The main reason for choosing the above critics and their respective essays is the fact that within feminist theories, Cixous often comes to be associated with French feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In addition both critical essays are worried with writing the body.
By the first eighties, feminists had advanced to a confrontational attack on male supremacy, advocating a full overthrow of the biased (male) canon of literature. French feminists, like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigary claimed that girls should have a greater consciousness of their bodies when writing, a thing which would create a far more honest and appropriate style of openness, fragmentation and non-linearity. Both feminist critics appear to obtain similar agendas mixing radical analysis with Lacanian and Freudian theory to be able to deconstruct patriarchal hegemony in the linked real, symbolic and imaginary orders. Hence their unorthodox prose, a reaction against and inside a symbolic order complicit in domination.
Cixous' first reading of the essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" reveals like an impassioned call to action and a feminist manifesto where women are urged to write themselves out of the world men constructed for females. While using the first person, plural and imperative statements, Cixous urges women to put themselves - the unthinkable/unthought - into words (Putnam Tong, 1998). She pledges for the invention of a fresh insurgent writing that will allow women to deconstruct the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system. Which means purpose of the essay under analysis is to split up and destroy a type of men writing which includes functioned as a musical instrument of patriarchal expression and which has turn into a locus where the repression of women has been for too long perpetuated.
In the same type of thought, Irigary pledges in her essay "This Sex Which Is Not One" (1977) for promoting women's language which can be regarded as far richer than men's language for the reason that it generally does not follow only one thread. It really is advanced the idea that women's writing is capable of constantly creating the 'other meaning' (Irigary: 204) producing an incomprehensible multiplicity of meanings which cannot remain immobilized, and for that reason impossible to be included into patterns of sexuality and behavior imposed by the dominant patriarchal cultural and social norms.
Writing and language become the primary concepts of the essays under analysis and the focuses on which the rest of the notions like feminine/masculine sexuality, identity, ideologies and power revolve. The concept of writing, most often hereafter known as 'criture feminine' is regarded as one important transformational tool if one is concerned with changing the social, cultural and political masculine economy. It is impardonable, as Cixous puts it that 'there has not yet been any writing that inscribes feminity' (Cixous: 2042). Assuming that language is not really a neutral medium it follows that writing is constituted in a discourse of relations social, political, and linguistic, and these relations are characterized in a masculine or feminine economy". In such a model, patterns of linearity and exclusion (patriarchal "logic") require a strict hierarchical organization of (sexual) difference in discourse and present a "grossly exaggerated" view of the "sexual opposition" actually inherent to language. Sexual opposition has always been inclusive to writing which is thus incriminated, this being one reason behind women never having the likelihood 'to speak' as writing has always favored men, it "worked for man's profit to the point of reducing writing. . . to his laws" (Cixous: 2050).
Irigary's critical vision is therefore in agreement with Cixous' ideas in that both point in negative terms to women's underdeveloped condition which stems from their submission to the oppressive culture. To this oppression, the feminist critics oppose a type of consciousness raising appeal as the key political base which would presumably have the ability to counteract the so-called 'amputation' of power (Irigary: 205). Also a re-vision of the prior historical and cultural activity is needed backed by the critical force of feminist tradition.
Therefore the rupture from the phallocentric tradition is indispensable as a means of escape for females. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is also in the end boring" and furthermore "stamped with the state seal of social approval, masculine writing is too weighted right down to move or change". Women's writing expressed a unique female consciousness, which was more discursive and conjunctive than the male one. Such consciousness was very different, and had been unfavorably treated. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex studied the ways that "legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. " Women have been induced the thought of inferiority and, although men theoretically supported equality, they would object its implementation.
Cixous' essay so that they can define criture feminine which favors experience over language and a type of non-linear, cyclical flow, actually lists one condition as the main prerequisite for causing some mutations in human relations: to destroy the sexual oppositions, as well as the distinction between feminine/masculine writing (Cixous: 2046). Such thread which aims at destroying the artificial power and cultural constructs is also favored by Irigary who militates against the kind of thinking predicated on sexism and disjunctive political discourses: 'the power of slaves' (Irigary: 205) would eventually collapse the binary thought inherent to Western tradition and would undo the logocentric ideology and proclaim woman as the foundation of life, power and energy.
