The Laugh of the Medusa Author(s): Hlne Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen Reviewed work(s): Source:

Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 875-893 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239 . Accessed: 14/02/2013 15:42
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VIEWPOINT

The Laugh of the Medusa

Helene Cixous Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen

I shall speak about women's writing:about whatit willdo. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violentlyas from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, withthe same fatalgoal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The futuremustno longer be determinedbythe past. I do not deny that the effectsof the past are stillwith us. But I refuse to strengthen the them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability equivalent of destiny,to confuse the biological and the cultural.Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are takingshape in an area just on the point of being discovered,theynecessarilybear the mark of our time-a time the during whichthe new breaksaway fromthe old, and, more precisely, de l'ancien).Thus, as thereare no (feminine)new fromthe old (la nouvelle grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy;and to foresee the unforeseeable,to project. I writethis as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitablestruggleagainst conventionalman; and of a universalwoman subjectwho mustbringwomen to theirsenses
This is a revised version of "Le Rire de la Meduse," which appeared in L'Arc (1975), pp. 39-54.
in Culture and Society 1976, vol. 1, no. 4] [Signs:Journalof Women of Chicago. All rightsreserved. ? 1976 by The University

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and to theirmeaning in history. it must be said thatin spite of But first the enormityof the repression that has kept them in the "dark"-that dark which people have been tryingto make them accept as their attribute-there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical I will say. But what strikesme is the woman. What theyhave in common infinite richnessof theirindividual constitutions: you can't talk about a female sexuality,uniform,homogeneous, classifiableinto codes-any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's imaginaryis inexhaustible,like music, painting,writing:their streamof phantasms is incredible. I have been amazed more than once by a descriptiona woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretlyhaunting since early childhood. A world of searching,the elaboration of a knowledge, withthe bodily functions, a on the basis of a systematic experimentation This and of her erotogeneity. practice, passionate precise interrogation in particularas concerns masturbarich and inventive, extraordinarily tion,is prolonged or accompanied by a productionof forms,a veritable each stage of rapture inscribinga resonant vision, a aestheticactivity, composition,somethingbeautiful.Beauty will no longer be forbidden. I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns,might exclaim: I, too, overflow;mydesires have inventednew desires,mybody knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrentsthat I could burst-burst with forms much more beautifulthan those which are put up in framesand sold for a stinking fortune.And I, too, said nothing,showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid,and I swallowedmyshame and myfear. I said to myself:You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods,these outbursts? woman who, immersedas she was in her Where is the ebullient,infinite in the dark about herself,led into self-disdain naivete,kept by the great hasn't been ashamed of her arm of parental-conjugalphallocentrism, strength?Who, surprised and horrifiedby the fantastictumultof her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjustednormal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herselfof being a monster? inside her (to sing,to write,to dare Who, feelinga funnydesire stirring to speak, in short,to bring out somethingnew), hasn't thoughtshe was sick?Well, her shamefulsicknessis thatshe resistsdeath, thatshe makes trouble. is foryou,you are foryou; And whydon't you write?Write!Writing written. I haven't take it. know is (And whyI whyyou your body yours, Because writingis at once didn't writebefore the age of twenty-seven.) too high,too great foryou, it'sreservedforthe great-that is, for"great a little, but in secret.And it men"; and it's"silly."Besides, you've written

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wasn't good, because it was in secret,and because you punished yourself for writing,because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, as when we would masturbatein secret,not to go further, but irresistibly, to And to attenuatethe tensiona bit, take the off. then just enough edge as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven;or to forget,to bury it until the next time. Write,let no one hold you back, let nothingstop you: not man; not the imbeciliccapitalist machinery,in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayersof imperativeshanded down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women-female-sexed texts.That kind scares them. I writewoman: woman mustwritewoman. And man, man. So only an oblique considerationwillbe found here of man; it's up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once men have opened theireyes and seen themselvesclearly.1 Now women returnfromafar, fromalways: from"without,"from the heath where witchesare kept alive; frombelow, frombeyond "culture"; fromtheirchildhood which men have been trying desperatelyto make them forget,condemning it to "eternal rest." The littlegirls and their"ill-mannered"bodies immured,well-preserved, intactunto themin the But mirror. are ever selves, they Frigidified. seethingunderneath! ittakes-there's no end to it-for the sex cops to bar their What an effort return.Such a displayof forceson both sides thatthe strugthreatening has for centuries been immobilizedin the trembling gle equilibriumof a deadlock. Here theyare, returning, arrivingover and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they've been given a deadly brainwashing.You can incarceratethem,slow themdown, get away with the old Apartheid routine,but fora timeonly. As soon as theybegin to speak, at the same timeas they'retaughttheirname, theycan be taught that theirterritory is black: because you are Africa,you are black. Your
1. Men stillhave everything to say about theirsexuality, and everything to write.For what theyhave said so far,for the most part,stems fromthe opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasizedobligatoryvirility meant to invade, to colto penetrateand to onize, and the consequential phantasmof woman as a "dark continent" "pacify." (We know what "pacify" means in terms of scotomizingthe other and misrecognizingthe self.) Conquering her, they'vemade haste to depart fromher borders,to out of himself and into her whom get out of sight,out of body. The way man has of getting he takes not for the other but for his own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily One can understand how man, confusinghimselfwithhis penis and rushingin territory. forthe attack,mightfeel resentment and fearof being "taken" bythe woman, of being lost in her, absorbed, or alone.

