Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.
Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. p. 880

To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon.
To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process. p. 880

There always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other-in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix, cradler; herself giver as her mother and child; she is her own sister-daughter. p. 881

The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was “born” to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself. The relation to the “mother,” in terms of intense pleasure and violence, is curtailed no more than the relation to childhood (the child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes, there at the point where, the same, she others herself). p. 882

Coda: my body –shot through with streams of song;
I don’t mean the overbearing, clutchy “mother” but, rather,
what touches you, the equivoice that affects you,
fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force;
the rhythm that laughs you;
the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable;
body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other;
that part of you that leaves a space between yourself
and urges you to inscribe in language your woman’s style. p. 882

-excerpts, The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous  pub. 1975

WTF!  Why not comment? Our evening discussion of the anthem of “feminist uprising” written by French intellectual Cixous in the mid 70s was controversial.  An adult of 26 in 1975, if by accident had I acquired this text, I would have felt confused, the language obtuse, alien, etc.  The “lost in translation” effect would have been my responsibility, my failure.  Forty seven years later, as I read this text, the words inspire, provoke, and connect with the limitless possibilities inherent within the child that still lives inside of me.  I am convinced these words are neither pro-woman nor anti-male, but are pro-human without qualification.  We become without end, who we are and who we are not.  And that endless journey is the reciprocal effect of love given and love returned.

In our discussion did we struggle, contend with these words by Cixous?  Of course we did.  Fire is both warmth and consumption.  Inevitably one comes away with a burn.

Does Cixous write a final word, the changeless truth about homo sapiens?  I doubt it.  In any case, how would I possibly know?  Still, these words are useful to our responsibility, individually and collectively, of auto-poiesis, to author the “poem” of my own life.

“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.”  p. 885