Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

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Hélène Cixous


Hélène Cixous (b. 1937) is a versatile French writer and critic who has worked in a
variety of areas—fiction, theatre and theoretical writing—in a style frequently
transgressive of genre. Associated with the ‘Psychanalyse et Politique’ group of
feminists, her work has been informed by a strong psychoanalytic impulse which seeks to
challenge unconscious structures of exclusion. Cixous has argued instead for a sexual
difference based on openness to the other, and has promoted a ‘feminine writing’—
écriture feminine—as a strategy of exploring difference in a non-exclusionary mode.
Such writing is not limited to women, however, and some of the best examples have been
the works of male authors such as James Joyce.
Like much of her other writing, ‘Attacks of the Castle’ contains traces of
autobiographical material and a significant psychoanalytic dimension. It draws in
particular on her earlier work on Kafka’s short story ‘Before the Law’, which had been
used by Cixous as an allegory for female exclusion under patriarchy. In Kafka’s story a
man arrives before the door to the Law, but remains convinced of his own exclusion,
even though the door remains open. The theme of access and denial runs throughout
‘Attacks of the Castle’. Prague is a city that can never be fully captured by the onto-
hermeneutical process. It is not Prague, but Pragues, promised Pragues to which the
author, like the character in Kafka’s tale, would never gain entry. ‘Promised Pragues.
You dream of going. You cannot go. What would happen if you went?’ The theme of
Prague as a city of multiple interpretations echoes Cixous’ earlier observations on
Monet’s twenty-six paintings, each an attempt to ‘capture’ Rouen Cathedral. The ‘truth’
of Rouen Cathedral is in fact twenty-six cathedrals. It is in her own very painterly and
self-reflexive writing on Prague—a Prague of traces, memories and meanings erased by
repetition—that Cixous opens up the possibility of a new way of writing about the city.


ATTACKS OF THE CASTLE


I was in Prague two weeks ago, it was the first time and the only thing I absolutely
wanted to see was Kafka’s tomb. But to-see-Kafka’s-tomb does not simply mean to see
Kafka’s tomb. I was at last in Prague and I wanted at last to see the hand, the trace, the
footprint, that is to say the natural and naked fleshy face of the author of the Letter, that is
to say the eyelids of god. It is now thirtyfive years that I have fought for this day, a long
combat and obscure like all combats. One never knows in the heat of the struggle who
one is everything being mixed up, desire, fear, hostility of love, one fights, desire is a
battle between oneself against oneself, an imagination of obstacles to stop oneself from
going off to lose the war.
But finally I was there, too bad. The long-awaited day was inevitable. I wanted to see
Kafka’s tomb. Knowing perfectly well (having verified it so many times) that you cannot
see what you want to see, I went to the cemetery to see what I could not see. It’s the law.

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