Ang, Reading Hélène Cixous

One can no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization.
Hélène Cixous

This paper argues that Hélène Cixous rewrites féminine in écriture féminine (”writing feminine” as opposed to the traditional translation, ”feminine writing”), beyond the boundaries of cultural representation, and in fact beyond representation into that which makes all writing possible. For Cixous, ”Writing makes love other. It is itself this love. Other-Love is writing’s first name” (”Sorties” 99) [1]. Other-Love makes writing possible. For Cixous, this is feminine. Écriture féminine unveils the illusion of masculine discourse, which excludes and represses this element of feminine in writing.

Reading Cixous in translation – in fact, the very act of translation – brings feminine to bear. Translation reveals how the oppressive masculine law can be undermined, and allows for an encounter with Other-ness. Contrary to some readings of Cixous, this paper argues that Cixous’ writings do not generate a law of feminine or feminine as thing/essence that can exist without the masculine discourse. Rather, it argues that the masculine law is necessary for feminine to be demonstrated in the first place, but in this very act of demonstration, gives gaps from which we can enter in the between of any laws at work, thereby re-visioning differences in the relationship between écriture and féminine.

Jacques Lacan, in drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic theory to account for his development and revision of Freudian psychoanalysis, emphasizes the importance of the symbolic language system in the constitution of subjectivity. In beginning with Lacan’s formulation of subjectivity in language, we can see how Cixous re-writes the notions of writing and feminine.

For Lacan, the subject stems from the ”mirror stage”, when the child realizes its separation from its mother. The child then ”identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body... [and to the child,] it represents an ideal unity, a salutory imago” (Lacan Ecrits 19). Lacan calls this a méconnaissance (”mis-recognition”), a fantasy of a unified image which conceals the fragmentary nature of the child’s existence and generates a false sense of wholeness.

What this shows is that it is in the other that the subject is born. Subjectivity is dependent on the separation of the mother and the external image of itself. The emergence of the subject is necessarily structured by a lack as it is at once itself and the other, although the other is rejected in its assertion for self.

For Lacan, the articulation of this identity occurs only in the Symbolic Order. Lacan’s Symbolic Order is based on Saussurean linguistics, a referential system that refers to categories and terms (signs) within its own context and nothing beyond it. A sign is constituted by two elements, the signifier (e.g. the word ‘cat’) and the signified (the concept of cat). The relationship between these two elements is arbitrary (there is no physical or necessary relation between signifier and signified), and meaning between signs are constituted through difference. Thus, we derive the meaning of ‘cat’ because the word ‘cat’ is different from other words, like ‘dog’ or ‘cow’ (Saussure 65 –70).

An existence in such a language system always implicates the other. As Lacan writes, ”The subject is born insofar as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other. But by that very fact, this subject – which was previously nothing if not a subject coming into being – solidifies into a signifier” ( The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 199). This means that the subject takes its form in language as ”I”, which creates the illusion of stability and unity.

However, this ”I” in language is the least stable of signifiers as its meaning is a function of the moment of enunciation. Emil Benveniste makes this clear in his distinction between é nonce and énonciation. This means that the ”I” in language is also split, into the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject. The example of the statement ”I am lying” shows that there are two subjects, one lying, one not. Thus, ”I” is an unstable signifier that shifts its position when the enunciating subject changes. The split within the ”I” in language mirrors and reflects the split subject in language (Benveniste 223 – 30).

Language itself is structured by a lack because it is there to stand in the place of the thing. According to Lacan, ”the unity of signification... proves never to be resolved into pure indication of the real, but always refers back to another signification”, and ”[no] signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification...” ( Ecrits 126, 150). In other words, the meaning of any signification is derived only from the absence and exclusion of another. This lack of the signified leads only to a constant shift along a chain of unstable signifiers without a centre, just as the signifier is itself without a centre and empty until we invest it with meaning. Lacan goes on to say that ”it is the connection between signifier and signified... that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation, using the value of reference back possessed by signification ... to invest it with desire aimed at the very lack it supports” (164). This means that language is structured by a lack that creates desire.

