ABSTRACT
This is how Helene Cixous articulates the conundrum barring her passage to ‘The Coming to Writing’, also the title o f the hybrid text which stands as a testimony to her eventual leap through the tormented quest for authorization to arrive finally at a jubilant affirmation o f her initial desire to write. Cixous’ text explores the inhibitory effect o f excessive self-questioning when the assumption o f the subject position o f enunciation reveals an ‘I ’ whose socio-political locus is charged with the negative resultant o f the combined forces o f gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and class:
Tout de moi se liguait pour m’interdire l’écriture: l’Histoire, mon histoire, mon origine, mon genre. Tout ce qui constituait mon moi social, culturel [...] J’étais de la race des perdeurs de paradis. Écrire francais? De quel droit?.2 [Everything in me leagued together to forbid me to write: History, my history, my origin, my gender. Everything which constituted my social and cultural ego [...] I was of the race of the losers of paradise. Write French? With what right?]
Instead o f the desired socio-cultural authorization for the assertion o f artistic activity, the subject encounters a host o f ‘authorities’ - whose traces already inscribe her Innen w e lt-which, in effect, prohibit her claim to literature, one o f the citadels o f culture. ‘You can desire [...] But writing is not accorded to you’.3 Writing ‘must occur in a space inaccessible to the small, the humble, women’.4
