The power of the symbol in the work "The Laugh of the Medusa" by Hélène Cixous: a semiotic analysis of its elements

Abstract

The Hélène Cixous proposal is aimed at the analysis of Western logocentrism, for this, it resorts to psychoanalytic, semiotic and poetic elements to try to overthrow the patriarchal law and all processes of female exclusion; through, the staging of what she calls "female writing". Appealing to the Greek myth of Medusa, among others, it is proposed to carry out a deconstruction of the patriarchal tradition of the West, and then to examine the problem of the exclusion of women in that tradition. I emphasize that his proposal is based on the criterion of non-ambivalence and / or the breaking of the phallocentric conceptual schemes of the Western world. The fundamental contribution that I will make in the present work, is to demonstrate how the repetition of the metaphor in the poetic-literary expression in the so-called feminine writing destroys the father figures that were empowered through the foundational myths of culture western