Hélène Cixous Quotes

“Reading then is writing, in an endless movement of giving and receiving: each reading reinscribes something of a text; each reading reconstitutes the web it tries to decipher, but by adding another web. One must read in a text not only that which is visible and present but also the nontext of the text, the parentheses, the silences.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“In reality, myth was that which took the place of analysis in former times. … It showed that there was the universe, but one knew that there was also something else. One knew that something stronger than the social existed.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“...for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of “other I’s,” the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I’s, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“All language is metaphoric, and abstract concepts are always used by those in power to insure their supremacy. Everything is language, and the body is always a written, never a “natural” body.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“The poetic is that which in every discourse can open up to the absolute loss of meaning, to the bottomlessness of the sacred, of nonmeaning, of play, to the loss of consciousness from which it awakens with a throw of the dice. Not an absence of meaning, which would one again subordinate poetry to discourse, but a nonmeaning in meaning, an affirmation of sovereignty. The temporal mode of this writing is the instant, not the point of full presence, the instant that slides and eludes between two presences, difference as elusive affirmation of presence.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“The poet must rethink her writing activities in such a way as to désoublier (to unforget), détaire (to unsilence), déterrer (to unbury), se désaveugler (to unbind), se dessourdier (to undeafen), in an endeavor to displace all that has been repressed, incorporated, appropriated. This is the poet’s way of fighting.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine

“That is to say that at the heart of existence is that double negation, “one can not, not.”
― Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine