Hélène Cixous

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Hélène Cixous, (born June 5 1937), is a French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher and literary critic.

She was born, and grew up, in Algeria, to a German Ashkenazi mother and Algerian Sephardic father. Her dissertation work was in English literature, studying the work of James Joyce, which was subsequently revised and published in 1968 as James Joyce ou l'art de replacement (English translation: The Exile of James Joyce). The following year she published Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel, her first, that won the Prix Médici. She is a professor at the University of Paris-VIII, which she helped to found, and whose center for women's studies, the first in Europe, she founded. She has published widely, including twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential articles. Along with Julia Kristeva, Cixous is one of the best-known of the late-20th-century "French feminists". She published Voiles (Veils) with Jacques Derrida and her work is often considered deconstructive. In introducing her Wellek Lecture, subsequently published as Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Derrida referred to her as the greatest living writer in his language (i.e. the French language). Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). In addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Cixous is best known to English readers for her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" (in French, "La rire de la mèduse") and her later book La jeune née (The Newly Born Woman — the title in French also plays on several phonetic, not quite homonymic contiguities: la Genet, the feminine form of Jean Genet's surname, and Là-je-nais, there are I am born or being born). Her fiction, dramatic writing, and poetry are not often read in English, and much of this work has not been translated from the original French. The difficulty of translating her work may be minimally exemplified even by examining the title just discussed. Her reading of Derrida proceeds along similar lines, finding additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level (these are not quite the same thing as puns, which play on the varied means of a word or phrase or the homonyms thereof, even though they bear some resemblance to them).

"The Laugh of the Medusa," an extremely literary essay, is well-known as an exhortation to a feminine mode of writing (the phrases "white ink" and "écriture féminine" are often cited, referring to this desired new way of writing). It is a strident critique of "logocentrism" and "phallogocentrism," having much in common with Jacques Derrida's slightly earlier thought. The essay also calls for an acknowledgement of universal bisexuality, or polymorphous perversity, which is clearly a precursor of queer theory's later emphases; and it swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly interxtextual, making a wide range of literary allusions.

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References

"The Laugh of the Medusa". Orig. English pub. Signs, Summer 1976. Anthologized in:
- New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. ISBN 0-87023-280-0.
- The "Signs" Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Abel and Abel. ISBN 0226000753.
- Literature in the Modern World, ed. Dennis Walder. ISBN 0-19-925301-3.
The Hélène Cixous Reader. ISBN 041504930X.