Womrn’s Studirs In!. Forum. Vol. 9. No. 4. pp. 44%4A7.1986. om-5395/86 s3.ul+.

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Printedin Grew Brirain. 8 1986 Perpmon JournalsLid.

WRITING WOMAN: HltLi?NE CIXOUS’ POLITICAL ‘SEXTS’

SUSAN SELLERS

Centre d’Etudes Feminines. Paris, France

Synopsfs-Logocentric thinking underlies all Western ideology and political ordering. Discourse is
its most powerful propagator. Parables from Kafka and of Eve in Paradise illustrate this. Writers
(such as Joyce and Clarice Lispector) create possibilities for transgressing or moving outside
logocentric Law. There is a fundamental difference between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ reactions to
the Law. Though this difference is not simply di! isible between mrn and wornon. women. because of
their placing within ~~gocentric discourse. are more likely to have access to the ‘feminine’ position
than men. In order for women to reach this position. they must rediscover their bodies. their
Unconscious and their past. They must inscribe these experiences in writing. This will bring about
corresponding changes in the ‘metalanguage that structures our personal lives as well as our political
systems. Lispector’s and Cixous’ own writing provide examples of the radical transformations a
‘feminine’ discourse implies. Such literature is ‘political’ in the most subversive sense of the word.

‘Now, l-woman am going to blow up the Law: an
explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let
it be done, right now, in language.’
(Cixous, 1975)
In her essay ‘The laugh of the medusa’
Cixous makes the following statement:
‘Writing is precisely the very possibility of
change, the space that can serve as a springboard
for subversive thought, the precursory movement
of a transformation of social and cultural
structures.’ (Cixous, 1975A: 249).
In order to understand this statement it is necessary
to explore the relationship between language,
writing and ideology. Drawing on her reading of
philosophy, Cixous argues that all Western thinking
(at least since Descartes)’ has been ‘Logocentric’:
that is, centrally organized and essentialist, based on
a myth of absolute knowledge which it is continually
striving to master. Logocentrism influences every
area of our thinking:
‘The theory of culture, theory of society. the
ensemble of symbolic, systems-art, religion,
family, language, everything elaborates the same
systems.’ (Cixous, 1975B: 91).
It inhabits our discourse. It is:
‘Always the same mktaphor: we follow it: it
transports us, in all of its forms wherever a
discourse is organized. The same thread (. . .)
leads us, whether we are reading. or speaking,
through literature, philosophy, criticism, cen-
turies of representation, of reflection.’ (Cixous,
1975B: 90).
One important aspect of logocentrism is that it
Helene works through opposition. It is a two-term system.
based on hierarchy, and meaning is generated
through the oppositional interplay between a term
and its compliment:
Father/son
Logos/writing
Master/slave.
(Cixous, 1975B: 91)
The master/slave division is a direct reference to
Hegel whose logocentric theories were perhaps first
made relevant to feminism through Simone de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Hegel’s theory is based
on the idea that a subject sets up its own object or
other in a continual struggle for recognition,
mastery and meaning. Thus woman: ‘is defined and
differentiated with reference to man and not he with
reference to her; she is the incidental. the inessential
as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is
the Absolute-she is the Other’ (de Beauvoir. 1949:
44).
Discourse, imbued as it is with logocentric
thinking, is one of logocentrism’s most powerful
propagandists. It maintains and perpetuates existing
structures, hiding its own will to domination behind
an appeal to conceptual truths.
As a demonstration of the way logocentrism
works, Cixous draws on Kafka’s parable ‘Before the

