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Medusa and the Real

Author(s): Hal Foster
Reviewed work(s):
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 44 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 181-190
Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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 Medusa and the real

HAL FOSTER

The myth of Medusa appears in various versions, arrested on her shield, its gaze fixed on her aegis, which
from Hesiod and Apollodorus through Ovid and Lucan, is thereafter known as the Gorgoneion. This apotropaic
but the basic story is clear enough. Medusa is one of the transformation from gaze-weapon to reflection-shield is
three Gorgons, the winged monsters who, born of the the crux of the myth, and it points to a twinning-in
a region near the world of to that of
night, reside in subterranean opposition of Athena and Medusa analogous
the dead; she is the only Gorgon who is not immortal. Apollo and Dionysus. For just as Apollo needs Dionysus
Perseus, the son of Dan?e and Zeus, is induced by a as his foil, Perseus must overcome Medusa in order to
suitor of his mother to take on the task of beheading establish his heroic identity, and Athena must transform
Medusa. The act is heroic because her horrific visage Medusa to establish her civilizational function.1
petrifies all mortals who behold it; her would-be For Claude L?vi-Strauss a myth is a set of variations on
assassins are all turned to stone. Inorder to confront a significant theme, often a fundamental contradiction in
Medusa, Perseus must first acquire three talismans that a culture that the myth eases through its spinning into
only the Nymphs can bestow; and in order to find the narrative. One of his prime examples is the myth of
he must first compel the three Graiai, the gray Oedipus, which he decodes as a debate between rival
Nymphs,
sisters of the Gorgons, to confess their whereabouts. theories of human origin?autochthonous, from the
The Graiai, who combine youth and age in a hideous earth, or familial, from blood relations.2 In this light the
mix, have only one eye among them, which Perseus uncertainty treated by the myth of Medusa centers on the
intercepts as it passes from one weird sister to another; power of the gaze and the capacity of representation to
control it (perhaps "Medusa" is to these riddles as
already in play here, then, is the topos of the power of
the gaze, or, more precisely, of this power intercepted. "Oedipus" is to the enigmas of identity and destiny). On
In order to regain the eye, the Graiai surrender the the one hand the Gorgon is the anti-artist par excellence;
location of the Nymphs, who in turn grant Perseus the the opposite of Pygmalion, she turns animate bodies into
talismans that he needs: the winged sandals that inanimate statues. On the other hand, this very power
transport him to Medusa, the Hades helmet that renders makes her the master artist, for she produces sculptural
him invisible to her, and the special pouch inwhich to images by her gaze alone.3 Nonetheless, the crux of the
stash her severed head?once more the power of the myth regarding representation remains elsewhere?in the
gaze is registered, here in the instruments required to
suspend it.The Nymphs also arm Perseus with a curved 1. As one might expect, the literature on Medusa is vast. For

blade to behead Medusa see especially Tobin The Mirror of Medusa

(significantly, given the literary background Siebers,

Freudian as a figure of (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); for artistic background,
reading of her decapitation see Jean Clair, M?duse (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1989). A
especially
castration, it is the kind of sickle that the titan Kronos to contemporary, is now available:
useful anthology of texts, ancient
used to castrate his father Ouranos, the first lord of the The Medusa Reader, ed. M. Garber and N. J.Vickers (New York:
universe). Perseus waits for Medusa to fall asleep, and Routledge, 2001).
2. See Claude "The Structural Study of Myth"
then, further protected from her gaze by a bronze shield L?vi-Strauss, (1955),
in Structural trans. C Jacobson (New York: Basic Books,
given him by Athena, he decapitates her. In some versions Anthropology,
1963), which includes this classical formulation: "Since the purpose of
of the myth, he looks at Medusa only through her a a
myth is to provide logical model capable of overcoming
reflection in the shield, and in other versions Athena offers contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the
her assistance only in exchange for the severed head. contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates [i.e.,

Medusa is killed, but she remains vital. Previously permutations] will be generated, each one slightly different from the
others. Thus, myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse
raped by Poseidon, she bears the horse Pegasus and the
which has produced it is exhausted" (p. 229).
giant Chrysaor from her neck as she dies (perhaps in a 3. The paradoxes continue: for example, on the one hand no one
demonic permutation of the birth of Athena from the can look upon Medusa; on the other hand her visage is represented
forehead of Zeus), and, more important, her gaze retains everywhere in Greece?on clothes and jewelry, coins and furniture,
its deadly power. It is this power that Athena transforms and so on. In "The Gorgon, Paradigm of Image Creation" (1993), the
classicist Fran?oise Frontisi-Ducroux discusses these paradoxes in
when Perseus presents the head to her: its image is
terms of Medusan "iconopoesis" (excerpted in The Medusa Reader, pp.
262-266). Medusa "becomes a bearable sight because it is an eikon/'
The essay presented here is an extract from my forthcoming book Frontisi-Ducroux writes, "and it is the iconicity of the Medusa which
Prosthetic Gods (MIT Press, 2004). the reflection sequence reveals" (p. 264). Might her head be to the
 182 RES 44 AUTUMN 2003

