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 dwelling-place exit
Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.
writing wings bird
And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
breathing preventing
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
writing cutting class
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
beautiful laughing medusa
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.
inspiration writing body
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
writing self law
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.