Hybridité inévitable : La théorie et la poïesis chez Hélène Cixous

Abstract

Theoretical and philosophical discourse that wishes to find “truth,” or rather the Being such as defined by Heidegger, is bound to engage in a poetical discourse, in his view the only hope to partially approach that which the words attempt to express and which remains unsaid. In her poetical and highly innovative texts, Hélène Cixous thus attempts to uncover the Book of the Books, where words may reveal the secrets of being and dying. Cixous, born in the Arabic-Jewish-French context of the colonial Algeria, with her German maternal roots, and later with her exposure to the Anglophone world through her exploration of Joyce’s literature, has been vitally exposed to hybridity that she embodies biologically, genealogically, linguistically, and culturally. As a scholar and a writer within the French academic system, she blends together feminism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In a condensed and often hermetic narration between philosophy, poetical prose and theatre, Cixous uses analogical and metaphorical thinking to combine various theoretical approaches in a fusion among metadiscourses by which the meaning of literature may be uncovered.