443
444 SUSAN SELLERS
Law’. In Kafka’s story a countryman arriving before
the Law asks the doorkeeper for admittance, which
the doorkeeper refuses. The countryman asks if he
will be allowed admittance later, to which the
doorkeeper gives a non-committal answer. The
countryman waits, asking the doorkeeper from time
to time when he may be admitted. The reply is
always the same. Finally. towards the end of his life,
the countryman wonders why, in all the years of
waiting, he has never seen anyone else enter the
door of the Law. He decides to ask the doorkeeper
who tells him: because it is your door’, whereupon
he closes it.
For Cixous, the meaning of the text is threefold. It
illustrates the power of the Law, whilst demonstrat-
ing that the Law is a word and not reality. It shows
that the authority of the word rests on consensus and
not verification. At no time did the countryman try
to question the importance or meaning of the Law,
or his position in front of it. His consent ensured its
power.
A second parable, this time that of Eve in the
garden of Eden shows what happens when that
consent is withheld. Eve is told by God that if she
eats the apple she will die. The word ‘death’ has
literally no meaning in Paradise and Eve, unlike the
countryman, refuses to take a word for reality. She
bites into the apple. What follows, according to the
Scriptural Fathers, is death and destruction, but
also, Cixous reminds us, knowledge. creation and
art.’
Literature, because it tells stories, because of its
capacity to explore meaning in language, is crucial
to the deconstruction of logencentrism. As an
example of the way in which writers may undermine
the power of the Law, Cixous turns to the work of
James Joyce and a Brazilian writer, Clarice
Lispector.
In the opening scene of The Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus
knows: ‘The Vances lived in number seven. They
had a different father and mother. When they were
grown up he was going to marry Eileen.’ (Joyce,
1916: 7).
The childhood scene is played in a kind of fairy-
tale setting before the interjection of the Law:
His mother said:
-0, Stephen will apologize.
Dante said:
* These two illustrations are taken from an unpublished
lecture given by Helene Cixous at the University of
Oregon, Portland, U.S.A. in 1984 under the title: ‘The
portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman’. References to
Joyce’s The Portrair of the Artist as a Young Man and
clice tispector’s Near ro the Wild Hearr were also made
during this lecture.
-0, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his
eyes.
The chapter finishes with a poem, Stephen’s first
creation as an artist:
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.
Like Eve, Stephen is threatened with the Law, the
precise meaning of which is hidden to him. (Why
must he apologize? What has he done to merit the
threat of punishment?) Stephen chooses to ignore
the Law, and he makes his first poem by playing
with the wording of it. He transgresses the Law by
listening, not to its message, but to the sounds and
syllables inside the words themselves.
In Clarice Lispector’s text Near to the Wild Heart,
a young girl Joana accused by her aunt of stealing a
book confesses: ‘yes I stole because I wanted to. I
will only steal when I want to. It doesn’t do any
harm.’ (Lispector, 1944: 68).2
Her words prompt the confused and furious aunt
to ask: ‘God help me, when does it do harm Joana?’
Joana replies: ‘When one steals and one is afraid.’
Joana, unlike the defiant Stephen Dedalus is
completely outside the sphere of the Law. What
Lispector shows us through Joana is that there are
no Laws, only those imposed on us by institutions.
The fact that Joyce, though he transgresses the
Law remains within its influence, is a man. and
Lispector, writing ‘in innocence’ of the Law, is a
woman. is incidental as far as Cixous is concerned.
This does not mean that she does not find a crucial
difference between what she terms ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ writing, but that this difference is not
necessarily or simply divisible between men and
women.
In order to distinguish between a ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ approach, Cixous, drawing on psycho-
analytic theory, talks in terms of ‘libidinal econo-
my’. A ‘masculine’ libido, developed through
separation, under the threat of castration, and
inscribed in the system of debt set out by Lacan.
refers to an economy that, is ‘organized around a
centre, limited, subject to re-appropriation, con-
trolled.‘3 It is logocentric, or-if we prefer to use
* All quotations from Clarice Lispector used in the text
are translated by Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell for Helene
cixous.
3 From an unpublished lecture given in the U.S.A. in
1982.
 H&he Cixous’ political ‘sexts’
Lacan’s term: ‘Phallo-logocentric’. A ‘feminine’
libido Cixous defines as one operating outside the
circle of castration, one which, drawing on the
maternal source, is characterized by expense. (The
word is used in the sense of spending. from the
French word ‘depense’.) It involves:
‘accepting the part of fife which is uncertain, of
enjoying possibility. of risking the investments,
and a kind of openness, of being able, for
instance, to have a relation to all the phenomenas
(of experience).
Ciious believes that the majority of women have
inscribed themselves in a ‘masculine’ economy-
with disastrous results. Lacan draws a parallel
between the realms of the Imaginary and the
Symbolic, or the subject’s passage through the
Oedipus complex and his or her entry into language.
Since a girl’s passage through the Oedipus complex
is marked by her not having the penis/phallus which
governs the operation, Lacan sees her entry into
