Between Maternity and Paternity: Figuring Ethical Subjectivity
Lisa Walsh
L'érection phallique, non toute-puissante, serait alors une version masculine du lien ombilical.
(Irigaray, Sexes et parentés 29)
Feminists have long argued that the more influential trends in Western thought have tended toward a decided neglect, if not violation, of the "better half" of the humanity they claim to comprehend. In an attempt to rectify this situation, over the past decades, feminist thinkers have more or less actively, more or less violently, more or less creatively . . . rejected any and all theoretical constructs founded upon a denial (or repression) of Woman. In the seventies, "French feminism" crossed the
Why phenomenology and psychoanalysis? And what exactly is the function of this and? For the purposes of this essay, I will propose a rather simplistic, though not entirely meritless, answer that will allow me to approach what to my mind has been a crucial area of benign theoretical neglect: the role of the nuclear family as constitutive of our understanding of ethics, ethics in its most basic incarnation--as the fundamental nature of the relation between self and other. And here we find a very common ground, one which might be traced back to Greek as shared "mother" tongue of both phenomenology and psychoanalysis. For despite their differing perspectives, in particular with regard to the structures (or lack thereof) of subjectivity, a recurrent recourse to a certain Attic sensibility informs both discourses and sets the stage for the introduction of the maternal and paternal metaphors as illustrative substantiation of ethical paradigms.
Keeping in mind contemporary challenges to the self-evidence of the nuclear family stucture, I would like, in this essay, to examine the ways in which maternity and paternity--masculinity and femininity--have guided certain phenomenological and psychoanalytic understandings of self and other. To this end, I have chosen to focus my study on the metaphoric shift from maternity to paternity in the two principal works of ethicist Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being, and on responses of Irigaray and Derrida to these texts. While Lévinas is certainly working quite solidly within the phenomenological tradition, his assumptions as to the nature of the maternal and paternal functions draw on the same Greek sensibilities (and, indeed, often the same tragic texts) foundational of the psychoanalytic assertion of an oedipal model of subjectivity. Psychoanalysis fleshes out the nuclear family as metaphor and provides uniquely incisive conceptual tools for a feminist reading of these phenomenological texts.
Paternity Transcends Femininity
In the initial chapters of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas lays out a Phenomenology of the Other wherein subjectivity is constituted and interiority surpassed vis-à-vis an experience of wonder and responsibility as a response to the priority and asymmetry of the face of a radical Other who remains forever beyond and irreducible to the self (same). [End Page 80] In the concluding moments of his reply to and rejection of previous phenomenological notions of the self/other relation, however, Lévinas posits the Phenomenology of Eros "beyond the face," describing the sensual relation between (masculine) lover and (feminine) beloved as a "profanation" incapable of ethical significance or responsibility. For Lévinas, the fragile, clandestine nudity of the beloved evokes the lover's equivocal desire. The "ultramateriality" of the feminine "designates the exhibitionist nudity of an exorbitant presence coming as though from farther than the frankness of the face, already profaning and wholly profaned, as if it had forced the interdiction of a secret. The essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming signification. Not nothingness--but what is not yet" (Totality 256). Unlike the chaste openness of the face, the nudity of the beloved virgin desecrates the beauty and shatters the logic of the ethical relation. This feminine "ultramateriality" with its illusive promises of revelation and gratification enacts a movement of infinite deferral, locking the lover into the temporality of the as-yet ("ce qui n'est pas encore") and erasing his position as subject. Neither the lover's gaze nor his caress can possibly achieve any form of knowledge or expression through his encounter with the feminine form; she is childlike, condemned to animality, and disturbingly silent.
The erotic relation, in fact, represents a perversion, an inversion, of the alterity involved in the ethical face-to-face. Because the ambiguously virginal beloved remains in the realm of the impossible, irretrievable future--"beyond the face"--the lover remains locked inside the interiority of an unethical, masturbatory negation of the social wherein the metaphysical transcendence and symbolic representation necessary to the onset of moral consciousness become all but unrealizable. For Lévinas, "exteriority defines the existent as existent, and the signification of the face is due to an essential coinciding of the existent and the signifier. . . . To signify is not equivalent to presenting oneself as a sign, but to expressing oneself, that is, presenting oneself in person. The symbolism of the sign already presupposes the signification of expression, the face" (Totality 262). Exteriority, or metaphysical transcendence, achieved only through the recognition of the face of the other, predicates individual subjectivity, or the status of "being"; the transparent, unequivocal expression of the face maintains the possibility of language. And language, both in the closure of the "said" [le dit] and the openness of the saying [le dire], is essential to a continually renewed, socio-ethical connection of the face-to-face.1 Erotic signification cannot aspire to the heights of a welcoming [End Page 81] exchange between speaking subjects; its feminine element renders it inhuman--despite its uncanny, though always unsuccessful, attempts to disguise itself as otherwise. The beloved sets herself in pseudo-Hegelian opposition to the lover, "as an irresponsible animality which does not speak true words" (Totality 263). In stark contrast to the deific expression of the open face,
erotic nudity is as it were an inverted signification, a signification that signifies f alsely, a clarity converted into ardor and night, an expression that ceases to express itself, that expresses its renunciation of expression and speech, that sinks into the equivocation of silence, a word that bespeaks not a meaning but exhibition. (Totality 263)
This feminine involution of the ethical face, expressed in the amorous encounter as "erotic nudity," suppresses a medusa-like laugh beneath the immoral meaninglessness of its lewd display. The deceptive silence of the feminine leads the always already ethical (male) speaking subject into the ignorant, inexpressive darkness of a fusional rejection of society and its ethical responsibilities.
Despite Lévinas's refusal of a traditional primacy of the subject--his affirmation of the irreducible alterity of the other--a disappointing, regressive equation of femininity and animality, sexuality and immorality, exiles the most fundamental of human relations from the realms of the social and the divine, and posits them as "less than nothing." For, not only is erotic coupling unethical, it is also unjust. As a result of the essentially exclusive quality of the heterosexual dyad, the equalizing presence of the Third, necessary to the rectification of the fundamental inequality of the self/other relation, disappears and leaves the lovers stranded in the darkness of egotistical seclusion: "The relationship established between lovers in voluptuosity, fundamentally refractory to universalization, is the very contrary of the social relation. It excludes the third party, it remains intimacy, dual solitude, closed society, the supremely non-public" (Totality 264-65). Lévinas defines the feminine as asocial particularity, incapable of the transcendence of the universal, and consequently, as Hegel so eloquently puts it, "the eternal irony of the community." In effect, the lover's contamination by the feminine creates a sort of subjective reversion to a state of interiority at the same time previous to, yet still in reference to, the ethical exteriority to which he has already attained. From a psychoanalytic point of view, this asymbolic [End Page 82] amorous closure is reminiscent of the pre-Oedipal materiality of the mother-child dyad, which has yet to admit the presence of the paternal as third and the consequent banishment of the child to the symbolic. For just as the child maintains a certain reference to the symbolic through the mother's prior initiation as speaking subject, Lévinas's wayward lover's inability to speak a language that signifies, his perdition in the silence of material excess, can only be determined as such in relation to and as a negation of, the exteriority of symbolic, face-to-face interaction. "The in appearance relation of eros will have a reference--be it negative--to the social. In this inversion of the face in femininity, in this disfigurement that refers to the face, non-signifyingness abides in the signifyingness of the face" (Totality 262-63). In other words, the erotic relation, despite its antipathy with regard to the social, finds its strength and support in terms of positive meaning only in and through the symbolic, without which any significance whatsoever becomes absolutely impossible. Perhaps, then, the not so discreet secret of the feminine might be read as the ever-elusive maternal body, an ambiguous origin both "beyond the face" and "less than nothing."