apotropaic of the Gorgon

transformation into the IfPerseus must suspend this horror, Athena must
Gorgoneion, of the Medusan gaze into the Athenan deflect this fear; thus the apotropaic transformation that
shield. There are two moments in this transformation. The together they perform: "the threat becomes a kind of
first is the capturing of the image of Medusa in the mirror protection; the danger, now directed against the enemy,
of the shield; this first act of mimesis, of reflection as becomes a means of defense."8 Yet what
precisely is
representation, mediates?moderates?the force of her transformed? What exactly is the power of Medusa? It
gaze. The second is the fixing of the severed head on the seems absolutely other, but it also involves a
"crossing
aegis of Athena, which thereby inherits some of its of gazes," and so this power must stem from us
power. In the first instance representation arrests the somehow. "It is your gaze that is captured in the mask,"
gaze; in the second instance representation also requires Vernant insists; "what the mask of Gorgo lets you see,
its force to arrest the viewer in turn. This is a crucial when you are bewitched by it, is yourself, yourself in the
point for subsequent reflections on art that draw on world beyond, the head clothed in night, the masked
the myth. face of the invisible that, in the eye of Gorgo, is
According to the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, revealed as the truth about your own face."9 In other
Medusa appears as both figure and mask in Greece from words, we project the power of our gaze onto her gaze,
the seventh century b.c.e. onward, but "one constant as her gaze, where it becomes other?intense, confused,
feature dominates all her representations: the frontal wild?and subjugates our gaze in turn. Athena
view of her face."4 Here, too, she is similar to Dionysus, intervenes first to suspend this wilded gaze through her
the only Olympian god represented in full face; this proxy Perseus, then to return it to us, transformed, as a
seems to special proximity to
frontality signify both the vision of rational civilization: stately art finds its initial
mortals and the particular power over them that they source in this archaic power. Thus the apotropaic
share. With Medusa this force is also figured by a transformation is indeed a crossing of gazes, and its crux
monstrous "blurring of all categories": often she is is the reflection of the Medusan gaze on the Athenan
depicted as both young and old, beautiful and ugly, shield. "Through the intervention of the mirror or the use
mortal and
immortal, celestial and infernal, and of some other mode of represented image," Vernant
sometimes with her snaky hair, leonine head, bovine writes, "this power of radiation is controlled, used for
ears, and boarish tusks, she appears both bestial and certain ends, and directed according to the disparate
human as well.5 Moreover, Medusa embodies "a fusion religious, military, and aesthetic strategies required. In
of genders": sometimes bearded, with her tongue the 'sympathy' they share, there is no absolute break
pendant like a penis, her face is rendered as genitals, between the image and the real, but rather affinities and
both male and female, made into a mask; her hair is means of passing from one to the other."10
also both penile and pubic.6 In short, inMedusa "a Note that Vernant associates the gaze with the real,
disquieting mixture takes place, analogous to the one which he understands as dangerous, even horrific. (Was
Dionysus achieves through joy and liberation toward a he influenced by Jacques Lacan here?for he too
communion with a golden age. But with Gorgo, the imagines the real in this manner?or was Lacan
disorder is produced through horror and fear in the influenced by the Medusan associations that Vernant
confusion of primordial Night."7

makes the point about the distinctive frontal ity of representations of

Medusa and Dionysus.
Greek tradition of the apotropaic Veronica's is to the 8. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, and Tragedy, p. 195.
image what veil Myth
tradition of the iconic 9. Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, pp. 137-138. The translation
Byzantine image?
4. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Tragedy reads "exchange of gazes," but the original is croisement. "In Gorgo's
Myth
in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge: MIT/Zone Books, 1988), face a kind of doubling process is at work. Through the effect of

p. 191. fascination, the onlooker iswrenched away from himself, robbed of

5. Ibid., p. 192. his own gaze, invested as if invaded by that of the figure facing him,
6.Ibid., pp. 190-195. Here too there is perhaps a twinning: who seizes and possesses him through the terror its eye and its features
Athena is also rendered as manly, but her "fusion of genders" is a inspire" (p. 137). Here Medusa also bears a conflicted relation to

Just as there is a bit of Medusa in Narcissus?as a form of identification based, paradoxically, on

proper?virtuous?one. Athena,
there is also a bit of Athena inMedusa: for example, her blood is not repulsion rather than seduction by the image?and this connection is
but curative as well, a "pharmakon" in the sense implicit in some elaborations of the myth in literature. Of course
only poisonous
identification is shot through with alienation in the Lacanian account
developed by Derrida.
7. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, ed. F. I.Zeitlin of "the mirror stage."
(Princeton: Princeton Press, 1991), p. 137. Vernant also 10. Ibid.; italics added.
University
 Foster:Medusa and the real 183

