Helene Cixous

In Herman Melville’s tale of Wall Street, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the eponymous central character repeatedly utters variations upon the famous “formula” (as Gilles Deleuze names it), “I would prefer not to”—a response which, ultimately, leads him to his death in the “Tombs” of Manhattan. The paper takes this response, proffered to the lawyer-narrator (the man of the law) as its central theme, showing how this enigmatic “response without response,” in the
words of Jacques Derrida, can be read as exemplary of the aporetic and at times terrifying
relationship between responding and responsibility, above all where this is bound up with
literature and law. Tracing Derrida’s fleeting responses to “Bartleby” across his oeuvre, and supplementing these explicit namings of Bartleby with readings of texts silently haunted by
Bartleby’s ghostly figure, the paper points towards the inherent affinities between the writings of Derrida and Melville. It suggests that, whereas Bartleby’s response has often been read as paradigmatic of a “passive resistance” that can be put to political use, in a Derridean line of thinking it points towards the experience of an “arche-passivity,” as a heteronomy that is the only possibility of freedom and responsibility, which offers no (ethical or political) program or strategy other than the experience of “knowing not to know”—an experience exemplified by what Derrida names “the secret of literature” that “Bartleby” is.

The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice investigates the widely debated, deeply flawed yet influential concept of the uncanny through the lens of feminist theory and contemporary art practice. Not merely a subversive strategy but a cipher of the fraught but fertile dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis, the uncanny makes an ideal vehicle for an arrangement marked by ambivalence and acts as a constant reminder that feminism and psychoanalysis are never quite at home with one another.

The Feminist Uncanny begins by charting the uncanniness of femininity in foundational psychoanalytic texts by Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Mladen Dolar, and contextually introduces a range of feminist responses and appropriations by Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman, among others. The book also offers thematically organised interpretations of famous artworks and practices informed by feminism, including Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, Faith Ringgold's story quilts and Susan Hiller's 'paraconceptualism', as well as less well-known practice, such as the Women's Postal Art Even (Feministo) and the photomontages of Maud Sulter. Dead (lexicalised) metaphors, unhomely domesticity, identity and (dis)identification, and the tension between family stories and art's histories are examined in and from the perspective of different artistic and critical practices, illustrating different aspects of the feminist uncanny.

Through a 'partisan' yet comprehensive critical review of the fascinating concept of the uncanny, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice proposes a new concept, the feminist uncanny, which it upholds as one of the most enduring legacies of the Women's Liberation Movement in contemporary art theory and practice.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-feminist-uncanny-in-theory-and-art-practice-9781472505583/

BOOK LAUNCH -- ICA, 7pm, 16 September 2016: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/book-launch-art-and-feminisms

Book review: Amy Tobin, 'Homesickness', Oxford Art J (2017) 40 (1): 199-203. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx013

What do children who cannot learn to read tell us about the very effect of the Letter? What connections can be made between psychopathology and the writer's craft itself? The iconic figure of the Reader coiled around a novel will allow us to think about the link between the magical thinking at work in the child who "prefers" not to see and the writer who would like to un-read, to undo the psychic implications of the advent to the alphabetic Symbolic and its laws, a humanizing initiation because it is a critique of incestuous jouissance.
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Que nous disent les enfants incapables d’apprendre à lire sur l’effet même de la lettre ? Quels rapports peuvent être établis entre la psychopathologie et la démarche même de l’écrivain ? La figure iconique de la Lectrice lovée autour d’un roman nous permettra de penser le lien entre la pensée magique à l’œuvre chez l’enfant qui « préfère » ne pas sa-voir et l’écrivain qui voudrait dé-lire, défaire les implications psychiques de l’advenue au symbolique alphabétique et à ses lois, une initiation humanisante parce que critique de la jouissance incestueuse

My talk, “A Literature of their Own? Women’s Writing: Myths and Realities,” with a special focus on Greek literature in Cyprus, takes the risk of dealing with the highly controversial question of “woman” and “women’s writing”. Offering an aporetical approach to both of these terms, inevitably caught up in debates between essentialist and constructivist positions—as well as “myths” and stereotypes, I shall try to show that they remain a theoretical problem, as well as theoretically significant for us today. Involving a split—whether endorsed or rejected—between Woman and Man or Woman and the Generic, “women’s writing,” this paper argues, may further entail a forcible choice, for a woman, between her Gender and her Humanity. Can we embrace, taking Toril Moi’s lead in returning to Simone de Beauvoir, our bodily—resolutely sexed—being as “lived experience,” a “situation” and a “becoming,” devoid of any metaphysical luggage? Can we think of men and women as embodied beings, material and historical, who act, write, and make choices, without having to eliminate their gendered subjectivity?