On the contrary, however, in a rhetorical move that parallels the lover's regenerative trajectory out of the impossible, immoral secrecy of the lascivious caress and into the epistemic light of symbolic exteriority, Lévinas unveils the hitherto unthinkable possibility of salvation from within the very depths of the corruptive, copulative exchange. The erotic relation, in fact, does maintain an ethically productive potential, a potential mysteriously suppressed until the essay's provocative conclusion. What miraculous force, then, is capable of salvaging some form of true, transcendent beauty (as opposed to the dangerously deceptive feminine variety) from the utter immoral non-sense of the sexual encounter? The answer--paternity--is both obvious and astonishing. Obvious in that paternity, in particular the father-son connection, signals procreation as the undeniable, social justification of the sexual act as necessary evil. Astonishing in its conceptual ignorance of the maternal and its consequent erasure of femininity: paternity as the ethical transcendence of sexual materiality somehow manages to wipe away every last trace of the engendering force of the feminine-maternal. It fails to accord any sense of signification to this unsavory, though necessary, moment in the attainment of a thoroughly masculine fecundation. For in fact, what the lover unconsciously desired all along was a (male) child, an other of himself, and yet not himself, a relation that must remain in the darkness [End Page 83] of the mysterious "as yet" until the lover escapes from the throes of the illusion of erotic desire and assumes his ethical, paternal responsibility. In the darkness of the ultramaterial feminine:
[love] abides in a vertigo above a depth of alterity that no signification clarifies any longer--a depth exhibited and profaned. Already the relation with the child--the coveting of the child, both other and myself--takes form in voluptuosity, to be accomplished in the child himself (as can be accomplished a Desire that is not extinguished in its end nor appeased in its satisfaction). (Totality 266)
The erotic relation, then, provides the material substance, which though meaningless in itself, prefigures the unique father/son relation--unique in that it remains ethical despite the inability of the child (analogous to that of the feminine beloved) to attain the status of absolute alterity. The child, in fact, "accomplishes" a transcendent synthesis of the signifying subject capable of recognizing and being recognized by the social Third and the material fusion of a purely structural intersubjectivity that is not one: "in this unparalleled conjuncture of identification, in this trans-substantiation, the same and the other are not united but precisely--beyond every possible project, beyond every meaningful and intelligent power--engender the child" (Totality 266).
For Lévinas, then, the "fecundity of the caress" issues forth as the father's son. In her engagement with Lévinas's seeming denigration of femininity, however, Irigaray re-writes the ethical transcendence of the erotic moment as always already existent in the flesh-to-flesh. Because Lévinas's lover remains fearful and ignorant of the sexed body of his beloved, he is unable to see in her silent "ultramateriality" a speaking subject whose very corporeality constitutes a unique conduit to an other sort of future, grounded in the memory of the past--an ethical re-birth of the subject well prior to the birth of the child. Positioning herself in the place of the beloved, though in this instance a sexualized speaking subject, Irigaray describes the potentially miraculous effect of the meeting of the two sexes:
As he caresses me, he bids me neither to disappear nor to forget but rather to remember the place where, for me, the most intimate life is held in reserve. Searching for what has not yet come into being for himself, he invites me to become what I have [End Page 84] not yet become. To realize a birth that is still in the future. Plunging me back into the maternal womb and beyond that conception, awakening me to another birth--as an amorous woman. (Ethics 187, Ethique 175)
Irigaray's secret, the original material connection to the maternal body, which Lévinas refuses to acknowledge, takes the lovers back to the "ultramateriality" of the presymbolic real without negating the continued presence of signification necessary to their second-coming (or "parousia") on the hither side of the initial conception. The flesh-to-flesh encounter of Irigaray's lovers creates a light that allows each to achieve a renewed sort of transcendence on discovering the mystery of the other sex. Unfortunately, even Lévinas is not privy to the answer to the secret of the beloved of his own creation: "The act of love would amount to reaching the inordinate limits of discourse, so that the woman is sent back to the position of fallen animal or child, and man to ecstasy in God. Two poles that are indefinitely separate. But perhaps the beloved woman's secret is that she knows, without knowing, that these two extremes are intimately connected" (An Ethics 198, Ethique 183). And the conduit between these two poles, as we will see, will take the form of the angelic Third created through the energy of the embodied, sexualized lovers, an energy that will send them back to themselves--other than as they were.
