Thanks to key French feminist thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous, much progress has been made in the last forty years for women seeking to find a distinctly feminine mode of writing and expression. However, symbolic structures of language continue to limit modes of expression. For women, in particular, the ability to write and read has been structured and ordered for too long by a symbolic masculine economy built on repression, hierarchy and exclusion. As Hélène Cixous rightly states in her influential work “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural – hence, political, typically masculine – economy” (260). This masculine economy results in the problematic question for women (and all marginalized individuals) of how to speak and write in their own voices. Not simply restricted to French Feminist theorists who have been working on this question since the 1960s and 70s, contemporary Canadian feminist writers such as Nicole Brossard continue to work and write against dominant modes of creative expression.

The poetical, theoretical and philosophical work of Hélène Cixous has been highly influential and liberating for women writers. Significantly, her continuing struggle to work against the exclusionary nature of dominant modes of language and writing has offered the possibility for a redefinition of feminine modes of expression. Influenced by her own tragic childhood which saw her mixed family caught between competing heritages and resulted in their exile from Algeria to France, Cixous is personally invested in finding a mode of expression that “challenges the exclusions which inform dominant systems of representation in an attempt to make language circulate more freely, less destructively, more democratically” (Bray 1). Often identifying herself as ‘triply marginalized’ (as an Algerian, a Jew, and a woman), after her divorce in the mid 1960s, Cixous became quite active as an intellectual and was involved in the political events of May 1968 in France.[1] The historical context of May 1968, including the mobilization of students, workers and intellectuals who demanded the dismantling of elitist institutions (including the Sorbonne), resulted in a fertile environment for feminist thinkers who were theorizing the possibility for a distinctly feminine mode of expression. Indeed, this period in history was a “period of belief in the revolutionary power of language and of hopes for a shattering of millenary oppressive structures” (Conley 3). After 1968, Cixous’s intellectual and personal concerns with the exclusionary nature of language gathered in intensity with her participation in the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and in the 1970s one of Cixous’s key theoretical concepts emerged: ecriture feminine. It is this concept which begins to outline the great influence that Cixous had on later feminists who were concerned with theorizing a distinct mode of feminine expression.

Significantly, Cixous’s project looks to the possibilities open in a feminine mode of writing and reading since texts written in this mode, through their pluralistic, non-linear, and imaginary techniques, subvert and challenge accepted social and historical structures. These texts open a space for the exploration of alternative identities that are not socially constructed or bound by masculine laws. Cixous focuses on ‘playing’ with language rather than allowing the discourse to continue its domination. In its subversion, this play with language and structure offers a release for both writer and reader from the restrictions that have marginalized women’s voice and identity.

Though her early work engages with such writers as James Joyce (Joyce was the focus of her doctoral research), in 1977 Cixous discovered Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector whose writing had a profound influence on Cixous’s work and lead to her publication of Vivre l’orange in 1979. In this text, Cixous documents her growing sense of alienation with the world around her and the miracle of rediscovering life through Lispector’s book Agua viva. What Cixous finds in this work is concrete proof for what she has fervently fought for: the ability for women’s writing to escape dominant forms of masculine expression. In addition Cixous finds a living language that locates the human in our increasingly digitized and mechanized world.

Through an examination of how Cixous writes as well as how she reads, in particular her readings ‘with’ Lispector, I will attempt to explore possible ways of ‘escaping’ the restrictions of the ready-made laws of the masculine economy including the laws of language, the laws of the book and the laws of genre. This is not an attempt to categorize ways of escaping, but rather an attempt to follow some of the possible paths that are offered by Cixous’s ideas of ecriture feminine. Loosely translated as ‘feminine writing,’ ecriture feminine is by its very nature a difficult topic to explore. As Cixous writes in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”: “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded – which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist”(“Laugh” 264). My hope is to continue in the spirit of Cixous and Lispector: to tentatively explore the possibilities of a feminine economy and write/read without reducing or restricting the open space offered by ecriture feminine.

