, the Realm of the Gift, to illustrate a more deconstructive approach. Cixous distinguishes between two different kinds of gifts. First there is the gift as it is perceived by men. For the male psyche, to receive a gift is a dangerous thing:

For the moment you receive something you are effectively 'open' to the other, and if you are a man you have only one wish, and that is hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an exchange that could have no end … to be nobody's child, to owe no one a thing.

In the Realm of the Proper, the gift is perceived as establishing an inequality—a difference—that is threatening in that it seems to open up an imbalance of power. Thus the act of giving becomes a subtle means of aggression, of exposing the other to the threat of one's own superiority. The woman, however, gives without a thought of return. Generosity is one of the most positive words in Cixous's vocabulary:

If there is a 'propriety of woman', it is paradoxically her capacity to depropriate unselfishly, body without end, without appendage, without principal 'parts'…. This doesn't mean that she's an undifferentiated magma, but that she doesn't lord it over her body or her desire…. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossings of the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom she inhabits long enough to look at from the point closest to their unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated through and through with these brief, identificatory embraces, she goes and passes into infinity. She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. ['The laugh of the Medusa']

The slippage from 'feminine' to 'female' (or 'woman') can here clearly be seen. Elaborating on her theme, Cixous adds that woman gives because she doesn't suffer from castration anxiety (fear of ex-propriation, as she often puts it) in the way men do. In spite of its clear biologism, the Realm of the Gift does seem to correspond fairly closely to a Derridean definition of writing: the feminine/female libidinal economy is open to difference, willing to be 'traversed by the other', characterized by spontaneous generosity; the Realm of the Gift isn't really a realm at all, but a deconstructive space of pleasure and orgasmic interchange with the other. There is no doubt that Cixous explicitly tries to give her exposition of the two 'libidinal economies' a Derridean profile. She warns, for instance, that 'one must beware of blindly or complaisantly falling into essentialist ideological interpretations', and refuses to accept any theory that posits a thematic origin of power and sexual difference. This effort is, however, not only partly undercut by her biologism: in her evocations of a specifically female writing she seems actively intent on promoting an utterly metaphysical case.

Ecriture féminine 2) the source and the voice

In La Jeune Née Cixous first reiterates her refusal to theorize about writing and femininity, only to indicate that she is, after all, willing to open up a discussion on the matter. What she describes as some tentative comments turn out to be no less than a lyrical, euphoric evocation of the essential bond between feminine writing and the mother as source and origin of the voice to be heard in all female texts. Femininity in writing can be discerned in a privileging of the voice: 'writing and voice … are woven together'. The speaking woman is entirely her voice: 'She physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body'. Woman, in other words, is wholly and physically present in her voice—and writing is no more than the extension of this self-identical prolongation of the speech act. The voice in each woman, moreover, is not only her own, but springs from the deepest layers of her psyche: her own speech becomes the echo of the primeval song she once heard, the voice the incarnation of the 'first voice of love which all women preserve alive … in each woman sings the first nameless love'. It is, in short, the Voice of the Mother, that omnipotent figure that dominates the fantasies of the pre-Oedipal baby: 'The Voice, a song before the Law, before the breath [le souffle] was split by the symbolic, reappropriated into language under the authority that separates. The deepest, most ancient and adorable of visitations'.

Finding its source in a time before the Law came into being, the voice is nameless: it is placed firmly in the pre-Oedipal stage before the child acquires language, and thereby the capacity to name itself and its objects. The voice is the mother and the mother's body: 'Voice: inexhaustible milk. She has been found again. The lost mother. Eternity: it is the voice mixed with milk'. The speaking/writing woman is in a space outside time (eternity), a space that allows no naming and no syntax. In her article 'Women's Time', Julia Kristeva has argued that syntax is constitutive of our sense of chronological time by the very fact that the order of words in a sentence marks a temporal sequence: since subject, verb, object cannot be spoken simultaneously, their utterance necessarily cuts up the temporal continuum of 'eternity'. Cixous, then, presents this nameless pre-Oedipal space filled with mother's milk and honey as the source of the song that resonates through all female writing.