Cette fresque de cinq heures, longue comme la tapisserie de
Bayeux, me poursuit de son indianité depuis mon printemps parisien
88. La fixer au mur une bonne fois pour toutes et qu’il en soit fait des rêves exotiques d'Hélène Cixous.
L'Indiade ou l'Inde de leurs rêves est une entreprise culottée.
D'abord parce qu'on dirait que tout spectacle s'adressant aux
Intellectuels implique une zone de souffrance quelque part: à la
Cartoucherie de Vincennes, la prise du plaisir du texte est âprement
Punie par la dureté monacale des sièges. Ascétisme oblige. Culottée,
parce qu'elle est œuvre de totalisation s'il en est une. L'englobante
affection d'Hélène Cixous et d'Ariane Mnouchkine pour le sublime
du tout-embrasser étouffe parfois le désir. Comblé-es de riz au cari,
d'Histoire, d'émotions, de musique à tout rompre, des folles
bousculades de la multitude, nous sortons de là, abasourdi-es,
épaté-es devant l’'impertinence, nous dirons, du projet. Mettre sur
scène l'Inde est déjà gigantesque, mais l'humanité toute entière  tient
de la Genèse. Il y est en effet question de retrouver l'étincelle
première de la constitution de l'être, l 'Inde devenant alors ce pays
parabolique du Pilgrim's Progress de Bunyan.

In the 1880s and 1890s, New Woman writers changed the face of British society and British fiction through their sexually open works, which critiqued old notions of marriage, and through their stylistic experimentation, which announced the modernist novel. New Woman scholarship has often studied their work in connection with that of French feminists of the late twentieth century, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. This article reconsiders the nature of this connection through a close examination of novels by two of the most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). I read Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) through the lens of Hélène Cixous’s theories of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, to question the accusation of biological determinism which is frequently directed at both groups of writers. By applying Cixous’s notions of feminine aesthetics, bisexuality, and alterity to Caird and Schreiner, my study provides the basis for a new understanding of their novels. More generally, it complements and qualifies the connection between the New Woman and so-called French feminism, thereby helping produce a more complex framework to study the fin de siècle.

Hélène Cixous’s most recent autobiographical novel, Les Ruines bien rangées (2020), revisits her mother’s birthplace, Osnabrück, Germany, and explores the sites and fragmented memories of trauma entwined in the places and people of that site. As Cixous recreates the suffering of witches, midwives, wise women, Jews, prisoners, and especially her mother Eve, she destabilises the places in which trauma was encountered and binds the victims together. In doing so, she demonstrates the experience Dylan Trigg has analysed when Holocaust survivors revisit the ruins of the place where they suffered. When the witness stands on the site where trauma occurred, Trigg writes, “The reality of the traumatic event is not reinforced (…) but instead trembles as an incommensurable void is given a voice between the viewer and the place” (Trigg 2009). In the same way Cixous’s and her mother’s realities tremble on the site of suffering when ruins are confronted even many decades later. However, Cixous also shows how this trembling pulls other places of trauma into the void. Osnabrück becomes Algiers. The Shoah becomes the Algerian War. The witch trials of the 16th century recur in every suspicious woman, and this trauma, reflected in the ruins of Osnabrück’s demolished synagogue, even move into the future with Cixous and her children. Using memory and trauma studies as an axis, this paper will explore how Cixous relates unsited trauma through the reframed ruins that appear both in the real world and in the book she writes.

