CIXOUS Hélène : sa vie et son oeuvre

« Cixous, Hélène (1937-) Hélène Cixous, a prolific French author born in Algeria, works between poetry and philosophy.

She is part of a larger intellectual community in France that, since the 1960s, has sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical' notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor. Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Cixous privileges the artistic and poetic but all her work has philosophical underpinnings, especially those proposed by Derrida.

Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, multiplicity and life over identity, univocity and death.

She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death.

Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Hegel and Heidegger. Though she declares herself primarily a poet and a thinker, Cixous has kept close ties with the academy and has undertaken a variety of political activities.

After helping to found, in 1968, the experimental University of Paris VIII at Vincennes - an institution both politically controversial and intellectually scintillating - she established there, in 1974, one of France's few Centres for Women's Studies.

Her seminars have attracted students from around the world and have become, not merely intellectual experiences, but spiritual training grounds.

Her struggle for a different approach to the other and for giving a voice to others has led her to espouse many political causes. But politics for Cixous are, like philosophy, never separated from poetry: from the invention of new languages without which, in her words, no social change can come about. The critique of a subject identified as ‘male' leads, from Cixous' earliest work on, to broadly psychoanalytical concerns.

Her acute perceptions of others' psychic ‘vibrations' has made her an excellent reader and critic, as evidenced in the early essays on Freud, Joyce, Kleist, and Poe collected in Prénoms de personne (1974).

But she has also subjected psychoanalysis to intense, deconstructive scrutiny, in which supposed psychoanalytic ‘truths' are rejected in favour of open-ended, personal narratives.

Her avant-garde writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s conceived of a subject that is no longer masterful and autonomous but always in dialogue - or transference - with other textual or living subjects or voices.

In this conception, the subject constructs itself, or is actively ‘born' and ‘reborn' , at the interstices of various texts and history.

The philosophical underpinning for this is a critique of Hegel and his brand of dialectical reasoning, as exemplified in the account of the master-slave relation in the Phenomenology of Spirit (see Hegel, G.W.F §5 ) - a relation which Cixous sees as the basis of much of Western dualistic thinking, including the existential humanism of Sartre and de Beauvoir . In one of her most widely read books, La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman ) (1975) co-authored with Catherine Clément , Cixous began a lengthy detour through the cause of women.

In this phase of her work, she. »