Laugh All You Medusas! Hélène Cixous’ Écriture Feminine as Feminist Legal Translation, Transformation, Transgression, and Translactation in the Era of AI and the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This text considers Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing feminine’) as one way to do feminist legal translation. It discusses the importance of ‘writing one self’ as legal scholars in our own time as a reflection both on what law as well as what the self is or can be. To write one self through écriture feminine is a feminist act in contestation to the ‘phallocentric’ search for the law’s (phallo-)‘originary first term or logos’. Drawing on Yoriko Otomo’s feminist legal scholarship, I show that écriture feminine writes the world differently through the writing of the self; something which is urgently needed in a time of, as Anna Grear puts it, ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’. Legal scholarship has often considered Cixous’ work in the context of ‘the linguistic turn’ – a turn that has been out of vogue for some time now. Hence, Cixous’ écriture feminine is rarely explicitly part of contemporary critical legal scholars’ efforts. In this text, however, I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and her écriture feminine, is necessary to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to new materialism, tech and AI: The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in écriture feminine interrupt the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in the world such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework.

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.

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa¹

1.0 Introduction

In order to go beyond the phallocentric logos of law one must disrupt the ‘(classic) phallic discourse’ and move towards dismantling ‘the myth of an originary first term of “logos”.’² These are the words of Hélène Cixous, and of Sara Ramshaw, as the latter transcribes Cixous’ écriture feminine into a feminist legal jurisprudence. Cixous, who is most well known for her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, originally published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1976, is a feminist post-structuralist, psychoanalytic scholar, intellectual, novelist and playwright.³ Her influence on feminist legal scholarship is considerable – if less so in feminist legal scholarship’s recent turns to tech, digitalisation and AI, as well as to theories drawing more on the material while downplaying the linguistic elements of law.⁴ The latter (turn to digitalisation, AI and tech and the material) includes feminist posthumanist and new materialist legal scholarship.⁵ Cixous’ aim to disrupt the logocentric – ‘the privileging of Logos, the Word, as a metaphysical presence’ – as well as the phallocentric – ‘the privileging of the phallus as the symbol or source of power’ – is central to all feminist legal scholarship.⁶ When considering feminist translations of, in and through law and critical jurisprudence – as this special issue does – I therefore find it timely to turn to Cixous and écriture feminine in order to think about feminist, embodied, material and situated critical legal scholarship.

In this text, I consider Cixous’ écriture feminine (‘writing feminine’) as a way of doing feminist legal translation. I do so in order to discuss the importance of ‘writing one self’ as feminist and critical legal scholars in our own time. To emphasise the material, the embodiedness, and situatedness of scholarship is done in Cixous’ work as écriture feminine. In other feminist iterations the material, the embodied and situated is done as autobiography, autoethnography, or perhaps most commonly in the introduction or author’s forewords to otherwise nominally logocentric scholarship.⁷ The position from which I write is feminist posthumanist, critical legal, as well as écriture feminine. Some, I am sure, will find my turn to language – a necessary turn when doing écriture feminine – treacherous (or less dramatically: plain boring, old fashioned and passé). After all, in the midst of the sixth planetary extinction and in response to climate crisis, increasing global inequalities through ever-increasing digital divides and distribution of wealth, and in response to the global spread of fascism, can writing be the right thing to do?

In contrast to most scholars who have turned to new materialisms and feminist posthumanism, I find no urge to simultaneously turn away from thinking and acting through text or the scholarship associated with the ‘linguistic turn’, psychoanalysis, and feminist poststructuralism – the context in which Cixous’ work is most often considered.⁸ Instead, against such a ‘turn away’, and in response to the posthuman condition of the Anthropocene – a convergence of climate crisis, the rise of digitalisation and the use of AI, and the material and global inequalities associated with and enhanced through it – I find it necessary to continue and to build on the work of existing feminist scholarship and traditions, including Cixouś écriture feminine, and to thereby live ethically in the world so that it becomes differently through my living.⁹ Such feminist living continues to be – and is perhaps even more so now than ever before – a necessary act of material, embodied, and situated feminist legal translation, transformation, transgression, and translactation undoing the logocentrism and phallic discourse that has enabled what Anna Grear has called the ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’ of the Anthropocene.¹⁰ To take hold of language, showing how it is part of the material and embodied of law and life, and to make the world different through écriture feminine seems like a necessary feminist life-commitment – now as much as ever. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ was published in 1975 – some years ago by now. Yet, there is need for us to once again be reminded that we ‘only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her.’¹¹

This text is structured as follows. I start by situating Cixous’ scholarship, and in particular her écriture feminine, within the context of this special issue: feminist translations in, of, and through law. I then move to explain what écriture feminine is and show what it can do in, with, and through well-known legal debates and jurisprudences: I draw on Yoriko Otomo’s feminist legal scholarship in order to show both how écriture feminine can be done as feminist legal translation and what it does to critical legal analysis. Rather than just writing about how Otomo’s écriture feminine writes the world differently – in her translactation through legal analysis of the global legal history of cows’ milk industry; in her transgression of grammar and desire in her analysis of post-World War Two claims on sovereignty in occupied Japan; and beyond – I allow parts of her writing-of-her-self to materialise as part-of-writing-myself in the text.

