On Cixous

“I, too, overflow; my desire have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength?”

This week’s reading is Cixous. I love Cixous! The Laugh of the Medusa is such great fun! :D She’d make a great girlfriend for one of those slumber parties, when we do girl talk and male bashing of sorts. She celebrates femininity and womanhood in a most eloquent and accessible manner. However, she is also extremely idealistic in her proposition for women to write themselves into being. It sounds as though she thinks a revolution may be brought about and egalitarianism achieved all by the pen, or rather, by writing, (since the ‘pen’ is a phallic symbol).

Women writing for Cixous is extremely bodily, like masturbation in secret—“[to women: your writing] wasn’t good, because it was in secret, […] because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty” (335)

The woman’s body for men, according to Cixous, is dark and stormy (336). The act of writing reclaims the body—“write your self. Your body must be heard” (338). There are obvious problems with this. First is Cixous’s reliance on prevailing binaries to make her case. She plays the logos of men against the anit-logos of women—“To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon” (338).

My question is, why must we always pit one against the other in order for the other to be heard? In other words, why must be pit ‘logos’ against ‘anti-logos’? Why can women not reconcile themselves to logos? Because that would be subjugating themselves under the phallus?

Must we set up the Other in order to take down both binaries? Like how the female must be defined against the male as the first step to collapsing the two, since without conceptualizing the female, the male wouldn’t exist? Yet if we erect the female (via writing, as Cixous proposes) in order to challenge the male, and then take down the two, wouldn’t the ‘female’ go as well? Or is Cixous rallying for an erection of a totally new system?

Also, when she talked about the “castration fear” (341), I couldn’t quite relate to it. So I asked a guy, what’s with “castration fear”? How would you feel if you’re castrated?

And he said like, “I’d feel irrelevant.”

“So a core part of your male identity lies in your sexuality? (And this reminds me of Grosz!) Your penis?”

“Yes. In the same way you would feel less of a woman if your breasts/womb are removed.”

Would I, indeed? I thought. I don’t know. If I do feel less of a woman if my womb is removed, that would be a core part of my identity as a woman is defined by my reproductive role; if I feel less of a woman if my breasts are removed, that would be a core part of my identity as a woman is defined by my sensuality and my ‘otherness’ from the male. Very provocative train of thought for me.

Which led me to think about how our identities are really, to a large extent, rooted in our sexualities. I wonder why we feel less of a man/woman if we’re castrated. Is it because that is what is most distinctive about us and losing that which is most distinctive would reduce us to ‘sameness’ and ‘blank, asexual slates’? This would make a larger point about how our bodies carry significant physical characteristics that determine who we are.

So our bodies are not as innocent as we think they are. Our bodies are in fact very loaded; it forms and affects who we are, or who we think we are.

Back to Cixous. She mentions that “women are body”, and that “I-woman am going to blow up the Law, […] right now, in language” (343). The thing is, language is hardly the only key that unlocks ‘freedom’ for women. It cannot be. Because if phallocentrism is the only obstacle, then how can language unlock that door, when the gate is guarded by precisely language? How can language (of men) turn on itself?

Moving to the next paragraph, is Cixous asking us to wield the ‘men’s’ language against themselves, or is she disowning language as men’s altogether?

She says to “leave it to the worriers, to masculine anxiety [of …] knowing ‘how it works’ in order to ‘make it work’, “for us the point is […] to dash through and to ‘fly’” (343). It all sounds very revolutionary and fired up, but my question is, “fly”, yes, for what ends? For women to have a voice? And is that a mere explosive end, or means to an enduring end?

For Cixous, the woman’s body is extremely powerful when transposed into text. It is capable of being “volcanic”, “upheaval”, “smash everything”, “shatter the framework”, “blow up the law”, “break up the truth’” (344). By translating her physicality into texts, her body becomes “singing flesh” (345), able to transcend time, space, culture, elements (345, 2nd para). There’s the image of vibrancy, celebrating multiplicity within the body of the female and the body of her texts.

The image of the pregnant woman is also rather poignant. “[A woman] when pregnant, not only doubles her market value, but […] takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and undeniably, acquires body and sex” (346). Cixous’ metaphor of the pregnant woman as a taboo is apt for multiplicity in that the pregnant woman is nurturing something other than herself within her, thereby becoming the living embodiment of multiplicity. A woman’s body, therefore, is capable of embodying multiplicity, and capable of transposing that multiplicity onto the texts that it generates. A woman’s body is far more superior in that way to men’s linearity and relative impotence, sterility, and inarticulateness.

Ok. Enough verbal diarrhea. Seriously. Woah. What a bloody long post.