Desire is expressed in language and addressed to an other. This implies that the subject sees the other as a site of knowledge and certainty which appears to hold the truth of the subject, as well as the site that makes good its loss. However, demand ”in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions which it calls for...” (Lacan ”The Meaning of the Phallus” 80). This is because the original object is lost. Lacan describes this insatiable desire as the shift of the signifier along an endless chain of signifiers. The other becomes the site in which the lack/desire is a created, projected and sustained because of the lost object that results in symbolization. Desire is actually ”the desire of the Other” (Lacan Ecrits 264).

Since it is from the Other that everything else takes its relation, we can conclude that the heart of the Symbolic Order is lack/desire. This lack/desire is the Law of the Father, the structuring principle of language. However, this Law that structures language creates only the desire to fill the gap, without fulfillment or pleasure. The Law of prohibition willfully sustains and desires lack. Desire becomes an endless process of difference and absence in the movement of signifiers along the chain of signifiers. For Lacan, ”it is situated in dependence on demand – which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it... an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued... ” ( The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis 154, italics mine). The perpetual effect of symbolic articulation is a desire that is essentially excessive and insatiable, and the fulfillment of such a lack in this way is an impossibility that will continue as long as language is used.

Like Freud, it is simply ”desire” for Lacan because he believed that there was no libido other than the masculine. Thus, any concept of subjectivity, the ”I”, is necessarily masculine. In this way, writing and subjectivity cannot be separated, and masculine inscription is possible only in the exclusion of feminine. This is where many feminist psychoanalytic critics begin in their criticisms of Lacan. Cixous departs from a similar sortie (”exit”).

It is important to see Cixous’ écriture féminine as a text that has to be read. This is because her boundaries between theory and fiction are fluid, making her theory read like fiction and vice versa. This is how she plays with difference while maintaining them. In reading Cixous, it is always ” tous les deux ” (Cixous Rootprints 25), which translates as ”all of the two”, or more literally, ”all the twos”.

Thus, accusations by Cixous’ critics, like Domma Stanton who says that for Cixous, ”the devalued term in phallologic becomes the superior value but the system of binary oppositions remain the same... [and so, reproduces] the dichotomy between male rationality and female materiality, corporeality and sexuality” (167), are misconstrued. While Cixous uses these binary oppositions, it cannot be said that she plays into the masculine trap. Cixous begins with traditionally established dichotomies as springboards to demonstrate écriture féminine by first re-valourizing the subjugated term in binary-systems, before going on to redefining these poles to mean something altogether, thereby creating a new relationship (exchange) between the two. This is what she does in rewriting desire.

For Cixous, there is feminine, other desire. Cixous writes that when woman is rejected to become the other, she is objectified to become ”the principle of consistency... everyday and eternal”, that makes the ”I” possible. At the same time, she is ”in the suspense, in what will soon be, always differed” (”Sorties” 67). What this implies is that Cixous identifies the metonymic remainder, the excess that shifts from signifier to signifier as the feminine. Feminine as the metonymic remainder means that it is the necessary in articulation, but in itself cannot be articulated because the Symbolic Order functions on grounds of the propre (signifier to signified), and this excess belongs to the realm of the non- propre (signifier to signifier in an endless chain).

Betsy Wing translates ” propre” in Cixous’ texts as ”selfsame” which usefully draws the connection between language (translation) and identity. In translating ” propre” this way, we can see how problematic it is in constituting an identity in language. It leaves out connotations of ownership, appropriation and property in ” propre”, and the economic and political overtones are important in understanding Cixous’ strategy of beginning with sexual difference, but aiming at any form of difference. The sexual and the economical-political come together when we read propre as ”clean” or ”tidy”. As Wing puts it, women are often expected to care for values of cleanliness and propriety, ”deeply involved with what is propre, but is... never quite propre herself” (167).

Thus, feminine desire can only be demonstrated through unveiling of the propre through play and translation. It is no longer about representation (the propre) as it moves beyond economy (necessary for representation) into the realm of the gift/love that is writing. In shifting from the propre to the non- propre, Cixous opens the field of self-sameness up to otherness ( altérité) that ”cannot be theorized... [but] escapes... is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other” (”Sorties” 71). Seen in this light, feminine is the impossible because it cannot be represented. However, this is an impossibility that can be demonstrated in translation, the act that unveils the body-voice of the other and this must be examined in terms of jouissance.

Jouissance: Playing Inside Differences

Cixous equates feminine with jouissance. Jouissance is a difficult word to translate. To translate it as ”enjoyment” or ”pleasure” leaves out connotations of rights and property. As Wing puts it, the word is ” simultaneously sexual, political and economic”. Wing goes on to use woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm as a metaphor to suggest that the word ”has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra – abundance and waste... [and] unrepresentable” (165).

For Shari Benstock, jouissance belongs to the place where ”truth falters” (16). This is the unconscious. For Lacan, ”[the unconscious] is a knowledge, a know-how of lalangue... [and] lalangue surpasses... what one is capable of accounting for in terms of language” (qtd in Benstock 18). Lalangue translates as ”mothertongue” or ”feminine language”. It belongs to the unconscious and it cannot be articulated in the Symbolic Order. As Lacan puts it, ”the woman becomes, or is produced, precisely as what he is not, that is, sexual difference, and... as what he has to renounce, that is jouissance” (qtd. in Rose 49). Jouissance is another name for the metonymic remainder, the excess that is produced in articulation. It has to be renounced by the masculine economy precisely because it cannot be articulated in language.

However, jouissance is more than just that which is beyond meaning. In jouissance, I hear j’ouï sens , which translates as ”I hear meaning”. Jouissance allows for this play of words through hearing and voice. Jouissance escapes meaning in the Symbolic because it cannot be expressed. This means that ”meaning” is not produced in terms of the signifier-signified relationship but manifests itself in word play (difference). Play is possible because of this excess that defies articulation. For Cixous, it begins with metaphors. She writes,

In writing like this, Cixous deconstructs ”man”, ”woman” and ”mother” as biological concepts and uses them as metaphors. Lacan’s use of Roman Jakobson’s work to elaborate on Freudian condensation shows that metaphorical relations are constituted through substitution (paradigmatic), and he associates them with poetic writing. There is no real similarity or resemblance between objects, but the relation is purely linguistic, on the basis that they are both expressed by signifiers. Lacan writes,

This means that the signified is submerged underneath the signifier, and the signifier becomes the symptom (replaces the signified). This allows the metonymic connection between two signifiers to work. Everything is metaphorical in so far the metonymic connection allows for the substitution of one signifier for another. However, everything is not metaphorical because metaphor confines signifiers within its own realm, no longer subject to change, being unrelated to other signifiers.

When words cease to mean only certain previously ascribed literal meanings (i.e. traditionally assigned signified to the signifier), the other meanings that can arise are metaphorical meanings. However, if words do not contain the presence of the things expressed, the only meanings are metaphorical meanings. But if everything is metaphorical, then, there are no such things as metaphors because they are metaphorical only in being different from the literal. Thus, her words are at once literal and metaphorical.

This sheds light on Cixous’ use of ”woman”, ”feminine” or ”mother”. ”Woman, for [Cixous], is she who kills no one in herself, she who gives (herself) her own lives: woman is always a certain way ‘mother’ for herself and for the other” (”Writing” 50). Thus, a man can be a woman, if the man ”kills no one in herself”, that is, it allows the other to remain other.

Similarly, she plays with the term ”mother”: ”virtually or actually mothers, women do after all have an experience of the inside, an experience of the capacity for other, an experience of nonnegative change brought about by the other, of positive receptivity” (”Author” 155). It appears that Cixous is drawing on biologism, in her claim of women knowing an ”inside”. But the mother, like inside, are metaphorical constructs that have to do with jouissance.

