Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo-Subjectivity-Diffraction
Event details
The workshop centres around Birgit M. Kaiser’s recent book Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice: Echo-Subjectivity-Diffraction (Bloomsbury 2025) and will engage with some of the book’s key concerns: what does it mean to have, lose or gain a voice? How are voices full of “echoes” and how can such layered voices shape how we think about identity and the self, especially in our postcolonial and transcultural present? And what if we think of such voices as a diffraction?
Kaiser’s interdisciplinary work brings French-Algerian writer Hélène Cixous into dialogue with thinkers like Karen Barad, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud and Trinh Minh-ha, interweaving their voices with Cixous’s in what we can call a “diffractive” approach. The book’s thematic focus spans feminism, new materialism, postcolonial thought, and ecocriticism, illustrating how Cixous’s poetics resonate far beyond traditional literary critique. Ultimately, Kaiser argues that Cixous’s vision urges us to rethink coexistence and the boundaries between self and other.
Known mainly for her feminist classic The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous challenges traditional views of subjectivity. Especially in her poetic fictions, which have circulated much less than that canonized essay, Cixous envisions and performs a self defined by relationality rather than individuality. Central to Kaiser’s analysis is the figure of Echo, representing a feminine, ecological self that exceeds any binary model of self/other. In that respect, Cixous deconstructs psychoanalytic ideas of the ego and offers a more fluid notion of selfhood - what Kaiser calls an “ec(h)ology” of existence.
During the workshop, we will engage especially with the multilingualism in Cixous’s writing and how it performs such an “ec(h)ology” of existence.
In preparation, workshop participants are asked to read The introduction (p. 1-24); Chapter 2: “Making Voice: Superposition or the Chorus that “I” is (Reading Cixous with Barad and Trinh)” (p. 49-76).