NEWLY BORN WOMAN
(Sorties –First Passage) In this passage, Cixous writes about the dual oppositions that exist within philosophical and literary traditions. She points to the marriage between the father and the son, and that in this symbolic, the mother disappears. The connection between logocentrism and phallocentrism subordinate the woman/feminine to the “masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-neutral” (39). However, if the story could be re-told in a different way, the foundations of this structure might begin to crumble.
(Sorties –Second Passage) Cixous describes two forms of bisexuality: 1) bisexuality as a fantasy of unity (in order to avoid castration) and 2) a bisexuality in which every subject “sets up his or her erotic universe” (41). Whereas the first kind depicts a certain “monosexuality”, the second kind opens up the possibility for multiplication. Cixous moves on the question of writing, and that “writing is woman’s” (42). It is a process during which the other comes through the body, an exchange with the other, and that women can do this because they can access the other within. Men, on the other hand, cannot so easily do this because their other is the feminine, something they must not allow to come forward because of the fear of homosexuality. Cixous also associates the masculine with a (selfish) giving that wants something in return, whereas women give without wanting anything in return (altruism).
LA – THE (FEMININE)
(First Passage) As dreamer, linguist, artist of love, the woman writer sings, crosses boundaries, lives in the abysses, laughs, shows, connects –writes in ways male writers don’t.
(Second Passage) A woman fears being alone –she needs a source to sustain herself. The journey to a source exhausts woman, and she finds herself at the end, when a god appears just as she is about to encounter herself and distracts her soul.
(Third Passage) This passage describes a woman giving birth and raises issues about the inside and outside, and nakedness. She almost wants to rid herself of the (necrophiliac) son, and commands him, “outside!” “Above all we must rid ourselves of the dead, gods and men who play the mother.” (66) Thus birthing becomes a metaphor for purging.
EXTREME FIDELITY
Here, Cixous makes the distinction between biological sex and gender. She insists that gender is not necessarily linked to anatomy, “one can find these economies in no matter which individual” (132). Cixous uses two monumental stories (The Original Sin and The Quest for the Holy Grail) to make connections between the (indefinable) law and the (prohibited) inside, and how women are closer (or have more access) to the inside/receptivity because of cultural schemas.
THREE STEPS
(First Passage) “These complexities are not yet audible.” (199) In this passage, Cixous argues both that sexual difference is complex, and that only through writing will we be able to get through the “cutting each other’s throats” part of sexual difference.
(Second Passage) The need to break the “construction we are” (201). Also, again, the importance of writing: but writing while walking. The process is important, “Walking through the self toward the dark.” (203)
(Third Passage) Again, going to the deep part of oneself, “It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought.” (204) Fear prevents us from going there in the writing process.
Questions:
1) How do these excerpts relate to an overall project of Cixous? Is there an overall argument you think she makes, and if so, what it is?
2) Why does Cixous choose to write in the ways she does? For example, in “La”, she writes in a different style than in the second passage from “Sorties”. How does this affect her argument?
3) Does Cixous make a good argument for the separation of sex and gender?
4) Why is writing, and the process of writing, so important for the feminist project?
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By making the journey through writing to locate Woman, Cixous envisions an end to binary sexual distinctions of masculine and feminine and thus an end to Phallocentrism and its adherence in a Logocentric society. For Cixous, writing “precedes prohibition, and so has the potential to return us to “paradise” (203). By describing sexual difference not in biologically essentialist terms, but instead as “the way the individual negotiates with this schema” (135), Cixous designs a future in which one has the potential to become ones own god. She closes with some words by Kafka that more or less fashion the individual (as lazy and impatient) as the major antagonist against this return to paradise. I do think that Cixous’s acknowledgement of sexual education outside of the classical Freudian model (ie: Perceval “a mother’s son”) is valuable if not for discussion then purely for recourse from that original model. However, Cixous’ emphatic promotion of a woman’s writing as the catalyst of profound change makes her allusions to heavily worn shoes only a metaphor. The emphasis remains in language and outside of experience and touch. The proverbial walk in the other’s shoes gives the impression that one can know or almost know what it is to be an other. “Cixous argues, (Lispector’s writing) entails a “relentless practice of de-egoization” in which both self and other can coexist “as equals”” (131). This idea that one can know or be in equality with another is in fundamental contention with Irigaray’s idea of one remaining infinitely outside of the self and unknowable.
ok well, i will have to look at this as a constructive reconstitution since i just wrote a response and it was deleted. by Them. i guess it will be shorter.
