There is a type of bravado in Cixous’s refusal to let death have any power on her writing. In ‘First Names of No One” she writes : ‘Death is nothing. It is not something. It is a hole. I can fill it with fantasies, and give it a name, freely. I can also think castration. But nothing human, nothing real, obliges me to. Nothing can stop me from thinking otherwise, without accounting or death’ (in Sellers 1997: 27). To write against death is to continuously pursue and challenge the limits of identity, not from some anarchic desire for the lawless, but from a desire to overcome the oppressive and self-destructive constraints which limit our ability to connect compassionately and creatively with others. To write against death, with the light of the axe, is not simply a therapeutic exercise designed to ward of existential anxieties, it is to write against the barriers erected by negativity which prevent the opening up of self through writing. Writing, in this sense, is not just about composing words upon a page, it is a mode of living in the world. Death is also linked to the Hegelian dialectic, to the ‘Empire of the Selfsame’, to the phallocentrism in ‘Sorties’ : ‘History, history of an identity : that of man’s becoming recognized by the other (son or woman), reminding him that as Hegel says, death is his master’(Cixous and Clement 1991/ 79). Cixous’s work echoes that of George Bataille who provided a seminal discussion of Hegel in ‘The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic’ (1985b) and throughout his writting challenges the notion of a Hegelian ‘closed economy’ by avowing the profane power of the outside or that which cannot be consumed by culture. This excess or remainder offers us another way of thinking through the tightly bound logic of the Hegelian dialectic. Cixous wonders, rhetorically, if Bataille engages in ‘pushing Hegel to the edge of the abyss that a civilized man keeps himself from falling into? This abyss that functions as a metaphor both of death and of the feminine sex?’ (Cixous and Clement 1991: 80). There appears to be a confusion here between death as the phallic master and death as the féminine. If we recall Cixous’s use of the Medusa myth we have a clearer understanding of what she means though : death is the master of the limit only in so fat as the absence of the phallus (singular, fixed identity) is confused with the feminine as abyss (the castrated one, the lack, absence). A feminine writing (and perhaps this is the key to her understanding of death), see abundance and plenitude in the limit of death for this limit is a spectre produced by a subjectivity which has no other way of thinking otherwise. If death is the limit, the Law, the spectre of castration (the feminine abyss, no-thing), a feminine writing moves through this spectral limit knowing that it is a representation produced by phallocentrism. In this sense death or the limit is a ‘mind forged manacle’ which feminine writing throws off in the pursuit of thought.” Abigail Bray - Hélène Cixous, Writing and Sexual Difference p.69-70 (2004)