Cixous draws on the myth of Eden to illustrate an individual’s relationship with pleasure. In the story of Eve and the apple, Eve is punished for disobeying the law which prohibits her from eating the fruit. To eat the fruit is to get to the inside of the fruit and let the fruit get inside you. ”Inside” becomes a metaphorical inside that deals with one’s relationship with pleasure. It is when one eats the apple – i.e. disobeys the law – that one comes to knowledge of the inside of pleasure. Yet at the same time, the inside isn’t metaphorical. Cixous describes with such intensity that it makes one wonder if she is talking about a material inside. This comes across again in her anecdote of Monet. Monet received an apple so splendid that he could not bear to eat it but gave it away instead. Cixous writes, ”I would have eaten it... in my need to touch the apple. To know it in the dark. With my fingers, with my lips, with my tongue” (”Painting” 130). For her, ”Knowledge and taste go together” (”Author” 151).

Both the ”inside” of the taster and the tasted are in fact full. Only in realizing that the inside isn’t lacking, that the desire for the other is borne out of love and not lack, can one ”listen to what your body hadn’t dared let surface” (Cixous, ”Writing” 50). Cixous says that feminine ”body knows unheard-of songs” (”Medusa” 335). It is unheard-of because it has been suppressed by the masculine law. Feminine, being beyond the law, is not prohibited from pleasure and allowed to explore her body and the pleasures that come from it.

Thus Cixous says that ”the difference... becomes most clearly perceived on the level of jouissance, inasmuch as a woman’s instinctual economy cannot be identified by a man or referred to the masculine economy” (”Sorties” 83). This does not lead to a new form of the law (of feminine) because this sense of feminine does not contain a centre at all, but is always an other. Feminine becomes a floating signifier that resists referentiality or metaphorization. It is a non-category/name. According to Barbara Freeman, ”the Cixousian body presents itself as the locus of incessant movement”. Cixous ”elates the domains of the proper (or referential) and the metaphorical (or textual) in non-hierarchical terms” (Freeman 65-66). Thus to say ”the mother also is a metaphor” (Medusa 339) is not to say that mother is either only metaphorical or corporeal, but to reformulate the categories and play their differences, tous les deux .

It is precisely because Cixous plays in writing that she celebrates plurality that isn’t contained. Thus Toril Moi, in saying that Cixous’ use of myth as a place ”where all difference, struggle and discord can in the end be satisfactorily resolved” and as ”a space in which all difference has been abolished” (Moi 116), misinterprets Cixous’ strategies. Cixous is not interested in resolving conflicts or putting differences under erasure. When Moi claims that Cixous ”[does not] gather up its contradictions within the plenitude of the Impossible” (121), she misses Cixous’ strategy of using play to insist on difference. Cixous does draw upon the ”plenitude of the Impossible”, but Moi, in criticizing Cixous for not gathering up contradictions, is unable to grasp the ultimate altérité of this Impossible which Cixous draws upon. It is precisely because the contradictions are left free flowing that is the Impossible. Cixous works hard ( propre) to keep her discourse at play and at the same time play (non- propre) at working her discourse. It is a play that gives jouissance. At the same time, it is jouissance that allows for play. In playing, she keeps the other-ness of the other complete.

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination.
Hélène Cixous

Writing is working; being worked; questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of the same and of other without which nothing lives; undoing death’s work be willing the togetherness of one-another, infinity charged with a ceaseless exchange of one with another – not knowing one another and beginning again only from what is most distant, from self, from other, from the other within ... And that is not done without danger, without pain, without loss – of moments of self, of consciousness, of persons one has been, goes beyond, leaves. It doesn’t happen without expense – of sense, time, direction.
Hélène Cixous

Writing is about possibilities as much as it is about the impossible. It is the body of possibilities in the act of writing that permits the impossible to come through. Cixous says, ”When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me... ” (”Medusa” 348). This is writing the other. It is the impossible because Cixous is writing the other when the other cannot be inscribed. This means that everything that is not ”me” comes out of ”me” in the act of writing. ”Me” becomes other to ”itself”. This is admitting to the impossible. How does one write the other?

Now, as I write, I translate. ”Translate” is traduire in French. Traduire has implications that ”translate” does not have. It also means ”arraign/indict” in the context of the law. In this instance of translation, I have unveiled the workings of the Law that is hidden in the French term. The Law of the Father disappears in ”translation”.

