MEDUSA
Medusa represents the objectifying look, the gaze, of the Other, that which objectifies and takes away Self. If one looks at something, Sartre says,”the one who looks is the center of consciousness.” The one who looks controls the world of a particular scene. But if, while looking, the looker is looked on by another, he becomes not only a being in and for itself but an objectified self for the Other. In this case, that Self that belongs to the recipient of the look is different from the Self seen by the Other, and, as Hazel Barnes in “The Look of the Gorgon (1974) explains: “The Other’s Look reveals to me that I am not alone in the world.” That might be all right in itself until I realize that now “the world is no longer my world.” In short, the Other’s look might deny my own freely organized world, therefore reducing me permanently to a hard stone-like object. The only solution to this problem is to assert one’s existence by making the self-defining choice of looking at the Other and, in so doing, neutralizing what is symbolized by the Gorgon’s life-denying look. This is the existentialist’s understanding of the only possible role of the post-Romantic alienated individual.” David Leeming, Medusa: In the Mirror of Time, 2013, 60-63.
@ lisa_sadler
Lisa Sadler
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre brings Medusa into his world of existentialist philosophy. The ‘petrification in in-itself by the Other,’ he says, is "the profound meaning of the myth of Medusa". The Other here is any person who looks at another, making the recipient of the look, the in-itself,” feel objectified– deindividualized– to the extent that his subjectivity has been petrified.
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