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in the dark, continentis dark. Dark is dangerous. You can't see anything you're afraid. Don't move, you mightfall. Most of all, don't go into the forest.And so we have internalizedthis horror of the dark. Men have committed the greatestcrimeagainstwomen. Insidiously, led them have to hate women,to be theirown enemies,to they violently, mobilizetheirimmensestrength to be the executants againstthemselves, A of theirvirileneeds. They have made for women an antinarcissism! narcissismwhich loves itselfonly to be loved for what women haven't got! They have constructedthe infamous logic of antilove. We the precocious, we the repressed of culture,our lovelymouths the gagged withpollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies-we are black and we are beautiful. and that which is ours breaks loose fromus without We're stormy, our fearingany debilitation.Our glances, our smiles,are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flowsand we extend ourselves withoutever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts,our signs,our writing;and we're not afraid of lacking. What happiness forus who are omitted,brushed aside at the scene of inheritances;we inspireourselves and we expire withoutrunningout of breath,we are everywhere! From now on, who, if we say so, can say no to us? We've come back fromalways. It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her-by loving her for gettingby, for gettingbeyond the Old withoutdelay,by going out ahead of whatthe New Woman willbe, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrationsmusically,in order to be more than her self. I say thatwe must,for,witha fewrare exceptions,therehas not yet been any writingthat inscribesfemininity; exceptions so rare, in fact, that, after plowing through literatureacross languages, cultures, and ages,2 one can only be startledat this vain scouting mission. It is well known that the number of women writers(while having increased very slightlyfrom the nineteenthcenturyon) has always been ridiculously small. This is a useless and deceptive fact unless from their species of female writerswe do not firstdeduct the immense majority whose and whicheither frommale writing, workmanshipis in no way different of women (as obscures women or reproduces the classic representations sensitive-intuitive-dreamy, etc.)3
2. I am speaking here only of the place "reserved" forwomen by the Westernworld. 3. Which works,then, mightbe called feminine?I'll just point out some examples: femininein their one would have to give themfullreadings to bringout whatis pervasively in Which I shall do elsewhere. In France (have you noted our infinite poverty significance. this field?-the Anglo-Saxon countries have shown resources of distinctly greaterconsecentury-and it'snot much-the quence), leafingthroughwhat'scome out of the twentieth

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Let me inserthere a parenthetical remark.I mean itwhen I speak of male writing.I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing;that, until now, far more extensivelyand repressively than is ever suspected or admitted,writinghas been run by a libidinal and cultural-hence political,typically masculine-economy; thatthisis a locus where the repressionof women has been perpetuated,over and since over, more or less consciously,and in a manner that'sfrightening charms of fiction;that it's often hidden or adorned withthe mystifying thislocus has grosslyexaggerated all the signsof sexual opposition (and not sexual difference),where woman has never herturn to speak-this is precisely being all the more serious and unpardonable in thatwriting thevery a the that can serve as ofchange, possibility springboardfor space of subversive thought,the precursorymovement of a transformation social and cultural structures. of writingis confounded withthe history Nearly the entire history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentrictradition.It is indeed that same self-admiring,self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism. With some exceptions, for there have been failures-and if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be writing(I-woman, escapee)-in that enormous machine that has been operating and turningout its "truth" forcenturies.There have been poets who would go to any lengthsto slip somethingby at odds with tradition-men capable of loving love and hence capable of loving others and of wantingthem,of imaginingthe woman who would hold out againstoppression and constitute herselfas a superb, equal, hence "impossible" subject, untenable in a real social framework.Such a woman the poet could desire only by breaking the codes thatnegate her. Her appearance would necessarily bringon, ifnot revolution-for the bastionwas supposed to be immutable-at least harrowingexplosions. At timesit is in the fissurecaused by an earthquake, through that radical mutationof thingsbrought on by a material upheaval when everystructure is fora momentthrownoffbalance and an ephemeral wildnesssweeps order away,thatthe poet slips somethingby, fora briefspan, of woman. Thus did Kleistexpend himselfin his yearnmaternaldaughters,mother-sisters, ing forthe existenceof sister-lovers, who never hung theirheads in shame. Once the palace of magistrates is restored,it's time to pay: immediatebloody death to the uncontrollable elements. But only the poets-not the novelists,allies of representationalism. Because poetryinvolves gaining strengththroughthe unconscious and
of femininity thatI have seen were by Colette,MargueriteDuras, ... and only inscriptions Jean Genet.

