Helene Cixous Quotes

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

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.

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique consideration will be 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 their eyes and seen themselves clearly.

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.

My voice repels death; my death; your death; my voice is my other. I write and you are not dead. The other is safe if I write.

One must have travelled a great deal to discover the obvious. One must have thoroughly rubbed and exhausted one's own eyes to get rid of the thousands of scales we start with...There are poets who have strived to do this...in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know.

Medusa is a good example of how Goddess in her dark aspect became demonized in the patriarchal context. Gimbutas points out that the earliest Greek gorgons were not terrifying symbols, but were portrayed with symbols of regeneration – bee wings and snakes as antennae102. Medusa with her serpent hair had been a widely recognized symbol of Divine Female Wisdom – the serpent representing Knowledge of Change, the very essence of Being, never-ending renewal, and thus immortality. Medusa was a face of Ultimate Mystery, of the One – She was “All that has been, that is, and that will be103.” In our cultural mythology Perseus was celebrated as hero for being able to defeat her and cut off her head with its so called deadly gaze. It was said that her gaze was so fearsome it turned mortals to stone. There is no doubt that it is fearsome to look into the eye of the Divine; but patriarchal gods have carried the same characteristic, Yahweh for example, without threat of the same retribution. In the patriarchal context, is it really the gaze of the Female that is deadly? It is women who are the chronically gazed upon, whether as sex object or on a pedestal; perhaps this epitomizes Medusa’s/Goddess’ imprisonment – how She is “kept an eye on”. The beheading of Medusa – one who is icon of Wisdom, may be understood as a story of dis-memberment of the Female Metaphor/Goddess104. The hera’s journey today is to go against the patriarchal injunction and look Medusa straight on, as philosopher Helene Cixous suggests105. She is at first fearsome, but the Dark Goddess’ fierceness nurtures a strength in a woman, gives her back the “steel in her stomach” that she needs to live her life. This Old Wisdom tradition is about recognizing the Power within, and daring to take the journey into that Self-knowledge.

All literature is scarry.

Es gibt Texte, die liest man, es gibt welche, von denen wird man gelesen und es gibt solche, die kommen vorbei und lesen einen auf.

Die neue Geschichte kommt, sie ist kein Traum: sie übersteigt nur das männliche Vorstellungsvermögen

Vergangenheit darf nicht mehr zukunftsbestimmend sein

Sie sagen, es gibt zwei Dinge, die sich nicht darstellen lassen: der Tod und das weibliche Geschlecht. Denn sie müssen Weiblichkeit mit dem Tod assoziieren

das ist es was das Leben am Leben erhält, eine Liebe

Ich bin für DICH das von dem DU willst, dass ich es bin im Augenblick wo DU mich siehst wie DU mich noch nie gesehen hast: in jedem Augenblick

Zulassen dass Schreiben eben genau bedeutet (im) Dazwischen zu arbeiten, die Entwicklung des Selben und des Anderen zu befragen ohne die nichts lebt (...) vielfältig unerschöpflicher Weg aus tausenden Begegnungen und Verwandlungen des Selben ins Andere und ins Zwischen

Wir haben nicht den leisesten Frauengrund dem Negativen einen Treueeid zu schwören

Es reicht Medusa ins Gesicht zu schauen, um sie zu sehen: und sie ist nicht tödlich. Sie ist schön und sie lacht.

Gebären bedeutet weder verlieren, noch sich einen Gewinn verschaffen. Es bedeutet dem generellen Leben ein weiteres hinzuzufügen.

Niemals werden wir uns (vor)fehlen