Hélène Cixous's Poetic's of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction

Abstract

Exploring the poetic fictions of prominent French, feminist writer Hélène Cixous, this open access book highlights rich and timely ideas of selfhood in her work.With careful elaboration of the writer’s relationship with Algeria, Birgit M. Kaiser shows how Cixous reflects on experiences of colonial and patriarchal othering. More than that, she crafts a voice – an autofictive "I" – that takes the figure of Echo as a guiding mythology to portray selfhood as diffractive, always already exceeding binary models of self/other that remain central to conceptions of subjectivity. Putting forward the notion of ‘echology’, Kaiser examines how Cixous performs selfhood within ecologies of cohabitation, thereby critiquing and revising key tenets of psychoanalysis and its narrative of the subject. Drawing from famous texts such asThe Laugh of the Medusa,The Newly Born Woman, andThe Portrait of Dora, but also more recent titles likeOsnabrück,So Close,Death Shall be Dethronedor Cixous's collaborations with Adel Abdessemed,Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffractionoffers fresh variations on familiar psychoanalytic and semiotic axes, and new ventures into dialogue with feminist new materialisms. Elegant, politically dynamic and providing exciting news ways into Cixous’s work and poetics, the concept of ‘echology’ lends new perspectives for feminist and postcolonial formations of selfhood and new imaginations of what it means to be human within planetary life.