Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Mirror of Medusa. by Tobin Siebers

Review by: Terrell M. Butler
Source: MLN, Vol. 99, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1984), pp. 1206-1210
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905414
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 1206 REVIEWS

Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 180 pages.

The Mirror of Medusa is a powerful and intriguing study of what Siebers

somewhat provocatively calls the "logic of superstition": the assertion of
difference in contexts of violent reciprocity where all significant differ-
ences have in fact vanished. Drawing on a dazzling variety of materials
from myth, folklore, anthropology, art history, psychology, and, espe-
cially, literature, Siebers describes this accusatory logic in extremely
suggestive and useful ways. In so doing he presents a demystified account
of superstitious beliefs and practices, and, at the same time, constructs a
theory of superstition as a "universal human activity" present in modern
as well as archaic societies (p. ix). On these grounds alone, The Mirror of
Medusa cannot be ignored. It is, I believe, indispensable: any study of
superstition will have to take account of this book.
Medusa, the evil eye, Narcissus and the Rat Man are figures of super-
stition that share one telling feature: each is a category in the etymological
sense of the term-from kategorema, "meaning a public denunciation or
accusation" (p. 34). Each of these figures is thus a stereotypical mode of
accusation. Even though Siebers maintains that superstition is a logic, he
deliberately downplays the cognitive value of la pensge sauvage in order to
emphasize the violent, accusatory force of superstition-and its role in
stabilizing the social order. Superstition is a false epistemology, a mystified
theory of causes that emerges when the causal nexus is lost. In a mimetic
crisis into which everyone is ineluctably drawn and in which each is the
violent double of the other, superstition is a collective strategy for com-
batting the violent reciprocity that effaces social distinctions by means of
limited violence directed toward a victim:

The community of accusers diverts its own violence toward the accused and
contains it in him through representations. And this act of containment is viewed
as fixing the cause of disorder and violence. Whatever dissipates violence and is
identified as its last resting place is always seen as its source. (p. 151)

The effects of such accusation are paradoxical: the very power to disrupt
the social order that makes the victim of superstitious logic contemptible
at the same time invests him with some degree of supernatural power. He
combines within himself the polarities of inferior-superior.
The collective refusal to see oneself in the other engenders meconmais-
sance that Siebers believes essential if society is to maintain itself as an
integrated, stable order. In the final chapter of his book, he concludes
that culture is a "series of representations that contain [man's] conflictual
tendencies," and that the "immense force" of superstition derives from its
violent subversion of violence:

Superstition is an institution more influential and encompassing than others and

thus more effectively realizes their common goal: all institutions ultimately work

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 M L N 1207

toward an orderly and obedient community. As long as the system is strong

enough to contain violent conflicts, it uses them to reaffirm its structure and
maintain a community. (p. 152)

On the level of collective order, violence must be answered by violence.

An eye for an eye. And the violence, to be effective, must remain hidden.
Siebers' book is preoccupied with the hiding of violence. Its title refers to
the violence that collective representations conceal. The mirror of Medusa
is a talismanic defense against magic, and an unmistakable sign of the
mimetic nature of the crisis. More importantly, it is an emblem of the
violent remedy for shared violence: the monstrous, often demonic iden-
tities given the victims of collective persecution by their accusers. If Siebers
is right, society does not function in an orderly manner, as Hegel thought,
because it possesses knowledge of itself. Rather, it maintains itself because
of a failure of knowledge: it masks its victims with its own violence and in
so doing creates centers around which to gather.
Siebers' theory of meconnaissance locates the generative mechanism of
collective representations in communal accusation rather than in the
unanimous murder or expulsion of a scapegoat. This means that although
he makes limited use of Ren6 Girard's discoveries, especially his theories
of mimesis and ritual violence, The Mirror of Medusa is not original in
Girard's sense: it is not a return to the origin that by disclosing it allows
us to renounce it (Girard, Le Bouc 9missaire, p. 183). Despite comments
such as the following, Siebers does not attempt to develop a sustained
argument about the inaugural moment of all religion and culture-unlike
La Violence et le sacrg and Des choses cachges depuis lafondation du monde which
he draws on to some extent:

