after “The Laugh of the Medusa”: Je suis femme, mais ceci n’est qu’une tentative l’écriture féminine (still learning)

When she was young, she wanted to be a writer. She wasn’t yet a woman, and thus had not yet learned of what she was capable, and of what she shouldn’t be capable. When one is young, emotions and outbursts and all of the new knowledge of the world flow freely as growth, sexless and unafraid. When one is an infant, there is nothing more enchanting, more delicious, more upsetting, or more terrifying than that of the present moment; this is the fearlessness of childhood feeling. Her words, as intensities, would do that to her, unleashed like her stories and streams and “a world of searching”.

But it was ironically when she entered the university that she was suddenly labeled a foreigner in her world of words. Not to say she wasn’t included. She could now count herself equally among the Others: female and foreign.Not until many years later did she realise that this was how easy it had been to shut her up! Her youthful a-sex grew out of her body, and she grew into her silence instead. The spaces within her head had always been loud, but now the reverberations cancel one another so that she forgets, so that she-grown-up-into-woman grows into herself, and that writing that had previously inscribed her childhood fantasies now inscribes into itself, disappearing like the folds of kneaded dough that slowly squash themselves with each turn of the baker’s hand.It was in this sense that she lost the ability to write herself. Writing, as in the inscription of mind to her body, such that each was closed in turn (“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time”). She had not the idea, young woman, where it was she should find herself: in mind, in body, in words. She had learned to segregate her many selves along this process of becoming woman, because that is the nature of woman, giver, to be able to be “for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant.” At every instant she gives herself away; she, escapee of herself.But to where would she escape? And if she was constantly running, would she ever find? Or does finding necessitate the specificity of time-space-body-mind-word? (“The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still.”) She wanted to be everywhere, just as she wanted to be everyone, to be that “desire-that-gives”. There is a balance to be had in the giving of herself and finding it in anOther. But perhaps she had given herself away too much already.In being everyone, everywhere, in wanting to love, she could not clearly differentiate anymore, because “she doesn’t ‘know’ what she’s giving, she doesn’t measure it”. She was paralysed in that flight. Her communication fell through to a generalised dis-course (lack of inter-course!). She had lost her voice. She had given herself up to the signifiers speaking through her.(“In one another we will never be lacking.”) This consoled her. But it still gave no indication of direction, or balance, her own becoming, and said nothing of where, and how much “she comes in, comes-in-between herself me and you”. But if we can no longer distinguish between ourselves and the Others, she thought, if there is no outside, no distinction, no sex——then maybe we can simply lay equally, yes, “in one another”. Multiplicitous, such that there is nothing given that is not also received——not in order to, but simply, in between ourselves, me and you. This does not imply a disappearance of either identity but a recovery of the Self in the Other. Giving then outlines a wholly newfound space, still, without the requirements of preposition, the directions from you, toward me or at you. Giving, like words as they are being put to paper: “We’ve come back from always.”

And suddenly, she thought to write everything down…

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[All quotes taken from Hélene Cixous, “Le rire de la méduse”, 1975]

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