In achieving this, you might necessarily destroy the phallocratic ideology which includes been responsible for the 'symbolic annihilation of women' (Tuchman, 1978). This annihilation serves to verify that the roles of wife, mother and housewife, etc. , are the fate of ladies in a patriarchal society. Women have been socialized into performing these roles by cultural representations that try to make them look like the natural prerogative of women.
Furthermore, within the context of media, men and women have been represented in conformity with the cultural stereotypes that serve to reproduce traditional sex roles. Thus men are usually shown as being dominant, active, aggressive and authoritative, performing a variety of important and varied roles that often requires professionalism, efficiency, rationality and strength to be completed successfully. Women in comparison are usually shown to be subordinate, passive, submissive and marginal, performing a restricted range of secondary and uninteresting tasks confined with their sexuality, their feelings and their domesticity. The concern being voiced here is that this 'symbolic annihilation of women' means that girls, their lives and their interests aren't being accurately reflected. Therefore, to Cixous, the practice of criture fminine is part of an ongoing concern with exclusion, with the transformation of subjectivity, and the struggle for identity.
Moreover ladies in Western thought has represented the Other that can confirm man's identity as Self, as rational thinking being (Beauvoir, 1949). The idea of Self, she writes, can be produced only towards that of not-self, so that the group of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. To constitute himself as Subject, man has constructed woman as Other: she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to him, the topic.
Cixous' voice acquires vehement tonalities militating for women's inscribing in language in a new articulation of feminine drives, libido and sex insinuating into texts as a way of liberation off their repressed sexuality and also as a means to changing this is of history: Let the priests tremble, we're going to suggest to them our sexts" (Cixous: 2048). ‰criture fminine could certainly prove itself extremely prodigious in its infinite and mobile complexity as opposed to masculine writing which is regarded as governed by the phallus, a kind of super-egoized machinery which is synonymous with the history of reasoning separating body from the written text and eventually rejecting female-sexed texts. Because of this policy of exclusion, the real potential of several women goes unfulfilled.
The cause of this policy of exclusion is the most blamed dogma of castration' which Cixous finds accountable for the sublation of the phalologocentric, a self-admiring and self-congratulatory tradition which censors the body and implicitly the speech, Freud's idea of castration anxiety. Irigary suggests the same kind of Freudian studying her mentioning of men's foraging for a social status and recognition: head/man/phallus/symbol of power. Freud argued that castration anxiety stems from a fear of female genitalia, perceived by males at a subconscious level as the result of castration - the feminine body understood subconsciously as "lacking" a phallus. Freud suggested that the mythical story of Medusa, where people use stone when they go through the snake-covered head of the Gorgon, could be read as addressing this psychoanalytic fear.
It follows that Cixous and Irigary argue, following many theorists, that masculine view of women as "lacking" has broader social and political implications; our sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked. To free one means freedom for the other. To create from one's body is to flee reality, "to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls joissance, that can be thought as a almost metaphysical fulfilment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction. . . [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political" (Gilbert: xvii). Cixous' definition of "jouissance" is whatever operates beyond patriarchy, in the realm of the feminine Imaginary which is a crucial concept since it's the source of women's writing and of breaking the Law of the daddy.
The Laugh of the Medusa" and "This Sex Which ISN'T One" also draw on the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan displaying an interest in connecting language, psyche and sexuality. Lacan's theory develops the idea of the introduction of the (male) ego from Pre-Oedipal (non-linguistic) Imaginary to Symbolic via the castration complex which is both a sexual and linguistic model. The Imaginary is fashioned as a feminine space (linked to your body, the mother, the breast). The Symbolic is from the Law of the Father and is a condition of having acquired language and sexual difference.
