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Cixous and Colette:

Bisexuality/Mental Hermaphroditism *** In this paper I will analyse Colettes novel The Pure and the Impure, comparing it to and explaining it in relation to the more theoretical work of Hlne Cixous , Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays, focusing on a particular issue both of these works address the bisexuality of mind. My main question is: How similar are the two concepts based on these two writings, and if they differ to what extent they do so? When Colettes novel The Pure and the Impure was being published in instalments in a cultural journal Gringoire in 1931, it was banned after the fourth of the nine parts was printed because of the criticism and the pressure of the public that it received. In it, Colette wrote explicitly about sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and the ways in which women live together perfectly normal lives without men. This must have been outrageous in those days. Yet Colettes novel was not a lesbian novel, although it could be considered that from many aspects. Colette was a bisexual, and this novel, more than any other of her writings, showcases the unisexuality, particularly the unisexuality of mind, not so much of the body. Forty-four years later Cixous published her now widely knownSorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays, one of the seminal works on criture fminine, in which she introduced her concept ofbisexuality, very similar to that of which Colette wrote in the above mentioned novel. Both of them thought that there is something particular to a human being who is constantly moving between the two ends of the gender binary, never fully belonging to either; that being that Colette deemed a monster[that] trails irrevocably among us its seraphic suffering, the same being that Cixous described as very fragile. It seems that they both have in mind the same sort of a being, that is latently present in all of us, but that not so often comes to embrace its inconsistency. This inconsistency is actually gendered, for both of them stress that women give in to it more easily, although it is equally accessible to men as well. My paper will comprise two parts; in the first I will give a short summary of Cixous main points on bisexuality and how it relates to what she named criture feminine, while the second part will deal with the similarities and possible

differences between Cixous and Colette when it comes to the same concept. I will provide some citations from Colettes novel, and discuss them in relation to Cixouss theory. In the closing paragraphs I will try to provide answers to my main question, based on the analysis of both texts. *** Cixous criture feminine according to her essay The Laugh of Medusafrom 1975 is on a very surface level the writing about women done by women. This, technically does not mean women only, but stems from Cixous idea that there is a certain kind of bisexuality, different from that common one which has been talked about since the 19th century in the psychoanalysis bisexuality as a fantasy of a complete being, which replaces the fear of castration and veils sexual differencethe bisexuality that melts together and effaces, but rather that bisexuality that is to say the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways according to the individualthe multiplication of the effects of desires inscription on every part of the body and the other body. The two sexes that each woman and men have within them, at least latently, can operate together, or one of them can be completely shut off, under the wheels of the society which is empowering to the males, and that imposes norms that restrain individuals. The part that Cixous says should write is the female part, because it is that part that does not succumb to fixing, regardless of our bodys anatomical sex. In this way, criture feminine is not reserved only to women, but does imply writing done by a woman inside each individual. What history prefers, what is the canon, is in Cixous terms the male writing, because it is normative, conventional and fixed. Furthermore, the language itself is masculine, and as such can be subverted only through the femininity inside. But more importantly, by writing with the woman inside, one should not disregard ones other half. Cixous is suggesting that different aspects of our lives are taken care of by our different selves. And as Cixous says: There are some exceptions. There have always been those uncertain poetic persons who have not let themselves be reduced to dummies programmed by pitiless repression of the homosexual element. Men or women: beings who are complex, mobile, open. Accepting the other sex as a component makes them much richer, more various, stronger, and to the extent that they are mobile very fragile. It is only in this condition that we invent This does not mean that you have to be homosexual to create. But it does mean that there is no invention possible, whether it be philosophical or poetic, without there being in the inventing subject an abundance of the other, of variety When she talks about homosexuality, she refers to it as an element. One of the two building blocks of each of us. According to Cixous this element, is in women usually more easily embraced, because men tend to fear it; since the male ideal is

