IN HER ASSESSMENT of the type of cultural unconscious integral to textual construction and its transmission – particularly patriarchal ‘grand-narrative’ texts such as the Book of Genesis that explicitly lay down both law and Logos – Hélène Cixous points towards the possibility for disruption of their hegemony by admitting the potentiality of a fruitful ‘reading-against-the-grain’ that, momentarily at least, can open up a fissure within the textual edifice and its ascribed ‘meanings’. In turn, such an ‘undisciplined’ reading, especially that invited by the syntactically anarchic ‘poetic text’, is ‘indifferent’ to that hegemony and ‘wild’ in its refusal to be interpellated by it. This, she claims, is because women's relation to the body, the natal and the maternal, whether culturally assigned in its meanings or not, allows for a greater ‘capacity for other [and] experience of nonnegative change’. For Cixous, therefore, a woman has a greater capacity to access the ‘internal’ pleasure of a text's inherent otherness by approaching it tangentially, rather than be governed by its prescribed meaning, because, ‘[whether] virtually or actually mothers, women do after all have an experience of the inside’. In other words, the enclosing walls of an apparently hegemonic culture and its laws, as embedded in that culture's grand-narrative texts, are nothing but social products, and, in some instances, are able to be fractured and breached from the inside by the text's insistence on the swirling becoming of a feminine pleasure that resists the traditionally static (phallic) binaries that seek to govern it from the outside. However, as Cixous establishes in the extract quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, the unruly feminine with which this breach is associated (regardless of the gender of a text's author) is always ultimately ‘recaptured’ by a male imaginary so as to reassert the established social order. As Cixous asserts, ‘the [feminine poetic] text struggles endlessly against the movement of [male] appropriation, which, even in its most innocent guises, is fatally destructive.