Cixous begins in the Newly Born Woman by retracing the notion of passivity,addressing it as the othering of the active, the relagated and marginalized foreign.
she goes o to say that this feminine passive/other goes together iwth the bisexual, that it mandates a bisexual with in the other.
For the other, woman, in order to address itself as a self, as that known to itself, must perform an act. the act of going out of, issuing forth and turning back in reflection. and an act is always other than passive.
thus passivity is itself inclusve as a concept of the other, as a concept of that which recives, of the notion of fragmentation and multiplicity. the otherness of woman as concept necessitates the otherness of woman to herself as a self.
so it is that woman is placed in the unique position to break with the general delusions of law. cixous has gone further than the philosophers who imagine the other from the I, the other who beckons the I. for her, the other is within. the dualism is not inside outside, but in amongst. there the battle becomes one we can each win.
In Cixous' economies, the currencies are acts corresponding to an essential symbolic masculine or feminine. Why do these need to adhere to a biblical doxa besides its being so 'ancient'? 'Feminine' may mostly belong to women because of our particular cultural composition, but doesn't it also somehow realte to the mythology of woman she seems to be creating?
In Extreme Fidelity, Cixous explores the importance of libidinal moments in the understanding of pleasure. Although in the first passage she condemns the inherent power dynamics of our societies inevitable dichotomies, Cixous proposes the dichotomy of pleasure and the law to develop her theory that masculinity and femininity correspond to one's relationship with pleasure. I don't completely understand the importance of the 'inside', the presence of the desirable and the non-fear of the inside especially when Cixous tries to connect the 'inside' as distinctively feminine or Eve and the "man who remains before the law" as also inside. (P.134)
Why is writing, and the process of writing, so important for the feminist project? If we look back to Irigaray, we see, as in the M.O.F., that, though it has been rejected and repressed, the "fluid" is still present in the "solid" phallocentric world. In Cixous, we can trace the continual rupturing of the history-as-text and history-as-discourse of the One by the (m)other. Because woman (the other "one" part of the two) has been relegated to the Real (unconscious), she keeps "returning" in and as hierachical binary oppostitions. Like Lacan's letter, the binaries are a string of metonymic signifiers. And, if, once again as Lacan states, "the unconscious is the discourse of the other," then woman must write her own textual archive. In other words, woman must write the "discourse of the other" as the other so as to "cross the line" of signification.
So, if woman is writing the "other one" of the "two," then she must also perform the two - Cixoux advocates a type of creative bisexuality. I take this to mean that bisexuality, if the participants are opperating with the right motive (wouldn't Kant be horrified), can act also act as a conduit for woman into both the Imaginary and the Sybolic...but I'm not saying this very well, and have to think about it more...
Lispector makes an interesting point in reference to critics’ accusation of essentializing : "Cixous explains that she employs the terms masculine and feminine to distinguish between two different "economies" or modes of behavior...Cixous’ insistence on the cultural interpretation of anatomical sex is important here, since her work has been branded with the charge of biological essentialism”. I think its an important distinction to recognize- when she says masculine or feminine she is not talking about some fundamental truth of bodies, but about the way those bodies are encoded culturally and socially: “it is not biological sex that determines anything here. It is, on the contrary, history from which one never escapes..”p135
Cixous explores the idea of the process of writing as a means to relating to the other . In the newly born woman, her description of a sense of fluidity, and borderlessness reminded me of the Irigaray mechanics of fluids where she says woman/fluid is already diffuse within itself.
Her overall project seems to be exposing the fact that philosophy is “constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement” yet makes itself appear
“eternal-natural”. She identifies a “solidarity between logocentrism and phalloscentrism” and seeks to interrogate this sort of conspiracy by shaking its language “like an apple tree”.
I wanted to quote from a passage that for me was the most striking on many registers. It is from Extreme Fidelity and comes after Cixous has begun discussing Eve's relationship to the apple: "What is at stake here is the mystery which is assailed by the law, the law which is absolutely verbal, invisible, negative, it is a symbolic coup de force and its force is its invisibility, its non-existence, its force of denial, its 'not'. And facing the law, there is the apple which is, is, is." (133).
