ABSTRACT
The crippling combination of hubris and self-doubt in the author's make-up makes the author want to do the big thing: produce an account of the whole of Helene Cixous’s work. If each language, each culture, distorts the foreign that it takes into its midst, it is because it is different: it also casts new light on it, gives it new life, is fertilized by it. Antoinette Fouque used to say that women need new forms of literacy: they need to learn to read without such reliance on habit and memory, for the weight of a cultural past that has almost always placed them in inferior positions makes habit and memory dangerous tools for women. Three women in particular play Promethean roles in Cixous’s mythologies: in the late seventies and early eighties, Antoinette Fouque with the Editions des femmes, her publishers and collaborators in what was then felt to be a joint venture.
