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Sumati Dwivedi, Roll No. 3302 Professor Shormishtha Panja Submission April 19 2012

What is Writing? A Beginners Interrogation of Cixous Inscription Cixous, in Sorties, distinguishes socially determined sexes and the qualifiers of sexual difference. The basis of man/masculine, woman/feminine is confusing when reading the immense system of cultural inscription readable as masculine or feminine. Read with her repeated refutation of essentialism, biological determinism and originality, this is easily understood. In its simplest application, her distinction enables us to think of men who write femininely and women, masculinely. But for a newcomer to the French feminists, this distinction is worth labouring at to develop an understanding of Cixous ideas on inscription. In Sorties, inscription appears in Logos/writing. If the logos is the Lacanian One, writing must be the Other, the passive, the one who dies in the universal battlefield therefore, the feminine. But Cixous also presents Logos/Pathos. The Aristotelian Pathos makes sense here, but it is more intriguing to look into Lacans development of the pathos formula. Lacan, with Freud and notably Warburg, uses pathos (a response to primal trauma) inter alia to explain sign-production. With some unpardonable simplification, the Lacanian idea is that the original/essential trauma is separation from the mother, the origin for the detachment of subject from object and for the formulation of ego against the environment. This primal trauma resists signification, yet it can only be represented. 1 Thus Lacanian inscription is natural, essential, born out of terror. In Sorties, writing and its Lacanian origin, pathos, are feminine to

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London 1977 passim; Freud, Sigmund, Screen Memories, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, London 1974.

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the masculine ultimate of the logos. Against this, we may set Cixous vision of inscription, at least in the male/masculinist imaginary, as masculine and heterosexual some women forcefully inscribe their masculinity; to Freud symbolic activity, hence the production of culture, is mens doing. Against both these gendered explanations is Cixous image of writing as produced by complex, mobile, open beings[having] a certain homosexuality. We have here two topics sufficient for detailed papers is writing in the Lacanian universe (psychologically) masculine or (structurally) feminine, to Cixous? And what idea of reading is implicit in Cixous (reading as masculine and feminine)? To Cixous, writing makes the self (as a crystallized work of ultrasubjectivities) and writing makes the world (by invention of other Is). Fascinatingly, this conclusion, completely opposed in ideology, motive and method to Lacan, is yet very close to his if we extract those oppositions and render both conclusions into explanations for writing. Lacan, too, explains writing as making the self and imagining, remembering (in analysable memory) and representing the world. But he sees origins everywhere in the essential human experience, in a template for psychology or art, in a primal trauma. I think a student should note, in fairness to both thinkers, that Lacan does not gender/sex his theory (at least of inscription); it is Cixous who takes on the burden of showing us the phallocentric puppet master behind the entire play of the Old Order. She succeeds with me, and I have no ambition to identify, if I even could, points where she is not fully divergent from the Old Order, where Ernest Jones-like she may have a finger or two in the Lacanian universe. But I do think it would be a valuable project to work out her implicit idea of inscription through jouissance, and I suspect it may make an interesting comparison with her explicit statement in The Laugh of the Medusa. [590 words]