the subject of love: Hélène Cixous and the feminine divine

This article broaches what can sometimes be seen as the suppression of the female voice, sometimes the repression of the feminine. To address these matters involves the reconsideration of the political discourse that pervades education and educational research. This article is an attempt to disclose inequity in apparently equitable space, through the acknowledgment of the voice of disequilibrium. It proposes to re-place the subject of philosophy, and the subject of woman, through an alternative idea of the feminine voice in philosophy. It tries to reconfigure the female voice without negating its fated biological origin and traits, and yet avoiding the confining of thought to the constraints of gender divides. In terms of education, it shall argue for the conversation of justice as a way of cultivating the feminine voice in philosophy: as the voice of disequilibrium. This is an occasion of mutual destabilization and transformation of man and woman, crossing gender divides, and preparing an alternative route to political criticism that not only reclaims the rights of women but releases the thinking of men and women, laying the way for a better, more pluralist, and more democratic politics. The feminine voice can find a way beyond the dominance of instrumental rationality and calculative thinking in the discourse on equity itself. And it can, one might reasonably hope, have an impact on the curriculum of university education.

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Desire, sanity and the middlebrow aesthetic: The case of Triveni’s Sharapanjara

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature ◽

10.1177/0021989419878487 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 002198941987848

Author(s):

Gayathri Prabhu

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Narrative Structure ◽

Popular Literature ◽

Domestic Space ◽

Mental Health Recovery ◽

Double Vision ◽

The Public ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

The Feminine ◽

The Subject

Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara. While the former got enshrined into the Indian modernist canon (the Navya movement), Triveni’s work has stayed mostly in the realms of popular literature for women. This article seeks to make a case to read Sharapanjara in light of recent scholarship on popular modernism and on the middlebrow novel, especially the feminine middlebrow. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s mental health, recovery and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space, this novel makes several bold thematic and stylistic forays. The article analyses Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about desire and insanity, both in its treatment of the subject as well as its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp where the domestic and the public collapse into each other.

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Disrupting Phallic Logic: (Re)thinking the Feminine with Hélène Cixous and Bracha Ettinger

Australian Feminist Studies ◽

10.1080/08164649.2021.2011706 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Ruth Daly

Keyword(s):

Helene Cixous ◽

The Feminine

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For hendes ansigt skinnede som solen

Kvinder Køn & Forskning ◽

10.7146/kkf.v0i3.28484 ◽

1997 ◽

Author(s):

Britt Istoft

Keyword(s):

Virgin Mary ◽

Hildegard Of Bingen ◽

Central Figure ◽

Spiritual World ◽

The Feminine ◽

The World ◽

Anima Mundi ◽

Feminine Divine

The Gernman abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) developped a richly nuanced theology of the feminine. At the heart of her spiritual world stands the numinous figure she called Sapientia or Caritas: Wisdom or Love, a theophany of the feminine aspect of the divine. In Hildegard's visionary work De operatione Dei, "The Book of Divine Works", written between 1163-1173, Caritas/Sapientia plays an important part. She is the central figure in five out of the ten visions, that comprises De operatione Dei. The first two visions picture Caritas as Anima Mundi, the world soul - the divine presense in the cosmos - and Creatrix, who creates the world by existing in it as an eternal, circling motion. The eighth vision presents Caritas/Sapienta as the "living fountain", that both quickens and reflects all creatures, and inspires the prophets, including Hildegard herself. The theme of the ninth vision is "Wisdom's vesture". Because Wisdom is both a cosmic and a microcosmic figure, her garb can represent the workmanship og either God or man. In the tenth vision Caritas rests in the center of the wheel of eternity and history, and is presented as the eternal archetype of the Virgin Mary. Besides being a theological necessity as mediator of creation, incarnation and salvation Hildegard's feminine divine also serves as a model for women, particularly consecrated virgins, who represent the feminine divine on earth.