I conclude by returning to the theme of increased digitalisation, AI and the ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’ in our Anthropocentric, posthuman predicament:¹² What relevance does Cixous’ écriture feminine have when the world is literally on fire, when ‘digital twins’ of human and non-human bodies act as digital doubles, and when critical legal scholarship is deeply concerned (once again) with the ‘hard sciences’: with tech, AI and the material conditions of the posthuman condition? I argue that Cixous’ scholarship, and écriture feminine, is necessary to contemporary legal scholarship in its turn to posthumanism and new materialism, tech and AI: The feminist translation, transformation, transgression and translactation in écriture feminine interrupts the phallocentric predatory imperative embedded in the world that such legal scholarship tries to make sense of and rework for the better.

2.0 The Phallocentric Logos of LAW

The posthuman condition, the Anthropocene, and its laws are often and primarily portrayed as a time of war, terror, and destruction.¹³ Yet, at the same time as there are real reasons for despair, there have never been as many feminist legal scholars as there are today, all working to undo and translate, transgress, transform, and translactate the ‘boundaries and binaries’ in conventional law and jurisprudence, ‘such as male/female, public/private, core/periphery, and North/South’.¹⁴ Rosemary Grey, Stu Marvel, Leila Brännström and Markus Gunneflo, Luisa Teresa Hedler Ferreira and Maj Grasten, and Sara Kolah Ghoutschi, Alina de Luna Aldape and Thorsten Bonacker show in their respective articles in this special issue that there is hope, rage, and courage to find in our own time, as well as in the feminist traditions that have come before us.¹⁵ Yet, of course, there is more work to do. But how to go about it? In Miriam Bak-McKenna’s and Maj Grasten’s words, this special issue seeks to

shed light on translational practices and theories as they relate to gender and law in order to map past uses and the potential for engaging with translation and translation as activism in the pursuit of women’s rights.¹⁶

Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine – with which I engage in this text with the aim to instil hope, rage, and courage to face the secret of law: that ‘there is no secret’¹⁷ – does not engage with women’s rights in any conventional legal sense. Instead, it engages with writing as a mode of translation, transformation, transgression, and translactation. Rather than offering an analysis of (the phallocentric origin of) rights – women’s or otherwise – or acting as a right in itself, écriture feminine is getting at undoing the structures that engender unequal rights to begin with. It is a writing-based practice of embodying undoing what is un-right. In a very practical sense, it is doing right through one’s embodied writing: (w)righting.

Cixous has a long career behind her as a professor, scholar, literary critic, writer and playwright. Most well known for her écriture feminine she is also known as one of the originators of feminist post-structuralism, as a founder of feminist studies in European academia, as well as for her studies on Clarise Lispector and her collaborations with Jacques Derrida.¹⁸

But what, then, is ércriture feminine? Cixous uses, in the original French, the terms écriture – i.e. writing – and feminine. The latter is often translated into English as ‘women’s’ and as a whole it is often (mis)translated as ‘women’s writing’ or, as I find to be closer to the Cixousian meaning I want to write with, ‘writing feminine.’¹⁹ Écriture feminine, in this latter meaning, is ‘to be engaged in a process of ongoing translation between the corporeal, the aesthetic, and language’.²⁰ Or, in a more general description, borrowed from Verena Andermatt Conley, ércriture feminine is a feminist practice as it ‘disrupts social practices in the ways it both discerns and literally rewrites them.’²¹

The French-to-English translation inscribes – as Bak-McKenna and Grasten note that translations often do – boundaries and meanings but also insecurities and ambivalences, disruptions and transgressions. Cixous insists on the faithfulness towards the other when translating. She does this in her own translational practices of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s literary work – but is wary of the ‘risk of betrayal, of becoming a translator-traitor (“traduttore tradittore”).’²² There is a life at stake:

This is the theme of translation: one does not arrive. There is the ‘arrival’ or target language [langue d’arrivée], one paces it, one rents it, one is a tenant, one adopts and is adopted, one tastes in it the delights of new surroundings one is not of one’s blood. At least this is my case. The idea of ‘doing’ a translation frightens me. The idea of rendering a text in another, to secure (as Jacques Derrida says) the survival of the body of the original.²³

At this instance, translation inscribes gendered differences and draws boundaries between sexes that cause trouble. Let us therefore stay with the French and do with the English (or, as Donna Haraway would have it: Let’s stay with the trouble).²⁴

Écriture feminine is not concerned with the performances of particular genders or biological sexes.²⁵ Rather, Cixous’ feminine is ‘a way of being in the world,’ as Ramshaw aptly puts it, ‘which corresponds with the economie libidinale feminine.’²⁶ The libidinal economy is knowingly split into a problematic duality by Cixous (but, as Cixous argues, we are caught in a language which we need to ‘shake … like apple trees all the time’²⁷).²⁸ Thus, Cixous gives it to us as the ‘energetic and economic model of the libido as a drive of desire that basically can be spent or retained.’²⁹ In other words, the feminine of the economie libidinale feminine and of écriture feminine keeps the other alive within oneself while not desiring destruction of neither the other nor oneself; it is desire that does not pursue destruction.³⁰ Powerful, vital, self-reflexive and splendidly Medusian. Écriture feminine allows anyone who by their ‘way of being in the world’ revels in a vital curiosity flowing from the embodied foreignness within one self, and from a libidinal economy that does not pursue the quest for the myth of the ‘originary’ phallo-logos.³¹ In Susan Sellers’ words the feminine (in Cixous’ lexicon) is that which ‘refuses to appropriate or annihilate the other’s difference in order to construct the self in a (masculine) position of mastery’.³² This is a feminine self who neither appropriates nor annihilates the ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism:’³³ Instead, such a self translates, transforms, transgresses, and translactates through writing the present anew.

