The Tactics of Perseus: Tackling the Invisible Other

Abstract

The paper re-examines the blinding effects of the Other’s gaze, targeting a certain vulnerability in our vision - a theme that has been so very prominent in the context of art discourses since the 1960s. It has been argued that the Sartrian gaze of the other self/subject has the quality of being unseen, as it causes self-reification as well as scotomization. Confronted with such invisibility, how does it ever become possible to see the Other, that is, to see Medusa, a figure standing for the Other’s petrifying look? The author refers to some representations of this monstrous Other and suggests that as possible devices to bypass the terror, various media of spectacle and of representation might be designed, notably painting, at times regarded as an “art of memory,” rather than an art of direct perception.