The fact that women have this 'privileged relationship to the voice' is due to their relative lack of defence-mechanisms: 'No woman ever heaps up as many defences against their libidinal drives as a man does'. Whereas man represses the mother, woman doesn't (or hardly does): she is always close to the mother as the source of good. Cixous's mother-figure is clearly what Melanie Klein would call the Good Mother: the omnipotent and generous dispenser of love, nourishment and plenitude. The writing woman is thus immensely powerful: hers is a puissance féminine derived directly from the mother, whose giving is always suffused with strength: 'The more you have, the more you give the more you are, the more you give the more you have'.

The most explicit description of an actual example of female writing produced under the Sign of the Voice, Cixous's article on the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, stresses both her openness and generosity, and, in a deeply un-Derridean passage, her capacity to endow words with their essential meaning:

There is almost nothing left of the sea but a word without water: for we have also translated the words, we have emptied them of their speech, dried, reduced and embalmed them, and they cannot any longer remind us of the way they used to rise up from the things as the peal of their essential laughter … But a clarice voice only has to say: the sea, the sea, for my keel to split open, the sea is calling me, sea! calling me, waters! ('L'approche')

In her article on Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, Christiane Makward distinguishes between twelve different kinds of style in Cixous's novel LA: seven poetic and five narrative levels. Five of the seven poetic levels of style can be characterized as in some way biblical, liturgical or mythological. These high poetic inflections find their way into Cixous's more theoretical writings as well. La Venue à l'écriture opens on the biblical note of 'In the beginning I adored'. In this text, as in many others, Cixous casts herself, if not as a goddess, at least as a prophetess—the desolate mother out to save her people, a feminine Moses as well as the Pharaoh's daughter:

The tears I shed at night! The waters of the world flow from my eyes, I wash my people in my despair, I bathe them, I lick them with my love, I go to the banks of the Nile to gather the peoples abandoned in wicker baskets; for the fate of the living I have the tireless love of a mother, that is why I am everywhere, my cosmic belly, I work on my worldwide unconscious, I throw death out, it comes back, we begin again, I am pregnant with beginnings. [La Venue à l'écriture]

Laying claim to all possible subject positions, the speaking subject can indeed proudly proclaim herself as a 'feminine plural', who through reading and writing partakes of divine eternity:

The book—I could reread it with the help of memory and forgetting. Start over again. From another perspective, from another and yet another. Reading, I discovered that writing is endless. Everlasting. Eternal.

Writing or God. God the writing. The writing God. [La Venue à l'écriture]

Cixous's predilection for the Old Testament is obvious, but her taste for classical antiquity is no less marked. Her capacity for identification seems endless: Medusa, Electra, Antigone, Dido, Cleopatra—in her imagination she has been them all. In fact, she declares that 'I am myself the earth, everything that happens on it, all the lives that live me there in my different forms'. This constant return to biblical and mythological imagery signals her investment in the world of myth: a world that, like the distant country of fairy tales is perceived as pervasively meaningful, as closure and unity. The mythical or religious discourse presents a universe where all difference, struggle and discord can in the end be satisfactorily resolved. Her mythical and biblical allusions are often accompanied by—or interspersed with—'oceanic' water imagery, evoking the endless pleasures of the polymorphously perverse child:

We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves…. Heterogeneous, yes. For her joyous benefits she is erogeneous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous: airborne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him, of you. ['The laugh of the Medusa']

For Cixous, as for countless mythologies, water is the feminine element par excellence: the closure of the mythical world contains and reflects the comforting security of the mother's womb. It is within this space that Cixous's speaking subject is free to move from one subject position to another, or to merge oceanically with the world. Her vision of female writing is in this sense firmly located within the closure of the Lacanian Imaginary: a space in which all difference has been abolished.