3.0 Writing the Present

It is not enough to write about écriture feminine, because écriture feminine is to become in and through (and not about) writing – to become in writing in the present and to write the present. It is ‘writing itself as it lives,’ as Cixous’ oft translator into English, Eric Prenowitz, puts it:

Hélène Cixous’ writing is biographical. Indeed doubly autobiographical: not just the writing of the self, an author’s written account of her life, but life itself writing itself as it lives, such that the reader can never separate the written from the lived, the life written from the writing of life.³⁴

Thus, if our present is one of ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’ something needs to be done in terms of writing our selves, and writing our lives, in the present:³⁵ We must write the present different. We must, as it were, write from the life drive.³⁶ In Cixous’ words: ‘[W]hat wants to flow is breath. And not just any old way. The breath “wants” a form. “Write me!” One day it begs me, another day it threatens. “Are you going to write me or not?”³⁷

Yoriko Otomo’s scholarship is an example of écriture feminine in our own time.³⁸ It was through Otomo and her feminist legal scholarship that I, and with me also others, have come to read (with) Cixous, and find my own self in writing.³⁹ In her article The Gentle Cannibal: The Rise and Fall of Lawful Milk, Otomo lactates the writing of the necropolitical past-and-present of the cows’ milk industry – its racist insistence on purity and whiteness, of nationalist supremacy, and colonial subjugation.⁴⁰ Hers is a translactation across boundaries between, and meanings of, species.⁴¹ The female body and the suckling infant: the gentle cannibal.⁴² Eating and being eaten becomes a transformative act without desire to appropriate or annihilate. Otomo translactates her body – writes the world – and recomposes herself into an article. Cixous says: ‘I don’t write. Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text.’⁴³ The same can be said about Otomo’s embodied, material and situated feminist legal life-texts.

In another of her articles – ‘Of Mimicry and Madness: Speculations on the State’ – Otomo relentlessly undoes the phallogocentric structures of grammar and reason. She takes, on the one hand, a sovereign legal demand for unconditional surrender and, on the other, the responding sovereign’s conditional surrender, and structure these two sovereigns’ words as a poetic collage:⁴⁴

Incalculable⁴⁵

The killing of innocents⁴⁶

Of this sacred state⁴⁷

A statement of terms⁴⁸

There are no alternatives⁴⁹

We brook no delay⁵⁰

Most cruel explosive⁵¹

Pains my body⁵²

To the point of fragmentation⁵³

Unconditional⁵⁴

The time has come for Japan⁵⁵

The path of reason⁵⁶

Peoples of the world⁵⁷

In fraternal contention⁵⁸

New order of peace⁵⁹

Tolerate the intolerable⁶⁰

For peace⁶¹

To last thousands of generations⁶²

On a world conquest⁶³

The Empire of Japan⁶⁴

The United States⁶⁵

Because the legal reality Otomo analyses is an instance of competing sovereign legal demands during what qualifies under international law as a belligerent occupation, she could have analysed the origin and meaning of sovereignty in international law and jurisprudence. At the time of her writing ‘Of Mimicry and Madness: Speculations on the State’ (cited above) it was en vogue amongst critical legal scholars to interrogate sovereignty through Carl Schmitt’s legal and political thought.⁶⁶ The Schmitt-sovereignty trajectory was searching for an ‘originary first term or “logos”,’ and a phallocentric myth of law in order to understand international law’s power and place in the world.⁶⁷ Yet, rather than to move with such power and pull (to heed to the logos and phallos, and to take the ‘turn’ which is en vogue in critical legal scholarship at the moment) Otomo breaks with it all and thereby makes sovereignty’s phallocentric and logocentric ‘secret’ visible. Otomo writes the present of masculine (as the opposite of economie libidinale feminine is the economie libidinale masculine) erotic desire ‘for unconditional love’ in the United States’ (US) demand for unconditional Japanese surrender at the end of World War Two.⁶⁸ She uses that which Cixous calls transgrammatical translations.⁶⁹ In other words, Otomo transgresses the structure of grammar in order to translate the two speeches into a love poem – intertwining US General McArthur’s erotic-destructive-appropriative-annihilating demand with the Japanese emperor Hirohito’s subjugational-erotic response, as an erotic desire for ‘simultaneously reinscrib[ing Hirohito’s] sovereignty (conditional upon recognition by the occupier) and render[ing] invisible the prior sacrifices of war.’⁷⁰ The economie libidinale rendered visible through Otomo’s writing is neither entirely feminine nor fully masculine in the lexicon of Cixous. Writing the present – the écriture feminine – in this case enables an understanding of the relation between McArthur’s (il)legal sovereign claim and Hirohito’s sovereign subjugation as far from binary (victor/conquered; sovereign/subject; occupier/dethroned): also, in the question of sovereign demand and subjugation there can be vital movements and transgrammatical translations into new life, transgressing the desire to appropriate and annihilate. In Cixous’ words:

We have to be transgrammatical, the way one says to be transgressive, which does not mean that we have to despise grammar but we are so used to obeying it absolutely that some work has to be done in that direction. I find it important to work on foreign texts, precisely because they displace our relationship to grammar.⁷¹

Writing the present in these ways is a ‘realisation of an impossible dream’.⁷² To write the present in such a way is to make the present take place in the act of writing. It then immediately takes place in the reading (your reading, my dear reader!). All the while, it takes place in the visual-aesthetic form of the stanzas of the poetry as well as in our sonorous memory of the presence of prosody.