unpacks? Or is it both?) Note, too, that Vernant sees the of "the object of anxiety par excellence"; indeed she is a
image not as an "absolute break" with the real but as a figure of the real, and her chaotic head is "the revelation
"means of passing" from it.This positions the mirror of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real
shield, the Gorgoneion, as a kind of ur-painting, an lacking any mediation, of the ultimate real, of the
originary model of art, which the Gorgoneion informs essential object which isn't an object any longer."14
with its own apotropaic purpose, a controlling of the From this perspective the terror of Medusa ismore
"radiation" of the real?radiation in the sense of primordial than "the terror of castration" that Freud sees
maleficent rays of light. Before the fourth century b.c.e., in her image: it is less a terror of castration, of lack or
Vernant tells us, "the motif of reflection" was absent difference, than a terror of a lack of difference, of a
from the myth; itwas "introduced on vases and in texts primal state inwhich all differences (sexual, semiotic,
to explain the victory of the hero over Medusa," for symbolic) are confounded, or not yet formed. But if this
without this protection from her gaze the deed seemed is the case?that is, ifMedusa figures the horrific real as
impossible (in some versions Perseus also beheads her radical other to the symbolic order?then this very
with this shield).11 Importantly, this reflection is also figuring is a first move in the mitigation of this real, a
fundamental to the controlling of "radiation" in other primordial act of civilization.15
ways, in "religious, military, and aesthetic strategies."
Vernant again: "The motif [of reflection] seems Medusa fascinated theWest long after antiquity. From
connected to the efforts of contemporary painters to give the medieval period through the Renaissance, the story
the illusion of perspective, to philosophers' reflections of Perseus and Medusa is often recoded, abstractly, as a
about mimesis (imitation), and also to the beginning of Christian allegory of the triumph of virtue over vice, and
experiments that, from Euclid to Ptolemy, will lead to a from the Renaissance through the Romantic period, it
science of optics."12 Implicit here is that some ancient sometimes serves as a pretext for experiments with the
approximations of perspective, theories of mimesis, and grotesque, a genre of representation that aims "to invoke
studies in optics might be driven by the need to control and subdue the demonic aspect of the world."16 Medusa
the primordial power of the real-as-radiation. Perhaps returns with special force in Baroque art, as in the
they project, as a necessary foil that motivates them, the celebrated paintings of her fearsome head by Caravaggio
real as a Medusan realm that resists all order, whether (1596-1598) and Rubens (1617-1618). Rubens depicts
pictorial (as in perspective), philosophical (as in an early moment in the apotropaic transformation of her
mimesis), or scientific (as in optics). In this hypothesis, power, with her snaky head strewn amid devilish
then, the real is an effect of the symbolic that is taken to creatures, while Caravaggio captures a later moment,
precede it, even as the symbolic is in the very her outraged visage fixed on the mirror-shield (whether
steeped
real that it is supposed to screen. (The mythic correlation that of Perseus or Athena is not quite clear). Although
here is that, in some versions, it isAthena who Medusa is freshly decapitated in the Rubens, everything
produces Medusa as a monster in the first place?as a is order here: her head is laid out as ifon a banquet
punishment for her rape by Poseidon in a temple table, and even the snakes follow the sinuous lines of
dedicated to Athena.) Baroque convention. Clearly the art of painting triumphs
For Vernant the horror of Medusa is a horror of a over the force of chaos. There is also order in the
"blurring of all categories," of a "return to the formless Caravaggio, of course; indeed he poses a close relation
and indistinct," and her powers are "the powers of the between mirror, Gorgoneion, and painting, between
beyond in their most radically alien form, that of death, reflection, protection, and representation (the support is
night, nothingness."13 For Lacan, too, Medusa is a figure

14. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego
11.Ibid., p. 147. in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955,
12. Ibid. Here it is as though looking aesthetically (or scientifically) trans. S. Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 164.
were an version of looking primordially: we meet
apotropaic the 15. Jean Laplanche argues that symbolic concentration per se has
intensity of our own gaze in sublimated form. The emphasis on an apotropaic effect, that any gathering into image, theme, or narrative
also suggests a basis of mimesis in magic, of an apotropaic
"sympathy" helps to structure anxiety. See Probl?matiques II/Castration

logic of "like produces like." Symbol isations (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), p. 66.
13. Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, p. 192. "Gorgo marks out the is an originary
Perhaps "Medusa" instance of such concentration.
boundary of the world of the dead. To pass that frontier is to become, 16. Wolfgang The Grotesque in Literature and Literature
Kayser,
oneself, beneath her gaze and in her ?mage, what the dead are? (1957), trans. U. Weisstein (New York: Columbia University Press,
empty heads without strength, heads shrouded in 1981), p. 188.
night."
 184 RES 44 AUTUMN 2003

an actual wood an old tournament prop). Yet, as

shield, Romantic version of the apotropaic transformation of
Louis Marin suggests in his brilliant reading of the work, Medusa, and this mixture of beauty and terror, of
this redoubling makes for an excess of mimesis that pleasure and pain, not only guarantees the visual allure
threatens to undo its own illusion, or at least to disturb of the work of art but also prepares its redemptive
any delectation of the painting along traditional lines; power: "'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown /
perhaps it is this excess that led Poussin to declare Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain / Which
(according to legend) that Caravaggio "had come into humanize and harmonize the strain." Yet here at least
the world in order to destroy painting."17 Mirror, shield, this redemptive reconciliation is not secure: the painting
and canvas are not seamlessly one, and the fabrication retains its "mailed radiance" and "brazen glare," and
of the painting can be glimpsed; at the same time it Shelley abandons
the poem unfinished.
remains so illusionistic as to appear hyperreal Medusa persists inmodern reflections in this register
("mimesis," Marin writes, "is turned inside out like a of the beautiful crossed with the sublime; and in some
glove"), and the effect is indeed almost Medusan.18 Here of these texts her apotropaic transformation figures,
painting does not only contain the intensity of the implicitly, as fundamental to art. The first text is the most
Medusan gaze, or the horror of the Medusan real; it famous. InThe Birth of Tragedy (1871) Nietzsche
conveys them as well. presents not Athena and Medusa but Apollo and
The Rubens is similar to a Flemish
painting of Dionysus as the opposed representatives of "two
Medusa (ca. 1620-1630) long attributed to Leonardo da radically dissimilar realms of art," the first associated
Vinci (Leonardo did begin such a painting, Vasari tells with visual art, the second with music, poetry, and
us, but never finished it). Hung in the Uffizi Gallery, the tragedy: "Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of
Flemish painting shows her head cast among other the principium individuationis; through him alone is it
creatures ? la Rubens, but here it is turned away from possible to achieve redemption in illusion. The mystical
us, radically foreshortened, and cast into a murkier jubilation of Dionysus, on the other hand, breaks the
world (what light there is shines on the snakes, not on spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal
her face). In 1819 the painting inspired Shelley to write womb of being."20 Here again the two figures are
a poem, "On the Medusa of Leonardo in the Florentine twinned in opposition: the "deliverance from the self"
Gallery," which exemplifies the Romantic ideal of represented by the Apollonian principle requires the
beauty, that is, of the beautiful enlivened by the horrific, "primordial pain" represented by the Dionysian
in effect crossed with the sublime.19 "Its horror and its principle as its ground (see note 20; ?7:37). Moreover,
beauty are divine," Shelley writes in the first stanza. when the Apollonian principle degenerates into
"Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine / Fiery and "aesthetic Socratism" and "logical schematism," it also
lurid, struggling underneath /The agonies of anguish requires the "un-selving" of the Dionysian principle for
and of death." It is this oxymoronic "grace," not sheer its renewal. "In the Dionysiac dithyramb man is incited
"horror," which arrests the "gazer"; for beauty to to strain his symbolic faculties to the utmost," Nietzsche
compel, Shelley suggests, itmust possess "the writes; "something quite unheard of is now clamoring to
tempestuous loveliness of terror." In effect, this is the be heard: the desire to tear asunder the veil of Maya, to
sink back into the original oneness of nature; the desire

