These are two things I created at a writing workshop recently. I think they hang together pretty well.
Dear John:
Unlike a doctor telling a child bad news, with a spoonful of sugar, with chocolate milk concealing the teaste, offering them something they like to drink, there will be none of that now. You will be getting it straight, not slant. No sugar coating is going to make this more palatable, tastier, easier to swallow. I am leaving. Let those words roll around in your mind, on your tongue, and taste the bitterness.
untitled (for now)
You sound like a roken record, skipping over key words nd notes, scratching across the surface and getting stuck at some point, always talking talking talking talking about the same things until something or someone flicks the needles off, shuts off the record player
in disgust.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Monday, November 27, 2017
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton
Barometric Pressures: Cubicleland -- Laura Winton: Download Laura Winton's Chapbook Here Laura Winton is a poet, writer, and performance artist currently based in Minneapolis...
Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing
Ecriture Feminine and Women’s Transgressive Writing
A Manifesto, a poem,
a performance piece, and
an academic article
Three French Theorists walk into a lecture hall..
(Michel Foucault picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.
Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license
Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works
Barthes says L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur! But who is speaking?
Foucault answers What does it matter who is speaking!?
Enter Cixous: Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!”
“Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.
“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”
Prologue: What is writing?
What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't.
An attempted poetic interlude
Stream-of-Consciousness Internal Dialogue
Writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and
know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph?
There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since Zizek's theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write).
Death of the Author: God and Mother, a Parable
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.
In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .
Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.
Gender and Genre
All of this brings me back to Amy Shuman's “Gender and Genre,” about a possible “rejection” or at least radical rethinking of academic work and what it means to be academic, what it means for women who have traditionally done “expressive” writing – short stories and fiction, storytelling, to rethink and remake what constitutes academic writing. Is it necessarily less rigorous? What potential do we have to remake academic writing and not have it devalued, like so many things in culture become once they are associated with women and with women's work? Is rigor always to be male-defined? Must we adhere to traditionally “male” academic standards that we had no role in setting, but must maintain, nonetheless? And if we choose to change those standards or to not uphold and maintain those standards any more, will our own work be less valid? What would the new standards look like?
Right away on the first page of the article she talks “how people negotiate the categories that are imposed upon them” . Many of the restrictions of academic writing predate women’s mass entrance into the academy and represent patriarchal categories of what “counts” as academic writing, what “counts” as academic publishing, etc. I have underlined at least half of the first page in the book because it says so much that I have come to love and agree with.
Theories of gender and genre converge in their exploration of the problems of classification and the disruption of boundaries. Genre is often gendered . . . . Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of conventions.
Shuman continues, talking about the way that “genre classification systems could represent the values of a culture ”, and the way that “genre systems are as much about disputes, maintenance, and shifting of boundaries ”. Thus, it is no wonder that feminists coming to academic would question those kinds of boundaries.
Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptualism question the use of rationality in art, and by extension writing, since in conceptualist art the link between the writing and theorizing and the actual making of art is dissolved. For LeWitt, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” The first four sentences are about the connection (or not) of rationality with art:
1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
2. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
3. Formal art is essentially rational.
4. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
Since women have been traditionally associated with irrationality, it seems that avant-garde art, at least by LeWitt's definition, would inherently be a feminine realm. Cixous carries it farther, saying that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. And hence, her own, if illegitimate (in the eyes of men), genres.
The Liberation of the Imagination:
From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry
In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.
The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.
Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman's idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a "feminine writing" and "women's language." Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter's position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based "prisonhouse of language," as Frederic Jameson says. The very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition. Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies. In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else's vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?
To remake language to find new
creative imagistic practices of language
is to make resistance possible to move us
toward our vision to have visions
never before possible
I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol LeWitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought. I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.
What Do Women Want?
Women want to be avant-garde.
We want to be on the c u t t
i n g
e
d
g
e
of literature, to operate
(within)(outside of) the m a r g i n s.
(That is where we reside anyway.)
We are used to working within that area
and we are
good at it.
We have gotten so used to it that we are not actually considered avant-garde. It comes very naturally to us. This is what Cixous is talking about when she speaks (or writes) of the ecriture feminine. If we are actually paying attention to how we function within society, even at this stage, even in 2016, we have to admit to ourselves that our involvement in culture and politics is still very radical and we operate, when we are being honest with ourselves, oppositionally.
To be a woman writer or artist
is to be truly
and inherently
avant-garde
whether
(you know it or not) (you call yourself that or not).
The Revolutionary Work of Poetry: or, To Destroy Language
"If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution," says John Cage.