Cixous herself says: ‘one cannot write in the present because one writes after the present.’⁷³ Yet, as Cixous also says, ‘I write before myself by apprehension, with noncomprehension’.⁷⁴

At a gallop, the snail! We scribble while crawling in the wake of God.

We live more quickly than ourselves, the pen doesn’t follow. To paint the present which is passing us by, we stop the present.

One cannot after all write a book with only one stroke, of only one page, and yet

we should.

But we are born for lateness.

Time, the body, are our slow vehicles, our chariots without wheels.⁷⁵

Writing the present through Cixous’ écriture feminine (as Otomo does) leads to what Sara Ramshaw, in recalling and citing Cixous, describes as

‘transformations of writing’, to transformations of language and world. In other words, it is this writing of the present, this writing the present, which ‘moves the place, the time of enunciation’, which moves the origin; returning us perhaps (always perhaps) to the ‘origin of the gesture of writing’.⁷⁶

Drinking a glass of cow’s milk – tasting its animality and bodily presence and sensing the material conditions through which it has been produced as a consumer product – or reading General McArthur’s and emperor Hirohito’s speeches will never again be the same after Otomo’s writing. Transformation of the world becomes possible when one looks straight at her – the Medusa. ‘Applied to law and legal discourse,’ Ramshaw continues, ‘the Cixousian “feminine” reveals to us the secret of law: “there is no secret”’.⁷⁷ Instead of a phallogocentric origin, ‘the text, the evidence of writing is the law’.⁷⁸ In Cixous’ words: ‘The law especially defends its own secret, which is that it does not exist. It exists, but only through its name. As soon as I speak about it, I give it a name.’⁷⁹ With Cixous, then, we are free to name and to transform through writing our selves. Yet, with such freedom and as our responsibility arrives the question: how do we write our selves in our own present time?

4.0 Write Your Self

So, what relevance does Cixous’ écriture feminine have when the world is on fire? Why take hold of language and make the world different through our lives? Why write our selves when ‘digital twins’ of human bodies and cities are made to double, mirror and simulate human life and societies, and when critical legal scholars turn to mathematics, theoretical physics, neuroscience, data science, the crypto sphere and to AI – all classical ‘hard sciences’ – in order to consider the specific challenges of our times? While the posthuman predicament challenges us to look closer at and to critically engage with all of the logocentric ‘hard’ (as well as other) sciences at work in our time, the message from Cixous is brilliantly clear: there is a feminist politics and power in claiming language and to use it in embodied, material and situated subversive ways in order to reveal the secrets hidden in plain sight. Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine bids us to, as well as provides us with the method for, revealing the secret of the law of the posthuman predicament and the Anthropocene in laughing beauty:

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.⁸⁰

This material emplacement-as-movement of oneself as the part of the world/body/text/law as a radiant and radical part of the world in which we live in is, as I have shown through Yoriko Otomo’s scholarship, something that feminist legal scholars are already doing and have been doing for some time: feminist legal translation, transformation, transgression, and translactation. To write one self through écriture feminine is a material, embodied, and situated practice necessary for the posthuman predicament and the Anthropocene era. It is necessary because without écriture feminine we will continue searching for an ‘originary first term or “logos”,’⁸¹ phallocentric myth of law in order to understand law’s power and place in the world. And, indeed our own power and place in it all.

A Cixousian response to the call by Bak-McKenna and Grasten – to consider ‘how legal concepts, categories and subjects travel and are translated and with what effects, how feminist jurisprudence is translated and transformed into feminist activism, the translation of conceptions of gender relations between different (con)texts and translation problems related to gender and law, and the role of translators as brokers and intermediaries in negotiating and contesting legal knowledge production and flows’ – is to write your self.⁸² Follow Cixous, Ramshaw, Otomo, and others who have written before us: translate, transform, transgress, and translactate in écriture féminine. And laugh because there is no secret: there is no origin. There is no need to heed to the necrotic, predatory imperative of the phallos, and there is no need to search for ‘the myth of an originary first term or “logos”.’⁸³ Instead: an author. Instead: writing your self. It is in the doing of this writing – the écriture feminine – that another law, Cixous reminds us, comes into our own time. I do as Cixous does: ‘I write the encore. Still here, I write my life.’⁸⁴ There is too much phallos-necrotic, predatory imperative in this world. Come on and do it: Laugh all you Medusas! Write your self. Do it already.

We are beautiful

and we are laughing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (trans Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen) (1976) 1(4) Signs 875, 885. For a general introduction to Cixous’ Medusa, see Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Oxford University Press 2006); as well as the 2010 republication of the French original with a new foreword: Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse et Autres Ironies [The Laugh of the Medusa and Other Ironies] (Éditions Galilée 2010).