17. See
Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. M. Hjort (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 97-125, here p. 99. In some 20. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. F. Golffing (New York:
ways this text is proleptic of my concerns here. At least on matters of 1956), p. 97; abbreviated hereafter BT. Nietzsche sums up
Doubleday,
Medusa, Poussin and Rubens are on the same?classical, Athenan? his essay as follows: "how the Dioynsiac and Apollonian elements, in
side. a continuous chain of creations, each enhancing the other, dominated
18. Ibid., p. 100. For related effects in recent art see the title essay the Hellenic mind; how from the Iron Age, with its battle of Titans
and^
of my The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). its austerepopular philosophy, there developed under the aegis of
19. In The Romantic Agony Mario Praz, who discusses the poem, Apollo the Homeric world of beauty; how this 'na?ve' splendor was
terms this Romantic "the Beauty of the Medusa/' See The then absorbed once more by the Dionysiac torrent and how, face to
beauty
Romantic Agony (1933), trans. A. Davidson (London: Oxford face with this new power, the Apollonian code rigidified into the
Praz also cites the moment in of Doric art and contemplation ... the true end toward which
University Press, 1970), pp. 23-52. majesty
Goethe's Faust (1808) when Faust mistakes Gretchen in a beautiful that evolution moved . . . the dramatic and Attic tragedy"
dithyramb
Medusan guise: "What ecstasy, and yet what pain! / Icannotbear to (BT, pp. 35-36). Visual art does seem to be placed on the side of
let this vision go/' Praz comments: the lips of Faust speaks redemptive sublimation only (perhaps there is a trace of Hegel on
"through
the whole of Romanticism" (p. 27). classical sculpture here).
 Foster:Medusa and the real 185

to express the very essence of nature Thus women hold for men, at least to some degree.23 In his
symbolically.
an entirely new set of
symbols springs into being" view these Medusan genitals petrify man with the terror
(67:88, 27).21 of castration, but they also arouse him?make him "stiff"
There are many echoes in The Birth of Tragedy with delight too. Freud sees this "transformation of
(Socrates, Plato, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, affect" in apotropaic terms: "For becoming stiff means
Wagner), but often Nietzsche anticipates another voice, an erection. Thus in the situation it offers
original
that of Freud. "The Apollonian need for beauty had to consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a
develop theOlympian hierarchyof joy by slow degrees penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact."24
from the original titanic hierarchy of terror," Nietzsche (Here the feminist H?l?ne Cixous interjects an
writes (61*30); and here his "redemptive vision" twist own:
apotropaic of her "Men say that there are two
anticipates Freud on the necessity of renunciation and death and the feminine sex.
unrepresentable things:
sublimation as sketched in Civilization and Its That's because they need femininity to be associated
Discontents (1930). Freud was a close reader of with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for
Nietzsche, so this association might not be accidental. themselves! They need to be afraid of us."25)
Yet Nietzsche wishes to retain the "titanic terror" of In "Medusa's Head" Freud assumes the
twinning of
Dionysus as much as to advance the Medusa and Athena: her image condenses both "terror"
"redemptive
vision" of Apollo (like Milton he seems to sympathize and "consolation"?the terror of castration and the
with the devil). More than the Freudian vision of consolation of its transformation. In this regard her
civilization, then, the Nietzschean theory of art image is the originary fetish, both a "memorial" to
remains within the ancient frame of the apotropaic castration and a "protection" against it.26 But perhaps
transformation of Medusan power. In fact the Apollo of more than fetishistic is involved here;
displacement
The Birth of Tragedy performs the acts and embodies the the of Medusa and Athena encodes a
perhaps myth
principles of both Perseus and Athena: "What kept inwhich the two opposed
psychoanalytic allegory
Greece safe was the proud, imposing image of Apollo, serve the same order. Cast in Lacanian
figures symbolic
who in holding up the head of the Gorgon to those terms, the moral of this would be: submit to
story
brutal and grotesque Dioynsiac forces subdued them. Medusa-Athena, undergo the penile castration
. . .That act of reconciliation to access the symbolic order, and be
[Vers?hnung] represents necessary
the most important event in the history of Greek ritual; rewarded with phallic shield of signification, of
every department of life now shows symptoms of a civilization, for doing so. Might this be the implication
revolutionary change. The two great antagonists have of any Perseus with the Head of Medusa, whether that of
been reconciled" (BT:26).22 Note that Nietzsche stresses Benvenuto Cellini (1545-1554), say, or Antonio Canova
"reconciliation," not eradication: in his account (1797-1801 ),with its raised head of Medusa and its
Dionysian sublimity is as crucial to art as Apollonian
beauty. As in the Medusa myth, the crux lies in the
apotropaic transformation of the one by the other. 23. See Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," in P. Rieff, ed.,
Freud discusses Medusa in a short text titled Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Collier Books,
1963),
"Medusa's Head" (1922), but not in relation to art. pp. 212-213; and chapter 6 above.
24. Ibid. "The erect male organ also has an apotropaic
Although alert to the fusion of genders in her image, effect,"
Freud continues, "but thanks to another mechanism. To display the
Freud still regards Medusa as a woman, indeed as the
penis (or any of its surrogates) is to say: 'I am not afraid of you. Idefy
woman:
primordial her head with its snaky hair is an you. I have a penis.'"