language as ,a negative one, structured by lack.
Cixous disagrees with Lacan. believing that this is
only true as long, as women are prepared to
subscribe to the theory of castration.
Cixous sees the Unconscious as a type of
ideological theatre storing a multitude of models
and representations which constantly act to alter the
individual’s imaginary order. She argues that
women have been cut off from the source of their
Unconscious in the same way that they have been
denied access to language and culture. Their bodies
have been colonized by men. their Unconscious
peopled with the images of masculine desire, their
mouths ‘gagged’. Women. Cixous urges, must re-
inhabit their bodies, and re-discover their Uncons-
cious and their past. They must mark these
experiences in writing:
‘It is by writing. from and toward women. and
by taking up the challenge of speech which has
been governed by the phallus, that women will
confirm women in a place other than that which is
reserved in and by the Symbolic, that is, in a place
other than silence.’ (Cixous, 1975A: 251).
Cixous believes that it is by writing that women will
break down the stranglehold of logocentrism.
Writing, she says, is woman’s ‘anti-logos weapon’.
for it is in language that women can begin to inscribe
the changes that will bring about corresponding
changes in the metalanguage that structures
personal relationships as well as political systems.
Cixous does not underestimate the difficulty that
women writing experience. Those that have written,
that have tried to defy or move outside logocentric
4 Ibid.
445
control, have been consistently marginalised, ig
noted. branded as hysterics and punished. Women
taking up the pen for the first time, are subject to
feelings of guilt, of doubt as to the value of their
work, together with all the censoring effects of the
logocentric ploy: ‘the imbecilic capitalist machinery
in which publishing houses are the craftly, obse-
quious relayen of imperatives handed down by an
economy that works against us and off our backs.’
(ibid. : 247).
This is all the more reason why women must write
their experience:
‘they must invent the impregnable language
that will wreck partitions, classes. and rhetorics,
regulations and codes. they must submerge, cut
through. get beyond the ultimate reserve-dis-
course.’ (ibid.: 256).
Woman. potentially closer to a *feminine’ economy
than men. must begin to write the ‘marvellous text
of herself: she must create her ‘sext’ (ibid: 250).
So difficult is the task of the woman writer, so all-
pervasive the influence of logocentrism that Cixous
believes women can currently only begin to glimpse,
through their writing. the changes a differently
structured order would imply. In her text La, Cixous
describes a scene in which a woman rises above the
towers and buildings of her town. The episode can
be read as a parable of the woman writer mounting
the bastions of logocentrism in her attempt to see
beyond:
‘She sets herself away from a dead-male state.
She climbs up on her polygams. She enraptures
herself in altitude. She rapidly succeeds in (. . .)
rising above the buildings, the terraces with yards.
the bell towers, all the suburban pretense.
Through rich appetite: for the love of that which
she could see if she succeeded in surmounting the
edifices which prevent her from contemplating her
infinite.’ (1976B: 219)s
What are some of the characteristics of a writing
located within a ‘feminine’ as opposed to a
phallo/logocentric economy? First, Cixous believes,
it is a writing situated in the physical self. Women’s
bodies have been confiscated from them through the
transforming power of men’s desire, and Cixous
argues that it is only by re-experiencing the body on
a primary level that a corresponding textual body
can be produced:
‘Text: my body- shot through with streams of
song . . . what touches you, the equivoice that
5 Translated by Verena Conley. For a more detailed
discussionof this scene see her book: Writing the Feminine:
H&+nc &our, 1984. University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln, Nebraska.
446 SUSAN SELLERS
affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come
to language and launches your force.’ (Cixous,
1975A: 252).
In particular, women, in re-discovering their bodies
as the life source, by drawling on the maternal with
its associative powers of giving and reparation, have
the possibility to bring to literature (and hence to
ideology and political systems) meaning generated,
not through the hierarchical opposition between one
term and another, but through difference. For
Cixous, this difference operates not only at the level
of sexual or linguistic difference, but also on the
complimentary levels of personal and political
relationships. Since:
‘Woman has always functioned “within” the
discourse of man, a signifier that has always
referred back to the opposite signifier which
annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or
stifles its very different sounds’ (ibid.: 257),
‘feminine’ discourse would refuse to mark an order
of preference between signifiers. ‘Naming’ would
thus no longer be based on the desire to appropriate
a person or object but on the attempt to ‘bring the
other to life.’ (ibid.: 262). At the level of personal
relationships, the celebration of sexual difference
must replace sexual opposition with its implicit
power struggle; these changes, Cixous argues, will
inevitably be reflected in our political and social
framework:
‘Let us imagine simultaneously a general
change in all the structures of formation,
education, framework, hence of reproduction, of
ideological effects, and let us imagine a real
liberation of sexuality, that is, a transformation of
our relationship to our body (-and to another
body-), an approximation of the immense