2 Sara Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”: The Cixousian “Feminine” and the Quest for Law’s Origin’ (2003) 19(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 11 at 12, 20 (‘Nearing the “Wild at Heart”’). See also Sara Ramshaw, ‘Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law’ (2021) Law, Culture and the Humanities at 1-2. For an early text on a similar theme (Cixous, and écriture feminine as a way of thinking the body of/in law), see Helen Stacey, ‘Legal Discourse and the Feminist Political Economy: Moving beyond Sameness/Difference’ (1996) 6 Australian Feminist Law Journal 115 at 128 (‘Legal Discourse’).

3 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, above note 1.

4 In browsing through the archive of the Australian Feminist Law Journal it is evident that the journal is one of the earliest (English language) and most prominent platforms in which feminist legal scholarship drawing on Cixous has been published. These scholarships are mainly dedicated to Cixous’ écriture feminine. It honours the journal that it has acted, and still acts, as a platform for important feminist legal writing. See especially Stacey, ‘Legal Discourse’, above note 2; Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild at Heart”’, above note 2; Yoriko Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness: Speculations on the State’ (2008) 28(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 53 (‘Of Mimicry and Madness’); Yoriko Otomo, ‘Endgame: Feminist Lawyers and the Revolutionary Body’ (2009) 31(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 153; Yoriko Otomo, ‘The Gentle Cannibal: The Rise and Fall of Lawful Milk’ (2014) 40(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 215 (‘The Gentle Cannibal’); Elena Loizidou and Sara Ramshaw, ‘Flesh, Bones and Other Matters’ (2008) 29(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 3; Helene Kazan, ‘The Architecture of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Violence and the Poetic Testimony of War’ (2018) 44(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 119 (‘The Architecture’). For critical legal scholarship on Cixous and Derrida, see Ramshaw, ‘Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law’, above note 2; Peter Fitzpatrick, ‘Breaking the Unity of the World: Savage Sources and Feminine Law’ (2003) 19 Australian Feminist Law Journal 47; Peter Fitzpatrick, ‘Being Originary: Periodization and the Force of Feminine Law’ (2013) 38(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 23; Peter Fitzpatrick ‘Taking Place: Westphalia and the Poetics of Law’ (2014) 2(1) London Review of International Law 155.

5 The distinction I make here between feminist posthumanism and new materialisms is primarily one of indicating how feminist knowledge, although being foundational to new materialist ontology and epistemology (and although many new materialist legal scholars are feminists), is too often written out of its theoretical and methodological frameworks and considerations. Relevant examples of feminist posthumanism and new materialism include: Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity 2013); Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Polity 2019); Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism (Polity 2021). Relevant feminist posthuman legal scholarship include: Matilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (eds) International Law and Posthuman Theory (Routledge forthcoming 2022); Matilda Arvidsson, ‘Targeting, Gender, and International Posthumanitarian Law and Practice: Framing the Question of the Human in International Humanitarian Law (2018) 44(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 9; Maneesha Deckha, ‘Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals’ (2012) 27(3) Hypatia 527; Gina Heathcote, ‘War’s Perpetuity: Disabled Bodies of War and the Exoskeleton of Equality’ (2018) 44(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 71; Emily Jones and Dianne Otto, Thinking through Anthropocentrism in International Law: Queer Theory, Posthuman Feminism and the Postcolonial presented at the Workshop on Gender, Nature and Peace, Centre for Women, Peace and Security, LSE 17 June 2019<https://www.lse.ac.uk/women-peace-security/assets/documents/2020/Final-Jones-and-Otto-Anthropocentrism-Posthuman-Feminism-Postcol-and-IL-LSE-WPS-Blog-2019-002.pdf>; Emily Jones, ‘A Posthuman-Xenofeminist Analysis of the Discourse on Autonomous Weapons Systems and Other Killing Machines’ (2018) 44(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 93; Jannice Käll, ‘The Potential for New Materialist Justice via Nordic Feminist Perspectives of Law’ (2020) 3(2) Nordic Journal on Law and Society 1; Alice Ollino, ‘Feminism, Nature and the Post-Human: Toward a Critical Analysis of the International Law of the Sea Governing Marine Living Resources Management’ in Irini Papanicolopulu (ed) Gender and Law of the Sea (Brill 2019) 204; Lauren Wilcox, ‘Embodying Algorithmic War: Gender, Race and the Posthuman in Drone Warfare’ (2017) 48(1) Security Dialogue 11; Lauren Wilcox, ‘Drones, Swarms and Becoming-Insect: Feminist Utopias and Posthuman Politics’ (2017) 116(1) Feminist Review 25.

6 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 14.

7 The autobiography of writing is brilliantly analysed by Barbara Johnson, in her reading of Mary Shelley’s life as embedded in Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein’s monster: Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/My Self’ in Barbara Johnson A Life with Mary Shelley (Stanford University Press 2014) 15. On autoethnography, see Matilda Arvidsson, ‘Embodying Law in the Garden: An Autoethnographic Account of an Office of Law’ (2013) 39(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 21.