The primary texts that I will be engaging with centre around Cixous’s ‘relationship’ with Lispector. In particular, I will be looking at Cixous’s first encounter with Lispector in Vivre l’orange as well as her readings of Lispector’s Agua viva. The focus of my exploration is one motivated by the desire to believe – like intellectuals in post-1968 France – that language and literature have the ability to enact social and political change. The type of change that will transform the repression and restrictions of ‘man-made’ laws to the ‘laws of life’ inscribed in both Cixous’s and Lispector’s works. As Cixous states in Vivre l’orange: “without being regressive, there can be another law, of the order of the living” (Vivre 26). Cixous offers a hopeful possibility for social transformation: since our world is formed and constructed through language, it can thus be transformed and de/re-constructed through language. In other words, it is only through a change in language itself that any social or political change can take place. Cixous explains in “The Laugh of the Medusa” that: “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (261, emphasis in original). The life that Cixous has restored to the text is born in the transformative power of a language rooted in a feminine libidinal economy. Writing and reading in this economy are indeed revolutionary and necessary, offering a way of altering our very reality. Verena Conley states in her work Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, “Fiction, far from being unreal, is ‘another’ form of reality, enigmatic and uncanny” (21). Writing then offers a powerful way for women to recreate a world that will allow them to speak and write. Through re-inscription, as Cixous herself states, women “can put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (“Laugh” 257). This is one of the gifts that emerges out of writing: a space in which one can live and express a self not socially or historically determined by the dominant patriarchal system.

Learning to receive the gifts

Near the beginning of Vivre l’orange, Cixous offers the following dedication:

Locating a feminine libidinal economy

Any exploration of the possibilities available within a feminine economy must also take into consideration where Cixous locates these spaces. Cixous does not offer the feminine economy as a replacement for a masculine economy. Rather she recognizes the impracticality of a space completely outside of patriarchal systems. She states in her work Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva that: “We are inside the narrative of the law and we cannot help it” (25). Writing is, thus, an act that is always working from within to subvert and challenge. As Chiara Briganti and Robert Con Davis write of Cixous:

It is important to note that Cixous, while largely seen as a theorist in North America, considers herself to be a poet, first and foremost. As Cixous explains to Mireille Calle-Gruber in the “Inter Views” section of Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing: “What is most true is poetic because it is not stopped-stoppable. All that is stopped, grasped, all that is subjugated […] which is to say all that is taken, caged, is less true. Has lost what is life itself” (4). The poetic, as Cixous sees it, offers a space where the fluidity and motion of life is ‘caressed’ and never robbed of its life. Cixous’s privileging of the poetic is also political because it offers a space for, as Conley notes: “the subversion of coded, clichéd, ordinary language – necessary to social transformation” (Conley 5). This subversion is one that can only take place in the open space of a feminine libidinal economy. As Conley explains, masculine economies are “based on property, being and the law,” whereas feminine economies are open to “the space of the gift, of positive loss and spending in a general economy not reversible into gain” (Conley 17). This space of the gift is crucial for Cixous as it subverts the destructive drives of accumulation, gain, and profit and becomes one of the key spaces inhabited by women. Though we inhabit a world which demands efficiency and consumption, what Cixous points to in this work is another alternative for those who wish to reject the destructive cycle of economic systems based on profit and gain. Rather than taking and exploiting, the space which Cixous holds up allows for a different set of priorities where giving rather than accumulating becomes central. Conley writes of the importance of the gift within a feminine economy: “the gift as excess, as spending and abundance, becomes, because of her cultural position in (Western) society, woman’s essential attribute; because she has always been repressed culturally, she is more capable of giving than man”(18). In contrast, a masculine economy is “based on castration and death [which] limits the possibilities of life, furthers gain, far from the space of the gift” (Conley 18). In a feminine economy there is no death drive where individuals are consumed by an insatiable need to accumulate and destroy. Instead, as Cixous finds in her encounters with the writings of Clarice Lispector, the drive is always towards life, which is lived through different notions of alterity. In a feminine libidinal economy, the relation to the ‘other’ is based on generosity rather than exploitation.

