ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that Helene Cixous developed a form of theatre that performed the enmeshing of writer and writing — the embodiment of text, the textualisation of body — in the space of the voice. The feminine-maternal body therefore provided Cixous with a provocative poetics of the body that would form the basis of her theory of writing. Cixous's incipient poetics, as evidenced in her theoretical writings from the 1970s, attributes to writing the power to heal the partition in women, to allow them to move beyond the place which culture has assigned them. Cixous exhorts the woman writer to find again the moment of her doubling, to inscribe that moment in writing. Cixous's play demonstrates that a new way of being in language is indissociable from new ways of being in bodies, new subjectivities. Cixous concludes by calling for a theatre that would lessen dependence on the visual and stress the auditory.
