Feminism Revisited: Helene Cixous and The Newly Born Woman

In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous discusses the masculine structure that has been imposed on women through a study of Ulysses by James Joyce. She proposes a definition of bisexuality to define the feminine and claims that contemporary writing is also of a feminine nature.

The duality of activity and passivity, where woman is always passive, marks all philosophical discourse as an absolute constant. Cixous writes that "either woman is passive or she does not exist." (p 349) She gives the example of Mallarme's tragic dream, where the father is acting even the part of the mother. This is seen throughout literary history - man's torment, the figure of the father, the male desire to be at the origin.

In order to threaten the stability of this masculine structure, Cixous states that it is urgent to question the solidarity between logocentrism and phallocentrism. There is a connection between the philosophical, the literary, and the phallocentric. Bringing to light woman's burial and questioning the existing structure would create a transformation of the functioning of all society. According to Cixous, this transformation is already in the process of happening.

The results of destabilizing the masculine structure are completely unpredictable. Meanwhile there is the certainty that man and woman are caught in a complex web of cultural determinations. Both sexes are trapped within a predefined ideological system that go back to ancient history. According to Cixous the radical transformation of behaviors, mentalities, roles, and the political economy is ultimately possible although the resulting effects on the libidinal economy are unthinkable.

Cixous asks the reader to imagine the real liberation of sexuality and the simultaneous change in the structures of ideological reproduction. There are exceptions to the phallocentric ideological system - men and women who are more complex, open, and mobile. "There is no invention possible, whether it be philosophical or poetic, without there being in the inventing subject an abundance of the other, of variety." (p 351) Thinkers, artists, and philosophers, those who invent and write, are able to do so through an awareness of the other, of variety, containing a certain homosexuality.

Cixous defines homosexuality as the I/play of bisexuality. Even as this certain homosexuality is repressed, so it also shines through by various signs, conduct-character, and behavior-acts. In the invention of poetry or fiction, this homosexuality acts to crystallize ultrasubjectivities. This action of homosexuality is most clearly seen in writing.

Cixous goes on to propose a new definition of bisexuality. There are two opposite ways of imagining the possibility and practice of bisexuality:
1. The fantasy of a complete being replaces the fear of castration and veils sexual difference, or the "two within one, and not even two holes." (p 352)
2. Bisexuality as a location within oneself of both sexes, a nonexclusion.
Cixous uses this second definition of bisexuality when she defines woman as bisexual.

Men are also victims of the masculine structure, as seen in man's fear of femininity and castration. Psychoanalysis was formed on the basis of woman and has repressed the femininity of masculine sexuality. On the other hand, while growing up woman did no have her bisexuality erased as man did. Woman's bisexuality opens her to the other, which is harder for man to allow through.

This is the reason Cixous claims contemporary writing to be feminine. Femininity keeps alive the other. Writing is the passageway, entrance, exit, and dwelling of the other. For man this nonexclusion is seen as a threat, as intolerable. For woman, even danger or destruction is an opportunity for expansion and exploration.

Writing is the constant exchange of one with another, a process of working and being worked. Writing is "questioning (in) the between (letting oneself be questioned) of same and of other without which nothing lives; undoing death's work by willing the togetherness of one-another, infinitely charged with a ceaseless exchange of one with another - not knowing one, another and beginning again only from what is most distant, from self, from other, from the other within. A course that multiplies transformations by the thousands." (p 353)

Woman's self has the capacity to depropriate herself. She is a whole that is made up of parts that in themselves are whole. This endless body has no end or parts. Woman does not perform the regionalization on her self as masculine sexuality does. According to Cixous, woman does not create a monarchy of her body or her desire. Not inscribed within (self) imposed frontiers, woman is changeable and open. Thus the female tongue does not hold back but instead enables, expressing multitude.

References:

Cixous, Helen and Catherine, Clement. 1975. The Newly Born Woman. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.