ambiguous figuration of the female genitals, and "the 25. H?l?ne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), in E. Marks
terror of Medusa is a terror of castration," a terror that all and I. de Courtivon, New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken
p. 255. Idon't see
Books, 1981), laughter inmost representations of
Medusa (but then most are made
representations by men);
nevertheless, there are some openings to feminist In the
readings.
mirror-shield of Caravaggio, for example, the horror expressed by
21. In The World as Will and Representation (1819), an important Medusa stem less from her appearance than from her outrage?
might
source for Nietzsche, is even more suspicious of the at her rape, and p?trification.
Schopenhauer decapitation, So, too, if Freud is correct
"principle of individuation," which he regards as the principal to read her snakes as penile symbols, the terror of Medusa might figure
delusion of "the veil of Maya," in a world governed by the "egoism" of not castration so much as
phallic power, inwhich case Medusa might
the will. the phallic woman, and is punished as such.
represent
22. translates with the stronger term 26. This is how Freud describes the fetish in "Fetishism"
Golffing Vers?hnung (1927),
"pacification." also in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, pp. 214-219.
 186 RES 44 AUTUMN 2003

raised sword of her decapitation: give up the penis in more, the Lacanian gaze mortifies this subject, catches
for the this him out, as itwere, unawares. This is the gist of his
exchange phallus? Might "phallologentric
sublation" be the introit of any art museum? (The famous anecdote of the sardine can in The Four
Canova Perseus stands above the entrance of the Fundamental Concepts: on a fishing boat as a young
Museum in New York: it is the genius man Lacan spies a can afloat on the sea and aglint in
Metropolitan
loci.)27 Certainly it is a moral that feminists decry? the sun, which seems to look at him "at the level of the
because it leaves women on the margins, if not point of light, the point at which everything that looks at
precisely
headless on the ground. me is situated" (FG95). Lacan turns this anecdote into
an epiphany about "the crossing of gazes" similar to the
The role of apotropaic transformation is less explicit one disclosed by Vernant in the Medusa myth: seen as
in the final text at issue here, the seminars on the gaze he sees, pictured as he pictures, the Lacanian subject is
in The Four Fundamental of Psychoanalysis caught in a double position, in a cat's cradle of
Concepts
(1972), though Lacan does allude to both Medusa and implicated looks.30 To graph this double position, Lacan
These seminars are also well known, but not superimposes, on the customary cone of vision that
Apollo.
well understood, in part because their premise is so emanates from the subject, another cone that emanates
radical: that in the first instance the gaze is not human from the object, at the point of light. It is this second
at all. To an extent like Sartre in Being and Nothingness cone that he first terms "the gaze" (see diagram).
(1943), Lacan distinguishes between the gaze and the The first cone of vision (graph 1) is familiar from
and to an extent like Renaissance treatises on perspective: an object is
eye (that is, physiological vision),
in The of Perception focused as an image for a subject at a geometric point of
Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology
(1945), he locates this in the world, again at least (The is a loose one, for obviously our
gaze viewing. analogy
For Lacan the world "sees" or, more precisely, it vision is not monocular and fixed in the manner of one
initially.
"shows"; it is the "iridescence" of its that allows us point perspective.) Here the subject-as-viewer is in a
light
to see at all, and it is this "gratuitous showing" that he position of apparent mastery that Lacan calls "Cartesian."
calls the "essence of the gaze," perhaps in the sense of But, he adds immediately, "I am not simply that
the fundament.28 In Lacan, language preexists the punctiform being located at the geometral point from
but so too does the gaze, and even more which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the
subject,
primordially so, for we are literally born into "the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture,
of the world" (see note 28; FC;72, 75). Yet this certainly, is in my eye. But I, Iam in the picture"
spectacle
is no benign bathing in light: "looked at from all sides," (FC:96). Hence the second cone (graph 2) that emanates
we can only feel the gaze as a threat, indeed as an "evil from the point of light, the object in the world (e.g., the
a profound sardine can): the subject is also under its gaze,
eye" (FC:118); this old superstition possesses
truth for Lacan. Here, then, behind the veil of Maya, or "photographed" by its light; it is in this sense that the
the world of appearances as Nietzsche sees it, stands subject is (in) picture as well. Here the tables are
a
Medusa, or the horrific real as Lacan imagines it.29 turned: the subject-as-viewecY is now in a position of
Even more than Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Lacan potential annihilation; in fact, Lacan writes (with a trace
of paranoia), the gaze might "go so far as to have me
challenges the presumed mastery of the subject in sight;
scotomized" (FC:84). Thus the superimposition of the
two cones of vision (graph 3), which ismeant to capture
27. Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," p. 255.
of this double status of the subject as seer and seen in one:
28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. "the object" (graph 1) is now in line with "the point of
FC More us to see is is termed
76; hereafter abbreviated precisely, what enables the light" (graph 2), the combination of which
our interrupting of this "iridescence" with our bodies, our carving out
now
"the gaze"; "the geometral point" (graph 1) is in line
of light a trajectory of sight?a point drawn from Merleau-Ponty.
with "the picture" (graph 2), the combination of which is
Especially importanthere is his The Visible and the Invisible, published
in February in the very midst of these seminars. called "the subject of representation"; and "the image"
posthumously 1964,
29. For Vernant, Medusa is born of the night, while for Lacan she
(graph 1) is now in line with "the screen" (graph 2), the
is all light, but the contradiction is only apparent, for these are two combination of which is dubbed "the image screen."
forms of the same blindedness. Incidentally, the fact that for Lacan
Medusa represents the gaze, and not vision, might be in keeping with
her ancient often depicted in art, her eyes are 30. In Being and Nothingness Sartre also writes of this relay of
representation: although
never described in literature; in some sense her entire visage?its looks, but there it is intersubjective, between two viewers; in effect
horrific confusion?is her gaze. Lacan dehumanizes this gaze, and primordializes it in the process.
 Foster: Medusa and the real 187

