Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Interpretation
Women should express themselves fully, overcoming societal barriers and traditional narratives.
In this quote, Helene Cixous emphasizes the importance of women's unique voices and experiences in literature and communication. She argues that women have the power to create a language that transcends societal divisions and norms, challenging the silence imposed on them. By writing through their lived experiences, women can connect with one another and find solidarity, suggesting that their collective expression is not only necessary but powerful.
In practice
During a women's literature festival, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of female voices.
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.
I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers.
Let us not make the poor our friends by our alms, not our enemies by our scorns. We had better have the ears of God full of their prayers, than heaps of money in our own coffers with their curses.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
What being a socialist means is... that you hold out... a vision of society where poverty is absolutely unnecessary, where international relations are not based on greed... but on cooperation... where human beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
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