Helene Cixous takes up where Lacan
left off, in noting that women and men enter into the Symbolic Order, into
language as structure, in different ways, or through different doors, and that
the subject positions open to either sex within the Symbolic are also
different. She understands that Lacan's naming the center of the Symbolic as
the Phallus highlights what a patriarchal system language is--or, more
specifically, what a phallo(go)centric system it is.
This idea, that the structure of
language is centered by the phallus, produced the word
"phallocentric." Derrida's idea that the structure of language relies
on spoken words being privileged over written words, produced the word
"logocentric" to describe Western culture in general. Cixous and
Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe Western cultural systems and
structures as "phallogocentric," based on the primacy of certain
terms in an array of binary oppositions. Thus a phallogocentric culture is one
which is structured by binary oppositions-- male/female, order/chaos,
language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil,
etc.--and in which the first term is valued over the second term; Cixous and
Irigaray insist that all valued terms (male, order, language, presence, speech,
etc.). are aligned with each other, and that all of them together provide the
basic structures of Western thought.
Cixous follows Lacan's
psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must separate from its
mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic. Because of this,
Cixous says, the female body in general becomes unrepresentable in language;
it's what can't be spoken or written in the phallogocentric Symbolic order.
Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body to the female body in general;
she also leaps from that female body to female sexuality, saying that female
sexuality, female sexual pleasure, is unrepresentable within the
phallogocentric Symbolic order.
To understand how she makes that
leap, we have to go back to what Freud says about female sexuality, and the
mess he makes of it. In Freud's story of the female Oedipus complex, girls have
to make a lot of switches, from clitoris to vagina, from attraction to female
bodies to attraction to male bodies, and from active sexuality to passive
sexuality, in order to become "normal" adults Cixous rewrites this,
via Lacan, by pointing out that "adulthood," in Lacan's terms, is the
same as entering into the Symbolic and taking up a subject position. Thus
"adulthood," or becoming a linguistic subject, for Cixous, means
having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal, heterosexual,
reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his logical extreme,
is not about female sexuality per se, but about male sexuality: the woman's pleasure
is to come from being passively filled by a penis (remember, Freud defines
activity as masculine, and passivity as feminine). So, Cixous concludes, there
really isn't any such thing as female sexuality in and of itself in this
phallogocentric system--it's always sexuality defined by the presence of a
penis, and not by anything intrinsic to the female body or to female sexual
pleasure.
If women have to be forced away from
their own bodies--first in the person of the mother's body, and then in the
person of their unique sexual feelings/pleasures--in order to become subjects
in language, Cactus argues, is it possible for a woman to write at all? Is it
possible for a woman to write as a woman? Or does entry into the Symbolic,
orienting one's language around a center designated as a Phallus, mean that
when one writes or speaks, one always does so as a "man"? In other
words, if the structure of language itself is phallogocentric, and stable
meaning is anchored and guaranteed by the Phallus, then isn't everyone who uses
language taking up a position as "male" within this structure which
excludes female bodies?
Cixous, and other poststructuralist
theoretical feminists, are both outraged and intrigued by the possibilities for
relations between gender and writing (or language use in general) that Lacan's
paradigms open up. That's what Cixous means when she says (p. 309a) that her
project has two aims: to break up and destroy, and to foresee and project. She
wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the phallogocentric system Lacan
describes, and to project some new strategies for a new kind of relation
between female bodies and language.
Lacan's description of the Symbolic
(as illustrated by the pictures on p. 741 of the two doors) places women and
men in different positions within the Symbolic in relation to the Phallus; men
more easily misperceive themselves as having the Phallus, as being closer to
it, whereas women (because they have no penises) are further from that center.
Because of that distance from the Phallus, the poststructuralist theoretical
feminists argue, women are closer to the margins of the Symbolic order; they
are not as firmly anchored or fixed in place as men are; they are closer to the
Imaginary, to images and fantasies, and further from the idea of absolute fixed
and stable meaning than men are.