the one preferred in the society, then the femininity is feared, its instability, multiplicity is not something that empowers in such a society, the society that does everything to fix the meaning; as Dickens would say: In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts.. For men, to embrace this kind of bisexuality would mean to give up the power they could possess in the male-dominated society. Women have nothing to lose; men lose a lot. But the stubborn suppression of bisexuality and conforming to the gender role prescribed for their anatomical sex costs them the quality of the produced artistic or any other work, because by suppressing their femininity, they suppress the creativity it carries. *** What Cixous sees as a bisexuals escape from fixing, Colette calls the invisibility of the mental hermaphrodite. On several occasions in her book, this invisibility is expressed with regard to different people she is moving about. In one of those, she says: They allowed me to share their sudden outbursts of gaiety, so shrill and revealing. They appreciated my silence, for I was faithful to their concept of me as a nice piece of furniture and I listened to them as if I were an expert. They got used to me, without ever allowing me access to a real affection. No one excluded me no one loved me Absent yet present, a translucent witness, I enjoyed an indefinable peace, accompanied by a kind of conspiratorial pride. What both Cixous and Colette are trying to point out is that such a subject, the best artist, is never really present. The movement between the two genders, which in Cixous terms is the reason for a bisexuals great fragility, is the source of great sadness that surrounds the hermaphrodite mind. Colette says that [this sadness], it fills the void the remark smacks of unisexuality, because this filling itself of the void is the embracing of that other in oneself. In the novel, Colette discusses the unisexuality on both the physical and the psychological level. She undeniably states that she is both a woman and a man inside, while later on in the book she observes persons around her who are asleep as physically androgynous. The first sort of androgyny, or unisexuality, as she would call it, is very evident from the scene in which she is talking to her good, male friend, particularly famous for his success with women: At a time when I was or I thought I was insensible to Damiens attraction, I suggested that he and I go for a voyage together, a pair of courteously egotistic companions, accommodating, fond of long silences I only like to travel with women, he replied. His gentle tone was meant to soften the brutal remark. But, afraid he offended me, he dressed it up with a remark that was even worse. You, a woman? Why, try as you will

Damiens remark hurt me for quite a while, and since it happened to be one of the last remarks he ever made to me, I never had the opportunity to admit to him that, oddly enough, I was secretly craving just then to be completely a woman. I am not alluding to a former self, a public and legendary figure that I had ostentatiously cultivated and arranged as to costume and external details. I am alluding to a genuine mental Hermaphroditism which burdens certain highly complex human beings. And if Damiens pronouncement vexed me, it was because I happened to be making a particular effort at the time to rid myself of this ambiguity, along with all its flaws and privileges, and to offer them up, still warm, at the feet of a certain man to whom I offered a healthy and quite female body and its perhaps fallacious vocation of a servant. It is very easy to distil the sadness that comes after the frustration of not being good enough for somebody who was taught to be fixed and who cannot cherish the beauty of ambiguity. She later says that there especially remains for the androgynous creature the right, even the obligation, never to be happy. If jovial, the androgynous creature is a monster. But it trails irrevocably among us its seraphic suffering, its glimmering tears. Colette also notes that bodies lose their gender during sleep; asleep, she rather resembled Dante, or a refined hidalgo, or Leonardo da Vincis Saint John the Baptist Sleep brings an incalculable number of women to assume the form they would no doubt have chosen if their waking state did not keep them in ignorance of themselves. The same applies to men. She refers to sleep in this way in several instances in the novel. I believe it is the active awareness that leaves us during sleep, of the surroundings, of our posture and the way we handle our space, that is absent. When not vigil of themselves, our bodies lose the imposed gender. *** In conclusion, I would argue that the concepts of unisexuality/mental Hermaphroditism and bisexuality Colette and Cixous introduced, respectively, are not at all that different. With a slight more attention of the female side of ones personality given by Cixous to the importance for writing, these two do not really differ. They both assume that there is a latent duality in every human being, that this being sways between the two ends of one scale, and that as such, it is both privileged and damned. Privileged because being neither this nor that, but something mobile in between at all times, this being has the ability to see the world in multiple ways. At the same time, this being is condemned to solitude and sadness, because it lives in the world that is hierarchical, and that seeks to fix everything, and thus as such it is highly misunderstood. Bibligraphy *Cixous, H., Sorties: out and out: attacks/ways out/forays in Belsey, C. and Moore, J. (eds.) (1989), The feminist reader: essays in gender and the politics of

literary criticism, Cambridge, Mass. & Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education; New York: Blackwell * Cixous, H. (1975), The Laugh of the Medusa in Warhol, R.R. and Price Herndl, D. (eds.) (1991), Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism, Rutgers, New Jersey * Colette, (2000), The pure and the impure, NYRB Classics, New York Dickens, C. (1981), Hard Times, Bentam Classics, Colette, (2000), The pd. p.108 Ibid. pp. 61-63 Ibid. p.8id. p.66 Tags Androgyny, Bisexual, Bisexuality, Cixous, Colette,Hermaphroditism, Sor ties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays, The Pure and the Impure, Unisexuality

