Hélène Cixous - Quotes

Are you sure you put your sex on properly this morning?
Cixous, Hélène.

I give myself a poet's right, otherwise I would not dare to speak.
Cixous, Hélène.

All I need is to open one of my beloved great books to find a print of the cloven hoof. He is there, black in the blackness or black on black. The hidden figure, incarnation of literature, his delict and delectable. What am I doing here? I am evoking the devil. I follow him everywhere, the indissociable dissociator.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

What to say of the Devil? What has the Devil to say of us. Diabolos. der Teufel. le diable. Tchort. dia does he say dispersion ... and he disperses he is the enemy of the point which claims to posit, to nail down.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

The devil, it is said, speaks evil, one speaks ill of the devil who introduces such so-called evils as separation, as auto-separation, as fendingness, as defending.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

The Devil is the soul of Literature. he is its genius its wit.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Let us not speak ill of evil it's too easy. And let us follow the wise advice of Jacques Derrida in Circumfession and take an interest in the experience of evil.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Mixed with the punishment, or before it or being it, literature makes its entry in the form of Avowal or Confession.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Admit! But how, why? ... Oh this word of admission, this avowel, this morsel of ver-(dict), this wormwood. it is (the porter or) the usher or the useless, vicious key which would make the famous great Tor of the law swing back on its hinges. If we knew how to turn the avowal would we go in? In where?
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

...writing is only interested in the experience of evil.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Make can mean make. make. make and truth can be heard truly as truth. truth. truth...
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

But is telling making?
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

It takes a great deal of effort to make truth in writing so that the truth as one dreams it may have the best chance of being - not approached, not glimpsed - but better dreamed.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Writing leaves nothing it touches intact. Touch it. he says. and the concept is done for. Should one desire to catch the truth by surprise or caress it or draw it close or spit it out. at that instant the writing. a born seductress. leads you down the garden path. Too beautiful to make true. What to do?
Cixous, Hélène. "The Devil Without Confessing Him." in: Paroles Gelées. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2003. (English).

Quickening.They have to be written to the quick, on the now, Live, All these scenes, all these events which only happen once...If you do not grab them in the instant they pass, these pulsations are lost forever.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

People either know or don't know that I have four or five forms of written expression: poetic fiction, chamber theater or theater on a world scale, criticism, essays -- without counting the notebooks I write only to myself and which no one will ever read, where I exercise a different style.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

No one fragment carries the totality of the message, but each text (which is in itself a whole) has a particular urgency, an individual force, a necessity, and yet each text also has a force which comes to it from all the other texts.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

Yet it is the whole that makes sense. That which cannot be met on one path, and which I cannot say in one of my languages, I seek to say through another form of expression.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

Now the fashionable code, these days, holds subjectivity, which is confused (unwittingly or not) with individualism, in suspicion: there is confusion -- and this is a pity for everyone -- between the infinite domain of the human subject, which is, of course, the primary territory of every artist and every creature blessed with the difficult happiness of being alive, and stupid egotistic, restrictive, exclusive behavior which excludes the other.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

Whereas subjectivity is the wealth we have in common and by definition, the subject is the non-closed mix of self/s and others; the human subject who, in the Bible for example, calls himself our like. No I without you ever or more precisely no I's without you's. I is always our like. When I explore I -- I take as object of observation a human sample. There is no true art which does not take as its source or root the universal regions of subjectivity.
Hélène Cixous and Eric Prenowitz (Translator). "Writing Blind" in: Hélène Cixous. Stigmata. 1998.

All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story.
Cixous, Helen. "Albums and legends." in: Eric Prenowitz (Translator). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Routledge. 1997. p. 170-80. (English).

They have always been there. I do not know them. I have never looked at them. I 'know' they are there. Their presence. Roots. Mine? My so strange roots.
Cixous, Helen. "Albums and legends." in: Eric Prenowitz (Translator). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Routledge. 1997. p. 170-80. (English).

Old tattered albums. Respect for the tatterdness. The tatterdness is the secret: portrait of the family memory. Album, memory, cemetery, abandoned. One goes forward, sowing the stones of grief behind oneself. Album of abandonment. Faithful to the abandonment. Respect the abandonment. To the question: how have these frail objects survived, how have they resisted, will they resist the teeth of time? not to respond.
Cixous, Helen. "Albums and legends." in: Eric Prenowitz (Translator). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Routledge. 1997. p. 170-80. (English).

Albums in ruins to be respected. It is memory itself. A place I do not return to. If we leaf through, we do it absent-mindedly, going by the open photos that fade to let me pass. I was born so far from my beginnings. I follow the bed of the blood. My distant blood, my foreigner, what a way we have come...
Cixous, Helen. "Albums and legends." in: Eric Prenowitz (Translator). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Routledge. 1997. p. 170-80. (English).

