Abstract

This essay argues that Hélène Cixous's writings on theatre demonstrate an ongoing concern with the non-theorizable as a fundamental element of her experience of theatre. This creates a tension between Cixous's role as a theorist and her role as a creative writer, and this essay explores how this tension manifests itself in her reflections on theatre. It looks at the strategies Cixous adopts to allow the non-theoretical to inflect her critical and creative writing, focusing on her denial of specialist knowledge about theatre, her conception of the theatre text in opposition to meditation and philosophical reflection, and on her attempts to model her own playwriting process on the practical work of actors and director Ariane Mnouchkine. Cixous's attraction to the non-theorizable, it is suggested, leads to a more poetic mode of criticism about the medium that draws both on embodied theatrical practice and the self/other relationships that structure theatre making