Stigmata by Cixous Hélène;

Author:Cixous, Hélène; [HéLèNE CIXOUS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile Daedalus, tired of Crete and of his long exile, was filled with longing for his own country, but he was shut in by the sea.4

Daedalus is also a learned artist. He produces works which, like all works of art, contain in fact a seed of death. Ultimately, the only people able to move about in art without risk are those who are in effect strong citizens having some authority within the art. Daedalus is the master of dead-ends and of evasions. He is at the turning point, at the passageway. Author of works which lead to going astray, inventor of the labyrinth; and also inventor of the antidote, maker of wings which on the one hand give man a superhuman power; and which on the other attribute to him a supplementary genos, a supplementary genus. Is the man who flies still and only a man? When he is a bit bird? Thus hybrid.

Through Daedalus, who steers from one extreme to the other, we thus have access to the passage, to the trans, to the crossing of borders, to the delimitation of genuses-genders-genres and species, to construction and to deconstruction, to metamorphosis. Through Dedalus I mean a Joyce.

With the call of his name, Daedalus leads monsters, mutants, chimeras. His story is an entanglement of prison and freedom. He had constructed the labyrinth under the orders of Minos, to lock up the Minotaur; this implies also that the monster, half bull half man, was to be preserved. The Minotaur is very much a monster, but after all Icarus and Daedalus are other monsters, other human anomalies. Daedalus revealed the secret of the labyrinth’s exit to Ariadne to help her save Theseus, who had been sent to confront the Minotaur in the labyrinth no one can leave. All it takes is not letting go of the thread.

This is also a lesson in reading, when you are in the labyrinth of a text, and a text is a labyrinth, a text which was not a labyrinth would not be a text, a labyrinth has its coherence, the rooms communicate with one another, and as a rule one cannot escape, which is a good thing, one must enter the labyrinth of a text with a thread.

But, friend of the lovers, Daedalus was punished and locked up without thread. His line was cut, it’s the same old story of the telephone. He was thus locked up without a thread but with his son Icarus, and as always he finds the easiest way to escape what’s inescapable. When one has no thread and cannot go by land, one goes by air. This is what poets do. Thus he invents human wings, he assembles feathers with wax. He needs time, because to make a sufficient collection he has to wait for birds to drop their feathers. The technical moment plunges the poet into voluptuous pleasure. This is how Ovid watches Daedalus adjust the wings:

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