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is the place where because the unconscious,thatother limitless country, the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies. She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writingwhich,when the moment of her liberationhas come, will allow her to carryout the indispensable ruptures and transformaat two levels that cannot be separated. tions in her history, first her self,woman will returnto the body a) Individually.By writing whichhas been more than confiscatedfromher, whichhas been turned into the uncanny strangeron display-the ailing or dead figure,which so often turnsout to be the nastycompanion, the cause and location of inhibitions.Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars-black or gold -nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game. To write.An act which will not only "realize" the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanlybeing, givingher access it willgive her back her goods, her pleasures, her to her nativestrength; whichhave been kept under seal; organs, her immensebodilyterritories it will tear her away fromthe superegoized structurein which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty(guiltyof everything, guiltyat every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid,for being "too hot"; for not being both at once; for being too and not enough; for having children and for not having any; motherly for nursing and for not nursing ... )-tear her away by means of this this emancipation of the research, thisjob of analysisand illumination, marvelous text of her self that she must urgentlylearn to speak. A woman withouta body, dumb, blind, can't possiblybe a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servantof the militant male, his shadow. We the live one frombreathing. mustkillthe falsewoman who is preventing Inscribe the breath of the whole woman. the occasion to b) An act thatwillalso be marked by woman'sseizing speak, hence her shatteringentryinto history,which has always been To writeand thus to forge for herselfthe anbased on hersuppression. for her own tilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, in every politicalprocess. right,in everysymbolicsystem, and oral It is time for women to startscoringtheir featsin written language. Every woman has known the tormentof gettingup to speak. Her heart racing,at timesentirely lost forwords, ground and language slipit is fora how daring a feat,how great a transgression ping away-that's woman to speak-even just open her mouth-in public. A double disher words fallalmostalways upon the tress,foreven if she transgresses,

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deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine. It is by writing,from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women willconfirmwomen in a place other than thatwhich is reserved in and by the symbolic,that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem. Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering(ifshe hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throwsher trembling body forshe lets of all her she of into her ward; flies; voice, and go herself, passes it'swithher body thatshe vitally the of her supports "logic" speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking;she signifiesit with her body. In a certainway she inscribes what she's saying,because she doesn't deny her drives the intractableand impassioned part theyhave in speaking. Her speech, even when "theoretical"or political,is never simple or linear or "objectified,"generalized: she draws her storyinto history. There is not that scission,that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text,bound as he is by his antiquated relation-servile, calculating-to mastery.From which proceeds the niggardlylip servicewhichengages only the tiniestpart of the body, plus the mask. In women's speech, as in their writing,that element which never stops resonating,which,once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retainsthe power of moving us-that element is the song: first music fromthe first voice of love whichis alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationshipwith the voice? Because no woman stockpilesas manydefensesforcounteringthe drivesas does a man. You don't build walls around yourself,you don't forego has generally pleasure as "wisely" as he. Even if phallic mystification contaminatedgood relationships, a woman is never farfrom"mother"(I mean outside her role functions: the "mother" as nonname and as source of goods). There is alwayswithinher at least a littleof that good mother'smilk. She writesin white ink. Womanfor women.--There always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other-in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix,cradler; herselfgiver as her motherand child; she is her own sister-daughter. You mightobject,"What about she who is the hysterical will be changed offspringof a bad mother?"Everything once woman gives woman to the other woman. There is hidden and alwaysready in woman the source; the locus forthe other. The mother, that the best of herself too, is a metaphor. It is necessaryand sufficient be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and returnin love the body thatwas "born" to her. Touch me, caress me,

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you the livingno-name, give me my self as myself.The relation to the "mother,"in termsofintensepleasure and violence,is curtailedno more than the relationto childhood (the child thatshe was, thatshe is, thatshe makes, remakes,undoes, there at the point where,the same, she others herself). Text: my body-shot through with streams of song; I don't mean the overbearing,clutchy"mother"but, rather,what touches you, the equivoice that affectsyou, fillsyour breast withan urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythmthat laughs you; the intimaterecipientwho makes all metaphorspossible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourselfand urges you to inscribein language your woman's style.In women thereis alwaysmore all right, or less of the motherwho makes everything who nourishes,and who stands up against separation; a forcethatwillnot be cut offbut will knock the wind out of the codes. We willrethinkwomankindbeginning witheveryformand every period of her body. The Americans remind us, "We are all Lesbians"; thatis, don't denigratewoman, don't make of her what men have made of you. Because the "economy" of her drives is prodigious,she cannot fail, in seizing the occasion to speak, to transform all and indirectly directly will of based on masculine thrift. Her libido systems exchange produce far more radical effectsof politicaland social change than some might like to think. Because she arrives,vibrant, over and again, we are at thebeginning or rather of a process of becoming in which several of a new history, woman alhistoriesintersectwith one another. As subject for history, in Woman the un-thinks4 several occurs ways simultaneously places. and that channels forces, homogenizes unifying,regulating history In woman, personal hisinto a single battlefield. herdingcontradictions toryblends togetherwith the historyof all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integralpart of all liberations. interaction.She She must be farsighted, not limitedto a blow-by-blow foreseesthather liberationwilldo more than modifypower relationsor toss the ball over to the other camp; she will bring about a mutationin human relations, in thought, in all praxis: hers is not simply a class struggle,which she carries forwardinto a much vaster movement.Not that in order to be a woman-in-struggle(s) you have to leave the class to or but have you splititopen, spread itout, push struggle repudiate it; it forward,fillit withthe fundamentalstruggleso as to preventthe class struggle,or any other strugglefor the liberationof a class or people, from operating as a form of repression, pretext for postponing the inevitable,the staggeringalterationin power relationsand in the pro4. "De-pense,"a neologism formed on the verb penser,hence "unthinks,"but also "spends" (fromdepenser) (translator'snote).

