Counterforces: Literary and Philosophical Voices of the Seventies
Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1971): "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--or 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. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. . . . Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes . . ."
James Baldwin, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind," in The Fire Next Time (1962): "To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless
foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion . . . of any reality . . . so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself."
