Hélène Cixous Explained

Region:Western philosophy
Era:Contemporary philosophy
Hélène Cixous
Birth Date:1937 6, df=yes
Birth Place:Oran, French Algeria
School Tradition:Continental philosophy
French feminism[1]
Main Interests:Literary criticism
Institutions:University of Paris VIII
European Graduate School
Cornell University
Influences:Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan
Influenced:Avital Ronell, Jacques Derrida
Doctoral Students:Frédéric Regard

Hélène Cixous (; in French siksu/; born 5 June 1937) is a French writer, playwright and literary critic.[2] During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes (today's University of Paris VIII), which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university.[3] Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.

She first gained attention in 1969 with her first work of fiction, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel which won the Prix Médicis and explored the themes of identity, memory, death and writing. She is perhaps best known for her 1976 article "The Laugh of the Medusa",[4] which established her as one of the early thinkers in post-structural feminism. She has collaborated with several artists and directors, such as Adel Abdessemed, Pierre Alechinsky, Simone Benmussa, Jacques Derrida, Simon Hantaï, Daniel Mesguich and Ariane Mnouchkine. She is considered a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[5] [6]

Life and career

Personal life

Cixous was born in Oran, French Algeria, to Jewish parents, Eve Cixous, née Klein, (1910–2013) and Georges Cixous (1909–1948).[7] Georges Cixous, a physician who had written his dissertation on tuberculosis, died of the disease in 1948. Eve Cixous became a midwife in Algiers 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 joined Cixous in Bordeaux. Her mother and brother returned to Algeria following the country's independence in 1962. They were 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 (b. 1958), Stéphane (1960–1961), and Pierre-François (b. 1961). Cixous and Berger divorced in 1964.

Academic career

Cixous earned her agrégation in English in 1959[8] 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."[9] Cixous would, in 1974, found the University's centre 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.[10]

Publications

In 1968, Cixous published her doctoral dissertation 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 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).[11] 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.[12] 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.[13] 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"), 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.

Film

Hélène Cixous is featured in Olivier Morel's 118-minute film Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous (France, USA, 2018).[14]

Accolades and awards

Cixous 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.[15]

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 that 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 and Electra complex, theories of which Cixous was particularly critical. She joined other scholars in positing The Freudian Coverup.

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".[16] 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 centre 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."[17]

Major works

The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

See main article: The Laugh of the Medusa. Cixous' critical feminist essay "The Laugh of the Medusa", originally written in French as Le Rire de la Méduse in 1975, was (after she revised it) 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 by women and for women.[18]

Bibliography

Published in English

Selected books

Plays

Published in French

Criticism

Books

Theatre

Selected essays

See also

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, Crescent Moon Publishing, 2016.
  2. Encyclopedia: Hélène Cixous . Encyclopædia Britannica . 2018-11-02.
  3. Web site: VINCENNES, L'UNIVERSITÉ PERDUE . 2016-06-10 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20160608050554/http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/059529-000-A/vincennes-l-universite-perdue . 8 June 2016 . dmy-all .
  4. Cixous . Hélène . Cohen . Keith . Cohen . Paula . The Laugh of the Medusa . Signs . 1 . 4 . 875–893 . The University of Chicago Press . 1976 . 10.1086/493306 . 144836586 .
  5. Web site: Will this woman be the next Jewish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature?. 4 November 2021. forward.com. 1 April 2023. Benjamin Ivry.
  6. Who Will Win the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature?. 3 October 2022. The New Republic. 1 April 2023. Alex Shepherd.
  7. Web site: Hélène Cixous . Jewish Women's Archive . 2014-01-17.
  8. Web site: Hélène Cixous . Poetry Foundation . 2 November 2018 .
  9. Web site: Peaking Behind the Curtains of Adieux . Crockett . Benjamin . 12 August 2015 . Los Angeles Review of Books . 2 November 2018 .
  10. Web site: Hélène Cixous . The European Graduate School . 2 November 2018 .
  11. Book: Cixous, Hélène . Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing . Columbia University Press . 15 April 1994 . New York City . 978-0231076593 .
  12. Not the same as puns, which play on the varied means of a word or phrase or the homonyms thereof.
  13. News: How many of these great female thinkers have you heard of?. Daily Post (Liverpool). 12. 11 December 2007.
  14. Web site: Evercixousmovie. 2019. www.evercixousmovie.com. March 13, 2019.
  15. News: French writer, German scholar and British poet named A.D. White Professors-at-Large . Aloi . Daniel . 13 August 2008 . Cornell Chronicle . 1 November 2008 .
  16. Book: Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint – Description of Cixous's Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint . Columbia University Press . 4 September 2014 . 9780231128247 . February 2004 . Cixous . Hélène .
  17. From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous . New Literary History: Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stag . Winter 2006 . Jacques . Derrida . Hélène Cixous . Aliette Armel . Ashley Thompson . 37 . 1 . 1–13 . 20057924 .
  18. Book: Cixous . Hélène . trans. Cohen . Keith and Paula . The Laugh of the Medusa . Signs . Summer 1976 . The University of Chicago Press . Chicago, IL . 1 No. 4 . 4 . 875–893 . 3173239 .

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