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On sexual difference: Let's start with these small points. One day Zeus and Hera, the ultimate couple, in the course of one of their intermittent and thoroughgoing disagreements-which today would be of the greatest interest to psychoanalysts-called on Tiresias to arbitrate. Tiresias, the blind seer who had enjoyed the uncommon fortune of having lived seven years as a woman and seven years as a man. He was gifted with second sight. Second sight in a sense other than we might usually understand it: it isn't simply that as a prophet he could see into the future. He could also see it from both sides: from the side of the male and from the side of the female. The subject of the disagreement was the question of sexual pleasure: "Of man and woman, who enjoys the greater pleasure?" Obviously neither Zeus nor Hera could answer this without giving their own answer, which they saw would be inadequate, since the ancients made fewer assumptions than we do about the possibility of making such identifications. So it came about that Tiresias was sought, as the only person who could know "which of the two." And Tiresias answered: "If sexual pleasure could be divided up into ten parts, nine of them would be the woman's." Nine. It's no coincidence that Tiresias makes another This article first appeared as "Le Sexe ou la tete?" in Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 13 (1976), pp. 5-15. The text was transcribed from a conversation between Helene Cixous and the editors of Les Cahiers du GRIF which took place in Brussels during 1975. The present translation follows the published transcript with two exceptions (signaled in nn. 4 and 5) and is published with the permission of Helene Cixous. The approach and arguments are developed in Cixous's more recent work. See, e.g., Vivre l'orange (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1979), written in French and English, and Illa (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1980). Thanks are due to to Elaine Marks for suggesting this translation of the title, to Keith Cohen for advice on specific points of translation, and to Chris Holmlund for bibliographical assistance.

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