Object image J^> Geometral

point Point oflight Pktmt

Graph 1. Graph 2.

How can "the subject of representation" be in a

position of both mastery and threat? Here again the
The gaze The subject of representation
analogy of one-point perspective might clarify this
apparent paradox. In paintings with such perspective the
space seems to build rationally from the vanishing point
toward the viewer, and this construction seems to place
the viewer in command of the pictorial array. In this Graph 3.

respect perspectival painting is a perfect screening of the

gaze understood as the light of the world, of its power of
radiation. At the same time the vanishing point is also a
point of absence, indeed a point of nullity, a tiny hole Lacanian viewer as well: apparent master of vision but
that opens onto a vast void. (In Renaissance it is potential victim of the gaze.
painting
sometimes exploited as a sign of divine infinity, as in the Of all the terms in the diagram of the gaze, the
Last Supper where Leonardo positions the head of Christ meaning of "the image screen" is especially obscure.32
over the I understand the term to represent the totality of what
vanishing point of the space.) Now as the is
vanishing point is structurally opposite and equal to the recognized as an image in a given culture, of what
viewing point, itmight communicate some of this nullity counts socially as visual representation. In this sense it is
to the viewer. In this way, for all the plenitude afforded the imagistic corollary of language in the symbolic
by perspective, there remains a hole at its heart, a hole order, the visual medium of social recognition and
that signifies as a kind of lack. In Lacanian terms, then, exchange. Obviously it is hardly singular or simple:
the gaze is not completely screened in perspectival each culture has different ?mage screens, with different
painting; the castrative implication of the gaze, its status subscreens, and each cultural subject arranges them in
as a look with a lack, is still in different files. Yet in any one culture there is enough
play: it still might
"scotomize." And it is this troublesome connection held in common to allow for communication, not least
between perspective and castration that Duchamp because we fashion our visual identities not only of the
stages
in his final work, Etant donn?s (1946-1966), the diorama world but for the world from images selected from this
with the headless mannequin in the Philadelphia screen. We might believe that we create these self
Museum of Modern Art (incidentally, Duchamp representations freely, but the imagistic material is
completed the work around the time of the Lacan mostly allotted to us, often imposed on us, and a fall
seminars on the gaze). Here the viewer, positioned as a outside of the ?mage screen has the same dire
peeping Tom, looks through a construction consequences as a fall outside of language: our status as
perspectival
at the splayed body of a female nude, directly at her social beings is cast in doubt; we risk the outsider
vulva: viewing point and vanishing point intersect at the condition of the psychotic. Such is the profound
point of lack, of "castration." "Con celui qui voit," Jean conservatism of this aspect of Lacanian thought: for
Fran?ois Lyotard once remarked of this schema. "He Nietzsche the tearing of the veil of Maya might allow for
who sees is a cunt."31 This is the double bind of the a renewal of the symbolic order, "an
entirely new set of

