Cixous, Hélène (b. 1937)

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CIXOUS, HÉLèNE (b. 1937)

One of the francophone world's most influential contemporary thinkers and writers.

Daughter of Jewish parents, Hélène Cixous (pronounced "seek-sue") was born on 5 June 1937 in Oran, Algeria. She has described her "luck" at being born during "the blazing hotbed between two holocausts" (1991, p. 17) since much of her future thinking, writing, and creative activity were to have their deepest roots in this historical accident. Raised as a Jewish child in Algeria during the German occupation of France and thus denied access to formal schooling, Cixous learned to read and write in a neighbor's informally organized "school" for children like herself. She has always claimed to know from a very early age that she would spend her life somehow with words and books. Cixous's earliest influential reading (texts she often describes as her "Grandmother texts") included the Bible, the epics (Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey), William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, as well as the German poets Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist. When Cixous went on to do doctoral work in France, however, it was the English-language writer James Joyce who received her major critical attention. The Exile of James Joyce (1969) is the English translation of her 1968 thesis. Later on in her career as a professor of English (and women's studies) within the French university system, Cixous would discover the works of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and bring them (through their publication by Antoinette Fouque in her Editions des femmes) to the attention of an international reading public. Thomas Bernhard, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Osip Mandelstam, Primo Levi—and many of the most read philosophers and critical theorists of the twentieth century (Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida) can also be considered decisive readings for Cixous. Indeed, Derrida and Cixous were not only longtime friends (both having been born in Algeria and having come to France at almost the same time) but literary collaborators (Veils, a "twinned" text, was published jointly in 2002). It was the outbreak of the Algerian War (1956) that saw Cixous's departure from Algeria and her definitive move to France. She completed her licence at Bordeaux (where she read English and American literature) and in 1959 became the youngest ever agrégée de lettres in France.

The tumultuous events of May 1968 in France led to major reforms in the French university system, and Cixous (by this time a professor of English literature in Paris) was asked by the government of the day to become chargée de mission for the setting up of an experimental Universitéde Paris VIII at Vincennes (today Saint-Denis). In 1974, she founded the Centre de recherches en études féminines at Paris VIII and became the center's first director. Her creative writing career had already had its beginnings nearly a decade before (in 1967) with the publication of a collection of short stories, Le Prénom de Dieu (The first name of God). In 1969 her first novel, Dedans (Inside), won the Prix Médicis.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a time of tremendous growth of feminism worldwide, Cixous was initially associated with various French feminist groups (Psych et Po, for example) yet early on attempted to distance herself from belonging to any organized group, preferring instead to concentrate on her teaching and writing, where she developed the seminal concept of the "libidinal economy" and articulated what that concept meant in terms of women's lives, women's writing, and "écriture féminine." Criticized by some feminists as being too "essentialist" with her emphasis on "writing the body," Cixous nonetheless is best known for her formulation of several of feminism's most fundamental tenets: the crucial need for woman to discover her voice and the critical importance of multiplicity in woman's jouissance. In two widely read and anthologized pieces, The Newly Born Woman and "The Laugh of the Medusa," Cixous locates a linkage between writing, femininity, and transformation, "between the economy of femininity.… and a link between this 'libido of the other' and writing" (Cixous and Clément, p. 91–92).

Resistant always to any label such as "theorist" or "feminist," Cixous is self-described primarily as a writer. Since her earliest publications of the mid-1960s she has produced almost one new book per year, an oeuvre that includes scholarly and philosophical works, creative fiction (short stories, novellas, novels, "texts"), political essays and journalistic pieces, lifewriting (a contemporary creative autobiographical form of writing very much in evidence in her work of the early 2000s), and many plays. Indeed, her collaboration with Ariane Mnouchkine of the Théâtre du Soleil dates from the early 1980s and in the early twenty-first century is perhaps her work with the widest audience.

See alsoDerrida, Jacques; Feminism; France.