The first and most important things that strike me about Hélène Cixous’ theory, and her life, are that both are positioned at a time when the very nature of writing and speech, and the relationship between the two, were being fundamentally questioned by some of the foremost scholars of her/our time. Cixous’ work is directly related to philosophers such as Derrida, who argued that neither speech nor writing can lead us to any fundamental truths, since both are caught between the signifier, the word, and the signified, the meaning.
It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed.
What Cixous was working, writing and theorizing against, then, was a concept as old as the Western world—what Derrida framed as logocentrism, which relied on dichotomies such as mind and matter, light and darkness, presence and absence, and nature and culture. This opposition resonates with me in terms of my own writing, in which—in line with many feminist writers and theoreticians—I hope to overtly and covertly challenge binary oppositions, including self and other, male and female, sentient and nonsentient, dominant and submissive.
Cixous, however, manages to sidestep one of the pitfalls many feminists (and other champions of a non-oppositional way of thinking about relationships between human beings and among and within elements throughout the world) inadvertently stumble into, which is to favor or articulate only one “side” of the story: that of the oppressed or shunned group. Instead, she “ … did not simply privilege the ‘female’ half of an existing binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ … she questioned the very adequacy of an either/or logics to name the complexity of cultural realities .”*
The result, of course, is that some have in turn questioned or shunned Cixous’ ideas. Those who frame the world in terms of binary oppositions might find it confusing or frustrating to interpret or confront thoughts, speech, writing and theories that don’t conform to such dichotomies. In contrast, I argue that Cixous’ approach could serve as a model for all poets. (It’s absolutely a model for my own poetry.)
For what is poetry if not a lifting of the veil of culture, even if only for a few moments—an opportunity to delay categorization, as cognitive theorist Reuven Tsur would argue, in a world that is increasingly (at least in the West) prodding us to rapidly categorize our surroundings, experiences and interactions? As if the experience of the experience weren’t enough—the one we are currently engaged with at any given time—we are seduced into gazing out as if along a rural Kansan horizon at the next experience, and the next, and the next: All of them lined up before us like diary cows waiting to have their teats automatically milked, those heavy udders of potential experiences ready to burst if we don’t tend to them immediately.
It goes without saying that dichotomies are one way to achieve the rapid categorization our culture pushes on us like dime bags full of skank weed. When we can see the world as this or that, that or this—or being the operative word in each case—we don’t have to use much cognitive (and hence emotional) space to relate to that world, its objects or its inhabitants at any given moment. This frees up even more time to rapidly categorize new experiences and move on to the next (and the next), as if living as a sentient being were simply a matter of peeling out at 60 miles per hour from one drive-through window to another.
Furthermore, overturning dichotomies momentarily only to shift the power (in theory more so than in reality) from one group to another or to reassign blame from the latter, shunned group to the former, desirable one—that adhesive rat trap so many well-meaning theorists and activists fall into—is merely a matter of executing awkward acrobatics on a stage, as opposed to pulling down the props, dismantling the stage, removing the exhausted, underpaid aerialists and then taking a seat in the audience to see what’s left occupying the now-empty space.
Creating empty space in place of dualities and other cultural and cognitive assumptions—space the mind can inhabit and move through unhindered and uninhibited—is the job of any good theorist, any good thinker/feeler.
And hence it’s the job of any good poet, or at least any good poem, or at least any poem I personally would actively take the time to seek out and read and sit with and return to. For if poetry won’t help us resist fast, easy categorization of this tremendously complicated world we live in and instead encourage us to slow down, remove our blinders, snap out of our cultural trances and realize all that we can never realize, it’s hard to say what, if anything, will do the trick.
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* From The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by William E. Cain, et al.
For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.
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An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience. — John Cage, from Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. III, 1979.
We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we’re alive to use them. — John Cage
When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage
When I first saw fingers, I said, “I’ll take ten of those.” / Hairs were another matter. / Because I couldnt count ’em, I just took as many as I could carry. / In this way, I gradually put my body together. — Alex Caldiero
I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo
Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible—that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus
Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson
Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me. — Anne Carson
There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson
Trust me. The trotting animal can restore / red hearts to red. — Anne Carson
Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson
So sweet / are we / to know / earth’s calloused / verses — Camille Carter
I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus
Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. — C. P. Cavafy
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. — C. P. Cavafy
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. — C. P. Cavafy
After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa
I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Certa
we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Certa
how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty
What I can see is that saving public land is saving ourselves. — Cody Chamberlain
The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney
Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you “I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon.” — Dan Chelotti
The world seems to be a certain thing / until a moment illuminates the text / so brightly it becomes unreadable. — Allisa Cherry
Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön
The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön
Someday we’ll lie in dirt. / With mouths and mushrooms, the earth / will accept our apology. — Franny Choi
Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. — Hélène Cixous
I tell myself in my more curmudgeonly moods that relationships with animals are preferable to those with people. I keep forgetting that people are in fact animals: complicated, conflicted, gloriously noble and hilarious animals. — Chris Clarke
Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark
To write in your own voice means taking a risk. — Kevin Clark
We carry different authentic voices within ourselves. — Kevin Clark
You have to risk embarrassment to write in a voice that is yours. — Kevin Clark
I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark
I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud
Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork. — Jean Cocteau
a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen
Feels like I’m drifting off / to some great mistake—here, to a nameless / atoll somewhere in the Pacific, / seeking—what? — Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam
i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted. — John Compton
those poems, / like mottled wings, / are my soul. — John Compton
If you haven’t been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. — CAConrad
Poetry has NEVER BEEN MORE ALIVE AND I FILL MY TANK WITH IT EVERY MORNING ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE! — CAConrad
The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad
We need to treat our creative organs like they are vital organs, and we need to protect them. — CA Conrad
Instead of writing a book review, / I write another review of my own / pair of socks. What makes someone else / a perfect judge of my legs? I’m my own / tiny branch in a series of broken / poetry books that I made myself. — Juliet Cook
Poetry is not all that popular; nor is my vagina. — Juliet Cook
Oh and let’s not forget / the heartbreak, / the heartbreak of newly-mown grass, / of any and every awful beauty. — Kay McKenzie Cook
We have homeostatic biological systems. Disease results because of an imbalance of homeostasis. — Dr. Ryan Cooley
how do you come / to be when there are no others, except / science fiction? I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, / is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction — Rio Cortez
In one story I come from a sea god / with the forest as my mother, and in / the other, I have no mother at all. — Rio Cortez
he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox
In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. — Caleb Crain, from “Twilight of the Books”
The third and the last— / he died with / and gave up loving / and lived with her. — Robert Creeley
One eye goes laughing / One eye goes crying / Through the trials / And trying of one life — King Crimson
A California of snow and the surprise / Of illness. I throned myself in the white / Noise of its silence and watched as the world / Fell away. — Cynthia Cruz
An IV drip of consumption, whether or not / I want it. Fashion and excess. / Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warn doom and contagion. — Cynthia Cruz
Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz
There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz
This is not meant to be a koan / Or a fable. / I am telling you everything. / One day they’ll remove / The memory out of me. — Cynthia Cruz
The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate / until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her / paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed / to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one. — Jessica Cuello
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings
Dana Henry Martin 