Entre le texte et le corps: deuil et différence sexuelle chez Hélène Cixous by Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goulet, and: Le Rire de la Méduse: regards critiques ed. by Frédéric Regard, Martine Reid (review)

The publication of these two books in separate collections by Honoré Champion is a sign of the marked growth of interest in Hélène Cixous in recent years, and of the canonical status her work now enjoys in France. The difference between them is an indication of the rich diversity of approaches currently being taken to her writing. Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goulet’s book focuses on mourning and its relation to sexual difference in Cixous’s fictions. The book is highly original in a number of respects. Not only is it the first detailed reading to bring together Judith Butler and Cixous, but it identifies an unusual angle from which to do so. Rather than (as one might have predicted) choosing Gender Trouble as the basis on which to investigate links between Butler’s thinking and a writer still known best today as a thinker of sexual difference, it takes her work on mourning in The Psychic Life of Power and to a lesser extent Precarious Life as its point of departure. As Crevier Goulet clearly and cogently explains, for Butler mourning is built into the very process of becoming a subject. In particular, identity formation involves the repression of the infant’s specifically homosexual attachments. Interestingly, Butler’s model does not differentiate between the little girl and the little boy: it is not clear how the retrospectively homosexual attachment of the former to the mother maps onto the case of the little boy, for whom the Oedipal stage involves the repression of a retrospectively heterosexual desire. Notwithstanding this point of opacity, Crevier Goulet finds in Butler’s focus on the ‘perte inscrite au cœur de l’identité’ (p. 13) a productive line of approach to Cixous’s fiction. She uses it to develop her insight of a creative melancholy, an ethical refusal to mourn, at work in Cixous’s writing. Mourning is constantly displaced, as Crevier Goulet demonstrates in her readings of different figures of loss that recur insistently throughout Cixous’s corpus: the father, the child, the animal, and the mother. This notion of displacement helps to account for the tension between, on the one hand, the substitutability inherent in the replacement of one loss by another and, on the other, the focus on the irreducible singularity of each. The book’s unusual structure, too, invites reading as a mode of engagement with a fundamental tension. The two parts into which it is divided remain surprisingly separate, the thoughtful and subtle analyses of Cixous’s textual representations of loss in the second making rather little direct reference to Butler’s conception of mourning as set out in the first. At issue here are indeed ‘deux genres de la pensée’ (p. 10); in effect (but I suspect also in intention) Crevier Goulet demonstrates the limits as much as the value of applying Butler’s theory to a literary text such as Cixous’s.

Cixous’s own theory, rather than her fiction, is the focus of attention in Frédéric Regard and Martine Reid’s volume of essays. The volume arises from events held to mark the first republication, in 2010, of the French original of Le Rire de la Méduse, Cixous’s most famous text, known above all in its much-anthologized English translation. Some of the pieces adopt a historical approach. Reid’s contextualization of the original publication in relation both to its time of publication...