Tyrants, despots, dictators, capitalism, all that forms the visible political space for us is only the visible and theatrical, photographable projection of the Self-with-against-the-other. I suggest we add the preposition "withagainst" to the English language.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer)."Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

Each time I have written or that I write a so-called "theoretical" text - in quotations because in reality my theoretical texts are also carried off by a poetic rhythm - it has been to respond to a moment of tension in cultural current events, where the ambient state of discourse - academic discourse, for example, or journalistic or political discourse - has pushed me to go back over things, to stop my journey and take the time to emphasize, to display in a didactic manner the thinking movement which for me was indissociable from my poetic movement, but which seemed to me to be entirely misunderstood, forgotten or repressed indeed by the topical scene.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

Never has a theory inspired my poetic texts. It is my poetic text that sits down from time to time on a bench or else at a café table - that's what I am in the process of doing at this moment by the way - to make itself heard in univocal, more immediately audible terms. In other words, it is always a last resort for me. So no, it does not provide an additional ethico-political structure; it is the concession a poet makes in accepting pedagogic responsibility.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

Ultimately I think that no one can write without the aid of God, but what is it, God? without the aid of writing, God-as-Writing.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

There is no decisive "shift" between theatre and fiction, in any case relative to an engagement, something that is on the order of a responsibility of writing.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

Language is a country in which scenes comparable to what is happening, for example, at this moment in France, in the domain of the opening or the closing of borders, are played out in the linguistic and poetic mode.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

Language is a country in which scenes comparable to what is happening, for example, at this moment in France, in the domain of the opening or the closing of borders, are played out in the linguistic and poetic mode.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

I would say that I am so afraid of being afraid that I am not afraid. Now clearly, if I wanted to stay in the domain of austerity and humility, I would say that, like all human beings, I fear seeing the people I love die.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

I am alive, thus I am contracted with terror at the idea that one of those close to me could be killed, could suffer. But I cannot say that it is what one calls fear. All the rest, for me, is anger; I am angry at the spirit of betrayal that dominates individuals and society.
Cixous, Helene and O'Grady, Kathleen (Interviewer). "Guardian of Language: an Interview with Helene Cixous." in: University of Iowa Libraries. March 1996.

What we hope for at the School of Dreams is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe's blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul. The face of "God" is the unveiling, the staggering vision fo the construction we are, the tiny and great lies, the small nontruths we must have incessantly woven to be able to prepare our brothers' dinner and cook for our children. An unveiling that only happens by surprise, by accident, and with a brutality that shatters: under the blow of truth, the eggshell we are breaks. Right in the middle of life's path: the apocalypse; we lose a life.
Cixous, Helene and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Sellers (Translator). Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. 1993.

Have the "self" and "liberty" changed? I asked myself.
Cixous, Hélène. "We Who Are Free, Are We Free?" in: Chris Miller (Translator). Critical Inquiry. Vol. 19, No. 2, 1993, p. 201-219. (English).

Writing: as if I had the urge to go on enjoying, to feel full, to push, to feel the force of my muscles, and my harmony, to be pregnant and at the same time to give myself the joys of parturition, the joys of both the mother and the child. To give birth to myself and to nurse myself, too. Life summons life. Pleasure seeks renewal.
Cixous, Hélène and Deborah Jenson (Editor) and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (Introduction). Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. January 1, 1991. Paperback, 214 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674144376.

In other words, there is more than one way to get past a wall and more than one wall to get past. The wall of sexual difference, because it seems to impermeable, is one to which H.C. keeps returning. What fascinates her is precisely the imagined possibility of getting past that wall.
Cixous, Hélène and Deborah Jenson (Editor) and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (Introduction). Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. January 1, 1991. Paperback, 214 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674144376.

In the beginning I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalitie, not defined and named beings. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off me, kindling me. Lightening-like bursts that came to me. Look! I blazed up and the sign withdrew. Vanished. While I burned on and consumed myself wholly.
Cixous, Hélène and Deborah Jenson (Editor) and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (Introduction). Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. January 1, 1991. Paperback, 214 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674144376.

What had reached me, so powerfully cast from a human body, was Beauty: there was a face with all the mystery prescribed and preserved on it; I was before it, I sensed that there was a beyond, to which I did not have access, an unlimited place ... a desire was seeking its home.
Cixous, Hélène and Deborah Jenson (Editor) and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (Introduction). Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. January 1, 1991. Paperback, 214 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674144376.

Myth ends up having our hides. Logos opens up its great maw and swallows us whole.
Cixous, Hélène and Deborah Jenson (Editor) and Sarah Cornell (Translator) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (Introduction). Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Harvard University Press. January 1, 1991. Paperback, 214 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674144376.

Everything remains to be said on the subject of the Ghost and the ambiguity of the Return, for what renders it intolerable is not so much that it is an announcement of death nor even the proof that death exists, since this Ghost announces and proves nothing more than his return. What is intolerable is that the Ghost erases the limit which exists between two states, neither alive nor dead ; passing through, the dead man returns in the manner of the Repressed. It is his coming back which makes the ghost what he is, just as it is the return of the Repressed that inscribes the repression. In the end, death is never anything more than the disturbance of the limits. The impossible is to die.
Cixous, Hélène. "Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The "uncanny")." in: New Literary History. Vol. 7, No.3, 1976.

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. in: Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4, Cixous, Hélène. p. 875-893, Summer 1976. (English).

Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement.
Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4, Cixous, Hélène. p. 875-893, Summer 1976. (English).

Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?
Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4, Cixous, Hélène. p. 875-893, Summer 1976. (English).

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.
Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4, Cixous, Hélène. p. 875-893, Summer 1976. (English).

All the great theorists of destiny or of human history have reproduced the most commonplace logic of desire, the one that keeps the movement toward the other staged in a patriarchal production, under Man's law.
Cixous,Hélène . "Sorties: Out and Out, Attacks/Ways Out/Forays" in: Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément and Betsy Wing(Translator). The Newly Born Woman. 1975.

When 'The Repressed' of their culture and their society come back, it is an explosive return, which is absolutely shattering, staggering, overturning, with a force never let loose before.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément and Betsy Wing(Translator). The Newly Born Woman. 1975.