Translation shows how the same word in different languages has different sets of linguistic/cultural implications, implying that there is never a direct equivalence between two words. The differences show how a word means more than it seems to say. This points to the fact that there isn’t a direct relationship between the word and meaning. In translation, the absolute status of words that the Law asserts is disrupted as identities of words are revealed to be unstable. Instead, multiplicity (difference) in language is revealed, showing that there is more than one reality of the word operating at the same time, some realities more conscious than others. Language is polyphonic, and meanings flow in the different forms of the same word precisely because language is not univocal.

What this implies is that there is never a body that is not subjected to inscription, and that writing cannot exist independently of the body. For Cixous, the body is ”already text”. The body is what makes writing possible and there is no body that is not already inscribed by writing. This inscription does not originate anywhere, but is a consequence of relations, in the exchange, between the body and life. Cixous blurs the boundaries between writing and life, treating life as writing and writing as life. Life is bodily-text/textual- body. There is no question of representation, only demonstration in the bodily text/textual-body. The body does not represent writing or life (or vice versa), thereby assuming a position of mastery over signification. In making mind/text as body and body as mind/text, Cixous collapses binary systems while maintaining differences, tous les deux . As Pamela Banting writes, ”[the] poetic body, the body as pictogram, allows her [Cixous] to hypothesize women’s writing as, in part, translation between language and corporeality” (231)

Banting says that Cixous seeks to translate the Symbolic Order. In Banting’s reading of Cixous, the Symbolic Order is the source language that Cixous speaks of and not some ancient matriarchal tongue (Banting 235). In claiming this, Banting removes Cixous from accusations of essentialism or biologism. It breaks the myth of the feminine, a construct of the masculine. Banting’s claim is grounded in Cixous’ own writing. For Cixous, ”there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break... to foresee the unforeseeable, to project” (”Medusa” 334). The possibility of the impossible – to project, thrust out to the Other, the impossible, the future, in motion – is in the ”arid millenial ground”. Thus, translation ”lets the other language speak – the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death... it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible” (”Medusa” 345).

For Banting, Cixous is not inventing a new and exclusive women’s language but creating new ‘interlanguages’. Banting cites Gideon Toury in defining the term interlanguages as ”the linguistic interference from the source language (SL) which results from a second language learner’s attempted production of the target language (TL)... [thus, the] intermediate between SL and TL”. For Banting, é criture féminine is ”located somewhere between patriarchal discourse (SL) and an as-yet-unknown language spoken by no one (TL)”. She goes on to say that écriture féminine creates interlanguages within a single language and between different forms of semiosis, and this form of writing ”foregrounds both the possibility and the necessity to translate” (236).

Banting’s idea that écriture féminine creates interlanguages (between languages, the exchange itself) is interesting in that it highlights both the translatory and polyphonic aspects of language. That these two aspects are inherent in language shows that there is a failure to represent anything. It follows that the body is not a site that represents, but the site in which interlanguages are played out. Banting goes on to say that translation is ”a semiotic operation within which different bodies can be constructed” (239). It is in translation that a ”third body” of writing (”Writing” 54), a body that is neither just body without text nor body only as text, can be effected.

Breath ( souffle, which also translates as ”inspiration”) is the body in writing. For Cixous, ”Censor the body [pleasures] and you censor breath and speech at the same time” (”Medusa” 338). To hear the voice to the other in writing is to write with extreme fidelity. Voice is connected to hearing, and hearing is deemed more important to Cixous than seeing because she believes that the eyes can lie. She prefers to write blind, thus hearing the fidelity of the thing that is there. Cixous writes, ”fidelity is equal respect for what seems beautiful...[or] ugly to us” (”Painting” 119).

We need to erase sight to hear, and leave ( lassier) behind notions of value. Lassier translates both as ”leave/passage” and ”let”. Fidelity allows the other to leave (through a passage) and it leaves/lets the other be. The passage or way ( voie) out is through voice ( voix). To hear the voice of the other is the way out of the repressive work of the masculine. Cixous uses the phrase ” il y a ”, which translates as ”there is”. The ”is” (being, truth) lies ”there”, in the elsewhere. Body/Voice writing is the body without body, absent body that is nowhe(n/)re because it is voice, and it leaves (the other be, as altérité, always there).