This was a course book that I hadn't got around to reading so I thought it would be a good source for the 2 essays that I need to read for #4 of the 2009 Mini Challenges. I have read articles by the French writer and theorist Helene Cixous before and found her theories about feminism in literature interesting, so the first one that I have picked is by her. Helene Cixous, 'Sorties', New French Feminisms, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivoron, eds (1975), pp. 366-71 In summary, Cixous talks about how the definition of femininity, especially feminine sexuality, has been determined by language. Her theory is that 'thought has always worked by opposition', eg high/low, big/small, light/dark, male/female. All theory is based upon the same system and the hierarchization in male dominated patriarchal society has assigned the male role as being active, and so on the same system females must be assumed to be passive. 'In philosophy, woman is always on the side of passivity.' The father has a will, desire and authority, but if woman is opposite, what does she have? According to Cixous she can be passive or nothing.

All literary theory refers back to 'man and his torment, his desire to be the origin'. Therefore, for everything to fit together, women must be subordinate. They teach these theories in schools onlineand many upper tier English courses. Cixous then brings in her thoughts about Freud, and his representations of women as 'an imperfect man'. In terms of sexuality, Freud anatomically places man in a position of power, with women in a position of 'defectiveness'. Libido can only be male. Cixous calls this obsession with male and female exterior anatomy as a 'voyeur's theory'. There ends up being no place for female desire in all of this because the system cites that she is the opposite of man. Cixous argues that men and women lose out by such theory, but we are currently living through a 'transitional period' and that 'men and women are caught up in a network of millenial cultural determinations of a complexity that is practically unanalyzable.' The nature of theory is that we can agree or disagree with them. I found a lot to interest me in her work, and certainly to look out for in language patterns of writing, by male and females. I am sure that there are those who believe that such theories are feminist twaddle, but there are many, both male and female, who believe that language has a lot of power, especially in patriarchal societies, however reformed. POSTED BY LEAH AT 12:28 LABELS: 2009 MINI CHALLENGES , FEMINISM, HELENE CIXOUS, LITERARY THEORY , MODERN LITERARY THEO RY Hlne Cixous 1937 Algerian-born French theorist, novelist, short story writer, essayist, nonfiction writer, dramatist, screenwriter, and librettist. The following entry presents criticism on Cixous's critical works through 1992. INTRODUCTION A major figure in contemporary feminist critical theory, Cixous is known for works that analyze and attempt to counter Western culture's traditional concepts of male and female. A proponent of criture fminine, or feminine writing, Cixous strives in all of her works to establish a uniquely feminine perspective, both as a kind of corrective to what she and many feminist theorists view as the traditionally masculine character of Western discourse and as a methodology with which to

critique that discourse. In the United States, Cixous's best known work is La jeune ne (1975; The Newly Born Woman), which is recognized as being markedly influenced by the writings of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of the critical method known as deconstructionism; Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher who proposed a linguistic theory of the unconscious; and Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis. Concerning Cixous's significance to contemporary thought, Morag Shiach has noted: "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." Biographical Information Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria. Her father, who was of French-colonial background, was a physician, and her mother, of Austro-German heritage, was a midwife. Members of her family were Sephardic Jews, and Cixous grew up with a sense of kinship with persecuted groups. Her father died when she was very young, an event some critics suggest informs her writing. In her teens, Cixous read myths, the German Romantics (including Heinrich von Kleist), and English literature, especially the writings of William Shakespeare. Cixous moved to France in her late teens, where she earned an agrgation d'anglais degree in 1959 and became a docteur ds letters in 1968. She was a founder of the University of Paris VIIIVincennes, a liberal school offering an alternative to traditional education, and the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Fminines in 1974. She also cofounded, with Grard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, the prestigious literary and critical journalPotique in 1968. Cixous has taught at various universities in France, including the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, and the University of Bordeaux; she has also been a visiting professor at such institutions as Yale University, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College. Major Works Cixous's first published work of criticism was her doctoral thesis, L'Exil de James Joyce (1968; The Exile of James Joyce). In this work she examines Joyce's experimental literary techniques and the ways in which they express his belief in the mutually influential relationship between linguistic and mental structures. She criticizes Joyce, however, for emphasizing a connection between guilt and death; she argues that this leads to the unnecessary paradox, detectable in all of his works, that one must "lose" in order to "gain," kill in order to live. In Prnoms de personne (1974), a collection of essays, Cixous presents psychoanalytic analyses