The current essays seem to reject the feminine Imaginary which is non-signifying or beyond language. To be able to express her opposition, Cixous uses Dora's case of aphonia which is known as to be the real mistress' of the Signifier, replacing the phallus as the privileged Signifier from Lacan's theory. Dora, the misunderstood hysterical woman, like Medusa, could be read as a mythological figure, examples of women who speak their body and threaten patriarchy. They have the capacity to continue to interrogate and eventually to deconstruct regulations of the daddy. Dora's words coming to us in twisted form rebel from the master/author of her story giving access to immense sources of the unconscious, de-censoring body and speech. The Laugh of the Medusa", therefore, revises the Freudian model which defines "woman as lack", once more alluding to the Law of the Father which is ruled by worries of castration, and instead celebrates "woman as excess".
The concern with decapitation or castration should no longer be perceived as a threat at least for females. They always had the capability to depropriate themselves. Woman is a whole that comprises of parts that in themselves are whole: "She actually is indefinitely other in herself" (Irigary: 204). Woman is also regarded as extremely complex and subtle in the geography of her pleasure which would be able to generate a connection between women's bodies and the making of meaning in a continuing play of signifier which would disrupt the symbolic former order of language.
A similar standpoint is manufactured by Cixous who states that this endless body has no end or parts, thus woman libido is 'cosmic' (Cixous: 2051). Woman will not perform the regionalization on herself as masculine sexuality does, her Eros is 'not organized around anybody sun', is not centralized, therefore woman language is not a solid opaque block, but a flow which displays meaning into a multiplicity of signifiers without contours or frontiers; woman is changeable and open, 'a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros' (Cixous: 2051) which lacks repressive patterning and rejects logocentrism, or phallogocentrism. Thus it's advocated that the feminine writing is a means of signifying that calls into question or disrupts the Law of the daddy because it will give access to women native strength and sexuality and un-coax conventions. Along with this rupture there comes a dislocation of language.
In addition, women's writing is also described in conditions of childbirth; a metaphor for the vast resources of feminine creativity. By extension, women's writing is described using imagery such as the mother's voice/body/milk: write in white ink" (Cixous: 2045), therefore a desired return to the pre-Oedipal stage where binaries were absent. Drawing on the sources of the Imaginary, mining its depths, women are urged in both above-mentioned essays to invent another history, one that is beyond narratives of power, inequality and oppression, and which figures itself inside our language and on our bodies.
The upheaval of these transformations is made possible through the process of collapsing the binary oppositions in which woman' has functioned as a poor term, always referring back again to its opposite pair which annihilated its energy and leading to woman to operate within the discourse of man. Therefore a go back to Pre-Oedipal stage is suggested, a go back to a time prior to the creation of oppositional binaries before the imposition of the types of male and female. This is the period associated with the mother's body. In this manner, Cixous' notion of feminine writing can be both feminine and non-essentialist, although this latter assertion is a matter of considerable debate amongst Cixous' critics. Therefore the oppositions do not limit themselves to the original antagony male/female, but extend beyond it to a logic of the main one and a logic of heterogenity and multiplicity' which claim that it is about time the phallocentric tradition be replaced by an infinite richness of individual subjectivities.
The body entering the text disrupts the masculine economy of superimposed linearity: the feminine is the "overflow" of "luminous torrents", a margin of "excess" eroticism and free-play in a roundabout way attributable to the fixed hierarchies of masculinity. Hierarchical structures are shaken and subjective distinctions are encouraged so that criture fminine could emerge as a way of overcoming the limits of Western logocentrism: Almost everything is yet to be written by women about feminity, sexuality, infinite and mobile complexity' (Cixous: 2049). The new feminine language, which yet needs to be invented, would be able to collapse partitions, classes and code sweeping away' syntax. At the end of the phallic era, women are envisaged as having two possible alternatives: they either quit any aspiration and become annihilated, or raise against their submissive and passive role to attain their full incandescence'.
Writing becomes therefore the primary imperative for women. These are asked to 'think differently', to leave behind the psychoanalytic labels and laws of the signifier which would only alter the generative powers of feminine writing: "In one another we won't be lacking" (Cixous: 2056). Therefore writing is the passageway, entrance, exit, and dwelling of the other. For man this non-exclusion is seen as a threat, as intolerable. Feminine writing keeps alive the other, as love is not perceived in economic terms any more.