We must be careful when thinking of the elsewhere of writing. Cixous writes, ”Writing... does not happen out there... [but] from the inside... down below... a desirable hell... deep in my body... behind thought... [but it] does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently from our thinking and speech”. She goes on to say, ”[it is] in the depths of my heart... in my stomach, my womb, and if you have not got a womb – then it is somewhere ‘else.’ You must climb down in order to go in the direction of that place” ( Three Steps 118). There is the reference to the inside again, but this time, it is not merely getting in touch with one’s relationship to pleasure, but the relationship to one’s pain as well. She talks about the ” ascent downwards” (5, italics mine) to hell/inside, to a heart/womb that thinks, implying that there is great work to be put in to go down into ”hell”.

Cixous asks, ”has there ever been any elsewhere, is there any? While it is not yet ‘here’, it is there by now – in this other place that disrupts social order, where desire makes fiction exist” (97). There ( altérité), is that which makes here (any-thing) possible. This other place is ”there by now”, it is there through the now, the eternal now of no time. This is feminine a-temporal space. To understand feminine a-temporal space, we need to look at how Cixous constitutes a feminine subject.

Féminine: Beyond Gift Economy

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, [and] the dwelling place of the other in me – the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live – that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? – a feminine one, a masculine one, some? – several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars.
Hélène Cixous

Cixous writes, ”First she dies, then she loves” (”Writing” 36). What she is merely showing is the condition – the death of the feminine subject – from which loving becomes possible. She does not mean to say that it is a process subjected to temporization, rather, it is an instantaneous moment, when/where death and love occupy the same space. ”Loving and killing absolutely cannot be disentangled. The only person who can kill us is clearly the person who loves us and whom we love” (Cixous, Three Steps 52). When there is love for and from an other, there is death of the self and identity.

According to Cixous, ”the permanence of identity is not fetishized” for feminine (”Sorties” 91). Feminine ”is pure ‘am’, activity of being that does not lead back to the self.... Woman does not stop at woman” (”Author” 169). Feminine subjectivity is not constituted from within the Symbolic Order, as any notion of self is eradicated in its flow to the other. There is and isn’t feminine subjectivity.

Cixous writes, ”Woman (I) have no fear of elsewhere or of same or of other” (”Sorties” 89). This means woman goes beyond the cultural/masculine space where she is only defined by its symbols of her. This is possible because ”[she] lifts the bar separating the present from the future, breaking the rigid law of individuation” (”Sorties” 96). The ”law of individuation” is the law of continuity of the selfsame. Thus, feminine subjectivity exists in a different space altogether. Cixous realized this when she was ”tormented by the need to act... [only to be] projected in opposing directions, divided, hurled, forward”, and this ”Forward... is that which had taken place beFore [sic]” (”Writing” 25). Time in such a space is a perpetual instantaneous moment. Thus, difference is constituted within a single moment-space. In Cixousian terms, ”life is no longer nailed down to generational time” (50). Generational time implies a lineage traced through the father, to the origin, the first father, to reveal heritage and inheritance ( propre), and feminine subjectivity does not arrive from such a lineage.

For Jacques Derrida, economy ( oikonomia) includes values of law ( nomos) and home ( oikos). Nomos signifies law of distribution and partition, the law as partition. As soon as there is law, there is partition (Derrida, Given Time 6). The law splits, into self and other. There is separation and property. This allows for symbolic exchange, which signals return to the point of origin (home). Venturing from this home ( chez-soi, means ”at home” and ”within the self”) is simply a sojourn to be re-appropriated in time by returning to the point of origin, the self.

