Paris Review - Hélène Cixous, The Art of Criticism No. 7
A COLLAGE OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF CIXOUS, JACQUES DERRIDA, HER GRANDDAUGHTER SARANYA, AND HER CATS PHILIA AND ALETHEIA. COURTESY OF OLIVIER MOREL AND HÉLÈNE CIXOUS. Hélène Cixous has never called herself a critic. She tends to shrug off, too, the other appellations she might be given: philosopher, theorist, novelist, memoirist, feminist. In her most famous work, the 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” however, she combined aspects of all these personae, exhorting women to harness their libidinal forces, the body’s rhythms and pleasures, simply by writing: “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 … Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.” Today, Cixous sighs at questions about the essay that propelled her to a level of international fame unusual for a young academic, but “Medusa” called into being an idea, l’écriture féminine, that has influenced generation
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