Such an emphasis on the Imaginary can explain why the writing woman enjoys such extraordinary freedom in Cixous's universe. In the Imaginary mother and child are part of a fundamental unity: they are one. Protected by the all-powerful Good Mother, the writing woman can always and everywhere feel deeply secure and shielded from danger: nothing will ever harm her, distance and separation will never disable her. Shakespeare's Cleopatra becomes an example of such triumphant femininity:

The intelligence, the strength of Cleopatra appear particularly in the work she accomplishes—a work of love—on the distance, the gap, the separation: she only evokes the gap in order to fill it to overflowing, never tolerating a separation that could harm the lover's body.

Antony and Cleopatra can risk anything since they will always save each other from harm: the self can be abandoned precisely in so far as it can always be recuperated. If Cixous's poetic discourse often acquires a haunting beauty in its evocations of the paradise of childhood, it does so not least through its refusal to accept the loss of that privileged realm. The mother's voice, her breasts, milk, honey and female waters are all invoked as part of an eternally present space surrounding her and her readers.

This Imaginary world, however, is not flawlessly homogeneous. We have already seen that the female Realm of the Gift is one of a deconstructive openness to difference, and though Cixous describes female writing largely in terms of the abiding presence of the Mother's Voice, she also presents the voice as an operation of detachment, splitting and fragmentation. In La Venue à l'écriture, the desire to write is first of all presented as a force that she cannot consciously control: her body contains 'another limitless space' that demands she give it a written form. Fighting against it—no blackmail will make her yield—she nevertheless feels a secret fascination for this overpowering souffle:

Because it [il] was so strong and so furious, I loved and feared this breath. To be lifted up one morning, snatched off the ground, swung in the air. To be surprised. To find in myself the possibility of the unexpected. To fall asleep as a mouse and wake up as an eagle! What delight! What terror. And I had nothing to do with it, I couldn't help it. [La Venue à l'écriture]

This passage, particularly with its French use of the masculine pronoun il for souffle throughout, reads somewhat like a transposition of a well-known feminine rape fantasy: il sweeps the woman off her feet; terrified and delighted she submits to the attack. Afterwards she feels stronger and more powerful (like an eagle), as if she had integrated the power of the phallus during the scene. And as in all rape fantasies, the delight and jouissance spring from the fact that the woman is blameless: she didn't want it, so cannot be guilty of any illicit desires. (Needless to say, this description only concerns rape fantasies and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of rape.) This is a brilliant evocation of women's relationship to language in the phallocentric symbolic order: if a woman is to write, she will feel guilty about her desire to obtain mastery over language unless she can fantasize away her own responsibility for such an unspeakable wish. But Cixous's account of the text as rape also constitutes the background for her vision of the text as the Good Mother: 'I was eating the texts, I was sucking, licking, kissing them, I am the innumerable child of their multitudes'. A Kleinian analysis of the mother's nipple as a pre-Oedipal penis image might illuminate this striking oral relationship to the text she reads—which, after all, also must be the text she guiltily hopes some day to write: 'Write? I was dying to do it for love, to give the writing what it [elle] had given to me. What an ambition! What impossible happiness. Feed my own mother. Give her, in her turn, my milk? Mad imprudence'. The text as mother becomes the text as rape, in a sequence of rapid transformations:

I said 'write French'. One writes in. Penetration. Door. Knock before you enter. Absolutely forbidden…. How could I not have wanted to write? When books took me, transported me, pierced me to the depths of my soul, let me feel their disinterested potency?… When my being was being populated, my body traversed and fertilized, how could I have closed myself up in silence? [La Venue à l'écriture]

Mother-text, rape-text; submission to the phallic rule of language as differential, as a structure of gaps and absences; celebration of writing as the realm of the omnipotent mother: Cixous will always incorporate differences, juxtapose contradictions, work to undo gaps and distinctions, fill the gap to overflowing, and happily integrate both penis and nipple.

