By endowing Medusa with the facility to speak through her previously repressed body and to denounce the falsified, phallocentric version of her being Cixous asseverates that women can transcend the barriers of male created myths and discover that they have nothing dark or mysterious to fear, either in themselves or in other women. .
The author employs the notions of Derridian deconstructionism and the psychoanalytic concepts of Lacan to convey the inadequacies of the phallocentric discourse. Derrida proposed the idea that the structure of language is dependent upon spoken words taking precedence over the written word. He coined the term logocentric to mean that Western uses of language are centered around a logos, which means either word or rationality (of men). Cixous combines the idea of the logocentric with the Lacanian concept of the phallocentric "where discourse is centered around and arranged by the phallic symbol. This phallogocentrism, or male-centered discourse, permeates every aspect of literature: vocabulary, syntax, rules of logic, and inclinations toward binary oppositions such as male/female, order/chaos, language/silence, speech/writing, .
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etc. In order for women to defeat this system of placing precedence on one entity over another (man/woman) they must "make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language- (315); and since the development of a new language is not feasible, they must discover and capitalize on the errors and the holes within the phallogocentric discourse. .
"The Laugh of the Medusa- exemplifies this course of action through the circuitous, repetitive, and contradictory style of writing contained within it. Cixous writes in this style to illustrate the idea that women are not able to correctly assert and express themselves through the phallogocentric nature of language and literary technique. By "sweeping away syntax- (315) and working in-between the phallogocentric language and its rigid rules of interpretation--in "seizing the occasion to speak---women are able to foster the "emancipation of the marvelous text of herself.
