Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous (born in Oran, French Algeria, in 1937) is a French writer, playwright and thinker, and one of the central figures of poststructuralist feminism. Her work spans novels, theatre, poetry and essays. It belongs to the tradition of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and its importance lies in linking writing to sexual difference and to the way we communicate in society.

She was born into a Jewish family in French Algeria. Her father, a physician, died of tuberculosis in 1948. She studied English, graduated in 1959 and completed her doctorate in 1968 with a study of James Joyce, published as The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement. That same year she helped found the University of Paris VIII, conceived as an alternative to the traditional academic model. In 1974 she set up its centre for women's studies, the first of its kind at a European university.

In 1969 she published Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel that won the Prix Médicis and explored identity, memory and writing. Her output has continued ever since, with more than seventy books across fiction, theatre, poetry and criticism. For years she worked with Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil, and she wrote monographs on Clarice Lispector, Kafka, Blanchot and Montaigne.

Her most influential text, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), championed écriture féminine, a mode of writing by and for women that breaks with masculine models of discourse. Alongside Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, she is regarded as one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory. She criticised Freud for assigning separate paths to boys and girls through the Oedipus and Electra complexes, and with Irigaray she coined the term phallogocentrism, which combines Derrida's logocentrism with Lacan's central role for the phallus.

Her intellectual friendship with Jacques Derrida lasted a lifetime. Both were French Jews born in Algeria, sharing a sense of belonging shaped by exclusion, and Cixous devoted a book to him, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint.

Her influence reaches literary criticism, feminist theory and gender studies. She has received numerous honorary doctorates and, in 2025, the Formentor Prize for Literature.