The Newly Born Woman

by Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément

English, French (translation)

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Gender, Womens, France

186 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

No le doy todas las estrellas porque hubieron varias cosillas que no comparto de su visión pero muy interesante y válido lo que propone. Me ha abierto los ojos en muchos aspectos. Y la narración es fenomenal, demasiado poética, muy metafórica, intensa y visceral.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not exaggerating all that much when I say I can split my intellectual life pre-Newly Born Woman and post-Newly Born Woman.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hard to get ahold of, which I suspect is exactly what it wants to be. It moves through different voices, registers, and discourses to forward evocative and provocative feminist rhetorics. I was especially keen on "A Woman Mistress," a section in which the two writers discuss their approaches' implications for teaching and mastery.

The Newly Born Woman is made up of three primary sections, each with its own relatively distinct voice. The writers of the first and second are not clearly identified till the third. All draw significantly from Lacan’s concepts of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, though the writers significantly rethink them as well. First, Clement’s “The Guilty One” tracks the history of the figures of the hysteric and sorceress, noting how both--as ways of sub-categorizing “woman”--have historically been placed in “an imaginary zone for what [culture] excludes” (6). These figures are “all decked-out in unrealizable compromises, imaginary transitions, incompatible syntheses” (8). Clement notes they can be just as excluded by psychoanalysis and its associated modern institutions as by inquisitors and Christian institutions, describing Freud’s slow process of shifting the blame for hysteria from the father to the patient herself. She ends by noting witch and hysteric “are old and worn-out figures... they no longer exist” (36), and that an ambiguous “She, like the sorceress, is going to fly away. But this time, one will know what she becomes” (37). Cixous, more poetic and autobiographical than Clement, spends “Sorties” questioning “phallo-logocentrism” (65). She notes various mythical and poetic figures she “inhabited” during her Algerian childhood, positioning these various possessions as indicative of woman’s openness to the other, which she opposes to the Hegelian, masculine “Empire of the Selfsame” (79). She thus positions “writing” as “woman’s,” a “passageway” closed off by men (noting carefully, however, that she does not think “masculine” and “feminine” as essential categories) (85). Hers is a “libidinal economy” of desire opposed to the narcissistic “mirror economy” of men--one that valorizes the Lacanian Imaginary. She ends by recounting, reconsidering, and rewriting the imaginary possibilities of Orestes and Electra, Kleist’s Penthesileia, and Antony and Cleopatra. “Exchanges” is a dialogue between Clement and Cixous, intended to make the text’s “differences” more “apparent” via discussions of “teaching” and “hysterical engagement” (135). The section on teaching considers issues of mastery and women’s complicity when they adopt the “traditional method of rhetorical demonstration,” explicitly posing the question, “What exactly is the teacher’s ‘power’?” (136). They next debate the interruptive political potential of the hysteric, with Clement more skeptical and Cixous generally pessimistic but hopeful about the potential of certain “degrees” of hysteria.

[Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wouldn't the worst thing be--isn't the worst thing that, really, woman is not castrated, that all on has to do is not listen to the sirens (because the sirens were men) for history to change its sense, its direction? All you have to do to see the Medusa is look her in the face: and she isn't deadly. She is beautiful, and she laughs."

"On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through. All the poets know that: whatever is thinkable is real... And it's true. There have to be ways o relating that are completely different from the tradition ordained by the masculine economy. So urgently, and anxiously, I look for a scene in which a type of exchange would be produced that would be different, a kind of desire that wouldn't be in collusion with the old story of death. This desire would invent Love, it alone would not use the word love to cover up its opposite: one would not land right back in a dialectical destiny, still unsatisfied by the debasement of one by the other. On the contrary, there would have to be a recognition of each other, and this grateful acknowledgment would come about thanks to the intense and passionate work of knowing. Finally, each would take the risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather, delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover, to respect, to favor, to cherish."

[Tiara · Rating 4 out of 5]

je sais que je suis censé aimer ce livre, mais il est très difficille. Quelqufois quand je l'ai lu, je pensais que Cixous me déteste. maintenant je sais que je ne comprends pas tout et je ne le ferais jamais, mais je reviendrai sur ce livre toujours.

