Mowa jabłka i ekonomia utraty
Speech of apple and economics of loss

Ways to read (write) texts by Hélène Cixous

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to the thought of the French writer and philosopher associated with the second wave of French feminism, Hélène Cixous. Her texts work in an innovative way with topos, myths and imaginary patterns of culture. Cixous has developed her own concept of writing, referred to as écriture féminine (I translate it here as kobieca ekrytura). Her style is based on embracing the illogical way of articulation as well as looking for poetic and literary stylizations. Cixous deconstructs various figures of cultural symbolic resources: this text focuses on her iconic article "The Laugh of Medusa" and the theme of the “apple”, a metaphor of writing and communing with the text, which the author repeatedly eploys. The metaphor first appeared when Cixous discovered the literature of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Exploring biblical motifs by a radical critique of literary texts leads us to a renewed understanding of culture, which re-evaluates "sexual difference", one of the fundamental concepts of Cixouan thinking.

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