At the opening of Vivre l’orange, Cixous shares with the reader a point in time where she had lost her self and thus, found her writing to be devoid of life, of the ‘orange.’” She writes: “Mute I fled the orange, my writing fled the secret voice of the orange […] was separated from the orange, didn’t write the orange […] didn’t carry the juice to my lips” (Vivre 14). Cixous’s ability to become once again nourished by and connected to the orange comes through her apprenticeship at, what she refers to as, the “school of Clarice” (Vivre 86). The orange becomes a powerful metaphor that functions on at least two levels. On the one hand, it is a symbol of nourishment for the body and the spirit, a body that must be nourished if it is to write. On the other, it represents the life that has been forgotten in language. This symbol of the orange is continuously echoed throughout the work in such symbols as trees, flowers, animals, all of which point to the loss in language of the life that surrounds us. As the text proceeds, it becomes clear that Vivre l’orange is a tale of (re)discovery, leading to lessons of how ‘to live the orange.’ As Cixous puts it: “The orange is a beginning. Starting out from the orange all voyages are possible. All voices that go her way via her are good” (20). The way of the orange is one close to the life around us: one that does not separate the text from the living earth.

One of the crucial lessons Cixous learns from Lispector’s words, offers a way to get back to a time before the separation between language and the living. As Cixous writes: “a writing found me when I was unfindable to myself. More than a writing […] the writing of other days, the terrestrial, vegetal writing, of the time when the earth was the sovereign mother” (Vivre 12). Lispector is heard as a voice that speaks from another time before the separation between the earth mother and her ‘children.’ In other words, what Cixous finds in Lispector is the ability to capture the living world in language. However, Lispector is an exception and thus, part of what Vivre l’orange is mourning is the separation of humans from the natural environment around them. The concern is a valid one particularly in our increasingly mechanized and work-obsessed age. Cixous asks, “Is it possible that we have passed before forests of living beings without perceiving them […] ? That we dispensed with life?”(Vivre 80). These questions locate one of the main concerns of Vivre l’orange. Throughout the text, this grief is expressed metaphorically through images of human blindness and absence. One especially poignant depiction of blindness is Cixous’s metaphor of frozen beings who are awake but blind to the life around them. As she says of her own frozen state before her encounter with Lispector:

In Vivre l’orange, Cixous describes the power of women’s voices. In particular, is the power for women to speak of the other without destroying that other. Rather, in a feminine libidinal economy “[t]here are those women who speak to watch over and save, not to catch” (8). The power of these voices is not located in their ability to assimilate the other. Instead, what Cixous continues to come back to is the ability of these voices to name things in tenderness, to approach the other without violence. This tender approach to the other can only take place in the space of a love that is “beyond desire, on the other side of love” (Vivre 108). It is a space that occurs under the law of life through excess and beyond the limitations of a naming that restricts. However like her concerns of the alienation between humanity and the earth, Cixous also mourns that outside of such writings as Lispector’s, this approach towards the other in love “happens to us only rarely: nowadays we are too cold and too thirsty [...].We do not know how to wait for the other: our waiting attacks” (108). The space inhabited by both Lispector and Cixous is a space of love which subverts the desire to replace or contain the other with the signifying word. Such a space requires the ability to “operate outside the law of the symbolic” and to approach the other slowly (Donovan 6).

Throughout most of her works, Cixous is concerned about the consequences of the rushed lives that are led today. Her concerns continue to be a major issue at the heart of Western society today. All one needs is a small sampling of headlines in North American newspapers to see concrete proof of Cixous’s fears that our lives are lead without time, thought, happiness, and love. Instead, the ever increasing push to improve productivity and efficiency in a global economy perpetuates and supports the alienation which dominates our lives. Sadly then, her concerns expressed in the 1970s continue to be an enormous problem today. In other words, Cixous is right to be worried about humans who are not able to break out of their frozen states given the absence (or, absentmindedness) that is part of their hurried existence. Thus, the importance of Cixous’s and Lispector’s works becomes very clear since these works show us a living space. And, Cixous’s call for change and action takes on significant implications when she recognizes that this living space is one that, like the world around us, is endangered. As Cixous puts it, Lispector’s work as a living space is one “that we must take care to keep [...]. Hurrying annuls. We are living in the time of the flat thought-screen [...] which does not leave time to think the littlest thing according to its living mode. We must save the approach that opens and leaves space for the other” (Vivre 62). The approach here is one which occurs in tenderness and results in an exchange that, far from assimilating the other, watches over it, protecting it from the death of signification. In addition, it is a space that also allows each of us to recover our own lives.

