Cry

Book section : Chapter

At first blush, the relation between the cry and literature in Cixous’s work seems to pull in two different directions. On the one hand, the cry is so intimately associated with literature and with what distinguishes it from other forms of discourse, such as philosophy, that it almost seems to be defining, even constitutive, of the literary. In the 2013 text Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature, the “right to literature” is described interchangeably as “the right to cries that reality or the community forbid us [le droit aux cris que la réalité et la communauté nous interdisent].” After a series of variations spanning from a greeting (“ALLO!”) to a shriek (“Ai!”), Cixous lets out a cry about the cry, exclaiming in a threefold ejaculation that writing is the taking back of a cry that has been “torn from me.” Writing just is the translation into its “ultrasilence” of “the sharp and short cries of reality [les cris aigus et brefs de la réalité]”—the cries that reality at the same time denies. Literature might just be the persistence, the survival, the return of the cry that patriarchy, along with metaphysics in general, represses. This might be its driving raison d’être: “Literature is for yelling at length,” enthuses Cixous, “pushing cries all the way to music.” It will be necessary to return later to the way in which literature transforms the cry, makes it melodic or rhythmic, renders it musical, in its simultaneous retreat from and salvage of reality, and thereby makes sound what reality silences, if only on condition that it sound otherwise, musically—cri now retuned as é-cri-ture. First, however, let us turn to this generalizing, almost universalizing impulse of the cri as the heart of é-cri-ture, as what makes literature distinctive, against a claim for uniqueness....

Authors: Waltham-Smith, N

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Host title: Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism
• Pages: 203-208
• Chapter number: 18
• Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism
• Place of publication: New York
• Publication date: 2025-12-17
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.5040/9798765132050.0026
• ISSN: 2637-9031
• EISBN: 9798765132029
• ISBN: 9798765132036
• Language: English
• Keywords: écriture féminine; music; death; mourning; animality; politics
• Subtype: Chapter