8 To do écriture feminine as a feminist posthumanist legal scholar is a way of work against a certain forgetfulness in legal scholarship about the critical traditions which we are part of. As Maria Drakopolou and Rosemary Hunter in their call for two workshops due to take place in 2022 on ‘The Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship’ (ie before the publication of this text) note: ‘Unlike other fields in the humanities and social sciences, there has been an absence of interest in questions of feminist inheritance in law; a certain unwillingness to grapple with feminism’s intellectual and/or textual traditions. Individual studies, however radical or sophisticated in their orientation, appear to be situated in the ‘feminist present’ only, such that the past of legal feminism is void of any heritage worthy of being handed down. Yet despite this disregard or disavowal, contemporary feminist legal scholarship rests on the foundations of a corpus of post-war feminist texts. Those texts’ vital power shaped new, creative, and critical modes of thinking, new routes for understanding and reflection that challenged dominant thought inside and outside the academy. They animated multiple ways of revalorising lived experience and the subject’s embodied nature and in so doing raised radical questions about women’s social being.’: Maria Drakopolou and Rosemary Hunter, CfP: The Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship, Part I: 1970–1985 (online) 25 March 2022 <https://criticallegalthinking.com/2022/03/25/cfp-the-forgotten-foundations-of-feminist-legal-scholarship-part-i-1970-1985/> (last accessed 19 May 2022).

9 For an extended discussion of the ways in which feminist posthumanism continues the work of feminism, broadly speaking, see Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, above note 5.

10 Anna Grear, ‘Ecological Publics: Imagining Epistemic Openness’ (2017) 10(44) global-e <https://globalejournal.org/global-e/june-2017/ecological-publics-imagining-epistemic-openness> (‘Ecological Publics’). The Anthropocene is aptly defined and critically discussed in Anna Grear, ‘Deconstructing Anthropos: A Critical Legal Reflection on “Anthropocentric” Law and Anthropocene “Humanity”’ (2015) 26(3) Law and Critique 225 (‘Deconstructing Anthropos’); Anna Grear, ‘Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: “Of” and “For”’ (2020) 31(3) Law and Critique 351. And you have read me right on translactation: No, translactation is not a Cixousian terminology or otherwise found anywhere else in the scholarship on or referencing Cixous. Yet, in writing this text I’ve come to see translactation as an integral part of écriture feminine. See more on this under the subtitle ‘Writing the Present’, where I discuss Yoriko Otomo’s translactating écriture feminine.

11 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, above note 1 at 885.

12 Grear, ‘Ecological Publics’, above note 10.

13 See, for example, Grear, ‘Deconstructing Anthropos’, above note 10; Grear, ‘Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: “Of” and “For”’, above note 10.

14 Miriam Bak-McKenna and Maj Grasten, ‘Law and Gender in Translation’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 143. While listing all fellow feminist scholars of today here is an impossible task, I want to call to attention Margaret Davies’ research anti-manifesto (which draws force from/with Cixous): Margaret Davies, ‘Ethics and Methodology in Legal Theory: A (Personal) Research Anti-Manifesto’ (2002) 6 Law Text Culture 6. And, while I have your attention: follow the call by Geraldine Finn, in her (too often overlooked) book Why Althusser Killed His Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence (Prometheus Books 1996). Take a year of reading female authors only and see how it changes your world. Reading Finn’s book will also, as a side note, make you feel sick-to-your-bones (if you were not already) over contemporary male philosophers’ appallingly necrotic, predatory, and phallocentric-logocentric responses to Louis Althusser’s murder of sociologist Hélène Rytmann in 1980 (Rytmann was married to Althusser, hence the title of Finn’s book). The answer to the question, in Finn’s title (which is also the title of the head essay in the book) is held in the male philosophers’ responses: because it was his desire. Because ‘she’, as one of the fellow male philosophers put it, ‘was quarrelsome’. Because she was beautiful, and she was laughing.

15 Rosemary Grey, ‘Translating Gender Diversity In International Criminal Law: An Impossible But Necessary Goal’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 163; Stu Marvel, ‘Speculative Egg Freezing and Oocyte Markets: Translating Metaphors of Body and Bank’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 187; Leila Brännström and Markus Gunneflo, ‘Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 207; Luisa Teresa Hedler Ferreira and Maj Grasten, ‘Law's Lolita Paradox: Translating “Childhood” In Statutory Rape Jurisprudence’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 229; Sara Kolah Ghoutschi, Alina de Luna Aldape and Thorsten Bonacker, ‘Translating Sexuality Education in Ethiopia and Kenya: A Multi-Sited Approach’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 251.

16 Miriam Bak-McKenna and Maj Grasten, ‘Call for Papers for Special Issue 47(2), 2021: ‘Translating Feminist Jurisprudence’ <https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0034/1209778/CfP-Translating-Feminist-Jurisprudence-Australian-Feminist-Law-Journal1.pdf>

17 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 20, citing Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law: Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, and Lispector’ in Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (trans Verena Andermatt Conley) (University of Minnesota Press 1991) 25 (‘Writing and the Law’):

The secret of the law, of the categorical imperative, of the Oedipal prohibition, and of all the laws under which we live, is that there is no secret, there are no stars. If the law tricks us, it is because we internalized its interdiction. We are always inside the social, and history began before us with the law. We are inside the narrative of the law and we cannot help it. The law tells us a story. Is there an author? That is the question.