This innovative book aims to create a 'poetics of Church' and a 'religious imaginary' as alternatives to more institutional and conventional ways of thinking and being 'Church'. Structured as a spiritual and literary journey, the work moves from models of the institutional Catholic Church into more radical and ambiguous textual spaces, which the author creates by bringing together an unorthodox group of thinkers referred to as 'poet-companions': the 16th-century founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, the French thinkers Gaston Bachelard and Hélène Cixous, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and the English playwright Dennis Potter.

"This thesis brings together discourses concerning indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language to bear upon the photographic image in an attempt to open the parameters of current photographic discourse and carve a place for nontraditional photographic practices. Each of these facets – indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language – links photography to the body and solicits an embodied response from the viewer by placing the viewer’s body at the center of the experience of beholding images. Mes vœux (My Wishes/My Vows, 1988-1991) is a photographic installation by multimedia French artist Annette Messager comprised of layers of black and white photographs depicting intimate close-ups of body parts, each framed under glass and hung from the wall by twine in a circular formation. Scraps of paper framed in the same manner overlay the photographs and contain handwritten, repeated words. The photographs and text exist as both images and elements of sculpture.

Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.

Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies."

Sophie Mackintosh's Blue Ticket touches upon the issues of gender roles, femininity, motherhood as well as oppression, dystopian restrictions, the abandonment of free will and predetermined life. As a lottery is used in the narrative to determine women's lives, the deconstruction of gender roles as well as a nightmarish system of oppression of women are thoroughly analysed in the novel. Since women's writing and women's issues have become quite relevant and topical today, Blue Ticket offers a deeper analysis and a horrible story about the aforementioned concepts. This paper aims to show how gender roles and the existence of women are reflected in Mackintosh's feminist dystopian narrative Blue Ticket by making use of Luce Irigaray's, Helene Cixous's and Michel Foucault's theories in which femininity, sex, gender roles, biological representation, and panopticon become prominent. Considering the fact that women's writing and restrictions of gender roles go hand in hand in contemporary British fiction, this study brings out significant results about how Mackintosh evaluates those issues with a unique voice and what her female characters tell the readers about living a predetermined life. In a world where women are given only two options, which are provided by pure chance in a lottery, of either having a baby or being used for the sexual pleasure of men, the conventional issues of femininity and gender roles are scrutinized with current patriarchal power relations and dystopian regimes.

Jacqueline Nicholls’s art addresses Jewish-religious themes from a gender perspective, often using textiles and a range of sewing and embroidery techniques. In this paper I discuss two of her works – Maybe This Month, about the laws and rituals of niddah, and Ghosts and Shadows: The Women Who Haunt the Talmud, which relates to female figures in the Talmud. Both compositions feature text embroidered in white thread on white fabric. I draw on feminist theories about the act of writing and explore the ways in which Nicholls’s aesthetic choices and, in particular, the one to embroider text, function in the works with respect to questions of religion and of gender. I discuss the works alongside canonical-religious texts and point out how visual images created by a woman using a “feminine” artistic technique respond to texts produced by men within a masculine tradition of writing.

This article makes the case for rethinking the relation between poststructuralism and postcolonialism, by building on the claims advanced by Robert Young, Azzedine Haddour and Pal Ahluwalia that the history of deconstruction coincides with the collapse of the French colonial system in Algeria, and with the violent anti-colonial struggle that ensued. I choose to examine narratives of theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Cixous because not only they provide the link between colonial violence, the poststructuralist project that ensued, and postcolonialism, but also because the problems I identify with their projects are replicated by much poststructuralist work in International Relations (IR). I signal that one of the most significant consequences of conducting poststructuralist research without attention to postcolonial horizons lies in the idealisation of the marginalised, the oppressed or the native without attending to the complexity of her position, voice or agency. Bringing these theories together aims to highlight the need for a dialogue, within IR, between poststructuralism's desire to disrupt the disciplinarity of the field, and postcolonialism's potential to transcend the self-referential frame of IR by introducing perspectives, (hi)stories, and voices from elsewhere.