While Irigaray insists on this potential parousia, or rebirth, through the sensual meeting of two desiring beings whose caresses dare to move beyond the skin as objective bodily threshold or enclosure, Lévinas's masculine lover achieves his onto-theological transcendence through the invention of a patriarchal genealogy that manages to efface the maternal and the feminine and construct the material and the divine as identical to the one and only masculine self. Replacing the feminine with his self-identical son (which Irigaray argues does not allow the child to be "for himself")2, the lover establishes a sacrilegious line of descent from a Father God, to father man, to son. And within this triadic enclosure, predicated upon the erasure of woman, along with her own genealogical attachments, a true thinking of the other is impossible. Again, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the real perversion at work in Lévinas's reading of hetero-sexuality lies not in the ambiguous virginity of the beloved, but in the lover's "preoccupation" with the primal scene: "When the lovers, male or female, substitute for, occupy, or possess the site of those who conceived them, they founder in the unethical, in profanation" [End Page 85] (An Ethics 187, Ethique 175). If the intention of erotic desire, albeit a hidden one, is in its very inception the "irreversible," mortal delivery of the male son, the lover in this instance refuses the presence of the ethical face of woman-as-subject and returns to an incestuous past in which he takes up the position of his own father and occupies an impossible position with regard to the maternal. Certain that he has now caught a glimpse of the dark secret of his own conception, the lover discards the maternal womb, and is born again in his own son, reducing the beloved to the ultramateriality of the maternal function, "depriving her of her desire as a virgin-daughter or as a woman" ("Questions" 116). Thus, the son as father becomes heir to the transcendence of God the father, cleansed of the mucous residue of the maternal body as well as that of the desiring lover with whom he has now conceived his self-identical other: "When recognized only in the son, love and sensual pleasure bespeak the male lover's vulnerability on the threshold of difference. His retreat, and appeal to his genealogy, his future as a man, his horizon, society, and security" (An Ethics 203, Ethique 187). In effect, it is precisely through his fear and ignorance in the face of the feminine other that Lévinas's masculine subject achieves ethical transcendence. And as Irigaray asks: "Who is the other, if the other of sexual difference is not recognized or known?" ("Questions" 112)
The transcendence of the ethical moment need not, however, entail the imaginary deletion of the bodily integrity of the other. Ironically, it is the angel as ethical intermediary who, though traditionally figured as disembodied and neuter, represents the possibility of a corporeal, sexualized ascension achieved through and not at the expense of the erotic union of the two sexes--each with its own genealogy, its own gods. For Irigaray, a truly amorous exchange does result in a birth, not the birth of the son to the father, but the rebirth of each lover who moves fearlessly in and through the other as a desiring, speaking subject without sacrificing his or her own time and space, and returns to her or himself with the trace of flesh forever etched in memory. Perhaps, as Lévinas argues, the pseudo-union of the sexes imposes a darkness or silence in the empty spaces between man and women, human and divine. On Irigaray's reading, the angels occupy this no-man's-land and provide the voices for the speechless lovers who have yet to be born again:
Before parousia occurs, silence happens. A silence that rehearses oblivion and is only filled by music. There, the voice of the [End Page 86] woman who sings and calls to the lover is still missing. It has been stifled by the noise of instruments and of nature running wild. . . . Unless she, too, disguises herself, in the guise of angels? Who perhaps have no sex? An interval that speaks between the bride and the spirit? Neither the one nor the other expressing themselves, unless it is through the mediation of the orders of the angels. The expectation of parousia would also mean the death of speech between the sexual partners of the scene. Which foretells the terrible aspect of a new cosmic chaos and the disappearance of the gods. (An Ethics 208-09, Ethique 192)
Though a truly transcendent union of the sexes may remain in the not so near future, the voices of angels remain uniquely capable of breaking through the brutal silence enforced by the abyssal gap between masculine and feminine, transcendence and immanence. The triadic cycle of God, father, and son, which has somehow managed to occlude the material relations of couple and family, finds its point of vulnerability, a fissure in its amnesic system in the music of the evanescent angel. The angel, in Irigaray's ethical project, represents a tropic possibility of the embodied approach of the radical other, a possibility that, despite the poetic beauty of his ethical ontology, Lévinas fails to perceive in his refusal of sexual difference. The ethical ideal of what Irigaray calls the "sensible transcendental," though still in the realm of the as-yet, remains in our mind's eye in the figure of the angel, who unlike his/her embodied counterparts, is not bound by the artificial restraints of a philosophical and theological tradition that refuses the union of man and woman, the marriage of human and divine.