[ᔡᕱᖇᕱᗁ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A stab at Lacanian feminism.

Sandra Gilbert, in her introduction, characterizes the newly born woman as a utopian figure; but doesn’t utopian thought come close to the “fantasy of a complete being which replaces the fear of castration... a fantasy of unity” which the authors warn about?

I found it hard to follow this book's new left politics. For example, immediately after critiquing the Selfsame phallocentrism that has dominated since “Ancient History”, the book demands liberation from the “pitiless repression of the homosexual element”. Doesn’t phallocentric history, passed down from father to son, itself engender a homosexuality that has at times been explicitly put into practice, particularly in antiquity?

The book discusses the need for writing “free from law” and “moderation”, while at the same time emphasizing that women’s writing needs to maintain a relationship to that which is the same in herself. "A woman, by her opening up, is open to being 'possessed', which is to say, dispossessed of herself. But I am speaking here of femininity as keeping alive the other that is confided to her, that visits her, that she can love as other. The loving to be other, another, without its necessarily going the route of abasing what is same, herself." Does this repetition of the self-same not constitute a law? Something phallic even? These passages are contradictory and incompatible with the Lacanian position that desire itself is law, for all the book’s indebtedness to Lacanian theory.

In the "Exchange" with Catherine Clément towards the end, Cixous claims that it is possible to convey knowledge without exercising power, only to backtrack when challenged on this point and claim that the power exercised in self satisfaction is a matter of quantity. These slippages into contradiction and utopianism give the text an unfinished quality that seems to fall more into the category of "singular phantasmic speciality" which Clément describes than a coherent approach to the subject of women's writing and subjectivity.

This book belongs to the 1970s, when the enemy was sexual repression, and the woman described in this text seems to enjoy occupying a position in opposition to masculine authority where she finds her identity. Does this still apply today? Has woman been newly born? Have we found our utopia?

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Woman, who has run her tongue ten thousand times seven times around her mouth before not speaking, either dies of it or knows her tongue and her mouth better than anyone."

[Françoise Corser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Clement’s “The Guilty One,” in The Newly Born Woman, presents a new depiction of the sorceress and the hysteric, one organized by the voice of a woman, criticizing male scholars/writers, ceremonies, social symbols, systems and cultural traditions that transform “illness” (in the Imaginary) and turn it into a spectacle for the male audience (in the Real), ultimately ridding the woman of her demon, resulting in an unconscious guilt that re-oppresses her into domesticity after the metamorphosis. The foundation of this confinement classifies women into a social class that does not fit into, but rather between, symbolic systems; as a part of this anomaly, women have symbolic mobility and threaten symbolic order. This disturbance to the social system prompts the symbolic repression of the hysteric’s becoming of both a man and a woman and the sorceress’ disposition for the animal and inhuman, leaving both imprisoned. Anthropophagic and anthropoemic modes are used to yield the same result; an abreaction that follows the spectacle of a woman’s hysteria. This abreaction does not change the woman’s role after the spectacle; although she is released and free to become beast-like/demonic/monstrous, she was initially bound as a girl and no symbolic metamorphosis will change those circumstances in the Real. Defined through the filters of culture, society, time period, ect., hysteria in women takes on different labels that range from mythological possession to the split of consciousness, all of which prompt a similar remedy. Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy, much like Levi-Strauss’ depiction of the shaman’s cure by way of making ill, removes the “demon” and instills a guilt that works to preserve the oppressive structure of the symbolic order, “The hysteric is in ignorance, perhaps in innocence; but it is a matter of a refusal, an escape, a rejection, and this innocence will soon be denounced as guilt, except that it is unconscious” (Cixous and Clément 14). The spectacle that Clement illustrates through the ritual in the colonies of Magna Graecia works to inject the same sense of guilt through the creation of an illness that confines the hysteric to her symptom. A woman’s inversion during her music fueled transformation is the focus of entertainment for the male audience, as she takes on many different liberating forms in societal rejection before becoming a woman again, cured from rebellion, possession, hysteria and ultimately the tarantula’s bite.

