Disrupting Phallic Logic: (Re)thinking the Feminine with Hélène Cixous and Bracha Ettinger

This article brings into dialogue the writings of Hélène Cixous and Bracha Ettinger. I contend that Cixous’s writing unsettles the very questions that form the basis for Ettinger’s key theoretical propositions, making for a productive dialogue between these two feminist thinkers. I identify key concepts and convergences that, when considered together, offer a novel methodology for thinking our way out of a conceptual impasse in which the ‘feminine’ exists either as a lack vis-à-vis the masculine or as unthinkable. What makes this meeting of works particularly generative is their ability to slide under the phallocentricity of Language to approach an ethics of the Other. A Cixousian reclamation of the feminine, coupled with Ettinger’s theorisation of subjectivity, in which the feminine is not foreclosed, offers to feminist debate and criticism an Other axis of sexual difference accessible to all living subjects. Considered together, Cixous’s and Ettinger’s formulations offer radical potentialities for reading with: that is, not a process in which we read as I’s positioned in opposition to an Other, but rather, one in which text and reader co-exist. Such a mode contests the violence that is done by phallic disciplinary structures and indifferent practices of reading.