Returning to Totality and Infinity, we recall that the paternal metaphor establishes a potential ethical opening out of the profane enclosure of the erotic me-you [moi-toi] whereby the male lover might escape the infinitely deferred temporality of the "as-yet," the empty promises of the feminine body, and complete a seemingly illogical temporal loop that might--after the fact--inscribe the indecent, ultramaterial embrace with some sort of transcendent, metaphysical meaning. We come to realize that in fact the effect of the sexual act between the male lover and the female beloved in the form of the male (or at best neuter) child always already existed as the very cause of that act. In a sense, then, the touch of the caress is or was never present to itself. As an ethical moment, it exists only as the substantive medium through which we might trace back a [End Page 87] preceding desire for a child, a desire recognizable only after the child has materialized to complete ethically the otherwise selfish flesh-to-flesh union. Lévinas writes: "Already the relation with the child--the coveting of the child, both other and myself--takes form in voluptuosity, to be accomplished in the child himself (as can be accomplished a Desire that is not extinguished in its end nor appeased in its satisfaction)" (266). Paternity, or the intersubjective union of an other who is both me and yet separate from me, relies on the temporality of the futur antérieur: the ethical desire for the child will have been etched into the pure animality of the erotic encounter. This refusal of the present moment implied in the notion of future anteriority, this reliance on the future to make sense of the past, might better allow us to understand Lévinas's shift from paternity to maternity as ethical paradigm--as well as what will have been the somewhat unsettling consequences (or causes) of this shift.
In his 1967 essay "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida enters into dialogue with Lévinas's early writings, in particular Totality and Infinity, arguing that Lévinas fails in his pretension to move beyond the Greek tradition that dominates the thought of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies. Lévinas's quarrel with the Greeks, in theory, amounts to a refusal of the entire Western philosophical tradition, which he sees as forever and inextricably bound up in the oppressive supremacy of the Greek logos. As an ethicist committed to preserving the radical alterity and precedence of an initial relation to the Other (Autrui), Lévinas locates the ontological erasure of ethical difference in the totalizing function of a history of thought that subsumes all of human experience under the rubric of the Same, the One--or Being. In order, then, to reinstate the metaphysical priority of an assymetrical movement toward the Other, an "ethics of ethics" (as opposed to a "theory of ethics") must free itself from the necessarily pernicious confines of philosophical discourse. Invoking the paternal metaphor, Derrida describes the transcendent moment as depicted in Totality and Infinity: "Creation is but creation of the other; it can only be as paternity, and the relations of the father to son escape all the logical, ontological, and phenomenological categories in which the absoluteness of the other is necessarily the same" (Writing 86, L'Ecriture 127). For Derrida, this gesture is not only impossible, it is fundamentally parricidal: "The Greek father who still holds us under his sway must be killed" (Writing 89, L'Ecriture 133). In other words, in calling forth the "creation" of his son, the philosopher will have killed his own father. The capacity to recognize the possibility of an other who is completely other [End Page 88] to myself and yet of my own creation, both me and not-me, necessitates a complete break with the law of the father that would have rendered this rupture impossible. And while this generational movement between life and death, creation and destruction, hearkens back to the oedipal drama in many respects, the maternal function so crucial to the unfolding of the Sophoclean drama remains conspicuously absent in Lévinas's account. And as we will see, it is within the space opened through her silence that the maternal metaphor will have inscribed itself in Lévinas's next major work.
