H&he Cixous’ political ‘sexts’445
Lacan’s term: ‘Phallo-logocentric’. A ‘feminine’libido Cixous defines as one operating outside thecircle of castration, one which, drawing on thematernal source, is characterized by expense. (Theword is used in the sense of spending. from theFrench word ‘depense’.) It involves:‘accepting the part of fife which is uncertain, ofenjoying possibility. of risking the investments,and a kind of openness, of being able, forinstance, to have a relation to all the phenomenas(of experience).Ciious believes that the majority of women haveinscribed themselves in a ‘masculine’ economy-with disastrous results. Lacan draws a parallelbetween the realms of the Imaginary and theSymbolic, or the subject’s passage through theOedipus complex and his or her entry into language.Since a girl’s passage through the Oedipus complexis marked by her not having the penis/phallus whichgoverns the operation, Lacan sees her
entry
intolanguage as ,a negative one, structured by lack.Cixous disagrees with Lacan. believing that this isonly true as long, as women are prepared tosubscribe to the theory of castration.Cixous sees the Unconscious as a type ofideological theatre storing a multitude of modelsand representations which constantly act to alter theindividual’s imaginary order. She argues thatwomen have
been cut
off from the source of theirUnconscious in the same way that they have beendenied access to language and culture. Their bodieshave been colonized by
men. their Unconscious
peopled with the images of masculine desire, theirmouths ‘gagged’. Women. Cixous
urges, must re-inhabit their bodies, and re-discover their Uncons-
cious and their past. They must mark theseexperiences
in writing:‘It is by writing. from and toward women. andby taking up the challenge of speech which hasbeen governed by the phallus, that women willconfirm women in a place other than that which is
reserved
in and by the Symbolic, that is, in a placeother than silence.’ (Cixous, 1975A: 251).Cixous believes that it is by writing that women willbreak down the stranglehold of logocentrism.Writing, she says, is woman’s ‘anti-logos weapon’.
for it is in language that
women can begin to inscribethe changes that will bring about correspondingchanges in the metalanguage that structurespersonal relationships as well as political systems.Cixous does not underestimate the difficulty thatwomen writing experience. Those that have written,that have tried to defy or move outside logocentric4
Ibid.
control, have been consistently marginalised, ignoted. branded as hysterics and punished.
Womentaking up the pen for the first time, are subject tofeelings of guilt, of doubt as to the value of their
work, together with all the censoring effects of thelogocentric ploy: ‘the imbecilic capitalist machinery
in which publishing houses are the craftly, obse-quious relayen of imperatives handed down by an
economy that works against us and off our backs.’(ibid.
:
247).This is all the more reason why women must writetheir experience:‘they must invent the impregnable languagethat will wreck partitions, classes. and rhetorics,regulations and codes. they must submerge,
cut
through. get beyond the ultimate reserve-dis-course.’ (ibid.: 256).Woman. potentially closer to a *feminine’ economythan men. must begin to write the ‘marvellous textof herself: she must create her ‘sext’ (ibid: 250).So difficult is the task of the woman writer, so all-pervasive the influence of logocentrism that Cixousbelieves women can currently only begin to glimpse,through their writing. the changes a differentlystructured order would imply. In her text
La, Cixous
describes a scene in which a woman rises above thetowers and buildings of her town. The episode canbe read as a parable of the woman writer mountingthe bastions of logocentrism in her attempt to seebeyond:‘She sets herself away from a dead-male state.She climbs up on her polygams. She enrapturesherself in altitude. She rapidly succeeds in (.
. .)
rising above the buildings, the terraces with yards.the bell towers, all the suburban pretense.Through rich appetite: for the love of that whichshe could see if she succeeded in surmounting theedifices which prevent her from contemplating herinfinite.’ (1976B: 219)sWhat are some of the characteristics of a writinglocated within a ‘feminine’ as opposed to aphallo/logocentric economy? First, Cixous believes,it is a writing situated in the physical self.
Women’sbodies have been confiscated from them through thetransforming power
of men’s desire, and Cixousargues that it is only by re-experiencing the body ona primary level that a corresponding textual bodycan be produced:‘Text: my body- shot through with streams ofsong
. . .
what touches you, the equivoice that
5 Translated
by Verena Conley. For a more detaileddiscussion of this scene see her
book: Writing the Feminine:
H&+nc &our, 1984. University of Nebraska Press,Lincoln, Nebraska.
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