For myself, much of the Cixous selections were difficult to approach because it seems to operate in a discourse less conventionally philosophical than even Irigaray or Kristeva. However, dispite the difficulty I am sure that the philosophical discussion is indeed occurring. It is in passages such as the one I have quoted in which the poignancy and strength of her thoughts are most aptly rendered. Here we see an opposition constructed between the law of god as symbolism and prohibition, and the apple of the garden as substance, vitality, fullness. It is fitting that this opposition be located in the primary scene of Western religious discourse on social formation and gender relations. The choice that we know conventionally as the wrong choice, the mistake Eve made in denying the law of god for the taste of the apple, is here completely reinvented from Eve's perspective. Now rather than the weakness that forced the expulsion from the garden, Eve understands a strength and a forcefulness that the conventional understanding has denied. A fleshy liveliness rather than the empty symbols of the law of negation.
Sorry for posting so late, I hope you have time to read this.
I wanted to comment on one of the issues Vanessa brought up in her post; Cixous' perspective on the self and the other, and how it compares with Irigaray's. I think it is interesting to think about whether it is it possible - even desirable - to know "the Other". If so, how do we know the other? Are there ways that are not appropriating? And further, is the idea of equality an attempt to erase sexual difference, and therefore necessarily Woman, as I think Irigaray and Kristeva are saying, or is it possible to hang on to this ideal without its misogyny, as I understand Cixous is saying?
This is what I got from reading the texts: Being a woman, according to C, is being more open, permeable, letting the other be apart of oneself, not having reasons enough to uphold the law and close oneself off to be whole and one.
Through writing, one can access the other, it's like a passageway, a dwelling place for the other. This notion of the self and its writing process harmonize with C's notion of bisexuality, which is an act outside of "the Phallocentric Performing Theatre" and recalls "the non-exclusion of difference" (p.41) The other is obviously plural, several, neither feminine nor masculine. This peopling of the inside she then calls disturbing, because it produces uncertainties and gets in the way of a subject's socialization.
But is there a self in C's way of thinking? I think this passage is important, p.42:
"... - the other that I am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live - [the other in me] that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me..."
It appears as if there is a self, but only to the extent that it is constantly changing in relation with the other. The self is a process, not once and for all defined. Maybe that is why she says on p.200: "I'll tell you frankly that I haven't the faintest idea who I am, but at least I know that I don't know." I feel like she is embracing - reclaiming - a certain notion of Plato's chora, and of passivity and receptivity - but not in the traditional, soulless way of perceiving it. The self is a medium, a blank page where society and culture inscribe values, but also "a place" where one constructs oneself in "opposition" with the multiple position of the other:
P.200: "As for you, the other, I am where I think you are not who you believe yourself to be, who you seem to be, who the world believes you to be..."
How does this compare with Irigaray? I think they are close to each other. First of all, neither one of them believes in the appropriation of the other. Both want to be in relation with the other - but whereas Irigaray is saying that this is impossible, because woman is erased in our phallogocentric discourse, Cixous is claiming that it is indeed possible through a kind of possessed writing, through taking a dangerous feminine position of receptivity. Irigaray wants to rewrite our metaphysical grounds and establish an ontology of the two, and probably thinks C's project is superficial? Cixous on the other hand, is not using the miming technique but rather living/writing in the cracks of ourselves and our world views. I feel like C's notion of the self is less rigid, more fluctuating - less essential, if I dear use that word - than Irigaray's. That doesn't mean that the self and the other is the same for C. It just means that the door is open, that the other can come and go, if one lets them. This is a course that "multiplies transformations by the thousands" (p.43). In relation to this, I find Irigaray's notion of the self more static and ready made, more defined and sufficient without the other, more masculine?
Is it possible to know the other? At first I thought C. was saying that. On page 60:
"As a linguist the freedom with which she crosses several consciouses to transmit the secrets and powers of a soul in another tongue and of a body in another in which to grow and transform without restraint."
But then when I read how she talks about Lispector's work, I got another perspective on it. The knowing of the other is not appropriation of the other to one owns views, but rather the deepest respect for "the otherness" that only happens through a relentless process of de-selfing. Again, it is notion of the self as a medium for the other that is raised.
It is too late for the last question! See you tomorrow.
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