31. See Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, Les TRAN S formateurs Duchamp 32. As often in Lacan, it is mostly heuristic, and in my reading it
(Paris: Galil?e, 1977), pp. 133-138. For a different motivation of this serves to mediate the primary realms of Lacanian the
topology:
work see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Imaginary, the Symbolic (these two are not separate here), and
Press, 1993), pp. 111-114. the Real.
 188 RES 44 AUTUMN 2003

symbols"; for Lacan any tearing of the image screen can historical motion as the visual medium of different codes
evince only a breakdown of the symbolic order, a of subjective identification and social recognition.34
psychotic failure in representation. However, the image screen ismore than the grid of
Although we are mostly oblivious to the image images through which a subject reads a society. It has
screen, it is hardly natural; it has a history, a myriad another side, as itwere, that faces another way?toward
histories, and art is only one index of them, as partial as the real. Thus for Lacan the function of the image screen
it is privileged. Lacan is no historian (on the contrary), is not only to mediate the social; it is also to filter the
but he does allude sketchily to three orderings of the real: it protects the subject from the gaze of the world,
image screen in theWest, which he calls "religious," captures its light, which he describes as "pulsatile,
"aristocratic," and "financial," respectively; they dazzling, and spread out" (FG89), and tames it in
correspond roughly to the social regimes governed by images, as images. Lacan terms this primordial function
the medieval church, the aristocratic court, and the of the image screen a dompte-regard or "taming of the
modern market. For Lacan the emblematic form of the gaze," and he ascribes this purpose to all art (though,
first regime is the icon, which he describes as "a go again, his is The is
paradigm painting). dompte-regard
between with the divinity" (FC:113), in effect a pictorial also distinctive to man: in his account animals are only
mask that mediates the gaze of God for medieval caught in the spectacle of the world, whereas we are not
subjects, that allows them to behold this omniscient reduced to this "imaginary capture" (FC:103); we have
gaze even as it subjects them to it. In this "sacrificial" access to the symbolic not only in the articulations of
man is under the divine gaze, and what is but in the of the with
regime language picturings image screen,
sacrificed, for the most part, is human autonomy. "The which we can moderate and manipulate the gaze.
next stage" in his potted history is the aristocratic Unlike animals, then, we "know how to play with the
ordering of the image screen, and here the given mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen
example is "the great hall of the Doges' Ralace in is here the locus of mediation" (FC:107). In this way the
Venice, inwhich are painted all kinds of battles, such as screen allows the subject, at the point of the
image
the Battle of Lepanto," in effect a pictorial history of the picture, to behold the object, at the point of light.
city. The painting of this regime (significantly, Lacan Otherwise itwould be impossible to do so, for to see
thinks only of painting) ismore political than religious, without the image screen would be to be touched by the
more "communal" than "sacrificial"; the good people of real, blinded by its radiation, petrified by its gaze.35
Venice are invited to see "in these vast compositions" Clearly Lacan is informed by the Medusa myth; certainly
the governmental gaze of the Doges who, "when the it inflects his language.36
audiences are not there, deliberate in this hall. Behind
34. For reflections on related matters see Norman
the picture, it is their gaze that is there" (FC:113).33 This Bryson, Vision
and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University
courtly spectatorship is absent in the modern regime of Press, 1983), and Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World
the image screen governed by the market, which
(New York: Routledge, 1996).
positions the artist as solitary producer, and the viewer 35. InAutobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl "Renee" also
as solitary consumer, of individual visions (Lacan describes this real inMedusan terms as "a country,
opposed to
an
mentions C?zanne and Matisse in particular). Here "the [everyday] reality, where reigned implacable light, blinding, leaving
no place for shadow; an immense space without a boundary, limitless,
gaze of the painter" appears in the historical default of
flat... I called it the 'Land of Light' because of the bright
those of God and aristocracy, which allows the artist to
illumination, dazzling, astral, cold, and the state of extreme tension in
claim his gaze as "the only gaze." Of course this which everything was, including myself" (Marguerite Sechehaye, ed.,
narrative is schematic in the extreme; it is concerned Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl [New York: New American

with formations within one Western Library, 1970], p. 19). Also see Louis A. Sass, Madness and
only hegemonic in
Modernism: Insanity the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and
tradition, of the image screen are
and recent orderings
Thought (New York: Basic Books), especially pp. 43-74.
entirely neglected (obviously these are very different, 36. Here his immediate source is Roger Caillois. In The Four
and painting has fallen drastically in importance). But at Fundamental Concepts Lacan refers to M?duse et cie (Paris: Gallimard,
least this sketch begins to set the image screen in 1960) inwhich Caillois studies insectmimicry; this littlebook
influenced Lacan on questions of visuality and spatiality. Yet Caillois
discusses Medusa only briefly, in terms of primitive belief in "the evil

eye," and like Vernant he sees her figure as a primordial form of mask,
33. Perhaps Lacan has in mind the famous hall of portraits of the with powers both "offensive and defensive." Sartre also mentions
as well. Another instance in this "communal" Medusa in passing in Being and Nothingness, as an
Doges ordering might be yet only allegory
the Dutch group portraiture of Rembrandt and Hals. of objectification under the look of the other.
 Foster: Medusa and the real 189