According to Girard the murder of the victim may be called the origin of rep-
resentation, for the resolution of the crisis requires that the community trans-
form the victim into a sign of the crisis. This aspect of Girard's theory may
nevertheless be modified, for the act of accusation itself has symbolic virtues.
Undoubtedly, the murder of the accused accentuates the representational nature
of accusation, but the initial stirrings of symbolic activity must be located in those
categories of difference that are created when cause and effect couple in accu-
satory gestures.... Not only is accusation the origin of representation, but its
signs are created to obscure the conditions of their own genesis. (pp. 21-22)

Siebers' book concentrates on later, derivative religious and mythical phe-

nomena that he believes essential to the orderly functioning of society,
those involving accusation rather than murder or expulsion-various
forms of imitative magic such as the evil-eye superstition, for example.
But in separating the origin of representation from death, The Mirror of
Medusa takes its distance from the enormously important Girardian en-
terprise of attempting to provide a theoretical description of the mur-
derous genesis of the earliest, most primitive and "elementary" forms of

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 1208 REVIEWS

the religious life-and from the transcendence of generative violence that

its disclosure makes possible.
Siebers does, however, use his theory of superstition to construct a
daring critique of the social sciences-anthropology and psychology in
particular. Meconnaissance, so necessary Siebers believes to social order,
has an imprisoning effect on these disciplines. To the extent that they
unwittingly accept the victimizers' point of view, they are themselves forms
of mystified knowledge. As such they are part of a cover-up that does not
recognize its contradictions. For Siebers this is especially clear in the case
of anthropologists. Wishing at all costs to avoid ethnocentrism, and in-
sisting on the dignity and worth of the primitive, they very often implicitly
accept the illusions of the accusers whose mystified accounts of collective
violence they claim to understand. By fetishizing the primitive this way,
anthropologists make themselves captives of superstition and the violent,
accusatory logic embodied in it. Even when they themselves are victims
of, for example, evil-eye accusations, anthropologists often mimetically
adopt the superstitious outlook of their persecutors:

One would imagine that the anthropologist suspected of the evil eye would
quickly recognize that the belief attacks the fascinator and not the fascinated
individual. In most cases, however, this recognition does not take pla'ce. The
anthropologist seems blinded by his desire to avoid ethnocentric behavior....
Nevertheless, in trying to avoid one aspect of ethnocentric behavior, the anthro-
pologist falls prey to a more perverse form of ethnocentrism. He identifies with
the group as a whole and behaves as it does toward individuals who are not
admitted to its ranks.... he patterns the norms of his objectivity on those of the
community, reproducing those beliefs that refuse to acknowledge the existence
of the fascinator as a victim. (pp. 105-106)

What Siebers says here amounts to a critique of Weber's Verstehen method

and its applications in anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology has
become contaminated by superstition in its efforts to understand archaic
cultures from within. Superstition also infects psychology, according to
Siebers. Freud's concepts of narcissism and the uncanny are accusatory
representations that, like the evil-eye belief, isolate and blame a victim. It
is no exaggeration to say that for Siebers, anthropology and psychology
are in crisis in the sense given this term by Girard-from the Greek krino,
meaning "not only to judge, distinguish, differentiate, but to accuse and
condemn a victim" (Girard, p. 36).
According to Siebers, literature, not anthropology or psychology, fully
demystifies superstition. In the case of the evil-eye superstition (which
crucially resembles narcissism), for him the demystifying text par excel-
lence is Gautier's Jettatura. In his innovative use of Gautier's novella, Sie-
bers demonstrates the revelatory power of literature-here, its capacity
to expose the illusions and violence of persecutors by presenting the evil-
eye superstition from the point of view of the victim and providing a

