Home 9 Passage 9 Feminine Phenomenology

Cixousian writing is constantly bent back onto itself and thus may seem confusing since it is not ordinary prosaic prose but already poetic, and thus (seeming unwittingly) showing what it is about. She uses neologisms, metaphors, puns, parodies, jests, and alliterations in multilayered self-reflexive texts. When Cixous says, poetically, that what is most true is poetic, she may mean that there may be other kinds of writing that are more or less true but not most true. If so, what is most true than most true? And when she says that she applies herself to “seeing” the world nude, one wonders: what is the interpretive intent of this mode of seeing? Of course, many phenomenological authors and thinkers would say about their work that it cannot be captured in definitional terms, and that it must be approached and read in their entirety, and not as arguments or summaries. The phenomenological reader might suggest that Cixous seems to practice the epoché with her expression of seeing the world naked. Seeing the world naked would be the perfect epoché since it means seeing without overlays, distortions, projections, or impositions. It means seeing in the kind of way that Rilke talks of as poetic “in-seeing into the heart of things.” And it can refer to the kind of seeing that Levinas describes as seeing the naked face of the other.