Because women are less fixed in the
Symbolic than men, women-- and their language--are more fluid, more flowing,
more unstable than men. It is worth noting here that when Cixous talks about
women and woman, sometimes she means it literally, as the physical beings with
vaginas and breasts, etc., and sometimes she means it as a linguistic
structural position: "woman" is a signifier in the chain of
signifiers within the Symbolic, just as "man" is; both have stable
meaning ("woman" is the signifier attached to the signified of vagina
and breasts (etc.)) because both are locked in place, anchored, by the Phallus
as center of the Symbolic order. When Cixous says that woman is more slippery,
more fluid, less fixed than man, she means both the literal woman, the person,
and the signifier "woman".
Cixous' essay is difficult, not only
because she's assuming we all know Freud and Lacan's formulations about female
sexuality and about the structure of language, but also because she writes on
two levels at once: she is always being both metaphoric and literal, referring
both to structures and to individuals. When she says that "woman must
write herself," "woman must write woman," she means both that
women must write themselves, tell their own stories (much as the American
feminists say women must tell their own stories) and that "woman" as
signifier must have a (new) way to be connected to the signifier "I,"
to write the signifier of selfhood/subjecthood offered within the Symbolic
order.
Cixous also discusses writing on
both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing with masturbation,
something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful, or silly,
something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order to achieve
adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in favor of
vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write themselves,
Cixous says, they must (re)claim a female-centered sexuality. If men write with
their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women can write they
have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be too quick to
decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that simple).
Cixous also argues that men haven't
yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and their writing, as long
as they are focused on writing with the penis. "Man must write man,"
Cixous says, again focusing on "man" as a signifier within the Symbolic,
which is no more privileged than "woman" as a signifier. In an
important footnote, Cixous explains that men's sexuality, like women's, has
been defined and circumscribed by binary oppositions (active/passive,
masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual relations have been structured by a
sense of otherness and fear created by these absolute binaries. As long as male
sexuality is defined in these limited and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will
be prisoners of a Symbolic order which alienates them from their bodies in ways
similar to (though not identical with) how women are alienated from their
bodies and their sexualities. Thus, while Cixous does slam men directly for
being patriarchal oppressors, she also identifies the structures which enforce
gender distinctions as being oppressive to both sexes.
She also links these oppressive
binary structures to other Western cultural practices, particularly those
involving racial distinctions. On 310 she follows Freud in calling women the
"dark continent," and expands the metaphor by reference to Apartheid,
to demonstrate that these same binary systems which structure gender also
structure imperialism: women are aligned with darkness, with otherness, with
Africa, against men who are aligned with lightness, with selfhood, and with Western
civilization. In this paragraph, note that Cixous is referring to women as
"they," as if women are non-speakers, non-writers, whom she is
observing. "As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're
taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is
black:"--i.e. entry into the Symbolic order, into language, into having a
self and a name, is entry into these structures of binary oppositions.
Cixous argues that most women do
write and speak, but that they do so from a "masculine" position; in
order to speak, women (or “woman”) have assumed she needed a stable, fixed
system of meaning, and thus has aligned herself with the Phallus which
stabilizes language. There has been little or no "feminine" writing,
Cixous says (p. 311). In making this statement, she insists that writing is
always "marked," within a Symbolic order that is structured through
binary opposites, including "masculine/feminine," in which the
feminine is always repressed. Remember here, when Cixous speaks of
"feminine," it is both literal and metaphoric--it's something
connected to femaleness, to female bodies, and something which is a product of
linguistic positioning. So Cixous is arguing that only women could produce
feminine writing, because it must come from their bodies, AND she is arguing
that men could occupy a structural position from which they could produce
feminine writing.