18 Relevant work by Hélène Cixous include (a selection): Vivre L’Orange/To Live the Orange (trans Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell) (Éditions des Femmes 1979); The Newly Born Woman (trans Betsy Wing) (University of Minnesota Press 1986); Reading with Clarice Lispector (trans by Verena Andermatt Conley) (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1990); Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, above note 17; ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays (trans Sarah Cornell) (Harvard University Press 1991) (‘Coming to Writing’); Susan Sellers (ed) The Hélène Cixous Reader((Routledge 1994); Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas (trans Catherine A F MacGillivray) (University of Minnesota Press 1994). At the age of 84 (at the time of writing) Cixous is still an active scholar, philosopher, literary writer, and playwright. On her collaborations with and writings on Derrida, see, eg, Jacques Derrida and others, ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’ (2006) 37(1) New Literary History 1; Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida (trans Peggy Kamuf) (Edinburgh University Press 2007); Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (trans Beverley Bie Brahic) (Columbia University Press 2005). For an analysis of the Cixous-Derrida relation and collaboration, see Ginette Michaud, Battements du secret littéraire: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous [Beats of Literary Secrecy: Read Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous] (Hermann 2010) vol 1; Ginette Michaud, ‘Comme en rêve … ’: Lire Jacques Derrida et Hélène Cixous [‘As in a Dream’: Read Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous] (Hermann 2010) vol 2.

19 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, above note 1 at 875. Ruth Daly rightly points out that ‘écriture feminine translates as “writing feminine” not feminine writing’: Ruth Daly, ‘Disrupting Phallic Logic: (Re)thinking the Feminine with Hélène Cixous and Bracha Ettinger’ (2021) 36(109) Australian Feminist Studies 335 at 337 (‘Disrupting Phallic Logic’).

20 Daly, ‘Disrupting Phallic Logic’, above note 19 at 337 (emphasis added).

21 Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Introduction’ in Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, above note 18 vii at viii.

22 Anna Klobucka, ‘Hélène Cixous and the Hour of Clarice Lispector’ (1994) 23(1) SubStance 41 at 46. For Cixous on Lispector, see, eg, Hélène Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, above note 18.

23 Hélène Cixous, ‘Promised Cities’ in Hélène Cixous, Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté (eds) Ex-Cities (Slought Books 2006) 27 at 40-1.

24 Donna J Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Duke University Press 2016).

25 For an in-depth discussion of the feminine in Cixous, see Daly, ‘Disrupting Phallic Logic’, above note 19. In later editions (in French) of The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous insists that the Medusa is the ‘queen des queers’, thus reframing her as the opposite to the normative (elsewhere in Cixous’ work, the masculine): Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse et Autres Ironies, above note 1 at 32.

26 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 13.

27 As above, citing Hélène Cixous, ‘Extreme Fidelity’ in Susan Sellers (ed) Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous (Open University Press 1988) 9 at 15.

28 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 13. Cixous expands on the libinidal economy (masculine and feminine) in Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ (trans Annette Kuhn) (1981) 7(1) Signs 41. See also Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law’, above note 17 at 26.

29 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild at Heart”’, above note 2 citing Catherine MacGillivray, ‘Introduction: “The Political Is – (and the) Poetical”’ in Cixous, Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, above note 18 at 262.

30 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: out and out: Attacks/ Ways out/ Forward’ in Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, above note18 63. This can also be seen as Cixous’ aim with translation in Cixous, ‘Promised Cities’, above note 23, and in Cixous, Reading with Clarise Lispector, above note 13 in which Cixous is in constant conversation with her own translation of Lispector’s texts.

31 On the inclusive character of Cixous’ ‘feminine’, see Raquelle K Bostow, ‘Loving across Borders: The Queer, Transspecies Intimacies of Cixousian Sexual Difference’ (2019) 134(4) MLN 806.

32 Susan Sellers, ‘Introduction’ in Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, above note 18 xxvi at xxix. See also Matilda Arvidsson, The Subject in International Law: The Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Occupied Iraq and its Laws (MediaTryck 2017) 68.

33 Grear, ‘Ecological Publics’, above note 10.

34 Eric Prenowitz, ‘A Biographicosmopolitical Note’ in Cixous and others (ed) Ex-Cities, at note 23 17.

35 Grear, ‘Ecological Publics’, above note 10.

36 Daly, ‘Disrupting Phallic Logic’, above note 19 at 336. Ramshaw in ‘Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law’, above note 2, discusses at depth the life drive in Cixous as distinct from the death drive in the work of Jacques Derrida (and, in consequence, that of Peter Fitzpatrick). And, yes, Sara, I side with you in giving myself ‘a poet’s right and side with Cixous for life’: Ramshaw, ‘Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law’, above note 2 at 8.

37 Cixous, Coming to Writing, above note 18 at 10.

38 Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness’, above note 4; Otomo, ‘Endgame: Feminist Lawyers and the Revolutionary Body’, above note 4; Yoriko Otomo, ‘The Decision Not to Prosecute the Emperor’ in Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack and Gerry Simpson (eds) Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited (Brill 2011) 63; Otomo, ‘The Gentle Cannibal’, above note 4; and Yoriko Otomo, Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement (Oxford University Press 2016).

39 See, eg, Matilda Arvidsson, ‘Embodying Law in the Garden: An Autoethnographic Account of an Office of Law’ (2013) 39 Australian Feminist Law Journal 21. See also Kazan ‘The Architecture’, above note 4.

40 Cixous likens her own reading of others’ texts with the suckling of milk – ‘my milk’: Cixous, Coming to Writing, above note 18 at 12 (emphasis added).

