Hélène Cixous

Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria to Jewish parents.[3] She earned her agrégation in
English in 1959 and her Doctorat ès lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English
literature and the works of James Joyce. In 1968, she published L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'Art du
remplacement (The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement) and the following year she
published her first novel, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical work that won the Prix
Médicis. She is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and the
University of Paris VIII, 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. 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 (French). Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques
Derrida en jeune saint juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). Her reading
of Derrida finds additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level.[4] In
addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer
Clarice Lispector, on Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de
Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is considered one of the mothers of
poststructuralist feminist theory.[5] In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship
between sexuality and language. Like other poststructuralist feminist theorists, Cixous believes
that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society. In 1975, Cixous published
her most influential article "Le rire de la méduse" ("The Laugh of the Medusa")[6] translated and
released in English in 1976. She has published over 70 works; her fiction, dramatic writing and
poetry, however, are not often read in English.

Influences on Cixous' writing

Some of the most notable influences on her writings have been Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud,
Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud.

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud established the initial theories which would serve as a basis for
some of Cixous' arguments in developmental psychology. Freud's analysis of gender roles and
sexual identity concluded with separate paths for boys and girls through the Oedipus complex,
theories of which Cixous was particularly critical.
Jacques Derrida

Contemporaries, lifelong friends, and intellectuals, Jacques Derrida and Cixous both grew up as
French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"—not
Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family
"one never said 'circumcision' but 'baptism,' not 'Bar Mitzvah' but 'communion.'" Judaism
cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the
thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint."[7] Her book Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young
Jewish Saint addresses these matters.

Through deconstruction, Derrida employed the term logocentrism (which was not his coinage).
This is the concept that explains how language relies on a hierarchical system that values the
spoken word over the written word in Western culture. The idea of binary opposition is essential
to Cixous' position on language.

Cixous and Luce Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea and Lacan's symbol for desire,
creating the term phallogocentrism. This term focuses on Derrida's social structure of speech and
binary opposition as the center of reference for language, with the phallic being privileged and
how women are only defined by what they lack; not A vs. B, but, rather A vs. ¬A (not-A).

In a dialogue between Derrida and Cixous, Derrida said about Cixous: "Helene's texts are
translated across the world, but they remain untranslatable. We are two French writers who
cultivate a strange relationship, or a strangely familiar relationship with the French language -- at
once more translated and more untranslatable than many a French author. We are more rooted in
the French language than those with ancestral roots in this culture and this land."[8]

The Bibliothèque nationale de France

In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France after
Cixous donated the entirety of her manuscripts to date. They then featured in the exhibit
"Brouillons d'écrivains" held there in 2001.

In 2003, the Bibliothèque held the conference "Genèses Généalogies Genres: Autour de l'oeuvre
d'Hélène Cixous". Among the speakers were Mireille Calle-Gruber, Marie Odile Germain,
Jacques Derrida, Annie Leclerc, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ginette Michaud, and Hélène Cixous
herself.

Major works
The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

Cixous' critical feminist essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" originally written in French as Le Rire
de la Méduse in 1975, was translated into English by Keith and Paula Cohen in 1976. In the
essay, Cixous issues an ultimatum: that women can either read and choose to stay trapped in
their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use
the body as a way to communicate. She describes a writing style, Écriture feminine, that she says
attempts to move outside of the conversational rules found in patriarchal systems. She argues
that Écriture feminine allows women to address their needs by building strong self-narratives and
identity. This text is situated in a history of feminist conversations that separated women in terms
of their gender and women in terms of authorship.[9] The “Laugh of the Medusa” addresses this
rhetoric, writing on individuality and commanding women to use writing and the body as sources
of power and inspiration. Cixous uses the term the Logic of Antilove to describe her
understanding of the systematic oppression of women by patriarchal figures. She defines the
Logic of Antilove as the self-hatred women have, “they have made for women an antinarcissism!
A naracissim which loves itself only to be loved by what women haven’t got”, this idea
persecutes women by defining them by what misogynistic tradition believes makes the female
sex inferior.[10] Cixous commands women to focus on individuality, particularly the individuality
of the body and to write to redefine self-identity in the context of her history and narrative. The
essay includes the argument that writing is a tool women must use to advocate for themselves in
order to acquire the freedom women have historically been denied.

"The Laugh of the Medusa", is an exhortation and call for a "feminine mode" of writing that
Cixous calls "white ink" and "écriture féminine" in the essay. Cixous builds the text using the
elements of this mode and fills it with literary allusions. She instructs women to use writing as a
means of authority. Cixous explores how the female body is closely connected to female
authorship. She conveys this message by employing a conversational dialogue in which she
instructs her audience directly. She urges her audience to write using many direct conversational
statements such as “Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it”.[11] Cixous'
repetition in her message that women must write for themselves and claim their bodies bridges
the gap between the physicality of the female body and their authorship. In doing so she
challenges the distinctions between theory and practice expanding on the feminist rhetorical
tradition.[12] The Laugh of the Medusa is successful in its creation of a writing style that allows
women to claim authority because it was created on the foundation of the woman’s claim to
herself and her body, therefore eliminating the oppressive effects of patriarchal control of
rhetoric.[13] This text is also a critique of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, because it de-
prioritizes the masculine form of reason traditionally associated with rhetoric, having much in
common with Jacques Derrida's earlier thought.[14] The essay also calls for an acknowledgment
of universal bisexuality or polymorphous perversity, a precursor of queer theory's later
emphases, and swiftly rejects many kinds of essentialism which were still common in Anglo-
American feminism at the time.

In homage to French theorists of the feminine, Laughing with Medusa was published by Oxford
University Press in 2006