Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of "L'Ecriture Feminine"

Abstract

each other's positions at top volume (Monique Wittig to Hle'ne Cixous: Ceci est un scandale!). But in the realm of theory, the French share a deep critique of the modes through which the West has claimed to discern evidence-or reality-and a suspicion concerning efforts to change the position of women that fail to address the forces in the body, in the unconscious, in the basic structures of culture that are invisible to the empirical eye. Briefly, French feminists in general believe that Western thought has been based on a systematic repression of women's experience. Thus their assertion of a bedrock female nature makes sense as a point from which to deconstruct langauge, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the social practices, and direction of patriarchal culture as we live in and resist it.