Like the multi-lingual structure of Vivre l’orange, Cixous finds in Lispector the power to save us from death through the same ability to speak in multiple languages, each language offering the hope that one will penetrate the frozen sight of the reader. The powerful description of transformation that Cixous undergoes upon her meeting with Lispector incarnates the possible freedoms that are open in a feminine libidinal economy to those who are willing to live outside of the laws of the dominant discourse as what Mary Klages calls “outlaws” (Klages par.28). These outlaws could be either women or men since a feminine economy would not continue the dominant system of hierarchies based on binary oppositions and exclusions. Indeed, freedom found in a feminine economy is open to anyone who can “‘conceive of’ feminine language...and […] who can resist or be distanced from the structuring central Phallus of the phallogocentric Symbolic order” (Klages par.28). For Cixous, this resistance is largely found in the ability to play with language in a state of innocence.

Reversing the Fall: Reclaiming innocence

One of the main difficulties facing women who attempt to re-inscribe and break free from their socially constructed identities, revolves around the issue of language. To be more precise, how can women speak if to speak is to wield the language of the dominating system? As Cixous relates in an interview with Conley: “It is true that if we enter society to become men, we have lost everything. In this case, we leave the space of repression to win another repression, which will please men who are also wasting their lives” (Conley 136). Clearly, to write requires an entirely different space that will have to re-inscribe social and historical constructions of identity. While difficult to attain, as Cixous demonstrates through her reading of Lispector, this space can be created through the reversal of accepted notions of accumulation.

Far from being easy, the position of the outlaw is one that instills fear and uncertainty. It is, after all, easier to continue to exist within the realm of the familiar even with its repression and exclusion than to venture forth on a new and completely unknown path. To occupy a position outside the law is also to be outside of what has always been known: to be located in a space that while powerful is also frightening. Cixous explains that this space requires courage on two levels. First, there must be a willingness to leave the security of the known world and, second, the will to live in a space that exists before all established knowledge. Lispector, Cixous remarks, has the courage to inhabit this space: “She had the double courage that women alone have when they have followed the course of fear [...]. The courage to disbelieve, and then the courage to begin to marvelously want to live before, before all exploration, before all reason, before god, before all hope. Or after”(Vivre 28 and 30). This passage is significant in its call for a type of innocence. Using Lispector’s phrase, Cixous speaks of innocent writing as located “behind thought” (“Foreword” xxxiv). In other words, it is a writing that breaks free from the law of logos. As Cixous states, it is “pre-discursive, pre-logical” (“Foreword,”xxxiv). This ‘pre-logical’ writing or writing through innocence grants access to a mode of writing that is outside or before that of the masculinist discourse but, significantly, one that can also survive in the ‘after.’ It is furthermore an innocence that requires a break from the self that is socially constructed. Cixous relates the difficulty of such a break: “How does the poet become self-strange to the point of the absolute innocence? Let herself be borne before thought” (Vivre 38). However, she also points to Lispector as an example of how this separation is possible: “She slipped out of the self, she had that severity, that violent practice, she went out by décollage, by radiance, by laying bare the senses [...] it requires removing from sight the looks that surround, shedding the looks that demand, like tears, dis-regarding to arrive at sight without a project, contemplation” (Vivre 28). The freedom to move outside of the fixed roles which are socially and historically determined for women, is one of the gifts that is bestowed through feminine writing. Rather than an identity fixed by the laws of a masculine economy, there is instead a fluid identity that is free to grow and change. Thus, as Cixous writes: “the confinement of the being ceases, there where things remain free, all are equal in vitality, there is no insignificance, at the deepest level, where each being evolves according to its own necessity, following the order of its intimate elements” (Vivre 30). This notion of being is one that occurs before/below the confined space of the symbolic order. It is a space of deep meaning where the destructive opposition between man and woman is eradicated. Instead, there emerges an organic being that is left to follow its own path of growth. In many ways, this is a vision of a rebirth which inscribes the potential of a feminine economy to bring forth a space without hurrying, restriction, exclusion, or emptiness. It is at once ideal and hard to imagine possible and yet, again and again, Cixous holds up the world of Lispector as one that lives inside such a feminine economy.

