RE: Framing Hélène Cixous, Part 2 | by Esmée

I keep wondering, what if, what if, what if these characters who model ideal kinds of sexual difference and human wholeness didn't have to die?

RE: Framing Hélène Cixous, Part 2 | by Esmée
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RE: Framing Cixous, Part 2 | by Esmée
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Are you the sort who reads Western stories about slaying dragons and thinks, “Fuck off! Let it be!” or “Waste of a perfectly good dragon!” or “Why not make friends and become invincible?" Then you are my kind. I'm almost always on the side of the monster. And in the East, one does not slay dragons. Dragons are our benefactors. 

Tiamat is a kind of monster, and she's the creatrix. The Mother. And then also several dragons from the waist down or one dragon with five heads. So, like bees and fireflies, I want her safe and powerful and left to mind her own business.

Cixous might see a face she could love. She loved Medusa, after all. The snake-headed form echoing Tiamat's many dragons by the rules of synchronicity and bewildered human fear.

Chimeras, Monsters & Human Possibility

Here's how I think of creatures we make myths of to explore the farther reaches of our human nature:

The monster is an extreme: Godzilla is a huge lizard, Cerberus is a huge, three-headed dog, … This is why the media often refer to rapists – well, rapists of children anyway – as monsters: they are an extreme of normalized and sexualized aggression.

The chimera is a melding of difference (yes, it's also a specific mythical beast, yes): a centaur, a pegasus, a sphinx, a gorgon, the octopus-witch in the Little Mermaid story. 

A gorgon will be monster-ized, a female chimera made into the embodiment of warrior "menis” or menace, the blind rage of Achilles crystalized into her eyes. This is something to do with the hard edges of idealist concepts (Platonic Forms) and the deep splitting of human traits into the pathologies of the gender binary. The gorgons, Medusa specifically, are the only chimera that are not useful/helpful to Man/men. As we learned, the oldest image of Medusa is a guardian on the pediment of the oldest known temple to Artemis, who as a protector of young girls (like … Medusa was in the story where she is priestess to Athena) is also not a great friend of men. 

Of Monsters & Chimeras

Anyway, this fuzzy difference between monsters and chimeras has something to do with how gender is unhealthy for humans, and this part of my study on Hélène Cixous will enfold and unfold all this. 

We are at the end of “Sorties,” where Cixous finds not only a woman but two couples who embody a being-two beyond gender-roles and hierarchies. Now, be prepared. Both of these couples wind up dead for their ‘rebellion,’ for the challenge their existence posed to the larger dominance order.