[Thai Divone · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me six years to get to this book. I've bought it when I was still in high-school, during my (un)critical enthusiasm with feminist theory. I might even call it "a craze". But it lied there, waiting, 'cause I had other books to read, and high-school stuff and all. To cut a long story short, I got to it now. And sure as hell, I'm glad I've waited with it. I think that it deserves the patience I couldn't give it back then, and that it also requires a far greater theoretical understanding than I had then. And yet, I'm glad that I've read it. It was the cherry at the top of my day, only filling long drives and midnight readings. While it is, and truly is, a product of its time, which means that sometimes it's too simplistic (or not always relevant to our days and age), it is, still, a mesmerizing book that suggests some very interesting and, especially and most importantly, highly different voices, while giving us the benefit of reading their dialogs.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of essays and dialogue between two very respected and educated women in the literary, women’s studies and political world may be a difficult read, but it’s a good one at that. Hélène’s parts were my favourite and i annotated throughout this whole book. some sections were not as exciting as others, some were confusing to understand and others were extremely memorable. So, it’s a book every woman, specifically, should read and take into consideration when you’d look at the world through a new lens with the help of critical theory, psychology, history and myth.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply confusing and meandering but ultimately a great book which communicates its premise in an interesting way. Through the obscurity of its writing and references to historical texts (and freud of course), it really does explain écriture feminine as something I can’t wrap my head around. Maybe i’m just not “one of those men who lets a little feminine through” - yet to see at least. I liked the Laugh of the Medusa more but it’s also largely pulled from this book (literal paragraphs and phrasing and so on) and just in a shorter format.

[Sara G · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's interesting though a bit muddled and lacking nuance. It's very clear that the loudest voices from the second wave feminists were a certain subset of women and it's clear that with that, a certain amount of privilege blinds one to shades of nuance which then narrows the breadth of the experience of womanhood. Cixous shows a great philosophical insight when self examining and focusing on introspection but she show a limited range when it comes to the wide society.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The themes presented here (reflections on hysteria, witchcraft, etc.) are all staples in French feminist theorizing by this point, but Cixous' autobiographical reflections (on her Jewish identity in the Algerian context, her bisexuality, etc.) add a more personal touch to the ruminations here.

[a.]

this was good and useful, and i'm glad i read it. but honest to god i WILL end it all if i ever have to even think about this text again

[Xis Meinedo · Rating 3 out of 5]

tiring but cool

[Emily]

Either Cixous is schizophrenic or I am.

[caity · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book made me feel like my beautiful mind is actually made of scrambled eggs .. will be back in 3 years when i've fully digested

[Karith Amel]

"When I write, all those that we don’t know we can be write themselves from me, without exclusion, without prediction, and everything that we will be calls us to the tireless, intoxicating, tender-costly-search for love. We will never lack ourselves." -Cixous

I can't say that I particularly understand, or necessarily even like, Cixous's crazed mix of poetry, theory, autobiography, literary criticism, and stream-of-consciousness. I lose myself in her pages, and the ideas blur in my head like watercolors running off the canvas. But there is mad energy in her words. Vitality. Life. She breaks the boundaries through the act of creation itself. And part of me loves her for it.

[Nikki Karalekas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real true slog. I’m no French feminist. Never have been and won’t be now. But there are some beautiful one liners and thought provoking passages about how difficult it is to exist as a woman in a phallologocentric economy. And how writing can break through that. Just not sure that things are as stark as they claim and find their obsession with knowledge and power to be quite limiting. Like, there’s more to life than all that. But I’m also just likely tired of reading this book.

[Leah]

I don't think I can provide a fair rating since I have not read Catherine Clément's contribution to the text. However, I will say that Hélène Cixous's writing has been immeasurably important in shaping not only my academic projects, but my overall view on women's writing and subjectivity.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating mix of memoir, psychoanalytic theory, and political statement. The first section might come off as being relatively esoteric and of narrow interest, though its implicit value grows more apparent as one reads the other sections.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helene teaches us about women and how we should take control of the phallocentricity of all written languages, she uses a circular, almost spoken word way of writing to emphasize her point. It's hard to understand at moments but that is the whole point she is trying to make.

[Sarahc Caflisch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back to Cixous, FYI.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cixous' essay "Sorties" is the highlight of the book.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sisters are doin' it for themselves!