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duction of individualities.This alteration is already upon us-in the United States, for example, where millionsof nightcrawlersare in the process of undermining the familyand disintegratingthe whole of American sociality. The new history is coming; it's not a dream, though it does extend men's beyond imagination,and for good reason. It's going to deprive themof theirconceptual orthopedics,beginningwiththe destruction of theirenticementmachine. It is impossibleto define a femininepracticeof writing, and thisis an that will for this can never be remain, theorized, impossibility practice enclosed, coded-which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentricsystem;it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to domination.It willbe conceived of only by subphilosophico-theoretical are who of breakers automatisms,by peripheral figures that no jects can ever authority subjugate. Hence the necessityto affirm the flourishesof this writing, to give formto itsmovement, itsnear and distantbyways. Bear in mind to begin with(1) thatsexual opposition,whichhas alwaysworked forman's profit to the point of reducing writing, too, to his laws, is only a historico-culturallimit.There is, therewillbe more and more rapidlypervasivenow, a fictionthat produces irreducible effects.offemininity. (2) That it is that most and writersof both sexes readers, critics, through ignorance hesitateto admit or deny outrightthe possibility or the pertinenceof a distinctionbetween feminineand masculine writing.It will usually be to the said, thus disposing of sexual difference:either that all writing, extentthatit materializes, is feminine;or, inversely-but it comes to the same thing-that the act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writescuts herselfout a paper penis); or that writingis bisexual, hence neuter, which again does away with differentiation.To admit that writingis precisely working (in) the inbetween, inspectingthe process of the same and of the other without whichnothingcan live,undoing the workof death-to admit thisis first to want the two,as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixedin sequences of struggleand expulsion or some other formof death but infinitely dynamizedbyan incessantprocess of exchange from one subject to another. A process of differentsubjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only fromthe livingboundaries of the other: a multipleand inexhaustiblecourse withmillionsof encountersand transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between,fromwhich woman takes her forms(and man, in his turn; but that's his other history). In saying "bisexual, hence neuter," I am referringto the classic which,squashed under the emblem of castraconception of bisexuality,

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of a "total"being (though composed tion fearand along withthe fantasy of two halves), would do away with the differenceexperienced as an operation incurringloss, as the mark of dreaded sectility. whichwould conjure To thisself-effacing, bisexuality, merger-type written "bisexual writer who his castration here, (the sign: away puts up come and see," when the odds are good that it's neither one nor the on whicheverysubject not enclosed other), I oppose the other bisexuality has founded in the false theater of phallocentricrepresentationalism his/hererotic universe. Bisexuality: that is, each one's location in self accordand insistent en soi) of the presence-variously manifest (reperage either both nonexclusion female-of male or sexes, ing to each person, multior of one sex, and, fromthis"self-permission," of the difference of desire, over all parts of my of the inscription plicationof the effects body and the other body. Now it happens that at present,for historico-cultural reasons, it is vatic fromthis women who are opening up to and benefiting bisexuality which doesn't annul differencesbut stirsthem up, pursues them, increases theirnumber. In a certainway,"woman is bisexual"; man-it's a in secretto no one-being poised to keep glorious phallicmonosexuality the primacyof the phallus and of bringingit view. By virtueof affirming into play, phallocraticideology has claimed more than one victim.As a woman, I've been clouded over by the great shadow of the scepter and been told: idolize it, that which you cannot brandish. But at the same time,man has been handed thatgrotesque and scarcelyenviable destiny (just imagine) of being reduced to a single idol with clay balls. And consumed, as Freud and his followersnote, by a fear of being a woman! fromwoman,to repressfemininity was constituted For, if psychoanalysis (and not so successfula repressionat that-men have made it clear), its account of masculine sexualityis now hardly refutable; as with all the "human" sciences,it reproduces the masculineview,of whichit is one of the effects. Here we encounter the inevitableman-with-rock, standingerect in his old Freudian realm, in the way that, to take the figureback to the is conceptualizingit "anew," Lacan preservesit in point where linguistics lack! Their the sanctuaryof the phallos (0) "sheltered" fromcastration's know it the sowers of it holds disorder, exists, "symbolic" power-we, in their our lives to are in no well. But we too way deposit obliged only of the subject in termsof a banks of lack, to consider the constitution drama manglingly restaged,to reinstateagain and again the religionof the father.Because we don't want that. We don't fawn around the supreme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the ". . . And yes," negative.The feminine(as the poets suspected) affirms: off beyond any book and toward the new says Molly, carryingUlysses writing;"I said yes, I will Yes." The Dark Continent dark nor unexplorable.-Itis still unexis neither

