From: meaghan-AT-utdallas.edu
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 19:00:19 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: cixous ponderings



Please, all, excuse my answering a post before reading the rest of the 
thread, but I've lots to read since I just got back from the white hot 
intensity that is getting married.  I'm responding so fast because I was 
intrigued by Sharon's post about Medusa.

Your two writers, Cixous and Wattford (??), are on two sides of an 
ambivalent figure.  In some versions of the myth, Medusa was a woman 
whose beauty rivaled that of Aphrodite (I think), and she became too 
vain, so the goddess turned he into the Gorgon Perseus has to go and 
kill.  Medusa has two sides, a haughty, beautiful and strong woman, and a 
monster who turns humans to stone with a glance.  The punishment visited 
on this desirable woman is that no one can look her without dying.  

The notion of obsessions and disorders being "chez Medusa" is even more 
interesting when you bring in the notion of jouissance -- bliss, sexual 
extasy -- because in the lacanian paradigm that bliss is gained at the 
expense of coming close to the Other, a figure as dangerous for him as a 
Medusa and locked away from our sight therefore.  

OOH, the poet is getting the better of me.  Buried in that last paragraph 
is the metaphor of a Gorgon's gaze, like the male gaze, one that 
"freezes" others inot objects.  It seems that Cixous wants the gorgon's 
gaze to be less dangerous than that, but as powerful and compelling as 
the masculine line of sight she and Irigaray are so interested in turnign 
away from.

I'm rambling.  

Meaghan



Meaghan Roberts-Jones				
Ph.D. Candidate - Ethics and Literature 
The University of Texas at Dallas	
Meaghan-AT-UTDALLAS.EDU