Helene Cixous
Helene Cixous
Hélène Cixousis a professor, Algerian/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 mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory. She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris...
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth5 June 1937
CityOran, Algeria
blind characters drama exactly natural nor people refined suffering supposed
The natural characters in the drama are not supposed to be philosophical, nor are they people with any refined kind of knowledge. They may be particularly blind or they may be suffering from the heaviness of the law, exactly as people have been suffering for 5000 years.
totally
It is totally different from my philosophical work,
aspects deals paradoxes
Philosophically speaking, the whole show deals with different aspects of the paradoxes of hospitality,
writing self law
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.
beautiful laughing medusa
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
breathing preventing
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
writing wings bird
And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
writing cutting class
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
writing dwelling-place exit
Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.
spring writing self
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
sublime innocence innocent
I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.
fixed
Me too, I make do, I anoint what cannot be fixed.
writing exclusion searching-for-love
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
enough passages manage
Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.