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plored onlybecause we've been made to believe thatitwas too dark to be explorable. And because theywantto make us believe thatwhatinterests withits monumentsto Lack. And we believed. us is the whitecontinent, riveted us between two betweenthe Medusa and They myths: horrifying the abyss. That would be enough to set half the world laughing,except thatit'sstillgoing on. For the phallologocentric is withus, and sublation5 it's militant,regeneratingthe old patterns,anchored in the dogma of castration.They haven't changed a thing:they'vetheorizedtheirdesire for reality!Let the prieststremble,we're going to show them our sexts! Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discoveringthat women aren't men, or that the mother doesn't have one. But isn't this fear convenient for them? Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst,in truth, that women aren't castrated,that theyhave only to stop listeningto the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change itsmeaning? You look have to at the Medusa on only straight to see her. And she's not She's and beautiful she's deadly. laughing. Men say that there are two unrepresentablethings:death and the femininesex. That's because theyneed femininity to be associated with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves!They need to be afraid of us. Look at the tremblingPerseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes. What lovelybacks! Not another minute to lose. Let's get out of here. Let's hurry:the continentis not impenetrably dark. I've been there often. I was overjoyed one day to run intoJean Genet. It was in Pompes funebres.6 He had come there led by his Jean. There are some men (all too few) who aren't afraid of femininity. Almost everything is yetto be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality,that is, its infiniteand mobile complexity,about theireroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certainminiscule-immense area of theirbodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive,about trips, crossings, trudges,abrupt and gradual awakena discoveries of zone at one time timorous and soon to be forthings, A woman's with its thousand and one thresholds of right. body, and ardor-once, by smashing yokes censors, she lets it articulatethe of that run profusion meanings throughit in everydirection-will make the old single-groovedmothertongue reverberatewith more than one language. We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefullytaught to ignore them,to strikethemwiththatstupid sexual modesty;we've been made victims of the old fool's game: each one willlove the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindlyyield to them? Why so few
5. Standard English term for the Hegelian Aufhebung, the French la releve. 6. Jean Genet, Pompesfunebres (Paris, 1948), p. 185.

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texts?Because so few women have as yetwon back theirbody. Women must writethroughtheirbodies, theymust inventthe impregnablelanclasses, and rhetorics, guage that will wreck partitions, regulationsand codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, includingthe one thatlaughs at the veryidea of prothe word "silence," the one that,aiming for the impossible, nouncing short the word "impossible"and writesit as "the end." before stops Such is the strength of women that,sweepingaway syntax, breaking thatfamous thread (just a tinylittle thread,theysay) whichacts formen as a surrogate umbilical cord, assuring them-otherwise they couldn't come-that the old lady is always right behind them, watching them make phallus, women will go rightup to the impossible. When the "repressed" of theirculture and theirsocietyreturns, it's an explosive,utterly with a force never destructive, return, yet staggering unleashed and equal to the most forbiddingof suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women willhave been eitherannihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence. Muffledthroughouttheirhistory, theyhave lived in dreams, in bodies in in (though muted), silences, aphonic revolts. And with such force in their fragility; a vulnerability, a fragility, to their they haven't subliequal Fortunately, incomparable intensity. their saved their mated; they've skin, energy. They haven't worked at the of futures.They have furiously lives without liquidating impasse inhabitedthese sumptuous bodies: admirablehysterics who made Freud succumb to manyvoluptuous momentsimpossibleto confess,bombarding his Mosaic statuewiththeircarnal and passionatebody words,haunting him with their inaudible and thunderingdenunciations,dazzling, more than naked underneath the seven veils of modesty.Those who, witha singleword of the body,have inscribedthe vertiginous immensity of a history whichis sprung like an arrow fromthe whole history of men and from biblico-capitalist are the the women, society, supplicants of the new after whom no who come as forebears of women, yesterday, will the same. relation ever be You, Dora, you the inintersubjective are the true of the Signifier. the "mistress" domitable, poetic body, you Before long your efficacity will be seen at work when your speech is no longer suppressed, its point turned in against your breast, but written out over against the other. In body.-More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation,women are body. More body, hence more writing. For a long time it has been in body that women have responded to to the persecution,to the familial-conjugal enterpriseof domestication, at have turned their them. Those who repeated attempts castrating are either dead times seven before not times 10,000 tongues speaking

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Signs

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fromit or more familiarwiththeirtongues and theirmouths than anyone else. Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law: an explosion henceforth possible and ineluctable; let it be done, right now, in language. Let us not be trapped by an analysisstillencumbered withthe old automatisms.It's not to be feared that language conceals an invincible adversary,because it's the language of men and their grammar. We mustn'tleave them a single place that's any more theirsalone than we are. If woman has always functioned"within"the discourse of man, a signifierthat has always referredback to the opposite signifierwhich annihilatesits specificenergyand diminishesor stifles its verydifferent it is time her to this to for dislocate sounds, "within," explode it,turn it and seize to make it it; around, hers, containingit,takingit in her own with that her mouth,biting veryown teethto inventforherselfa tongue And to inside of. you'll see withwhat ease she will spring get language forth from that "within"-the "within" where once she so drowsily crouched-to overflowat the lips she will cover the foam. Nor is the point to appropriate their instruments, their concepts, theirplaces, or to begrudge themtheirpositionof mastery. Justbecause there's a risk of identification doesn't mean that we'll succumb. Let's leave it to the worriers, to masculine anxietyand its obsession withhow to dominate the way thingswork-knowing "how it works" in order to "make it work." For us the point is not to take possession in order to internalizeor manipulate, but ratherto dash throughand to "fly."7 We Flyingis woman's gesture-flyingin language and makingit fly. have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centurieswe've been able to possess anythingonly by flying; we've lived in when desired, narrowpassageways,hidden flight, stealingaway,finding, crossovers.It's no accident thatvolerhas a double meaning,thatit plays on each of themand thus throwsoffthe agentsof sense. It's no accident: women take after birds and robbersjust as robbers take afterwomen and birds. They (illes)8 go by,flythe coop, take pleasure injumbling the order of space, in disorientingit, in changing around the furniture, structures, dislocatingthingsand values,breakingthemall up, emptying and turningproprietyupside down. What woman hasn't flown/stolen? Who hasn't felt, dreamt, performedthe gesturethatjams sociality? Who hasn'tcrumbled,held up to ridicule,the bar of separation? Who hasn't inscribedwithher body the differential, punctured the systemof couples and opposition? Who, by
7. Also, "to steal." Both meanings of the verb volerare played on, as the text itself explains in the followingparagraph (translator'snote). 8. Illes is a fusion of the masculine pronoun ils, which refers back to birds and robbers,withthe femininepronoun elles,which refersto women (translator'snote).