Cixous coins the phrase
"l'ecriture feminine" to discuss this notion of feminine writing (and
masculine writing, its phallogocentric counterpart). She sees "l'ecriture
feminine" first of all as something possible only in poetry (in the
existing genres), and not in realist prose. Novels, she says on p. 311, are
"allies of representationalism"--they are genres (particularly
realist fiction) which try to speak in stable language, language with
one-to-one fixed meanings of words, language where words seemingly point to
things (and not to the structure of language itself). In poetry, however,
language is set loose--the chains of signifiers flow more freely, meaning is
less fixed; poetry, Cixous says, is thus closer to the unconscious, and thus to
what has been repressed (and thus to female bodies/female sexuality). This is
one model she uses to describe what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like.
(It is worth noting, however, that all the poets and "feminine"
writers Cixous mentions specifically are men.)
Such feminine writing will serve as
a rupture, or a site of transformation or change; she means "rupture"
here in the Derridean sense, a place where the totality of the system breaks
down and one can see a system as a system or structure, rather than simply as
"the truth." Feminine writing will show the structure of the Symbolic
as a structure, not as an inevitable order, and thus allow us to deconstruct
that order.
There are two levels on which
"l'ecriture feminine" will be transformative, Cixous argues (p.
311-312), and these levels correspond again to her use of the literal and the
metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level, the individual
woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her body feels like,
and how to write about that body in language. Specifically, women must find
their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own bodies, and find
ways to write about that pleasure--which Cixous, following Lacan, names
"jouissance." On the second level, when women speak/write their own
bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become active
subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as subject in
language will shift. Women who write--if they don't merely reproduce the
phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and
which excludes them)--will be creating a new signifying system; this system may
have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid
phallogocentric symbolic order. "Beware, my friend," Cixous writes
toward the end of the essay (p. 319) "of the signifier that would take you
back to the authority of a signified!"
The woman who speaks, Cixous says,
and who does not reproduce the representational stability of the Symbolic
order, will not speak in linear fashion, will not "make sense" in any
currently existing form. L'ecriture feminine, like feminine speech, will not be
objective/objectifiable; it will erase the divisions between speech and text,
between order and chaos, between sense and nonsense. In this way, l'ecriture
feminine will be an inherently deconstructive language. Such speech/writing
(and remember, this language will erase that slash) will bring users closer to
the realm of the Real, back to the mother's body, to the breast, to the sense
of union or non-separation. This is why Cixous uses (p.312) the metaphor of
"white ink," of writing in breast milk; she wants to convey that idea
of a reunion with the maternal body, an unalienated relation to female bodies
in general.
Cixous' descriptions of what
"l'ecriture feminine" looks like (or, better, sounds like, since it's
not clear that this writing will "look like" anything--since
"looking like" is at the heart of the misperception of self in the
Mirror Stage which launches people into the Symbolic order) flow into
metaphors, which she also means literally. She wants to be careful to talk
about writing in new ways, in ways that distinguish l'ecriture feminine from
existing forms of speech/writing, and in so doing she is associating feminine
writing with existing non-linguistic modes. So, for instance, l'ecriture
feminine is milk, it's a song, something with rhythm and pulse, but no words,
something connected with bodies and with bodies' beats and movements, but not
with representational language.
She uses these metaphors also to be
"slippery", arguing (p. 313) that one can't define the practice of
"l'ecriture feminine." To define something is to pin it down, to
anchor it, to limit it, to put it in its place within a stable system or
structure--and Cixous says that l'ecriture feminine is too fluid for that; it
will always exceed or escape any definition. It can't be theorized, enclosed,
coded, or understood --which doesn't mean, she warns, that it doesn't exist.
Rather, it will always be greater than the existing systems for classification
and ordering of knowledge in phallogocentric western culture. It can't be
defined, but it can be "conceived of,"--another phrase which works on
literal and metaphoric levels--by subjects not subjugated to a central
authority. Only those on the margins--the outlaws--can "conceive of"
feminine language; those outlaws will be women, and anyone else who can resist
or be distanced from the structuring central Phallus of the phallogocentric
Symbolic order.