My own sentences on revolutionary poetics
1. To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities.
2. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit.
3. As an instrument of "instruction" and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall prey to.
4. The avant garde is the "first wave," the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field.
Ecriture Feminine and the Petit Mort of Writing
One of my interlocutors was talking about dying little deaths, small deaths along the way of writing, this made me think of the petit mort, which is French for orgasm. And as I read Cixous and think about her ecstasy in writing, talking about the flesh at work in a labor of love, I think more and more about the petit mort as a form of women's writing . This is all over Cixous. Her writing is full of ecstatic phrases about what it is to write. She does not fear the death of the author, either actual or metaphorical. Nor does writing, for Cixous, promise immortality. It is an in the moment activity. In “The Author in Truth,” Cixous writes about “striking out for the unknown, to make our way in the dark. To see the world with the fingers: isn't this the act of writing par excellence? ” In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “The text, already the lover who savors the wait and the promise,” she explains. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” . As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh. ” In Cixous' definition of the text, I do not feel the need to repudiate stupid Derrida. I can accept that there is nothing outside of this text, this ecriture feminine in which all things live as long as they live. It is not a hedge against death nor
a headlong dive into death.
It is not about immortality and “what survives.”
Writing is its own joy, its own reward its own pleasure.
It is a petit mort that is meant to be shared.
It is a revolution in language that is meant to liberate.
It is a private moment, expressivist and confessional.
It is everything.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 142-148.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 155-164.
Cage, John. M: Writings '67-72. Hanover, NJ: Wesleyan University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. The Feminist Critique of Language. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre,” Bulletin of the International Colloquim on Genre. University of Strasborg, 4-8 July, 1979. Translated by Avital Ronnell. Speech.
Dworkin, Craig. To destroy language", Textual Practice (18)2, 2004, 185-197.
Lewitt, Sol.“Sentences on Conceptualism,” http://www.altx.com/vizarts// Referenced November 27, 2016.
Shuman, Amy. “Gender and Genre,” Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore. Susan Tower Hollis, Linda Pershing, M Jane Young, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. p. 71-88.
A Manifesto, a poem,
a performance piece, and
an academic article
Three French Theorists walk into a lecture hall..
(Michel Foucault picks things out of the trashbin of literary history.
Voila! Stephen King’s Parking Tickets
Voila! Nietzsche’s Laundry List
Voila! Hemingway’s hunting license
Voila! Shakespeare’s supposed (typed) manuscript of his complete works
Barthes says L’auter est mort! Vive le lecteur! But who is speaking?
Foucault answers What does it matter who is speaking!?
Enter Cixous: Of course it matters, you patriarchal windbags. The author isn’t dead, She’s right here!”
“Why is that men on the left cannot see their own blind spots? You go on all day about the oppressors and post-colonial this and post-structural that but then you deny us our voices when it suits you, when you don’t feel the need for an author.
“Who makes me write, moan, sing, dance? Who gives me the body that is never afraid of fear? Who writes me? . . . When I have finished writing, when we have returned to the air of the song that we are, the body of texts that we will have made for ourselves will become one of its names among so many others. In the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh”
Prologue: What is writing?
What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't.
An attempted poetic interlude
Stream-of-Consciousness Internal Dialogue
Writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and
know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph?
There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since Zizek's theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write).
Death of the Author: God and Mother, a Parable
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the text, the word, is sacred. We cannot seem to get out of the tradition. For all of their post-modernism and the agnosticism that frequently comes with that, Barthes (and Derrida) also come out of a French tradition which was very very Catholic. Thus, I am going to make the story of the death of the author, male and female, into a comparative parable.
In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .
Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. Cixous also talks about the (female) author as continuing “to have what she has eternally, to not lose having, to be pregnant with having is . . . the text, already in the child, in the woman . . . ” The woman is birthing the text, bringing it into being, and like giving birth, some of herself with leave her along with the text. But that text will not necessitate a death for the author. If the reader is a co-creator in meaning, as with Barthes, the author-mother will do so in conjunction with, not opposed to, the reader and the text.
Gender and Genre
All of this brings me back to Amy Shuman's “Gender and Genre,” about a possible “rejection” or at least radical rethinking of academic work and what it means to be academic, what it means for women who have traditionally done “expressive” writing – short stories and fiction, storytelling, to rethink and remake what constitutes academic writing. Is it necessarily less rigorous? What potential do we have to remake academic writing and not have it devalued, like so many things in culture become once they are associated with women and with women's work? Is rigor always to be male-defined? Must we adhere to traditionally “male” academic standards that we had no role in setting, but must maintain, nonetheless? And if we choose to change those standards or to not uphold and maintain those standards any more, will our own work be less valid? What would the new standards look like?
