ABSTRACT
The traditional antithesis of nature and culture gives way to an opposition between culture and cultures. It was traditionally assumed that to study French language and literature, in school or university, was to learn about something called French culture, in singular. The singular French culture was held to have achieved its highest realization in the works of France’s novelists, philosophers, poets, and playwrights, whose mastery of their own language enabled them to express le genie francais, something quint essential about the French national psyche and identity. For Helene Cixous, philosophical systems, theories of culture and of society were characterized by hierarchized oppositions which served to marginalize woman, placing her always on the side of passivity. Cixous is cited alongside two of her contemporaries, the philosopher Luce Irigaray and the psychoanalyst and literary theorist Julia Kristeva, as typifying French feminism’s focus on sexual difference as a force which disrupts a symbolic and social order organized around the power of the phallus.