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hasn'toverthrown some act of transgression, successiveness, connection, the wall of circumfusion? A femininetext cannot fail to be more than subversive.It is volcanic; as it is writtenit brings about an upheaval of the old property there'sno otherway.There's no crust,carrierof masculineinvestments; room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she,it's in order to smash of institutions, to blow up the law, to shatterthe framework everything, to break up the "truth"withlaughter. she cannot failto make For once she blazes hertrailin the symbolic, of it the chaosmos of the "personal"-in her pronouns, her nouns, and And for good reason. There will have been the her clique of referents. of long history gynocide. This is known by the colonized peoples of yesterday,the workers, the nations, the species off whose backs the of of men has made itsgold; thosewho have knownthe ignominy history those derive it obstinate future desire for from an grandeur; persecution who are locked up know betterthan theirjailers the taste of free air. women today know (how to do and want) what Thanks to theirhistory, men willbe able to conceive of only much later. I say woman overturns the "personal," for if, by means of laws, lies, blackmail,and marriage, her rightto herselfhas been extortedat the same timeas her name, she has been able, through the very movementof mortalalienation, to see more closely the inanityof "propriety,"the reductivestinginessof the On the masculine-conjugalsubjectiveeconomy,whichshe doubly resists. as that constituted herself hand she has one necessarily "person" capable But secretly, of losing a part of herself without losing her integrity. and she multiplies,for,on the other silently, deep down inside, grows far and about the relationbetween more about living hand, she knows and the economy of the drives the management of the ego than any man. Unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles,his connected with his pouches of value, his cap, crown, and everything head, woman couldn't care less about the fearof decapitation(or castration), adventuring, without the masculine temerity,into anonymity, which she can merge withwithoutannihilatingherself:because she's a giver. I shall have a greatdeal to say about the whole deceptive problematic of the gift. Woman is obviouslynot thatwoman Nietzschedreamed of who gives only in order to.9 Who could ever think of the gift as a Who else but man, preciselythe one who would like to gift-that-takes? take everything?
9. Reread Derrida's text,"Le Stylede la femme,"in Nietzsche (Paris: Union aujourd'hui Generale d'Editions, Coll. 10/18), where the philosopher can be seen operating an of all philosophyin itssystematic reducingof woman to the place of seduction: Aufhebung she appears as the one who is taken for; the bait in person,all veils unfurled,the one who doesn't give but who gives only in order to (take).

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If thereis a "propriety of woman," it is paradoxicallyher capacityto body withoutend, withoutappendage, without depropriate unselfishly: If she is a whole, it's a whole composed of parts that principal "parts." are wholes, not simple partialobjects but a moving,limitlessly changing traversedby Eros, an immenseastralspace ensemble,a cosmos tirelessly not organized around any one sun that's any more of a star than the others. This doesn't mean that she's an undifferentiated magma, but that she doesn't lord it over her body or her desire. Though masculine sexualitygravitatesaround the penis, engendering thatcentralizedbody (in political anatomy) under the dictatorshipof its parts,woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple and which is inscribedonly withinboundaries. Her libido head/genitals is cosmic,just as her unconscious is worldwide. Her writingcan only keep going, withoutever inscribingor discerningcontours, daring to make these vertiginous crossingsof the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him,her,them,whom she inhabitslong enough to look at from the point closest to their unconscious from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated through and through with these brief, She alone embraces, she goes and passes into infinity. identificatory where she, the outcast,has never dares and wishesto know fromwithin, ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language.She lets the other language speak-the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neitherenclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. When id is ambiguouslyuttered-the wonder of being several-she doesn't defend herselfagainst these unknown women whom she's surprised at becomI am spacious, ing, but derives pleasure from this giftof alterability. singing flesh,on which is graftedno one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. Write! and your self-seeking text will know itselfbetterthan flesh and blood, rising,insurrectionary withsonorous, dough kneading itself, a livelycombinationof flying colors, leaves, and perfumed ingredients, riversplunginginto the sea we feed. "Ah, there'sher sea," he willsay as he holds out to me a basin full of water from the littlephallic mother from whom he's inseparable. But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fishor not, opaque or transparent,red or black, high or smooth,narrow or bankless; and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seachildren,waves .... More or less wavily weed, beaches, tides,swimmers, sea, earth, sky-what matterwould rebuffus? We know how to speak them all. Heterogeneous, yes. For herjoyous benefitshe is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous: airborne swimmer, in flight, she

