Hélène Cixous and Utopian Thought: From ‘Tancredi Continues’ to The Book of Promethea

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 JEANNELLE LAILLOU SAVONA Hélène Cixous and Utopian Thought: From >Tancredi Continues= to The Book of Promethea No, I never cease to belong to this world where women=s bodies meet. Hélène Cixous, First Days of the Year Hélène Cixous has often been described as a utopian writer (see Moi, 102B26, for example) mainly because of her valuation of >the feminine= in many of her writings. Her insistence on sexual difference, often expressed through maternal metaphors, has even been considered as potentially homophobic by Domna Stanton (Stanton, 177). In this essay, I intend to return to the question of >sexual difference=1 and view it in its relation to sexual orientation through a comparative study of >Tancredi Continues= and The Book of Promethea, an essay and a work of fiction that, to my knowledge, have never been read together from a lesbian perspective. These two contemporaneous texts (1983), which constitute innovative versions of the myths of Tancredi and Prometheus, seem particularly appropriate, since they both treat same-sex love and seriously question the notions of >masculine= and >feminine.= As Cixous=s myths of Tancredi and Promethea lead to two definite forms of utopias concerning gender, I will attempt to assess both their helpfulness and danger in the context of gender and feminist theories. The Book of Promethea refers to >Tancredi Continues= from its very beginning , when the narrator-author introduces the subject of her fiction B xxxxxxxxx A different version of this text, entitled >La Multisexualité de l=amour,= was published in French in Hélène Cixous croisées d=une œuvre, ed Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Galilée 2000), 425B36. I would like to thank Fadi Abou-Rihan for translating the original version into English and Patricia Skippon for her editorial help with this version. 1 The expression >différence sexuelle,= which tends to be used in France by both philosophers and psychoanalysts, overlaps >gender= without really coinciding with it. To sociologists, it often has >essentialist= connotations. As the word >gender= does not exist in French, such expressions as >genre sexuel= or >sociosexuation= have appeared since the 1960s, with different political nuances. Monique Wittig, a radical lesbian, carefully avoids the word >gender= throughout The Straight Mind and uses >category of sex,= which implies a class system based on oppression. For an interesting discussion of the controversy between gender theories, which tend to be constructionist, and >sexual difference= perspectives, which take certain psychoanalytical notions into account, see Rosi Braidotti=s interview with Judith Butler, >Feminism by Another Name: Interview.= For a survey of the notion of university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 >sexual difference= in a French feminist context, see Sellers, Language and Sexual Difference. the burgeoning passion between two women B by declaring that all her past theories, of which she had been so proud, >make fun of each other,= having become >intoxicated in their freedom= (7). >All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?= (8) The answer to this question, the >noui= (>nyes= or >noyes=) of the narrator, suggests a double and contradictory truth: on the one hand, the question of gender seems irrelevant when two human beings are in love, but on the other, the experience of a lesbian love must certainly be different from a heterosexual relationship. One can understand this answer=s ironic indecision, since most theories of lesbian identity have reduced it to either a perverse regression to a pre-oedipal stage (I am referring to the classical Freudian account), or a socio-historical category of the >homosexual,= whose examples and forms of representation have almost invariably been male (I am thinking of Michel Foucault=s theories in particular).1 In The Book of Promethea, the narrator=s erstwhile theories are invoked in the following terms: >From the first, the one about bisexuality, which I always had some qualms about, up to the newest and supplest, the one that carried me dancing to a tune by Rossini in a single, unbroken gallop from Argel by way of Santiago to Jerusalem= (6B7). While the reference to bisexuality alludes to...