Derrida’s description of economy fits Cixous’ delineation of the masculine. For Cixous, the masculine ”always turns the gift into the gift-that-takes... [and] brings in a return. Loss, at the end of a curved line, is turned into its opposite and comes back to him as profit” (”Sorties” 87). This ”curved line” is time, which supports the economy. The masculine is the economy of time that always returns from the other, bearing no reparative work, but maintaining the separation so that the work will always bring profit to the self, at the cost of the other by its constant negation. It is a gift-that-takes which generates more returns (both in terms of revenir, ”to come back”, and rapporter, ”interest/revenue”).

women exist in a unique (non-) position as the excluded of the masculine. Cixous sees this lack as the necessary and possible condition for writing – ” losing everything ... [and] this is not a thinkable ‘condition’... if you want to [lose], then there is you and wanting, there is nonloss” (”Writing” 38), and this lack extends to being excluded from language, ”the material that writing is formed of and extracted from” (12). If woman is excluded from language, she lies beyond language, and the lack inherent in language.

Thus, feminine is ”the economy of positive lack...” (Cixous, ”Author” 164). Feminine is negative that is at once positive, without negating itself. This is because Cixous sees woman as ”unthinkable, unthought... she is not thought... [thus] she does not enter into the oppositions... [and] make a couple with the father” (”Sorties” 64). Being excluded from the masculine economy, she is no longer defined by binaries or values. This is how Cixous plays with language.

Patricia Yaeger points out that ”[play] is associated with the apolitical... [and] escape from the most productive of social constraints” (211). The point that it is more important to work (profit) than to play (expenditure) is in itself a masculine oppression. However, Cixous goes beyond the play that Yaeger points out. This is seen in the way Cixous says that feminine ”gives for.... [but] doesn’t try to ‘recover her expenses’” (”Sorties” 87). This is more than just endless expenditure/play, but expenditure-that-is-work that yields a profit which cannot be calculated economically. Instead, this is the work of affirming the other, it is expenditure for the profit of the other. It is a gift.

Derrida speaks of the impossibility of the gift. He writes, ”If there is a gift, the given of the gift... must not come back to the giving. It must not circulate.. [or have it]exchanged... the gift must remain aneconomic.” ( Given Time 7). It is necessary for the gift to remain aneconomic (a-temporal) because time will always signal a return, even if it is just (is it ever just?) the possibility of return. Time destroys the gift because any form of restitution (in time) annuls the gift. There is no now, as there is no more then, therefore, the present/presence of the gift, the gift as present cannot exist. It is at once a now here and a nowhere. The gift is and is not. It is in this sense that the gift is the impossible.

”Differance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself. It is (given) in the think itself. It (is) the thing itself.... It, without anything other. Itself, nothing” (Derrida, Given Time 40). The conclusion which Derrida yields is that the gift is the impossible in that it is itself nothing, and it gives nothing. According to Derrida, the only thing that the gift gives is that it gives time, and that is why ”the given of the gift arrives, if it arrives, only in narrative” (41). Narrative is the revelation of information in time and space in language. Time is a radically metaphysical concept and does not exist (as a thing). The gift, in giving time, gives no-thing. Temporality is based on presence and there is no presence. As such, there is no such thing as time.

This excess is that which ruins the semantic reference of any signifier-signified relationship (masculine propre) as seen in Lacanian writing on psychoanalysis and writing. In this sense, we could say that this madness is actually language itself. Derrida writes, ”Only an atopic and utopic madness, perhaps... could thus give rise to the gift that can give only on the condition of not taking place...” (35). This madness belongs to feminine. The gift and the madness do not belong to feminine economy because there is no feminine economy, just as there is no gift. The gift is feminine, and this is the impossibility that we must think.

The gift has to be the impossible to be thinkable, for there to be thought, and the gift is possible only in a non-spatial dispersal. The gift is possible only insofar as it does not take place. That is the impossibility. But this impossibility is possible, perhaps, in language – endless différance, always differing and deferring. In Cixousian terms, it is always in the exchange. At the same time, this possibility is the impossible, because it is the excess that fractures possibility in going beyond the economy. For Cixous, ”[this] is writing. If there is a somewhere else that escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds” (”Sorties” 72). This is what it means for feminine to be the necessary impossibility in écriture féminine .

