In this essay I examine Hélène Cixous's readings and figurings of women in colonial and decolonizing cultural spaces and slippages between universalized Western metaphors and metonyms and their colonial and orientalist significance. These readings, figurings, and slippages provide a supplementary framing of Cixous's utopian model of intersubjective exchange, her representation of the relation between materiality and textuality, and her universalization of the singular transcendental subject.