material organic sensual universe that we are, this
not being possible, of course, without equally
radical political transformations. (Imagine!)’
(ibid.: 247).
As an example of how these transformations may be
created and carried through literature, Cixous turns
to the work of Clarice Lispector. From The Passion
According fo G. H., Cixous quotes the following
passage:
‘I have avidity for the world. I have strong and
definite desires. tonight 1’11go down and eat, I
won’t use the blue dress but the black one. But at
the same time I don’t need anything. I don’t even
need a tree to exist. I don’t impose my need on
things, they exist without my asking them.
demanding them to be there.’ (Lispector, 1964:
179).
Lispector argues for a re-definition of relationships
that allows and does not suppress difference, which
refuses to appropriate or transform what is Other
through the needs of narcissistic desire. In her
writing, she demc+rates the possibility of relin-
quishing the demands of the Ego for unity and
control, of opening the self to acceptance of non-
order, plurality and contradiction-life in its fullest
‘feminine’ sense.
‘Feminine* writing, beginning with the re-dis-
covery of the body, and rooted in a celebration of
difference, involves a radical transformation of
literary genre. Refusing arbitrary order, there are
no beginnings or endings to narrative, no attempt to
imprison time in a linear structure, no false division
of parts. Drawing heavily on the Unconscious and
the non-centred, multiple self, there are no
‘characters’ in the traditional sense. Accepting the
plurality of meaning, including contradiction, the
text allows free reign to readers, inviting them to
create their own responses. Finally, a ‘feminine’
literature is not based on exclusion-on selection
and privilege and the burying over of what is
discarded, but on the inclusion of all parts of truth.
Thus it is a literature which is pQlitica1 in the most
subversive sense, keeping within its play of meaning
the existence df tyranny and repression as well as the
possibility for their deconstruction, the prevalence
of death as well as the creation of life.
This is exemplified in the writing of Cixous
herself. Jn Vivre I’Orung~ (1979). struck by the
magnificence of an orange which has been brought
to life for her through reading Clarice Lispector,
Cixous is reminded by a telephone call that women
are marching in a demonstration of solidarity with
the women of Iran, and is brought to think back to
the horror of the concentration camps. This is the
crux of the ‘feminine’ position which Cixous marks
in her text:
‘death, slaughter, indifference, to be able to
arrive alive awoman in front of an orange full of
life, we must be able to think six million cadavers’
(P. 76).
The reaction to such wriGng in France has been
inevitably hostile, and the minimal press Cixous’
books have received has ranged from cursory
dismissal to outright ridicule. Her attempt to set up
a women’s studies programme at the University of
Paris VIII failed when the programme was removed
from the curriculum in June 19gO. In the September
of the same year, the Prime Minister, addressing the
Universities, directly attacked the programme and
Cixous herself.‘j In many ways, however, the very
6 See Cixous’ letter to the Spring 1982 edition of Sign%.
M. Barre’s denunciation of Cixous’ hi8hly innovative
women’s studies pro8ramme took the following form: ‘un
professeur d’anglais du sexe fCminin encadrer trois
etudiants sur des problemes g6nCraux de stxualitC’.
 Helbne Cixous’ political ‘sexts’
virulence of such attacks confirms Cixous’ position;
for such hostility must surely be seen not only as an
indication of the danger of women’s continued
exclusion from the realms of dominant discourse,
but also as a sign of the threat such writing poses to
the invested interests of establishment literature
the political status quo.
REFERENCES
de Bcauvoir, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex. First
appeared as LX Deuxikme Sexe. Guoted in Marks.
Elaine and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds, 1981. New
French Feminisms, p. 44. The Harvester Press.
Brighton, Sussex.
Cixous, H&l&e. 1975A. The Laugh of the Medusa. In New
French Feminiwns, pp. 245-264. First appeared as ‘Le
Rire de la Mtduse’. In L’Arc. 1975. Also published in
English in Signs Summer 1976.
Cixous, Helene. 19758. Sorties. In New French Femi-
nisms, pp. 90-98. From L.a Jeune NPe. 1975. Union
G&r&ale d’Editions. 1008. Paris.
Cixous, Helene. 1976A. Castration or Decapitation? In
Signs Autumn 1981: 41-55. First appeared as ‘Le Sexe
447
ou la T&e?.’ In Les Cahiers du GRIF 13 (1976).
Cixous. HCltne. 1976B. Lo. Gallimard. Paris.
Cixous, HClene. 1977. Lo Venue d I’Ecriture. (With Annie
Lecierc and Madeleine Gagnon.) Union Generale
D’Editions, 10118, Paris.
Cixous, Helene. 1979. Vivre /‘Orange ! To Live the
and Orunge. des femmes, Paris.
Cixous, HClene. 1980. Poetry is/and (the) Political. In
Breud and Roses 2 (1). 16-18.
Conley, Verena. 1984. Writing the Feminine: Hblkne
Cixous. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Nebraska.
Derrida. Jacques. 1967. L’Ecriture et ka Diflerence.
Translated into English as Writing and Difference.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Illinois.
Joyce. James. 1916. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Rpt 1960. Penguin. Harmondsworth.
Kafka, Franz. 1926. Before the Law. Rpt 1971 in The
Complete Stories. Stoken Books. New York.
Lacan,‘Jacques. 1966. Ecrits. Editions du Seuil. Paris.
Listrector. Clarice. 1944. Near to the Wild Heart.
Translated from the Brazilian into French as P&s du
C@ur &wage. 1982. des femmes. Paris.
Lispector. Clarice. 1964. The Passion According to G.H.
Translated into French as Lo Passion Selon G.H. 1978.
des femmes. Paris.