La/Là Possible: Other-Love

Cixous’ critics are concerned with control and certainty when they say that her discourse ”resists any easy pluralistic assimilation” (Jones 93, italics mine) and that it is a ”textual jungle” that ”offers no obvious edge to seize hold of for the analytically minded critic” (Moi 103, italics mine). These are the concerns of the selfsame, the propre. However, it is precisely because of the im- propre-ity – the impossibility – of Cixous’ discourse that gives an encounter with the other. This impossibility that reveals itself as play (non- propre) in language is that which tradition calls the poetic. As Martin Heidegger says, ”everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem” (208). We have forgotten that language is poetic, that it is possible because of the poetic. We have used it up, spent it, and have forgotten that when we write, it is a gift. For Cixous, ”What is most true is poetic” ( Rootprints 3). She cautions her readers against the propre that uses up the generative powers of feminine, of writing: ”Beware, my friend, of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of the signified! Beware of diagnosis that would reduce your generative powers” (”Medusa” 347). The signified must not be mistaken as that which grounds the signifier. That is what the masculine seeks to establish.

However, it is important to realize that the poetic would mean nothing if there were no theoretical framework or masculine law at work. This implies that the masculine law – lack and desire – is necessary if we are to have any form of meaningful communication. Perhaps Cixous is aware of this by implicitly relying on different theoretical frameworks in her writings (even though she sees theory as secondary to the poetical). It is only in understanding and accepting these two perspectives that there is a leveling of differences between the poetic and the theoretical while maintaining their differences, thus showing the necessity of the acceptance of both without exclusion. Perhaps this is the way in which she seeks the reparation of the two, a separation-reparation, tous les deux . That is the impossible – difference in sameness – that Cixous is concerned with. Although Cixous speaks of the ”third body” (”Writing” 54), this is ”not the third term, it is not a block between two blocks: it is exchange itself” ( Rootprints 53). Cixous’ writing is to unveil the non-propre that makes the propre possible, while affirming both. It is in the exchange that profits the other, the between that she is interested in.

That is why it is necessary ”to shake them [words] all the time, like apple trees” (Cixous ”Author” 150). In this way, words do not become dead formulations and clichés, but become one’s relationship with jouissance. Écriture féminine is writing in admittance of jouissance. Thus Cixous writes, ”To write and thus forge the antilogos weapon” that will ”submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” (”Medusa” 337, 342). Writing is the antilogos weapon. It is the gift. Logocentrism is but a veil over language, over this gift.

Cixous teaches us that writing is to put to question everything that we have been taught to know and think, and to be in a non-position so as not to veil or lie. Cixous admits to the difficulties of not lying in writing. She muses about the possibility of ”the need to write in order to lie less... [so as] not to submit the subject of writing... to the laws of cultural cowardice and habit”. More writing hence more body, more life, and more possibility. As Cixous puts it, ”What enlarges a person’s life are the impossible dreams, the unrealizable desires. The one that has not yet come true”(”Painting” 129). Writing is the impossible that makes this possible. Cixous calls it feminine writing because for her, ”women will go right up to the impossible” (”Medusa” 342).

Feminine is the impossible, and it manifests itself as writing. ”It is... that writing makes love other. It is itself this love. Other-Love is writing’s first name” (Cixous, ”Sorties” 99). For Cixous, ”[to] love, to watch-think-seek the other in the other... is what nourishes life – a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange...” (”Medusa” 348). To write is to love, which in Cixousian terms translates as self-as-other, other-as-self, otherself, Other-Love. Cixousian writing addresses the other, reveals the other, and gives (to) the other, and this is where we must grow in awareness and love when we read or write, for Other-Love gives (for) all writing.

List of Works Cited

[1]The following texts by Cixous will be abbreviated accordingly: ”The Author in Truth” (”Author”), ”Coming to Writing” (”Writing”), ”The Last Painting” (”Painting”), ”The Laugh of the Medusa” (”Medusa”), Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing (Three Steps)

(Giving an Other) Reading (of) Hélène Cixous, écriture (and) féminine

Sorties: Lacking Propre Desire

Jouissance: Playing Inside Differences

Féminine: Beyond Gift Economy

La/Là Possible: Other-Love

List of Works Cited