Squeezing a Juicy Archive of Sticky Objects with Hélène Cixous’s Écriture Matérialiste

Hélène Cixous’s ethicopoetic inflections of writing with the body (écriture féminine or women’s writing) have received disciplinary attention in rhetorical studies as political disruptors of androcentric canons. However, her powerful writings remain underexplored as a queer word/worldmaking praxis of her posthumanist rhetoric that challenges anthropocentric and representational accounts of rhetorical agency and distributes rhetorical action across transversal sites of subjectivation in entanglement with a more- than- human materiality. In this work, I draw on Cixous’s article “Vivre l’orange/To Live the Orange” to retrace her era- defining feminist rhetoric of writing with the body as a queer, juicy, deessentialized archive of sticky objects and more- than- human subjects interweaving a post humanist rhetoric of writing with matter (materialist writing or écriture matérialiste). I emphasize that Cixous’s envelopment with the vibrant call of quotidian objects is her sensing, her witnessing of matter as her critical- creative- vibrant peer, her more- than- human, sticky kin. In the end, without an amplified rhetorical sensing of object histories, which I consider Cixous’s gesture of queer responsiveness to the social stratifications of matter, intensified intervention in the ongoing injustices of the world is not ethically possible in Cixousian praxis.