The courage to think other/wise

The question of whether it is possible to write in a mode outside of or before masculine ideology is succinctly captured in Cixous’s question: “Can one win?” (Conley 136). For Cixous, the answer is yes but to win requires the courage to think differently and to challenge one’s knowledge of the self and the world since these are the constructions of a system that must be overturned. Clearly, to write and think differently will come out of a willingness to break laws: moral laws, language laws and writing laws. It requires the move back to Cixous’s ideas of the desired state of ‘innocence.’ To write in such a mode, from the position of the ‘innocent outlaw,’ is not easy, but the alternative found in Cixous’s work is to ‘waste’ our lives in a hurried, frozen and blinded state. In one of her interviews, Cixous claims that success will only come on the “condition that upon entering society one does not identify with men but that one works on other possibilities of living […] on other relationships to the other […] in such a way that one also brings about transformation in oneself, in others, and in men” (Conley 136). The question of winning then, becomes one of how to win.

Subverting the law through play and the gift of transformation

Cixous writes in Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing that there is “still this problem of the law and the language. Feminist question: Imagine a corrected language. I am against it. [...] Indeed, they allow us to play. We would not play anymore”(63). Both Lispector’s and Cixous’ texts work on several levels, consistently playing with accepted structures of narrative, genre, and the text. This process of resistance and subversion is where the transformative power of language resides. As Cixous aptly puts it: “The fact that language resists me, hampers me, is a good thing. There is a profit” (63). Far from being the naïve idealist that many critics charge, Cixous fully recognizes the problems inherent in attempting to break the ready-made laws of masculinist discourses. She knows that there are laws which cannot be completely broken through play: laws that can only be destabilized. While Cixous talks about the truth of the poetic because it is not ‘caged,’ there is a tension between the resistance and the obedience which is demanded by the laws of language and the book. Even with the subversion of non-linear narratives, blurred genres, and multi-voiced texts, there are some structures that cannot be completely overturned. As Cixous laments, there are some demands dictated by the law that require compliance: “I just finish writing a book, someone asks me what is it called...and there is never a title. Never. One must obey the law of the book which is to have a title” (Rootprints 18). Clearly, Cixous is aware of the limitations that are enforced by the laws but rather than accepting these laws, Cixous transforms the limitations into ‘profit’ and renders their attempts to hamper the gift of transformation ineffective.

The fruits of the text

The masculine drive to death, through its restrictions and exclusions, has arguably robbed the text of life, but in a new feminine economy the life of the text can never be completely extinguished. As Cixous relates, the text may be scarred by the enforced obedience of the writer, but there is still life within. She states, in her essay “Writing Blind” that: “A book is just about round. But since to appear, i.e. to be published, it must adjust itself into a rectangular parallelepiped, at a certain moment you cut the sphere, you flatten it, you square it up. You give the planet the form of a tomb. The book has only to await resurrection” (“Writing Blind” 3-4). The book then, becomes an example of the successful transformation available in a feminine economy – for even with the attempts to flatten the life within it, there lies a possibility for the text to be reborn. Language need not remain in the alien and impersonal space of the book: it can, like us, be brought back to life. The implication is that the gift of life can be found even when writing from within the language laws of the masculine economy. Certainly, Cixous recognizes that there are some things that are impossible for language to accomplish but these sites of impossibility still bear fruit: they still bring us closer to the orange and lead us away from death and alienation. As she admits in Rootprints: “There are impossible things that I try to do with writing. [...] Trying to realize the dream leads thus to transformations of writing” (Rootprints 78). Cixous’s work offers us the ability to engage in the world around us, encouraging us to slow down enough to find the human even as our lives seem to spiral out of control. Ultimately, these transformations of writing allow for the potential rebirth into an open space of a feminine economy: a space of infinite (im)possibilities for living and being.