41 Following Cixous, see, eg, Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘We Are Already in the Jaws of the Book: Inter Views’ in Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (trans Erik Prenowitz) (Routledge 1997) 1, where being human (humain) is a transformative and transgressing act which does not fall short of transgressing species. See also Birgit Mara Kaiser, ‘(Un)grounding the Human: Affective Entanglements and Subjectivity in Hélène Cixous’s Algerian Reveries’ (2013) 15(3-4) International Journal of Francophone Studies 477. On human-animal relations (of which there are many in Cixous’ texts), see also Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (Routledge 1998); Helen Andersson, ‘“My Little Wild Fever-Struck Brother’: Human and Animal Subjectivity in Hélène Cixous’ Algeria’ (2017) 78(4-5) International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 456. On transspecies intimacies in Cixous’ writing, see Bostow, ‘Loving across Borders: The Queer, Transspecies Intimacies of Cixousian Sexual Difference’, above note 31.

42 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 14; Otomo, ‘The Gentle Cannibal’, above note 4. See also Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo (eds), Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food (Bloomsbury 2017).

43 Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing, above note 18 at 52. In reading Cixous with Elena Loizidou can we ‘write the legal body’? ‘[To] stay close to Cixous, I wonder how can we ever write the legal body if ”writing the body”, as she suggests, is always “freed from law”, if it always ‘blows up the law’? At the same time, though, I think, how can we ever do otherwise but write the body of law, in law, by law?’: Loizidou in Loizidou and Ramshaw, ‘Flesh, Bones and Other Matters’, above note 4 at 8).

44 Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness’, above note 4 at 75-6. See also Otomo, Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement, above note 38. Drawing on Otomo’s work, Helene Kazan has termed her écriture feminine ‘poetic testimony’: Kazan, ‘The Architecture’, above note 4.

45 Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness’, above note 4 at 75 n 118: ‘Gyokuon Hoso (lit ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’) Imperial rescript on the termination of the war via phonograph.’

46 As above at 75 n 119: ‘As above.’

47 As above at 75 n 120: ‘As above.’

48 As above at 75 n 121: ‘Demand for Unconditional Surrender: The Potsdam Proclamation (1945), Title sub-heading.’

49 As above at 75 n 122: ‘As above at Line 5.’

50 As above at 75 n 123: ‘As above.’

51 As above at 75 n 124: ‘Gyokuon Hoso As above note 118.’

52 As above at 75 n 125: ‘As above.’

53 As above at 75 n 126: ‘As above.’

54 As above at 75 n 127: ‘Demand for Unconditional Surrender As above note 121 Line 13.’

55 As above at 75 n 128: ‘As above Line 4.’

56 As above at 75 n 129: ‘As above Line 9.’

57 As above at 75 n 130: ‘Demand for Unconditional Surrender As above note 121 Line 3.’

58 As above at 75 n 131: ‘Gyokuon Hoso As above note 118.’

59 As above at 76 n 132: ‘Demand for Unconditional Surrender As above note 121 Line 6.’

60 As above at 76 n 133: ‘Gyokuon Hoso As above note 118.’

61 As above at 76 n 134: ‘As above.’

62 As above at 76 n 135: ‘As above.’

63 As above at 76 n 136: ‘Demand for Unconditional Surrender As above note 121 Line 6.’

64 As above at 76 n 137: ‘As above.’

65 As above at 76 n 138: ‘As above.’

66 See, eg, Seyla Benhabib, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Kant: Sovereignty and International Law’ (2012) 40(6) Political Theory 688; Panu Minkkinen, Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law (Routledge 2011); Matilda Arvidsson, ‘From Teleology to Eschatology: The katechon and the Political Theology of the International Law of Belligerent Occupation’ in Matilda Arvidsson, Leila Brännström and Panu Minkkinen (eds) The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law, Politics, Theology (Routledge 2017) 223.

67 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2. Examples include: Arvidsson, ‘From Teleology to Eschatology: The katechon and the Political Theology of the International Law of Belligerent Occupation’, above note 66; Anne Orford, ‘Jurisdiction without Territory: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Responsibility to Protect’ (2009) 30(3) Michigan Journal of International Law 981; Martti Koskenniemi, ‘International Law as Political Theology: How to Read Nomos der Erde?’ (2004) 11(4) Constellations 492.

68 Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness’, above note 4 at 75.

69 Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law’, above note 17 at 3.

70 Otomo, ‘Of Mimicry and Madness’, above note 4 at 75. General McArthur was the US Administrator of occupied Japan, and thus under international law was not considered sovereign over Japan but rather the representative of the occupying power (which was the US).

71 Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law’, above note 17 at 3.

72 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 20. See also Ramshaw, ‘Fitzpatrick and the Feminine Law’, above note 2 at 7-8.

73 Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, above note 41 at 78.

74 Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, above note 32 at 17.

75 Above at 26.

76 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 20, citing Cixous and Calle-Gruber, ‘We Are Already in the Jaws of the Book’, above note 63 at 78; Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law’, above note 17 at 1.

77 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 20.

78 As above at 21.

79 Cixous, ‘Writing and the Law’, above note 17 at 18.

80 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, above note 1 at 875.

81 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2.

82 Bak-McKenna and Grasten, ‘Call for Papers’, above note 16.

83 Ramshaw, ‘Nearing the “Wild Heart”’, above note 2 at 1–2.

84 Cixous, Coming to Writing, above note 18 at 5.