Imaginary contradictions

Fundamentally contradictory, Cixous's theory of writing and femininity shifts back and forth from a Derridean emphasis on textuality as difference to a full-blown metaphysical account of writing as voice, presence and origin. In a 1984 interview, Cixous shows herself to be perfectly aware of these contradictions:

If I were a philosopher, I could never allow myself to speak in terms of presence, essence, etc., or of the meaning of something. I would be capable of carrying on a philosophical discourse, but I do not. I let myself be carried off by the poetic word.

In a reference to Derrida's Of Grammatology she explains the relationship (or lack of it) between Derrida's concept and her own:

In Grammatology, he treats of writing in general, of the text in general. When I talk about writing, that is not what I am talking about. One must displace at the moment; I do not speak about the concept of writing the way Derrida analyzes it. I speak in a more idealistic fashion. I allow this to myself; I disenfranchise myself from the philosophical obligations and corrections, which does not mean that I disregard them.

Though her own theoretico-poetic style apparently strives to undo the opposition, Cixous's work bases itself on a conscious distinction between 'poetry' and 'philosophy' (a distinction Derrida himself might well want to deconstruct). How then can we best illuminate Cixous's seeming passion for contradiction? Some might claim it as a cunning strategy intended to prove her own point: by refusing to accept the Aristotelian logic that excludes A from also being not A, Cixous deftly enacts her own deconstruction of patriarchal logic. But this argument assumes that Cixous's point really is a deconstructive one, and thus over-looks the many passages that present a thoroughly metaphysical position. From a psychoanalytic perspective, it would seem that her textual manoeuvres are designed to create a space in which the différance of the Symbolic Order can co-exist peacefully with the closure and identity of the Imaginary. Such co-existence, however, covers only one aspect of Cixous's vision: the level on which the female essence is described in deconstructive terms, as for instance in the Realm of the Gift, or in those passages relating to the heterogeneous multiplicity of the 'new bisexuality'. But we have seen that even the openness of the Giving Woman or the plurality of bisexual writing are characterized by biblical, mythological or elemental imagery that returns us to a preoccupation with the Imaginary. The difference and diversity in question thus seems more akin to the polymorphous perversity of the pre-Oedipal child than to the metonymic displacements of desire in the symbolic order. The 'new bisexuality' in particular seems ultimately an imaginary closure that enables the subject effortlessly to shift from masculine to feminine subject positions. In the end, then, the contradictions of Cixous's discourse can be shown to be contained and resolved within the secure haven of the Imaginary. Her supreme disregard for 'patriarchal' logic is not after all an indication of her Barthesian concern for the liberation of the reader, though at first glance Barthes's description of readerly jouissance might seem strikingly appropriate to our experience of Cixous's texts:

Imagine someone (a kind of monsieur Teste in reverse) who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old spectre: logical contradiction; who mixes every language, even those said to be incompatible; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!)… Now this anti-hero exists: he is the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure.

The difference between the jouissance of the Barthesian reader and Cixous's text is that whereas the former signals absolute loss, a space in which the subject fades to nothing, the latter will always finally gather up its contradictions within the plenitude of the Imaginary.

Power, ideology, politics

Cixous's vision of feminine/female writing as a way of re-establishing a spontaneous relationship to the physical jouissance of the female body may be read positively, as a utopian vision of female creativity in a truly non-oppressive and non-sexist society. Indeed a marked emphasis on the Imaginary is common in utopian writing. In 1972, for example, Christiane Rochefort published a powerful feminist utopian novel, Archaos ou le jardin étincelant, which in its narrative mode exhibits striking parallels to Cixous's preoccupation with the Imaginary as a utopian solution to the problem of desire.

Utopian thought has always been a source of political inspiration for feminists and socialists alike. Confidently assuming that change is both possible and desirable, the utopian vision takes off from a negative analysis of its own society in order to create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation. Influenced by Frankfurt School theorists such as Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, Arnhelm Neusüss has shown that anti-utopian arguments tend to be advanced from the right as part of a strategy aiming at the neutralization or recuperation of the revolutionary contents of the utopian dream. The most pernicious and widespread of the various anti-utopian arguments described by Neusüss is the one we might call the 'realist' approach. While tending towards rationalism in its underestimation of the possible political impact of human desire, the 'realist' position also objects to the contradictory nature of many utopias: there is no point in taking them seriously, the argument goes, since they are so illogical that anybody could tell that they would never work in real life anyway.