Right away on the first page of the article she talks “how people negotiate the categories that are imposed upon them” . Many of the restrictions of academic writing predate women’s mass entrance into the academy and represent patriarchal categories of what “counts” as academic writing, what “counts” as academic publishing, etc. I have underlined at least half of the first page in the book because it says so much that I have come to love and agree with.
Theories of gender and genre converge in their exploration of the problems of classification and the disruption of boundaries. Genre is often gendered . . . . Gender scholarship questions how cultural categories are reproduced and under what conditions women are complicit with or resistant to the reproduction of conventions.
Shuman continues, talking about the way that “genre classification systems could represent the values of a culture ”, and the way that “genre systems are as much about disputes, maintenance, and shifting of boundaries ”. Thus, it is no wonder that feminists coming to academic would question those kinds of boundaries.
Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptualism question the use of rationality in art, and by extension writing, since in conceptualist art the link between the writing and theorizing and the actual making of art is dissolved. For LeWitt, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” The first four sentences are about the connection (or not) of rationality with art:
1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
2. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
3. Formal art is essentially rational.
4. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
Since women have been traditionally associated with irrationality, it seems that avant-garde art, at least by LeWitt's definition, would inherently be a feminine realm. Cixous carries it farther, saying that she “has no right to write within your logic: nowhere to write from.” Because she is a woman, she has “no fatherland, no legitimate history. No certainties, no property. ” With no “fatherland,” no history or tradition, a woman has no “genre,” she feels an allegiance to. It is all up for grabs for her to make her own history, her own traditions. And hence, her own, if illegitimate (in the eyes of men), genres.
The Liberation of the Imagination:
From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry
In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.
The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.
Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman's idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a "feminine writing" and "women's language." Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter's position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based "prisonhouse of language," as Frederic Jameson says. The very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition. Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies. In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else's vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?
To remake language to find new
creative imagistic practices of language
is to make resistance possible to move us
toward our vision to have visions
never before possible
I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways prescribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol LeWitt says, “rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts.” The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we've always thought. I'm not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.
What Do Women Want?
Women want to be avant-garde.
We want to be on the c u t t
i n g
e
d
g
e
of literature, to operate
(within)(outside of) the m a r g i n s.
(That is where we reside anyway.)
We are used to working within that area
and we are
good at it.
We have gotten so used to it that we are not actually considered avant-garde. It comes very naturally to us. This is what Cixous is talking about when she speaks (or writes) of the ecriture feminine. If we are actually paying attention to how we function within society, even at this stage, even in 2016, we have to admit to ourselves that our involvement in culture and politics is still very radical and we operate, when we are being honest with ourselves, oppositionally.
To be a woman writer or artist
is to be truly
and inherently
avant-garde
whether
(you know it or not) (you call yourself that or not).
The Revolutionary Work of Poetry: or, To Destroy Language
"If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution," says John Cage.
My own sentences on revolutionary poetics
1. To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities.
2. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit.
3. As an instrument of "instruction" and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall prey to.
4. The avant garde is the "first wave," the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field.
Ecriture Feminine and the Petit Mort of Writing
One of my interlocutors was talking about dying little deaths, small deaths along the way of writing, this made me think of the petit mort, which is French for orgasm. And as I read Cixous and think about her ecstasy in writing, talking about the flesh at work in a labor of love, I think more and more about the petit mort as a form of women's writing . This is all over Cixous. Her writing is full of ecstatic phrases about what it is to write. She does not fear the death of the author, either actual or metaphorical. Nor does writing, for Cixous, promise immortality. It is an in the moment activity. In “The Author in Truth,” Cixous writes about “striking out for the unknown, to make our way in the dark. To see the world with the fingers: isn't this the act of writing par excellence? ” In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “The text, already the lover who savors the wait and the promise,” she explains. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” . As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh. ” In Cixous' definition of the text, I do not feel the need to repudiate stupid Derrida. I can accept that there is nothing outside of this text, this ecriture feminine in which all things live as long as they live. It is not a hedge against death nor
a headlong dive into death.
It is not about immortality and “what survives.”
Writing is its own joy, its own reward its own pleasure.
It is a petit mort that is meant to be shared.
It is a revolution in language that is meant to liberate.
It is a private moment, expressivist and confessional.
It is everything.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 142-148.
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang Press, 1977. p. 155-164.
Cage, John. M: Writings '67-72. Hanover, NJ: Wesleyan University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. The Feminist Critique of Language. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
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