I bought this book by mistake. I was ordering a couple used books online and if I ordered one more, I received free shipping. I thought to myself: Pick an author you've been meaning to read for a long time, but still haven't gotten around to... Hélène Cixous! Typed her name into the search and voila. Except I got so excited I didn't pay attention that her name was the title of the book, not the author of the book. So, I still have not read anything by Cixous, but I've read a bit about her...

Although slim, this is a fairly dense academic examination by Conley of Cixous's writing and approach to language as a whole. At times, tedious; at others, thought-provoking; occasionally it bordered on hagiography (e.g., “Cixous coins and spends words literally outside the space of meaning.”), but Conley seems to have studied and read Cixous quite thoroughly and places her within cultural, literary, and historical contexts quite well.

“...the otherness of the female must be valorized so as to break the age-old distinctions of intelligence versus sensuality, reason versus poetry, and male versus female at the same time that the floating missing signification of no known attribute must be the non-essence of the female body.”

The quote above from an interview with Cixous frames the crux, not only to Cixous’s writing, but in many ways to the very identity issues with which much of the 21st century world is struggling. Audre Lorde wrote about this, as well. Writing as formerly privileged from a male perspective, elevating logic and reason as the only or best approach and denying any sort of corporeal existence; whereas, female writing opens the door to something more holistic and affirming: instinct, emotion, desire couple with reason and logic. I'm still searching for the right words to get across what I sense/feel about this and to describe it in a better way.

“...women-as-beings-of-proximity are still back in, or must go back to, ‘those times’ when knowledge is, was, not predicated on distance and sight but has the immediacy of smell, taste, and touch.”

This left me picturing a piece of chewed gum being stretched apart with the body/person at one end and current day knowledge/concepts/technology at the other. Existence is somewhere near that middle, which is thinned out and starting to fray.

Cixous champions a real breaking down of barriers (psychological and social), advocated via writing and yet I felt like I needed to not just read Freud, but study him to understand/appreciate a good bit of her approach. Phrases like "libidinal economies" mean almost nothing to me. Mostly it seems like language proscribes and imprisons and Cixous sought a kind of freedom from this by "hacking the code" so to speak.

“Cixous derives her own theory of libidinal economies, the effects of which she attempts to read in artistic texts. She distinguishes between two economies, one masculine:... centralized, short, reappropriating, cutting, an alternation of attraction-repulsion; one feminine: continuous, overabundant, overflowing. These economies produce differences in inscription on the textual level, but they do not refer to one or the other of the sexes in exclusive fashion. They are, at all times, to be found in varying degrees in both men and women.”

She brought poetry and theory together, creating a powerful voice and platform as a writer allowing her to break free of social and written identity constraints, especially because the poetic has its own type of logic. And writing/thinking cannot be divorced from the body. Down with binary oppositions!

“...words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ that circulate everywhere and that are completely distorted by everyday usage,---words which refer, of course, to a classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women---are our burden, that is what burdens us. … my work in fact aims at getting rid of words like ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine,’ ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity,’ even ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ which designate that which cannot be classified outside a signifier except by force and violence and which goes beyond it in any case.”

Later she talks about preferring proper names to adjectives like feminine and masculine (e.g., a Kleistian economy instead of a “feminine” economy) and mentions that when being asked to theorize to clarify her ideas she finds herself “back in the trap of words.”

I guess some things really never do change...
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WORDS THAT COULD NOT TRAP ME BECAUSE I WAS UNFAMILIAR WITH THEM
fulgurating | blason | toponyms | litanic | libidinal economies | polysemy | cheminement
(normally, I provide links to the definitions, but that would leave us both trapped---we can temporarily escape via ignorance)

Writing the Feminine is everything it sets out to be. It's a good, informative overview of Cixous's works that gives as much information as it can it so little space. The book suffers from its somewhat bland prose style, but being an informational text, it doesn't need a fancy prose style. (It's just a shame, as Cixous's texts are often a joy to read.) As a bonus, two interviews are translated in the back of the book, the first wonderful and the second somewhat less interesting. Overall, a great introduction to Cixous.