Rejecting this position, Neusüss sees the contradictions embodied by so many utopias as a justification of their social critique: signalling the repressive effects of the social structures that gave rise to the utopia in the first place, its gaps and inconsistencies indicate the pervasive nature of the authoritarian ideology the utopian thinker is trying to undermine. If Neusüss is right, the utopian project will always be marked by conflict and contradiction. Thus, if we choose to read Cixous as a utopian feminist, at least some of the contradictory aspects of her texts may be analysed as structured by the conflict between an already contradictory patriarchal ideology and the utopian thought that struggles to free itself from that patriarchal stranglehold. But if it is true that her contradictions are finally gathered up into the homogenizing space of the Imaginary, then they are more likely also to constitute a flight from the dominant social reality.

In a critique of Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, himself a vigorous defender of utopianism, describes Brown's utopian ideal as an effort towards the 'restoration of original and total unity: unity of male and female, father and mother, subject and object, body and soul—abolition of the self, of mine and thine, abolition of the reality principle, of all boundaries'. While a positive effort towards abolishing existing repressive structures, Brown's Cixouslike cultivation of the pleasure principle is for Marcuse unsatisfactory precisely because it is located exclusively within the Imaginary:

The roots of repression are and remain real roots; consequently, their eradication remains a real and rational job. What is to be abolished is not the reality principle; not everything, but such particular things as business, politics, exploitation, poverty. Short of this recapture of reality and reason Brown's purpose is defeated.

It is just this absence of any specific analysis of the material factors preventing women from writing that constitutes a major weakness of Cixous's utopia. Within her poetic mythology, writing is posited as an absolute activity of which all women qua women automatically partake. Stirring and seductive though such a vision is, it can say nothing of the actual inequities, deprivations and violations that women, as social beings rather than as mythological archetypes, must constantly suffer.

Marcuse's insistence on the need to recapture reason and reality for the utopian project is a timely one. In her eagerness to appropriate imagination and the pleasure principle for women, Cixous seems in danger of playing directly into the hands of the very patriarchal ideology she denounces. It is, after all, patriarchy, not feminism, that insists on labelling women as emotional, intuitive and imaginative, while jealously converting reason and rationality into an exclusively male preserve. Utopias, then, challenge us both on the poetic and the political level. It is therefore understandable that, while acknowledging the rhetorical power of Cixous's vision, feminists should nevertheless want to examine its specific political implications in order to discover exactly what it is we are being inspired to do.

But is it justifiable to force Cixous's writing into a political straitjacket, particularly when, as she argues, she is concerned less with politics than with poetry?

I would lie if I said that I am a political woman, not at all. In fact, I have to assemble the two words, political and poetic. Not to lie to you, I must confess that I put the accent on the poetic. I do it so that the political does not repress, because the political is something cruel and hard and so rigorously real that sometimes I feel like consoling myself by crying and shedding poetic tears.

The distance posited here between the political and the poetic is surely one that feminist criticism has consistently sought to undo. And though Cixous seems to be claiming 'poetic' status for her own texts, this does not prevent her from writing directly about power and ideology in relation to feminist politics. According to Cixous, ideology is a 'kind of immense membrane that envelops everything. A skin that we must know is there even if it covers us like a net or a closed eyelid'. This view of ideology as total closure parallels Kate Millett's vision of it as a monolithic unity, and suffers from exactly the same defects. How could we ever discover the nature of the ideology that surrounds us if it were entirely consistent, without the slightest contradiction, gap or fissure that might allow us to perceive it in the first place? Cixous's image of ideology recreates the closure of the mythological universe in which she constantly seeks refuge from the contradictions of the material world. When Catherine Clément accuses Cixous of speaking at a non-political level, she pinpoints precisely this problem in Cixous's work:

C[atherine Clément]. I must admit that your sentences are devoid of reality for me, except if I take what you say in a poetic sense. Give me an example…. Your level of description is one where I don't recognize any of the things I think in political terms. It's not that it's 'false', of course not. But it's described in terms which seem to me to belong to the level of myth or poetry; it all indicates a kind of desiring, fictive, collective subject, a huge entity which alternately is free and revolutionary or enslaved, asleep or awake…. Those are not subjects existing in reality.

