Neuter by Hélène Cixous
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Neuter is a difficult book to read, because Cixous starts where she starts, slightly outside the context of your storied-expectations. Through a series of opening ephigraphs, and outlines of meditations on readings and texts, Cixous draws you deeper into the cramp inner space of story, subjectivity and analyst. Both psychoanalytical and philosophical, Cixous draws the thin null space, the non-existent middle, by which we see the internal dynamic structures that sustain the situation of subjectivity.
This is another way of saying that Cixous desexualizes subjectivity, by further castrating the subject. Rather than posing the master discourse of the universal All-Father, Cixous chooses instead the mother-son relationship, in order to show how a desexualized subject, one that is reversed in their “phallic-essence” is in fact one that is null. From there, she highlights the stakes of the story itself, and the relative positions of analyst and subject.
It all seems pretty mystical though (or musical, if you like), because Cixous walks the line using metaphors and literal meanings of words. Of course words are both literal and figurative at the same time, so she plays heavily with that ambiguity. As part of the writing, the text approaches self awareness, describing its own audience as it creates its own bridges and metaphors. It questions its own page turning, layering for us an introduction that takes us out of the context and turns us back around so that we can leave behind what we are supposed to experience and begin to experience what is there, outside the context of familiarity. This heavy introduction is the chanting part of the text: dive deeper-deeper! as she drops into the very inner void, and places us in the place for a master-text within the master-text, showing us bare subjectivity and bare story as the elements of the narrative are actors in the narrative itself.
Neuter then, is Cixous’s way of castrating the story, taking out the contingencies of names, place and time, by which we read universal “common” experience through each sideline of particularity. Cixous allows us to experience the arbitrary relationships of a story, and she does this masterfully, by turning all its elements inside-out, defamiliarizing the story itself by castrating it of its essential contingencies. In a sense, she makes the story a pataphysical experience of what was previously universal. Neuter is the smallest null space one can get. Neuter is the barest outline of the essential arc. Neuter is the null subjectivity, the zero degree point of view. Truly a difficult and masterful piece of writing, controlled, deliberate and evocative.