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does not cling to herself;she is dispersible,prodigious,stunning,desirous and capable of others,of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't,of him, of you. Woman be unafraid of any other place, of any same, or any other. My eyes, my tongue, my ears, my nose, my skin, my mouth, my that I long for it in order to fillup a hole, to body-for-(the)-other-not of mine, or because, as fatewould have it, some defect provide against I'm spurred on by feminine"jealousy"; not because I've been dragged thatbringsthatwhichis substituted into the whole chain of substitutions back to its ultimateobject. That sortof thingyou would expect to come straightout of "Tom Thumb," out of the Penisneidwhispered to us by If theybelieve, old grandmotherogresses, servantsto theirfather-sons. iftheyreallyneed to believe in order to musterup some self-importance, that we're dyingof desire, that we are this hole fringedwithdesire for it their penis-that's theirimmemorialbusiness. Undeniably (we verify at our own expense-but also to our amusement),it'stheirbusinessto let us know they're gettinga hard-on, so that we'll assure them (we the thattheystillcan, that maternalmistresses of theirlittlepocket signifier) witha themselvesonly by being fitted it's stillthere-that men structure feather.In the child it'snot the penis thatthe woman desires,it'snot that famousbitof skinaround whicheveryman gravitates. Pregnancycannot limitsof the ancients,to some be tracedback, except withinthe historical form of fate, to those mechanical substitutions brought about by the not to penis envies; and unconscious of some eternal "jealous woman"; not to narcissismor to some sort of homosexualitylinked to the everpresent mother! Begettinga child doesn't mean that the woman or the man must fall ineluctablyinto patternsor must recharge the circuitof reproduction.If there'sa riskthere'snot an inevitabletrap: may women of a be spared the pressure, under the guise of consciousness-raising, Either you want a kid or you don't-that's supplement of interdictions. Let nobody threatenyou; in satisfying your desire, let not yourbusiness. the fear of becoming the accomplice to a socialitysucceed the old-time fearof being "taken." And man, are you stillgoing to bank on everyone's afraid lest the child make a fatherand, conseblindness and passivity, quently,thatin having a kid the woman land herselfmore than one bad deal by engenderingall at once child-mother-father-family? No; it's up to you to break the old circuits.It will be up to man and woman to render obsolete the formerrelationshipand all itsconsequences, to consider the launchingof a brand-newsubject,alive, withdefamilialization. Let us demater-paternalizerather than deny woman, in an effortto era of the body. Let us avoid the co-optationof procreation,a thrilling defetishize.Let's get away fromthe dialectic which has it that the only good fatheris a dead one, or that the child is the death of his parents. The child is the other, but the other withoutviolence, bypassing loss,

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of bonds foreverto be severed, struggle.We're fed up withthe reuniting with the litanyof castrationthat'shanded down and genealogized. We won't advance backwardanymore; we're not going to represssomething so simple as the desire for life. Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive-all and among them is the gestationdrive these drives are our strengths, like the desire to write: a desire to live self fromwithin,a desire -just for the swollen belly, for language, for blood. We are not going to the unsurpassed pleasures our fancy, refuse,ifitshould happen to strike of pregnancywhich have actuallybeen alwaysexaggerated or conjured away-or cursed-in the classic texts.For if there'sone thingthat'sbeen repressed here's just the place to find it: in the taboo of the pregnant woman. This says a lot about the power she seems investedwithat the time, because it has always been suspected, that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but-what's more important-takes on intrinsicvalue as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably,acquires body and sex. There are thousands of ways of livingone's pregnancy;to have or not to have withthatstillinvisibleother a relationshipof another intensity.And if you don't have thatparticularyearning,it doesn't mean that in its own special way, you're in any way lacking. Each body distributes withoutmodel or norm,the nonfinite and changingtotality of itsdesires. Decide for yourselfon your position in the arena of contradictions, where pleasure and realityembrace. Bring the other to life. Women know how to live detachment;givingbirthis neitherlosing nor increasing. It's adding to lifean other. Am I dreaming?Am I mis-recognizing? You, the defenders of "theory,"the sacrosanct yes-men of Concept, enthronersof the phallus (but not of the penis): Once more you'll say that all this smacks of "idealism," or what's worse, you'll splutterthat I'm a "mystic." And what about the libido? Haven't I read the "Signification of the Phallus"? And what about separation, what about that bit of self for which,to be born, you undergo an ablation-an ablation,so theysay,to be forevercommemoratedby your desire? Besides, isn'tit evidentthatthe penis getsaround in mytexts,thatI give ita place and appeal? Of course I do. I wantall. I wantall of me with all of him. Why should I deprive myself of a part of us? I want all of us. Woman of course has a desire fora "lovingdesire" and not ajealous one. But not because she is gelded; not because she's deprived and needs to be filledout, like some wounded person who wantsto console herselfor seek vengeance: I don't want a penis to decorate mybody with.But I do desire the other forthe other,whole and entire,male or female; because that is, everything thatlives,and wantlivingmeans wantingeverything ing it alive. Castration?Let otherstoywithit. What's a desire originating froma lack? A prettymeager desire. The woman who stillallows herselfto be threatenedby the big dick,

