Hélène Cixous


Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. Cixous is best known for her article "The Laugh of the Medusa", which established her as one of the early thinkers in post-structural feminism. She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris.
She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College London in the UK; and Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the USA. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014.

Life and career

Academic career

Cixous 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. Cixous became assistante at the University of Bordeaux in 1962, served as maître assistante at the Sorbonne from 1965 to 1967, and was appointed maître de conférence at Paris Nanterre University in 1967.
In 1968, following the French student riots, Cixous was charged with founding the University of Paris VIII, "created to serve as an alternative to the traditional French academic environment." Cixous would, in 1974, found the University's center for women's studies, the first in Europe. Cixous is a professor at the University of Paris VIII and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Publications

In 1968, Cixous published her doctoral dissertation L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'Art du remplacement and the following year she published her first novel, Dedans, a semi-autobiographical work that won the Prix Médicis.
She has published widely, including twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential articles. She published Voiles 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. Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif. Her reading of Derrida finds additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level. 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. Cixous is also the author of essays on artists, including Simon Hantaï, Pierre Alechinsky and Adel Abdessemed to whom she has devoted two books.
Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is considered one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory.
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", which was revised by her, translated into English by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen, 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.

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.

Film

Hélène Cixous is featured in Olivier Morel's 118-minute film Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous.

Personal life

Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria to Jewish parents, Eve Cixous, née Klein and Georges Cixous. Georges Cixous, a physician who had written his dissertation on tuberculosis, died of the disease in 1948. Eve Cixous became a midwife following his death, "until her expulsion with the last French doctors and midwives in 1971." Cixous' brother, Pierre, "a medical student and a supporter of Algerian independence" was condemned to death in 1961 by the Organisation Armée Secrète, and would join Cixous in Bordeaux. Her mother and brother would return to Algeria following the country's independence in 1962. They would be arrested, and Cixous "obtained their release with the help of Ahmed Ben Bella's lawyer."
Cixous married Guy Berger in 1955, with whom she had three children, Anne-Emmanuelle, Stéphane, and Pierre-François. Cixous and Berger divorced in 1964.

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

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". Her book Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint addresses these matters.
Through deconstruction, Derrida employed the term logocentrism. 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.
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."

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 Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen in 1976. It has become a seminal essay, particularly because it announces what Cixous called écriture féminine, a distinctive mode of writing for women and by women.

Publications

Published in English

Selected books

Criticism