The Newly Born Woman

"Newly Born Woman by Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. I put this in to show some of the wider effects of deconstruction. One of the things I was pleased to discover when I was writing my biography of Derrida was that he did try and learn from the lessons of feminism or feminisms. Cixous was very close to him in lots of ways. He actually said that, for him, Cixous was the best French writer of the late 20th century. They were both Algerian, and they had an incredible solidarity. They did a lot of books together as dialogue. She was almost as prolific as him. And, in many ways, she’s even more rebarbative with some of her stuff, if you’re not used to reading these things. She came to prominence in the Anglophone world with her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In that and in Newly Born Woman , she’s trying to create or recapture what she calls a ‘feminine mode of writing’. There are often lots of complexities around that now, to do with gender and sex and so forth but, at the time, she was trying to write against a masculine text. And for her, the way of doing that was retaining the feminine body as present in the act of writing, speaking through that body’s mode of being, in the way she argues that most men, in her view, retain the masculine body in their writing, as a sort of undisputed normality. In a sense, I’m using this book to represent a lot of different modes of thinking, which deconstruction allowed to come into the philosophical realm. The book is a complex taking apart of the masculine text, the female text, and a building up of possible ways of writing and possible ways of disrupting the normal voices of philosophy. It looks at a lot of psychoanalysis and a lot of literature. It’s quite a confronting and challenging book, in the same way as Of Grammatology is. You are meant to feel uncomfortable reading it. You are meant to see someone battling against those hierarchies that Derrida was also interested in turning over—man, woman, good, evil. Like Derrida, Cixous doesn’t just want to turn the hierarchies over, as in putting them the other way around. She wants to see how they are in dialogue, how they battle with each other, how they create each other. One of the famous essays in there is called “Sorties”. She’s making ‘sorties’ against the masculine voice, against the conventional voice. She’s going out, gathering what she can, going back in and trying to write her ‘own’ text. It is intimidating, but it’s supposed to be intimidating. One of her sorties is against just being able to have a nice, casual read of some good conventional stuff. I would probably recommend “The Laugh of the Medusa” for a first reading of Cixous, although it’s less of a deconstructive text, which is why I didn’t include it here. It’s much more of a scream of pleasure, anger and joy, and all of those things. It’s a more conventional book in that sense. But she’s very interested in trying to get away from a straight narrative telling of everything. One of the things about Cixous is that she embraces plurality, in language and meaning and female embodiment. Her writing constantly and consciously goes around in circles, circle after circle after circle after circle, to try on the one hand to reinforce meaning through repetition, but on the other to make it suspect, through the accretion of difference. I think there’s an argument for saying it’s a good thing and there’s an argument for saying it’s a bad thing. I think it depends on the text that you’re reading. Derrida said “if things were simple, word would have gotten around”, which I think is terrific. Exactly. By its nature, deconstruction is saying that simple declarative statements are suspect; that clarity is a tactic. Sometimes it’s a justifiable tactic. In science, for instance, or analytic philosophy, or lots of philosophy, clarity is a virtue. It is the best way of doing it. But you shouldn’t mistake that for absolute truth. If a scientific truth could be given by something that’s doesn’t possess great clarity, then you would use that too. All of these writers are trying to get away from the idea that you can just declare things. They are also very open to the ways that meaning is generated by fiction, as we’ve covered, or by the methods of fiction. We read a piece of fiction, which is obviously made up characters doing things; it’s like playing with dolls. These writers are quite happy to use those sort of tactics in order to produce something philosophical as well as literary. Many of them are described as ‘post-modernist’. I see many of them, in fact, as using modernist techniques, the literary techniques of the 1920s, and so forth. Take Ulysses as an example. Being rebarbative, being difficult to get to, can sometimes make things more rewarding and sometimes can reveal truth. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When it’s done badly, it’s terrible. I think Derrida does it badly sometimes. I think all of them do it badly sometimes. I think there are just some bad writers in this tradition too. One of the things you can do with deconstruction, which happens too often—and Derrida didn’t do it as much as he’s accused of—is just taking up a pun or an etymology and flogging it to death for page after page after page. There are some writers who do that. Derrida didn’t do that, although he occasionally slipped into that. He occasionally was almost doing ‘pretend Derrida’. I think if you’re looking for a very simple, easy read, or you’re looking for a very clear read—and why not look for that, a lot of philosophy requires that—then, possibly, these are not places to go. Yes, you’re correct. He’s performing the work by doing it. But Plato writes in dialogue, which I actually find quite rebarbative and which I struggle to read. But he’s doing that for a particular reason, to get this meaning for us. And I think the basic thing is that, if something is written clearly, that doesn’t mean it’s good. If something is written rebarbatively—to keep using that word—it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Derrida is performing deconstruction as he’s thinking it up or through. And just to bring up one book: he does, in the 1970s, do a book called Glas , which I think goes a bit too far. It’s written in two columns, one column is on/by Jean Genet and one column is Hegel… Quotations, but also analysis and footnotes and all that sort of thing. It’s a beautiful-looking book. It is performing the fact that books are constructed things and are in dialogue. In performing it I think that he goes a bit too far, in the sense that he makes you forget that even just a normally written book is also doing that. He’s performing it to an absurd point. I find it almost unreadable. So that’s the hard limit for me of Derrida. Absolutely. With those conceptual art pieces—not all obviously, the great stuff is great—it’s actually the catalogue that tells you what you need to know. And for me—obviously, there’s stuff going on that maybe I’m not picking up—but I just don’t think it’s worth the effort to be honest. Glas for me is a bit like that, the explanation is the book. But many disagree."