Helene Cixous
Helene Cixous
Hélène Cixousis a professor, Algerian/French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. Cixous is best known for her article ''The Laugh of the Medusa'', which established her as one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory. She founded the first centre of feminist studies at a European university at the Centre universitaire de Vincennes of the University of Paris...
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth5 June 1937
CityOran, Algeria
writing mean succeed
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
writing exclusion searching-for-love
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
believe together i-believe
I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life
broken-heart way losing
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
fixed
Me too, I make do, I anoint what cannot be fixed.
beautiful men laughing
Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
hurt book writing
The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed
solitude vastness void
Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth.
sublime innocence innocent
I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.
death flower dying
Everything ends with flowers.
language speak
We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.
spring writing self
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
thinking decision effort
Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.
wish tongue doe
She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore language. She lets the other language speak - the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back; it makes possible.