In discussing who might exist in the
position of outlaw, Cixous brings up (p. 314) the question of bisexuality.
Again, she starts from Freud's idea that all humans are fundamentally bisexual,
and that the Oedipal trajectory which steers both boys and girls into
heterosexuality is an unfortunate requirement of culture. For Cixous,
"culture" is always a phallogocentric order; the entry into the Symbolic
requires the division between male and female, feminine and masculine, which
subordinates and represses the feminine. But by erasing/deconstructing the
slash between masculine and feminine, Cixous is not arguing for Freud's old
idea of bisexuality. Rather, she wants a new bisexuality, the "other
bisexuality," which is the "non-exclusion either of the difference or
of one sex"--a refusal of self/other as a structuring dichotomy. In
essence, rather than scotch-taping masculine and feminine together, Cixous'
bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that sexuality would be from anybody,
any site, at any time.
Without the dichotomy of self/other,
all other dichotomies would start to fall apart, Cixous says: her other
bisexuality would thus become a deconstructive force to erase the slashes in
all structuring binary oppositions. When this occurs, the Western cultural
representations of female sexuality--the myths associated with womanhood--will
also fall apart. Cixous focuses in particular (p. 315) on the myth of the
Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair, whose look will turn men into stone,
and on the myth of woman as black hole, as abyss. The idea of woman as abyss or
hole is pretty easy to understand; in Freudian terms, a woman lacks a penis, and
instead has this scary hole in which the penis disappears (and might not come
back). Freud reads the Medusa as part of the fear of castration, the woman
whose hair is writhing penises; she's scary, not because she's got too few
penises, but because she has too many. Cixous says those are the fears that
scare men into being complicit in upholding the phallogocentric order: they're
scared of losing their one penis when they see women as having either no penis
or too many penises. If women could show men their true sexual pleasures, their
real bodies--by writing them in non-representational form--Cixous says, men
would understand that female bodies, female sexuality, is not about penises
(too few or too many) at all. That's why she says we have to show them "our
sexts"--another new word, the combination of sex and texts, the idea of
female sexuality as a new form of writing.
Cixous then moves on to talk about
the idea of hysterics as prior examples of women who write "sexts,"
who write their bodies as texts of l'ecriture feminine. Again, she's following
Freud, whose earliest works were on hysteria, and focused on female hysterics.
The idea of hysteria is that a body produces a symptom, such as the paralysis
of a limb, which represents a repressed idea; the body thus "speaks"
what the conscious mind cannot say, and the unconscious thoughts are written
out by the body itself. L'ecriture feminine has a lot in common with hysterics,
as you can see, in the idea of the direct connections between the unconscious
and the body as a mode of "writing".
Cixous concludes the essay (starting
on p. 318) by offering a critique of the Freudian nuclear family, the
mom-dad-child formation, which she sees as generating the ideas of castration
(Penisneid, in German) and lack which form the basis for ideas of the feminine
in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She wants to break up these
"old circuits" so that the family formations which uphold the
phallogocentric Symbolic won't be recreated every time a child is born; she argues
that this family system is just as limiting and oppressive to men as to women,
and that it needs to be "demater-paternalized."
Then she discusses other ways to
figure pregnancy, arguing that, like all functions of the female body,
pregnancy needs to be written, in "l'ecriture feminine." When
pregnancy is written, and the female body figured in language as the source of
life, rather than the penis, birth can be figured as something other than as
separation, or as lack.
She ends with the idea of formulating
desire as a desire for everything, not for something lacking or absent, as in
the Lacanian Symbolic; such a new desire would strip the penis of its
significance as the signifier of lack or of fulfillment of lack, and would free
people to see each other as different beings, each of whom are whole, and who
are not complementary. These beings, not defined by difference, absence, or
even by gender, would begin to form a new kind of love, a love which she
describes on 319-
This essay was written by Dr. Mary
Klages, Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, and remains her property.
Last revision:
November 24, 1997
For comments, send mail to Mary Klages
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