We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
Interpretation
The quote calls for the destruction of societal norms and false identities that stifle authentic womanhood.
Helene Cixous' quote emphasizes the need to reject oppressive societal constructs that inhibit women's true selves from flourishing. The 'false woman' symbolizes imposed roles and expectations, while the 'live one' represents the authentic, vibrant identity that can thrive when unencumbered by such limitations, advocating for liberation and self-realization.
In practice
During a women's rights seminar, this quote can inspire participants to reflect on their identities.
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, the whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.
Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
I am one who has been acquainted with the night
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move.
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