of literary texts by Freud, August Heinrich Hoffmann, Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, and Joyce. These essays deal variously with the concept of the "unified subject," or the individual's sense of being or "possessing" a distinct, whole personality. In 1975 Cixous published "Le rire de la Mduse" (1975; "The Laugh of the Medusa"), a well-known essay that examines Freud's concept of castration anxiety. Freud argued that this anxiety stems from a fear of female genitalia, perceived by males at a subconscious level as the result of castrationthe female body understood subconsciously as "lacking" a phallus. Freud suggested that the mythical story of Medusa, in which people turn to stone when they look at the snake-entwined head of the Gorgon, could be read as addressing this psychoanalytic fear. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" Cixous argues, following many theorists, that this masculine view of women as "lacking" has broad social and political implications and manifestations. The Newly Born Woman consists of three parts: Catherine Clment's essay "The Guilty One," Cixous's "Sorties," and "Exchange," a dialogue between the two authors in which they discuss the similarities and differences in their views on women and writing. Through their readings of various historical, literary, and psychoanalytical texts, the two explore the role played by language in determining women's secondary place in society. They go on to propose that Western culture's repressive language must be replaced with a language of liberation. Elizabeth Wright has noted that "the general thesis of this book is that if women are going to take part in history they must write themselves into it." La venue l'criture (1977), coauthored with Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon, further evinces Cixous's preoccupations with language, psychoanalysis, and feminine pleasure. According to Verena Andermatt Conley, in this work Cixous "traces the origin of women's writing to the mother's voice and body." "Coming to Writing," and Other Essays (1991) collects translations of a number of Cixous's critical works written between 1976 and 1989, including "Clarice Lispector: An Approach," "Tancredi Continues," and the title essay, which is a translation of La venue l'criture. Critical Reception Reaction to Cixous's critical works has been mixed. Many critics have praised her attempts to revolutionize traditional beliefs about women and writing. Others, however, have castigated what they consider the contradictoriness of her work and her intentional resistance to analysis. Toril Moi has stated: "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." Some reviewers also suggest that Cixous's

attempts to redefine gender differences reduces women to what one critic has called an "anatomical essence," and that her works are, in fact, antifeminist. Others argue, like Moi, that Cixous's work is expansive rather than reductive and "seems to displace the whole 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 literary text itself." Most critics, however, praise Cixous's belief that the creation of a new language is, as stated by Nicole Irving, "a precondition of a new reality." Cixous herself has asserted: "Writing is the very possibility of change, the space from which a subversive thought can spring forth, the forward runner in any movement to change social and cultural strategies." Introduction to Helene Cixous by Julie Jasken

Helene Cixous Quotes Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. -- "The Laugh of the Medusa" Writing: as if I had the urge to go on enjoying, to feel full, to push, to feel the force of my muscles, and my harmony, to be pregnant and at the same time to give myself the joys of parturition, the joys of both the mother and the child. To give birth to myself and to nurse myself, too. Life summons life. Pleasure seeks renewal. -- "Coming to Writing" Myth ends up having our hides. Logos opens up its great maw and swallows us whole. --"Coming to Writing" Contextual Setting Feminism, it's that infamous "f" word that makes even those of us who consider ourselves well inside her walls a bit uncomfortable. Even within academics, feminists have often been unfairly labeled as man-hating feminazi's, and guarders of political correctness. The truth is, although you may disagree with some of the

politics feminist theorists espouse, if you were engaged in the politicization of rhetoric within the classroom found in theorists such as Eagleton, Berlin, and Friere and Macedo, then you probably fall into the same camp as many feminist scholars and certainly many feminist rhetoricians. Like the theorists we have read in the last couple of weeks, many feminists have a much broader agenda that deals with the epistemic nature of our rhetoric and the oppression of the many classes that are found within it . What theorists like Cixous and Kristeva are trying to do is answer the questions that many of us may have personally struggled with throughout our studies in rhetoric and perhaps even our studies this summer. Why have women's voices been so historically absent in a rich tradition of rhetoric that spans over two thousand years? Is it simply a matter of women being forbidden the education that would allow them into the discourse community? or, is there actually a distinct woman's way of thinking, speaking, and interacting, a women's rhetoric if you will, that has made it difficult for women to communicate in these forums? These are the types of questions that Cixous is specifically interested in attempting to answer. Biographical Information Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria in 1937, which was a colony of France, and was raised in a German-Jewish household. She received her agregation in English in 1959 and her Docteur en lettres in 1968. Cixous has taught at many different universities throughout France including the University of Bordeaux (1962), the Sorbonne (1965-67), and Nanterre (1967). In the 1970's Cixous became involved in exploring the relationship between sexuality and writing, the same kinds of work being done by theorists like Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida, and Irigaray (Shiach). In this time period she composed such influential works as "Sortie," "The Laugh of the Medusa," and "Coming to Writing." Since the authoring of these texts in the seventies, Cixous has become even more mysterious and complex, but has somewhat lessened her radical ideology for a more inclusive exploration of collective identities. She is currently an English literature professor at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes where she has established a center for women's studies and is a co-founder of the structuralist journal Poetique. Influential Thinkers for Cixous:

Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Arthur Rimbaud, Clarice Lispector, Jacques Derrida, Jaques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Heidegger Because of her versatile and radical voice, it is difficult to place Cixous in a particular scholarly category. She is a professor, a radical feminist, a poet, a philosopher, and a literary scholar, just to name a few. The particular facet of her we will be interested in for this presentation, however, is her position as a rhetorician. Cixous' Influential Works While Cixous has been she has been quite prolific in texts that would fall, at least partially into the rhetorical cannon, there are only a few influential works that have been translated and are therefore accessible. Below is a synopsis of two of her works, "The Laugh of the Medusa," and "Sortie" which are the most anthologized and cited. Sortie (1975)--In this essay, Cixous describes the set of hierarchical values, of which we are probably all familiar. The oppositions she sets up include culture/nature; head/heart; colonizer/colonized; and, speaking/writing. She relates these to the opposition between man and women and then engages in a political and philosophical rejection of the dialectical relation of these terms, believing that they depend on power and exclusion for their existence. **Although Cixous would cringe at my categorization, she seems to suggest two separate approaches to exploding these dichotomies: 1. Deconstructive reading--in which we must challenge ourselves to questions the naturalness or inevitability of structural hierarchies (Freire and Macedo). 2. Subversive and political writing--in which she posits a feminine writing practice she calls writing the body that attempts to do away with hierarchical structures. The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)--In this text, Cixous expands the concept of feminine writing by claiming its proximity to voice. She says that this writing should take place in the between, which is an abstract space that has no loyalty to opposing terms. Cixous uses her poetic genius and academic savvy to create a text that is brilliantly effective in many ways. First, she succeeds in giving the reader a concept of feminine writing but convinces us that in actually defining of the term, we destroy

its beauty. She also manages to give us an example of what this text might be like in her illusive and circular style, but still writes academically enough to be included in most major surveys of rhetoric, literary criticism, and feminist theory. Overall Theoretical Approach Much of Cixous' theory relies heavily on Freudian and Greek mythology in attempts to topple the narrative myths (Fisher) that dominate our culture. Cixous' believes that in order to escape the discourse of mastery we must begin to write the body. To Cixous, our sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked. To free one means freedom for the other. To write from one's body is to flee reality, "to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls joissance., which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction... [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political" (Gilbert xvii). The implications of this philosophy to the rhetorical theories we have studied so far is, believe it or not, quite practical. It can be seen when we look at the large number of rhetoricians who believe that our language structures create meaning, whether at the argumentative level (Perelman, Toulmin) or the syntactical level (Habermas). Ohmann's description of the new rhetoric as "the pursuit,-- not simply the transmission--of truth and right" (300) and Scott's belief that "truth is not prior and immutable but is contingent" (313) also supports this idea. For Cixous, then, the logical structure of our discourse protects those who occupy the privledged position in dichotomous terms by making hierarchical positions seem natural. By writing the body, she hopes to explode this linearity (see above quotes). Criticism on Cixous Some criticize Cixous for being essentialist, that she "reduces women to an essence ... and thus negates the possibility of the very change which she seeks to promote" (Shiach 17) Other feminists have difficulty with her reclaiming of the maternal, as a starting place for her engagement with the politics of sexual difference. They fear that reclaiming the naturalness of motherhood, something with which women have been historically oppressed (Stanton 157-182). he main location for Cixous's views on patriarchal binary thought is her essay, 'Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays' which is in a book jointly written

with Catherine Clement called The Newly Born Woman (1975; 1986). References in this section to the essay are from this text. Extracts from her essay can also be found in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (1981) and Catherine Betsey and Jane Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (1989). In the synopsis of Cixous's ideas from Toril Moi, below, the references are from the original French version, La Jeune Nie (1975); for your convenience I have included, after the French, the page references to the English translation. Cixous and Ruskin 1 Cixous's comments on patriarchal binary thought are summarized here by the critic Toril Moi: 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 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

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 battlefield 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 women: '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.