The Love of the Medusa

Kris Casey | March 2021

for Helene Cixous

This writing is an exercise in conceptual rewriting using the text “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Helene Cixous, written in 1976.

We shall speak about women’s Love: about what it will do. Woman must love herself, must love woman and bring woman to loving, from which she has been driven away from as ferociously as nature. Woman must put herself into love, as into nature, and into the future, by her own gesture.

The future is not determined by the past We need not repeat that insidious trail of reactions. The past cannot create. Only the future holds the key to creation, and the future is now. The velocity of velocities is imperative. Such figurations have made their appearance but remain to be practiced. What we say has two sides and two aims: to embody love and to generate nature; to feel and to create.

We write this as woman, as love. When we say “woman” we’re speaking of woman in her pure accordance with extraordinary nature; and of an extraordinary nature which must bring woman to their love and to their nature in loving.

We wish that woman would Love and proclaim this extraordinary nature so that other women, other subaltern agents, might exclaim: We, too, overflow; our LOVE has invented new love, and our hearts feel unfelt realms. Time and again we, too, feel so full of the force of love that we could expand, expand with a force much more potent than those expansions of today.

Yet we haven’t opened our hearts, we haven’t reclaimed our half of the world. We are fearful. We are hiding, and we swallow our Love and hide our nature. We say to ourselves: We are bad! What's the meaning of these affections, these forces, these natures? Where is the affectionate, gentile woman who hasn't been afraid of her love? Who, shocked by the realization of the fantastic force of her love, hasn't denied herself of being nature, a source of immensity? Who, feeling a tumescent force stirring inside her (the gestation of something new) hasn't considered herself marginally insane? Well, her insanity is that she is embodied love, embodied nature.

And why don't we love? Love! Loving is for us, we are for us; our Love is ours, make it. I know why we haven't loved. Because loving is at once too alive, too (powerful) for us, it's reserved for the (future)-that is, for "(future) (time)"; and it's wasted. Besides, we’ve loved a little, but in rations. And it wasn't good, because it was in rations, and because we punished ourselves for loving, because we didn't go all the way; or because we loved, irresistibly, as when we would fantasize in secret, not to go further, but to fill up and accumulate intensities a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we fill up, we go and make ourselves guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Love, let no one hold us back, let nothing stop us: not ordinary man; not the techno-capitalist surveillance machine in which social media feeds are trickster feedback loops, relayers of messages selling us love objects in exchange for loving ourselves. Woman’s love, the true force of our nature, nullifies the superficial, the artificial.

We love woman: woman must love woman. Now women return from the outside, from being always "without," from the spell of disembodiment; from indoctrinations of "culture"; towards our nature which has been desperately tried to remain written off, condemning us to chaos, unreason, wildness. But are we ever breeding underneath! What an effort it takes, there's no end to it.

Woman must Love her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent loving which, when the moment of our liberation has come, will allow us to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in our future, first at two levels that cannot be separated. a) Individually. By loving her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display-the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor Love and Nature at the same time.

To Love. An act which will not only "realize" the disembodied relation of women to nature, to our womanly nature, giving us access to our innate force, LOVE will give us back our powers, our pleasures, our (natures), our immense loving (natures) which have been kept under seal; it will tear us away from the outdated structures that subvert the natures we have always embodied, these forces reserved for the “sick” (sick of everything, sick at every turn: for having ideas, for not having any; for being a visionary, for being x"; for being both at once; for producing too much and not enough, for working too hard and not enough, for speaking too loudly, too softly, not at all)- tear us away by embodying love, this force of nature, this immensity that is innate to our selves, which we must urgently relearn to embody. We must kill the disembodied woman who is preventing the embodied one from loving.

Love your self. Your nature must be heard.

Original Article: Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-93. Accessed April 9, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.