Equally disturbing is Cixous's discourse on power. In an interview in La Revue des sciences humaines, she distinguishes between one 'bad' and one 'good' kind of power:

I would indeed make a clear distinction when it comes to the kind of power that is the will to supremacy, the thirst for individual and narcissistic satisfaction. That power is always a power over others. It is something that relates back to government, control, and beyond that, to despotism. Whereas if I say 'woman's powers', first it isn't one power any longer, it is multiplied, there is more than one (therefore it is not a question of centralization—that destroys the relation with the unique, that levels everything out) and it is a question of power over oneself, in other words of a relation not based on mastery but on availability [disponibilité].

Both kinds of power are entirely personal and individual: the struggle against oppression seems to consist in a lame effort to affirm a certain heterogeneity of woman's powers (a heterogeneity belied by the singular of 'woman'), which in any case seems to come down to claiming that a strong woman can do what she likes. In French, the term disponibilité carries a heavy bourgeois-liberal heritage, partly because of its central status in the works of André Gide. To be 'available' can thus imply a certain egoistic desire to be 'ready for anything', not to be bogged down in social and interpersonal obligations. Cixous's global appeal to 'woman's powers' glosses over the real differences among women, and thus ironically represses the true heterogeneity of women's powers.

Cixous's poetic vision of writing as the very enactment of liberation, rather than the mere vehicle of it, carries the same individualist overtones. Writing as ecstatic self-expression casts the individual as supremely capable of liberating herself back into union with the primeval mother. For Cixous, women seem to relate to each other exclusively on a dualistic (I/you) pattern: as mothers and daughters, lesbian couples or in some variety of the teacher/student or prophet/disciple relationship. The paucity of references to a wider community of women or to collective forms of organization is not only conspicuous in the work of a feminist activist, but indicative of Cixous's general inability to represent the non-Imaginary, triangulated structures of desire typical of social relationships.

Given the individualist orientation of Cixous's theory, it is perhaps not surprising that some of her students should present her politics as a simple prolongation of her persona, as in Verena Andermatt Conley's account of Cixous's appearance at the University of Paris at Vincennes ('a school notorious for a certain regal squalor'):

Cixous used to enter the complex in a dazzling ermine coat whose capital worth most probably surpassed the means of many in the classroom. Her proxemics marked a progressive use of repression. As a replica of Bataille's evocation of Aztec ceremony, she surged from the context of the cheaply reinforced concrete of classroom shelters. She then became a surplus value and a zero-degree term, the sovereign center of a decorous, eminently caressive body where her politics splintered those of an archaic scene in which the king would have his wives circulate about him.

Ermine as emancipation: it is odd that the women of the Third World have been so ludicrously slow to take up Cixous's sartorial strategy.

For a reader steeped in the Anglo-American approach to women and writing, Hélène Cixous's work represents a dramatic new departure. In spite of the vicissitudes that the concept undergoes in her texts, writing for her is always in some sense a libidinal object or act. By enabling feminist criticism to escape from a disabling author-centred empiricism, this linking of sexuality and textuality opens up a whole new field of feminist investigation of the articulations of desire in language, not only in texts written by women, but also in texts by men.

As we have seen, a closer investigation of her work has to confront its intricate webs of contradiction and conflict, where a deconstructive view of textuality is countered and undermined by an equally passionate presentation of writing as a female essence. If these contradictions in the end can be seen to be abolished within the Imaginary, this in its turn raises a series of political problems for the feminist reader of Cixous: marred as much by its lack of reference to recognizable social structures as by its biologism, her work nevertheless constitutes an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of women.