In the milieu of exegetical readings, Jouissance asks “can she be read?” Jouissance asks whether it is possible that a poetic text characterized by star falls and shadows can be systematised; an object of exegesis. An-‘other’ kind of reading is proposed; a kind of reading that resists the exegetical economy as absolute by disclosing an open system. It would be a kind of textual encounter. It would orient itself as one of unlimited possible readings but it would be naked, unique and ‘true’. In the reading, the reader-author would inhabit the text, bringing her ‘whole being’ to it; allowing herself to be taken in its jaws, one time, and once only. If this could be called reading, it would be live-reading, or reciprocating-reading or corporeal reading. It is a reading of the Song of Songs that is birthed and dreamed; that joins breath with breath.

In David H. Hwang’s play "M. Butterfly" the protagonist and opera singer Song Liling utilizes gender strategically to get Rene Gallimard to fall in love with “her” but also to solicit sensitive information from him. Liling’s performance as a woman, who is biologically a man, is an allegorical critique of western assumptions about the “east” and stereotypes of women in general. Judith Butler’s notion of “gender as performance” complements and serves to advance the explicit and implicit commentary made throughout the text. Furthermore, this notion relates to Helene Cixous concept of female language and Gayatri Spivak’s argument about imperialism and cultural representation. This paper uses a framework of Butler, Cixous, and Spivak’s arguments to illustrate Hwang’s commentary and critique throughout "M. Butterfly".

Despite numerous and continuous imperial encounters with Iraq, very little literature by Iraqi women has made its way into the English cultural system. In contrast, English literature diffuses throughout the world with relative ease, characteristic of the global imbalance in the exchange of culture. The limited pool of Iraqi women's works in English translation has been the subject of little critical scholarship. In view of this,  I present different attempts and attitudes towards translating Arab women's works, the manner in which translations are received by English audiences, and—given the asymmetrical power relationship between the contemporary Arab woman writer and her Western reader—the problem of reading and translating from dominated cultures.

Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou both attempted to rethink the event by accounting for a certain poetizing essence of philosophy, or for a poetics of the event. Notably, they tried to approach the eventness of the event by highlighting a phantasmatic dimension inseparable from what we call 'the real.' As they both reject the conventional opposition between 'phantasm' and 'real event,' they redefine the role of phantasm and literature in relation to reality by attributing to the phantasm a certain materiality and a privileged access to what we call an 'event.' But they do so with very different implications as to the status and definition of reality. This chapter discusses these two conceptions of the articulation between 'phantasm' and 'the real' — the first predicated on Malabou's readings of Heidegger and Kafka, the second following Derrida's readings of Blanchot and Cixous. While Malabou's 'ontological phantasm' offers an ontology of the event described as Being's plasticity and indexed on a 'new materialism,' Derrida strives to think a phantasm-event that precedes and exceeds its capture by ontological discourse, thus liberating literature and the event's otherness, its 'materiality without matter,' from the authority of philosophical decision on the truth of Being.

Tolerance of same-sex relations in the earlier Platonic dialogues is called into question in Plato's *Laws.* Jennings offers insightful historical and political motivations as to why this Platonic anomaly may have come about. The colloquial image of the gay-friendly Plato is all the more dangerous because it is so tacitly presupposed ~ so uncritically accepted ~ that it seems almost genetically to pass down through the educated classes. To out Plato ~ he who very well may have invented the closet ~ as, himself, a closeted proto-homophobe is utterly scandalous and utterly necessary and...deserves our attention and applause.

In this paper I analyze and contrast Schachter-Shalomi's conception of gender through relating his thought to its Habad origins, utilizing Elliot Wolfson's study of Menahem Mendel Schneerson as a prism. I further contrast Schachter-Shalomi's thought with other New-Age movements and specifically the neo-Kabbalah of Michael Laitman and Berg family. Lastly, I read his "dream tale" regarding the Maiden of Ludmir with the use of Bracha Ettinger's theories as well as other psychoanalysts.