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Between Mirrors all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body

Lifewriting Annual ◽

10.16995/la.1913 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Marion May Campbell

Keyword(s):

Social Identity ◽

Life Writing ◽

The Body ◽

Helene Cixous ◽

Material Practice ◽

The Subject

Just as any body's cells are constantly dying and regenerating, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body draw its vitality from the teeming traffic of death, the fertile muck of the abject. Such is the suggestion of the title, sourced in Hélène Cixous' work (1991: 41), out of whose spell this life writing marks off its distinctive poetics of the fragment, drawing an ethics of openness from the mining of abjection. To be sure, this is no chronological memoir, building teleologically to a transformation and consolidation of social identity. Quite to the contrary: bold, brave, and disturbingly innovative, this work from Sydney-born Quinn Eades, formerly known as Karina Quinn, performs a body reinventing itself: scarified, 'surgeried', written into and out of, and endlessly reconfigured through the writing. Eades builds their story through a constellation of scenes staging the embodied, yet fractured self, the sujet en procès, the subject-on-trial and -in process (Kristeva 1977) from coruscating scintillation to depressive passivity, through what they call écriture matière -- writing as a material practice. 

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"Imago expandit splendorem suum". Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript

Eikon / Imago ◽

10.5209/eiko.73380 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 1-68

Author(s):

Nathaniel M. Campbell

Keyword(s):

Hildegard Of Bingen ◽

Salvation History ◽

Visual Markers ◽

Original Manuscript ◽

The Feminine ◽

Theological Discourse ◽

Color Scheme ◽

Feminine Divine ◽

The Church ◽

Significant Point

A significant point of contention within studies of the twelfth-century visionary saint and Doctor of the Church, Hildegard of Bingen, is the question of her role in the production of the illuminated Scivias manuscript known as the Rupertsberg Codex. While current German scholarship has tended to preclude Hildegard’s hand, pre-war German scholars, who had access to the original manuscript before it was lost, and most modern Anglophone scholars have argued more or less strongly for Hildegard’s influence on the design. This paper argues for Hildegard’s direction of the images based on their function as a theological discourse refracting the text. The images are not ancillary to or derivative of the work; they are integral to it. A key area of the manuscript design that reveals these authorial interventions is the color scheme. The use of certain colors, such as green and red, that have particular meanings in Hildegard’s symbolic vocabulary—even when at odds with the colors described in the recorded vision text—reveals the theological place of each image within Hildegard’s perception of salvation history. Furthermore, the extensive use of silver, gold, and blue in the manuscript can be understood both through Hildegard’s likely use of actual jewelry that contained enamel work and those metals, and through the theological meanings with which Hildegard imbues the metallic pigments. Such visual markers invested with theological significance thus argue for Hildegard’s design of the manuscript and aid the viewer- reader in interpreting the complex visual allegories at work in Hildegard’s often enigmatic visions. Finally, they reveal the dynamic ways in which Hildegard used the images to emphasize her theological insights into the feminine divine and its connection especially to her and her community as virgin members of a virgin Church.

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Divine Women? Irigaray, God, and the Subject

Feminist Theology ◽

10.1177/0966735018814670 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 117-125

Author(s):

Susan Hekman

Keyword(s):

Female Subject ◽

Process Theology ◽

Luce Irigaray ◽

Western Tradition ◽

Feminist Literature ◽

Men I ◽

The Feminine ◽

The Subject ◽

Feminine Subject

One of the central themes of contemporary feminist literature is the exclusion of the female subject from the Western tradition. Luce Irigaray has made significant contributions to this literature. In this article I examine one aspect of Irigaray’s work on the feminine subject, her discussion of divine women. She argues that in order to achieve full subjectivity women must worship a female god that will give them the divinity that they lack, the divinity that the patriarchal god provides for men. I argue that this thesis is both counterproductive and incoherent. It perpetuates the male/female binarism that is at the root of patriarchy. It also fails to define the concept of a female god which is at the centre of Irigaray’s argument. I conclude that the approach of process theology is much more successful in removing the maleness of God and providing women with a deity compatible with feminist beliefs.

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