Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"

She was an American woman engaged in work of a propagandist nature, which consisted principally in speaking and writing. All her life a certain degree of anxiety, sometimes very severe, was experienced after every public performance, such as speaking to an audience. In spite of her unquestionable success and ability, both intellectual and practical, and her capacity for managing an audience and dealing with discussions, etc., she would be excited and apprehensive all night after, with misgivings whether she had done anything inappropriate, and obsessed by a need for reassurance. This need for reassurance led her compulsively on any such occasion to seek some attention or complimentary notice from a man or men at the close of the proceedings in which she had taken part or been the principal figure; and it soon became evident that the men chosen for the purpose were always unmistakeable father-figures, although often not persons whose judgement on her performance would in reality carry much weight.
     — Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade" (1929)

Cixous, c. 1969, signing copies of her first novel,
Dedans (Inside)

Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away--that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak--even just to open her mouth--in public. ... Listen to  woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare.
    —Cixous, N 1947

You, Dora, you the indomitable, the poetic body, you are the true "mistress" of the Signifier.
    —Cixous, N 1953

..who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body...
     —Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 48

1. Speaking as a woman
A Room of One's Own was first delivered by Woolf as a lecture about women's writing. Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" is in many ways an essay about women's speech, their voices.

Perhaps even more than Lacan, Cixous's friend Jacques Derrida had made the difference between writing and speech a central topic for theoretical reflection of all kinds in France in the late '60s and early '70s. In a section of Dissemination (1972) called "Plato's Pharmacy," which you can find excerpted in the Norton anthology, Derrida undertakes a philologically grounded critique of the discussion of writing and speech in Plato's Phaedrus. (The following summary is rough at best...) In the Phaedrus, Socrates claims that writing is inferior to speech for a variety of reasons: it's merely a crutch to support our fallible memories; it lets an author make an argument without being present to support it, and so is in some ways intrinsically devious; it's more material than speech, which more immediately expresses one's thought. Writing, then, is just a supplement or support to spoken language; speech expresses the "Logos," truth grounded in reason. Plato's argument is grounded in an alignment of binary terms:

speech          writing

philosophy          rhetoric

truth          falsehood

presence          absence

mind          matter

Derrida will attempt to show that these binaries are in fact unstable, and that the values they encode are therefore reversible.

In thinking about the relation of writing to speech in her 1975 essay, then, Cixous intervenes in an ongoing philosophical conversation, and makes gender and sexuality more prominent parts of that conversation. Her emphasis on speech might let us ask how Woolf's theorizing would have proceeded differently had she shared this emphasis: if a woman needs £500 a year and a room of her own to write well, what does she need to speak well in public?

2. Writing (and theorizing) as a woman
Cixous's essay, compared to the texts we read last Friday, is challenging in that it seeks to perform the "feminine writing" that it also describes. What's more, Cixous asserts that a full theoretical account of feminine writing is impossible: "

It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded--which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. (1949)

This passage raises questions about Cixous's view of writing and her view of theory.

1) Theory: Rather than seeing this as a simply evasive moment in Cixous's argument, or even as an argument against theory as such, we might take it first of all as an argument against a particular practice of theory, one in which the moves that count as properly theoretical are the ones she resists here: defining, enclosing, coding. If we take Cixous's text as advocating a different (which isn't to say, opposed) set of theoretical moves, what would they be?

2) Feminine writing: Even if we can't (or shouldn't) define feminine writing, we can at least describe some of its characteristics and effects on the basis of Cixous's performance of it. What can we say about feminine writing, as this text exemplifies it? It will help, I think, to keep Woolf's account of writing "as women write" (Room, 74ff) in mind as we read as a point of comparison. What aspects of her own theorization of women's writing might Woolf recognize in Cixous's essay? What are the important differences between these two texts?


3. Cixous and psychoanalysis

Anon. (Flemish), Medusa's Head, c. 1600. The painting
was believed until to the late 19th c. to be the work
of Leonardo da Vinci.

Cixous, much more readily than Woolf or Friedan, embraces some of the terms of psychoanalysis (libido, the unconscious, repression, drives) even as she rejects many of its premises (most centrally, the conception of women as "castrated"). We discussed last week how Friedan's account of women's identity (or "internal image") as something necessary for emotional as well as intellectual and social wholeness derives from a psychoanalytic view of the self, especially from the "ego-psychology" school of psychoanalysis. Yet the presence of psychoanalysis in The Feminine Mystique seems minor compared to its prominence in "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which the central image's effect depends on our awareness that Cixous is radically reversing Freud's interpretation of it. For Freud,

to decapitate=to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of the mother. (Freud, "Medusa's Head" [written 1922, published 1940], in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. Neil Hertz, p. 264)

Uma Thurman as Medusa, in Percy Jackson and
the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (2010).

For Cixous, the sight of the Medusa (thus of of female sexuality) is neither terrifying nor suggestive of a lack or wound:

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing. (1951)

Her assertion that the Medusa is "beautiful" is perhaps an expected reversal of value; the claim the she's "laughing" is a bit more surprising, and it's the idea that Cixous chooses to emphasize with her title. Why is this so important? What does laughter mean for Cixous in this essay? (Look first of all at other references to laughter in her text -- these will help to fill in the concept for you).

More broadly, we might ask about the connection between sexuality and politics in this text. It seems fair to say that sexual desire is more integral to Cixous's account of feminism than it was to Woolf's or Friedan's. (It's important for the both of them, of course, but doesn't permeate their texts to the same extent). What risks does Cixous run in asserting, for example, that "more so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body" (1953)? Why might she think it worth taking the risk of such a claim?

You'll sense (and the Norton's helpful footnotes will confirm this) that Cixous's point of reference for pyschoanalytic thinking is more often Lacan than Freud. Her essay is centrally concerned with language, and so Lacan's articulation of linguistics and psychoanalysis is particularly important for her. What particular aspects of his theory of language does she challenge? Which aspects does she draw on?

Like Lacan (and for that matter Woolf), Cixous wishes to retain a concept of sexual "difference" for her theory while jettisoning some of the baggage that comes with it: she'll thus distinguish between "sexual opposition" and "sexual difference" (1946). What's the difference? (Lorde's and Johnson's accounts of difference may be helpful here).

Just as she distinguishes between two understandings of sexual difference, Cixous wishes to distinguish two theories of bisexuality: what are they, and why does the difference matter? (See 1950). To what extent does Cixous's "other bisexuality" (1950) resemble Woolf's theory of the writer's "androgynous" mind?

Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597

In your comments, feel free to respond to any of the questions I've raised above or to point out aspects of Cixous's text that I haven't dealt with. Comparisons of Cixous to other writers (Woolf, Lacan, Friedan), grounded if possible in particular quotations, are especially welcome.