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who's stillimpressed by the commotion of the phallic stance, who still leads a loyal masterto the beat of the drum: that'sthe woman of yesterof the oldest of farces: day. They stillexist,easy and numerous victims either they'recast in the original silent version in which, as titanesses lyingunder the mountains theymake with theirquivering,theynever see erected that theoreticmonumentto the golden phallus looming, in the old manner,over theirbodies. Or, coming today out of theirinfans period and into the second, "enlightened"versionof theirvirtuousdebasement,theysee themselvessuddenlyassaulted by the builders of the analytic empire and, as soon as they've begun to formulatethe new desire, naked, nameless, so happy at making an appearance, they're taken in theirbath by the new old men, and then,whoops! Luring them withflashy the demon of interpretation-oblique, decked out signifiers, in modernity-sells them the same old handcuffs,baubles, and chains. Which castrationdo you prefer?Whose degrading do you like better, littlegirl. the father'sor the mother's?Oh, what pwetty eyes,you pwetty tell the see and Here, buy myglasses Truth-Me-Myself you everyyou'll look thingyou should know. Put themon yournose and take a fetishist's I'm at what are the other me, tellingyou) your body analyst-that's (you and the body of the other. You see? No? Wait, you'll have everything explained to you, and you'll know at last which sort of neurosis you're so that you can related to. Hold still,we're going to do your portrait, it like rightaway. begin looking and second degree are stilllegion. If the Yes, the naives to the first New Women, arriving now, dare to create outside the theoretical, remonthey're called in by the cops of the signifier,fingerprinted, that are order line of the and into strated, they supposed to brought in the chain that's a to force of know; assigned by trickery precise place are pieced We a of the benefit formed for privileged signifier. always back to the stringwhich leads back, if not to the Name-of-the-Father, to the place of the phallic-mother. then, for a new twist, that would take you back to the Beware, my friend,of the signifier Beware of a of diagnoses that would reduce your authority signified! are also proper nouns thatdisparnouns "Common" generativepowers. it into byclassifying species. Break out of the circles; age yoursingularity closure. Take a look around, don't remain within the psychoanalytic then cut through! And ifwe are legion,it'sbecause the war of liberationhas onlymade as yet a tinybreakthrough.But women are throngingto it. I've seen them, those who will be neitherdupe nor domestic,those who will not fear the risk of being a woman; will not fear any risk,any desire, any space stillunexplored in themselves,among themselvesand others or theydo not deny,theydo not hate. anywhereelse. They do not fetishize, observe, theyapproach, theytryto see the otherwoman, the child, They

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the lover-not to strengthen theirown narcissism or verify the solidity or weakness of the master,but to make love better,to invent Otherlove.-In the beginning are our differences.The new love dares for the other,wants the other,makes dizzying,precipitousflights between knowledge and invention.The woman arrivingover and over again does not stand still; she's everywhere,she exchanges, she is the (Not enclosed in the paradox of the giftthattakes nor desire-that-gives. under the illusion of unitary fusion. We're past that.) She comes in, comes-in-between herselfme and you, between the other me where one is alwaysinfinitely more than one and more than me, withoutthe fearof ever reaching a limit; she thrillsin our becoming. And we'll keep on becoming! She cuts through defensive loves, motherages,and devourations: beyond selfish in the moving,open, transitional narcissism, space, she runs her risks. Beyond the struggle-to-the-death that's been removed to the bed, beyond the love-battlethat claims to representexchange, she scorns at an Eros dynamic that would be fed by hatred. Hatred: a heritage, again, a remainder, a duping subservience to the the other in the other, to dephallus. To love, to watch-think-seek to unhoard. Does this seem difficult? It's not impossible,and specularize, this is what nourishes life-a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifiesthe strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies.Wherever stillunfolds as the history of death, she does not tread. Opposihistory the tion, hierarchizingexchange, struggle for masterywhich can end in at least one death master-one (one slave, or two nonmasters only # two dead)-all that comes from a period in time governed by phallocentric values. The fact that this period extends into the present doesn't preventwoman fromstarting the history of life somewhereelse. Elsewhere, she gives. She doesn't "know" what she's giving,she doesn't measure it; she gives, though, neither a counterfeitimpression nor somethingshe hasn't got. She gives more, withno assurance that she'll fromwhatshe puts out. She gives get back even some unexpected profit that there may be life,thought,transformation. This is an "economy" thatcan no longer be put in economic terms.Wherevershe loves,all the old conceptsof managementare leftbehind. At the end of a more or less conscious computation,she findsnot her sum but her differences.I am for you what you want me to be at the momentyou look at me in a way you've never seen me before: at everyinstant.When I write,it's everything that we don't know we can be that is writtenout of me, without we will be calls us to the exclusions,withoutstipulation,and everything unflagging,intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking. University ofParis VIII-Vincennes

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