Even as the gaze may trap the subject, the subject also be used to arrest the viewer; this is the Medusan
may tame the gaze, and it is through the image screen aspect of beauty to which poets from Petrarch to Shelley
that we, like so many little Athenas, negotiate its "laying and beyond have attested. Lacan speaks of the process
down [d?p?t]" (FG101). The Englishphrase introduces as one of "initial" seeing and "terminal" arrest, as one of
a double meaning: a laying down of the gaze of the "suture" through "pseudo identification" (FG117): the
as in down of paint, that promotes a laying must not be
artist, laying subject trapped by the image, but he must
down of the gaze of the world, as in a laying down of a be lured by it.41
weapon. This trope again presents the gaze not only as Traditionally inWestern philosophy tropes like "veils"
maleficent but as violent?as a Medusan force that can and "screens" figure as blinds that obscure truth,
arrest us, even petrify us, if it is not disarmed first?and illusions that mystify reality: we are supposed to shed
very elliptically Lacan does intimate different degrees of them (like the scales before our eyes in the New
apotropaic disarming in painting. At itsmore expressive, Testament), to see beyond them (like the shadows in the
painting might aim to arrest the gaze before the gaze cave of Plato), to tear them asunder (like the veil of
can arrest us, as if the very gestures of such a in Schopenhauer). In Lacan, on the contrary, the
Maya
composition might preempt the violence of the gaze. screen is a necessary protection without which we are at
At itsmore "Apollonian" (FG101), painting might aim the mercy of the real; almost as a structural effect, then,
to pacify the gaze, as if the perfections of such a his binary logic constructs the real as horrific?and art
composition might ease the viewer from the grip of the as protective, indeed redemptive. Just as elsewhere in
gaze.37 "In the contemplation of the picture," an auditor his thought the imaginary integrationof the body
of the seminar (Moustapha Safouan) comments, "the eye
seeks relaxation from the gaze" (FC: 103), and Lacan
seems to concur. Such is aesthetic for eye" and the evil eye with "the eye filled with voracity"; this leads him
contemplation to assert that the value" of the picture lies in its ability to
Lacan: some art attempts a trompe-l'oeil, a tricking of "hypnotic
appease this "appetite" (FC:115). This description to evoke a
the eye, but all art aspires to a dompte-regard, a taming begins
human subject, especially so when Lacan refers this "voracity" to envy.
of the gaze.38 "Invidia comes from videre," he writes, as if to imply that the gaze is

Again, to tame the gaze is not to block it entirely: it is invidious because it is shot through with envy from our earliest age.

to deflect Here Lacan cites the Confessions of Saint Augustine

it, to redirect it, as a mask does (a trope that where he recalls
his murderous as a little
Lacan uses more often than the image screen). In this feelings when, boy, he sees his baby brother
at the breast of his mother: "He was not old to talk," Augustine
enough
way a picture must not only "tame" and "civilize" the writes of his infantile self, "but whenever he saw his brother at the
gaze; itmust also "fascinate" the viewer with the gaze breast he would grow pale with envy." Perhaps Augustine cast an
transformed (FC:116).39Just as Dionysian terror is envious look at his brother that embittered him as well. (This recalls

necessary to to Nietzsche, Medusan "Envy" as depicted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel: an old woman
tragedy according
fascination is necessary to the image according to
whose tongue snakes out of her mouth and circles back to bite her
eyes. Here it is as though the eyes and the snakes of Medusa have
Lacan. "The evil eye is the fascinum/' he writes, and this become one, as, more importantly, have Medusa and her victim.) The
fascinum (the Latin version of baskania, the Greek for boy is not jealous; he doesn't want the milk. He is envious; he desires
evil eye) "has the effect of arresting movement and, what the other has, and that is union with the maternal breast. The
of breast is the first lost object in the Freudian scheme of
literally, killing life." Hence again the necessity of the things, and the
as an transformation: "it is a question primary objet petit a in the Lacanian scheme, the primary object
picture apotropaic cause of desire. This is
why Lacan pictures the young Augustine as
of dispossessing the evil eye of the gaze, in order to
"pale before the image of a closed upon itself," a
completeness
ward itoff" (FC: 118).40 But itsmoderated power must that he enjoyed once and his
completeness little brother enjoys now
(FC;116). In this account the Medusan gaze seems to be our own
invidious look projected onto the other (recall that inVernant it is our
37. "Composition" is a telling term here. The distinction between gaze "that is captured in the mask of Medusa"). In short, in the
figure
and Apollonian
expressive preemption pacification might be a way to of Medusa our voracious desire is radicalized as monstrous, and in this
inflect familiar oppositions in art history: Caravaggio versus Poussin, form of the primordial alien it seems to demand and
"taming"
Delacroix versus
Ingres, etc. "civilizing."
38. As we saw with the Caravaggio Medusa, can also 41. Subsequently this term becomes in film theory.
trompe-l'oeil very important
disturb dompte-regard. On this phenomenon in postwar painting see In "Barbara and the Medusa Effect" Craig Owens calls suture
Kruger
the title chapter of my The Return of the Real. "the Medusa Effect": ruse, imaginary identification of seer
"specular
39. In this sense to sublimate is not to damp down so much as it is and seen, {Medusa Reader, p. 207).
immediacy, capture, stereotype
to distill.
Again Medusa here is close to Narcissus; and this proximity might put
40. Lacan does not strictly the real as horrific and the some pressure on the ideal of in art long advanced
ontologize "absorption" by
gaze as Medusan. At one point he associates the gaze with "the evil Michael Fried.
 190 RES 44 AUTUMN 2003

a
achieved in "the mirror stage" projects a prior stage of
fearsome "body-in-pieces" (corps morcel?) to be
avoided at all costs, so here the image screen projects
the real as amorphous and awful. The Nietzschean
opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian has a
similar effect, but, again, Nietzsche anticipates a

symbolic renewal in the Dionysian shattering of

Apollonian individuation, whereas Lacan sees no such
a
possibility in the tearing of the image screen. Far from
the Lacanian real is a
phenomenological plenitude,
black hole, a negative space of non-sociality, indeed of
non-subjectivity. And this binary logic is structurally
conservative: Lacan cannot imagine an art that
transgresses the image screen in order to transform it
radically. At the same time, this very logic makes the
tearing of the image screen, the probing for the real,
very attractive to avant-gardes with transgressive
ambitions. As Hugo Ball once remarked of Zurich Dada
at the height of World War I: "The Gorgon's head of a
boundless terror smiles out of the fantastic destruction."