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 M L N 1209

compelling account of the psychology of the accused. By dramatizing the

superstition as a series of accusations emerging in a mimetic crisis and
directed toward a man stereotypically marked as a scapegoat, Gautier
strips the demonic mask from the victim, forces us to see him as the
arbitrary object of collective violence, and makes us feel his growing de-
spair in the presence of a crowd united against him. Paul d'Aspremont is
a stranger and a newcomer in Naples, and also a foreigner with physical
traints (reddish hair; narrowly-placed, grayish-green eyes) that invite the
evil-eye accusation and ostracism in a community full of rivalry and sus-
picion. The expos6 of the evil-eye superstition culminates when Paul be-
comes crazed and imitates his persecutors by turning the community's
violence against himself. Blinded by the accusations of the persecutors,
trapped within their mystified and violent perspective, he pierces his own
eyes. And he finally expresses his abandonment to the turba by throwing
himself into the sea.
According to Siebers, the killing of a victim of evil-eye accusation is rare.
The drama of violence and the sacred is not normally played out to its
conclusion in this case. The cure of the evil-eye affliction and the naming
of its cause are frequently one and the same. Typically, the accused person
is not killed or expelled but becomes instead a "living victim . . . isolated
at the heart of the community . . . the object of a more sinister and psy-
chological violence" (p. 56). Moreover, since evil-eye fascination "always
passes from victim to victim even when folk cures do not acknowledge the
fact" (p. 45), every victimizer is himself also a victim, and every victim is
potentially a victimizer. In any case, the demons are never permanently
expelled in this arrangement, but passed from person to person. Thus at
the same time that its accusatory logic creates difference where none exists,
the evil-eye superstition partially effaces the difference, and the difference
circulates within the collective.
One can ask whether Siebers' view of the necessity of violence is a ten-
able one in the modern world-whether magical beliefs and practices can
any longer be counted on to maintain or restore order in a scandalized,
mimetic world in which accusation and counter-accusation escalate and
threaten to turn into catastrophic forms of violence-indeed, in more
general terms, whether violence can still subvert violence and restore
order, given what Girard has shown to be the drastically weakened con-
dition of the scapegoat mechanism, and this in the presence of unlimited
powers of self-destruction.
To comment adequately on these issues would be to raise the question
of the Bible and its role in history-above all, it would be to read the
Bible. This Siebers does not undertake, even though it contains revelatory
texts in which malevolent looking, superstition, and collective persecution
converge-in the Psalms and the Gospels, for example. What the Bible
offers, often in parabolic language to be sure, is the way to be rid of the

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 1210 REVIEWS

mimetic desire that is the heart and soul of violence: "And if your eye
should cause you to sin, tear it out and throw it away: it is better for you
to enter into life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be thrown into
the hell of fire" (Matthew 18:9).

Brigham Young University TERRELL M. BUTLER

Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire; Disclosures of Heloise.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Using the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard as a point of entry,

Peggy Kamuf proposes to examine this legendary story of passion and
desire in light of its sequel and survival in a selected corpus of seventeenth
and eighteenth-century French fiction.
This corpus consists of four texts which replicate the story of Heloise
in various guises. Professor Kamuf rejects the idea of reading one text as
descending in a straight line from another, for the idea of a direct influ-
ence is contrary to her method. Her purpose, rather, is to write "some of
the chapters in this other 'history,' the residue of a woman's excessive
desire" (p. xiv). The texts in question are Les Lettres portugaises, La Princesse
de Cheves, La Nouvelle Hgloise, and Les Liaisons dangereuses.
Having warned the reader at the outset that her point of view is not
that of the literary historian, Professor Kamuf nevertheless acknowledges
that the immense popularity of the medieval letters, beginning in the late
seventeenth century and intensifying in the eighteenth, when adaptations
and free translations proliferated, is no mere historical coincidence. The
resurgence of this courtly topos and rhetoric as the expression of sexual
passion created a singularly meaningful cultural legacy.
This legacy is Professor Kamuf's principal focus insofar as it reflects
"the force of a woman's passion" (p. xvi). The connecting thread of the
book's five chapters is "the construction which encloses women with their
desire" (p. xvii). Her principal focus is the way in which the force of a
woman's passion works within a specific literary text.
Professor Kamuf does not overlook the fact that patterns of feminine
behavior are closely related to societal pressures and rules. Yet her analysis
is never naively referential. She has read widely and well, and she has put
to excellent use the latest theoretical and psychological studies that bear
directly upon her subject.
One of the most notable features of this book, despite its dense scholarly
and theoretical framework, is its clarity of style and argumentation. Pro-
fessor Kamuf's reading of her texts is eminently personal and undog-
matic, despite the extensive ideological underpinnings of her argumen-
tation. She approaches each text on its own terms, and she knows how to
express her ideas and insights in a compact, pithy style that is remarkably

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