La première victime de la tradition patriarcale n’étant autre que la femme a été considérée comme ‘moins
humain’ que l’homme pendant des siècles. Cependant, depuis une cinquantaine d’années s’émergent
des mouvements essayant de repositionner l’être-humain ‘mâle’ dans le cadre existentiel. En littérature,
l’intervention féminine n’est survenue que dans les années soixante où la pensée postmoderne a ouvert
les portes de la liberté pour les opprimés. Entre-temps, germait une nouvelle tendance existentielle,
consciente de la place privilégiée de l’homme blanc occidental par rapport aux êtres-humains n’étant ni
blancs ni occidentaux et par rapport aux êtres non-humains et visant à repositionner cette place. Cette
tendance intitulée le posthumanisme, ayant des liens étroits avec le postmodernisme, propose de
reconsidérer l’être-humain en pleine harmonie avec l'univers où il se trouve, avec la technologie qu'il
développe et, en ce qui concerne notre étude, avec les êtres-humains restés hors du privilège patriarcal
avec lesquels il noue des rapports. Ayant la théorie de l’hypertextualité de Gérard Genette en tant que
méthodologie, ainsi que considérant le posthumanisme feministe de Rosi Braidotti comme cadre
théorique, nous essayerons de voir la manière dont on repositionne la femme sur le territoire littéraire.
Dans ce cadre, nous aurons recours à la réécriture du mythe sophocléen d’OEdipe par Hélène Cixous, qui
adopte le point de vue de la mère d’OEdipe, Jocaste. Dans Le Nom D’OEdipe où l’auteure donne la parole
à la mère d’OEdipe, Cixous fait non seulement la promotion d’une esthétique d’écriture féminine, mais
elle repositionne également le mythe qui représente indiscutablement la tradition patriarcale dans
l’imaginaire collectif. Nous verrons, enfin, que les liens hypertextuels qui resituent et féminisent le
mythe le font vivre dans le contexte de la pensée posthumaniste de nos jours.
Mots clés: Posthumanisme, réécriture, écriture féminine, mythe, OEdipe, Hélène Cixous, hypertexte.

A reading of Hélène Cixous's "Le Rire de la Méduse" through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on laughter. This chapter appeared in A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), edited by Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow.

In order to think about a range of literary configurations
of mourning, the languages used to do this work, and the public and private injunctions addressed to women writers in particular, this essay considers works by Algerian
women in which the language of literature is called upon to speak to unspeakable loss.  The texts under consideration here—Yamina Méchakra’s La Grotte éclatée (1979),
Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh, Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995), and Hélène Cixous’s Si près (2007)—each produce spontaneous, singular forms of female solidarity that may be said to arise both through language and outside of languages (“hors les langues” (245) in Djebar’s phrase). What is
more, they do this despite institutional expectations relating to language, religion and the
state that overdetermine the value of women’s memory work (and forgetting work).

"The gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  ("Editorial" by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand.

A partir d'une analyse des occurrences du mot "sein" dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig, l'étude s'attache à expliciter les stratégies wittigiennes de l'écriture du corps. Contestant les représentations culturelles héritées, qui témoignent d'un regard phallogocentré, le traitement stylistique et énonciatif du "sein" permet de mettre au jour un projet esthétique qui vise à dépasser les crispations sur une érogénéité localisée et à accéder à une nouvelle dimension de l'humain incarné.

In this paper, I examine the diverse ways in which the maternal is addressed by several feminist thinkers, such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. I will firstly outline the ways in which the maternal can bring about other modes of signification. Secondly, I examine how the figuration of the pregnant body evokes new ideas on differentiation. Finally, I will look into the new modalities of subjectivity that the previous findings entail. Taking the feminine (and in particular, the maternal) seriously, might fundamentally change our beliefs about these processes.

This article presents a Bourdieuian reading of Isabella Whitney`s A Sweet Nosegay (1573) and offers some important insights regarding the social status of women in the patriarchal society of the Renaissance era. This study embodies two primary aims; firstly, to investigate women`s social status based on Bourdieu`s theory concerning cultural, social, and economic capital and secondly, to ascertain that both habitus and field have a central role in determining one`s social position. The research data for this study are collected using Bourdieu`s assumptions regarding women`s perspectives in society that, to some extent, are in line with theories of Hélèn Cixous and Elaine Showalter concerning “écriture féminine”. Taken together, this study confirms previous findings and contributes evidence that suggests whether or not women had experienced the renaissance of female consciousness in the sixteenth century.