Sarah

Abstract

Throughout this book, I have sought to apply Hélène Cixous’s celebration of the emancipatory potential of l’écritureféminine to a way of reading and understanding the possibilities for transformational adult learning. An issue that emerged from the interview with Jane was that resilience can be constituted in the ability of the learner to allow herself to be transformed and to survive the process within an academic system that expects compliance in return for the benefits it bestows. For Cixous, the corresponding problem, which it is almost impossible to resolve, is how to write in a way that refuses to grant power to the masculine game of academic and philosophical discourse, while at the same time having only the tools of the master¹ with which to work. As Toril Moi puts it, “Her whole theoretical project can in one sense be summed up as the effort to undo this logocentric ideology… and to hail the advent of a new, feminine language that ceaselessly subverts these patriarchal binary schemes.”² Cixous’s own later expansion of l’écriture féminine in her essay “Coming to Writing” points the way to the potential benefits that might be reaped by its wider application and specifically to its use in the field of education. It is clearly a view of writing that undermines much that is taken to be inherent in the sort of theoretical mastery that dominates academic writing in the social sciences, though, because it defies attempts to pin it down and define it—Cixous often defines it in terms of what it is not:

You don’t seek to master. To demonstrate, explain, grasp. And then to lock away in a strongbox. To pocket a part of the riches of the world. Butrather to transmit: to make things loved by making them known. You, in your turn, want to affect, you want to wake the dead, you want to remind people that they once wept for love, and trembled with desires, and that they were then very close to the life that they claim they’ve been seeking while constantly moving further away ever since. ³