[3] Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.

[4] She first gained attention in 1969 with her first work of fiction, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel which won the Prix Médicis and explored the themes of identity, memory, death and writing.

[8] She has published widely, including twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential articles.

In introducing her Wellek Lecture, subsequently published as Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Derrida referred to her as the greatest living writer in his language (French).

[13] In addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, on Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Cixous is also the author of essays on artists, including Simon Hantaï, Pierre Alechinsky and Adel Abdessemed to whom she has devoted two books.

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud established the initial theories that would serve as a basis for some of Cixous' arguments in developmental psychology.

Contemporaries, lifelong friends, and intellectuals, Jacques Derrida and Cixous both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"—not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated.

Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint".

Cixous and Luce Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea and Lacan's primary signifier for desire (the phallus), creating the term phallogocentrism.

This term focuses on Derrida's social structure of speech and binary opposition as the centre of reference for language, with the phallic being privileged and how women are only defined by what they lack; not A vs. B, but, rather A vs. ¬A (not-A).