But before moving on, it is important to remember that while, according to Derrida, Lévinas may have murder in his heart, the actual death blow is constitutively unrealizable, because the father, in fact, is correct in his paternal assertion of philosophical omnipotence, if only by virtue of the fact that the son can only speak his "mother" tongue--in this case Greek. The question becomes, then, how does the father, who will have been the son, completely destroy his own language without rendering himself, and consequently his own son, silent and therefore powerless to enact symbolic change. Derrida writes:
In Greek, in our language, in a language rich with all the alluvia of its history--and our question takes shape already--in a language that admits to its powers of seduction while playing on them unceasingly, this thought summons us to a dislocation of the Greek logos, to a dislocation of our identity, and perhaps of identity in general; it summons us to depart from the Greek site and perhaps from every site in general, and to move toward what is no longer a source or a site (too welcoming to the gods), but toward an exhalation, toward a prophetic speech already emitted not only nearer to the source than Plato or the pre-Socratics, but inside the Greek origin, close to the other of the Greek (but will the other of the Greek be the non-Greek? Above all, can it be named the non-Greek?). (Writing 82, L'Ecriture 122)
In this reading of Totality and Infinity, Lévinas's inability to escape from the economy of violence instantiated through the philosophical discourse of ontology lies in the written word that even the ethicist cannot forego if he is to create a "work" (oeuvre). So while Derrida grants that Lévinas has indeed managed to map out a theory of intersubjectivity that accomplishes an admirable diminution of textual violence through a poetically rendered [End Page 89] series of negations, of "neither . . . nors" or "not yets," the metaphysical nature of Lévinas's argument renders complete non-violence a foundational impossibility.3
According to Derrida, because Lévinas's main concern is that of primacy or priority--the primacy or priority of ethics over ontology--in the last analysis his affirmation of the precedence of the relation to the other is a metaphysical, and therefore violent, affirmation without which even the notion of non-violence is impossible (Writing 97, L'Ecriture 145). As Lévinas seeks to grapple with the intricacies of an ethics forever and inescapably bound by ontology and metaphysics, once more we see the temporal logic of the past future at work in his thinking of the potential transcendence of the face-to-face relation: "Metaphysics begins when theory criticizes itself as ontology, as the dogmatism and spontaneity of the same, and when metaphysics, in departing from itself, lets itself be put into question by the other in the movement of ethics. Although in fact it is secondary [postérieure], metaphysics as the critique of ontology is rightfully and philosophically primary [première]" (Writing 96, L'Ecriture 143, my emphasis). The metaphysical presence of the face of the other, a presence supercessive of both the immanence of nature and the sameness of ontology will have liberated the other from its neutral, symmetrical status as experiential phenomenon or object of the philosophical logos. It would seem then that the critique here depends upon the inability of Lévinas's assertion of ethical precedence to reconcile the future anteriority of metaphysical transcendence and the absolute presentness of the face of the other. Because the face of the other is a properly embodied face, in other words, not a metaphoric or tropic substitution for some disembodied notion of otherness, its claim to asymmetrical transcendence is at philosophical odds with its claim to absolute alterity and separation: "If the face is body, it is mortal. Infinite alterity as death cannot be reconciled with infinite alterity as positivity and presence (God)" (Writing 115, L'Ecriture 170).4 Lévinas, however, attempts to bridge this gap between the physicality or interiority of the embodied face and the metaphysicality or exteriority of the Other (figured above as God) by seeking recourse in the spoken word, a valiant yet hopelessly naive attempt which for Derrida returns ethicity to an economy of violence, but through which we begin to see the possibility of an ethicity beyond metaphysics. The father may not be dead, but he has been severely wounded.
As indicated in the title of Derrida's essay, it is Lévinas's continued belief in the possibility of metaphysics, a belief further aggravated [End Page 90] by a concomitant and theoretically necessary commitment to a flawed distinction between the written and spoken word, that renders any aspiration to a completely peaceful ethical connection constitutively impossible. For while Lévinas rightly condemns the order of the Greek logos in his patricidal call to action, he fails to recognize that the spoken word also partakes of this Greek heritage and cannot be posited as prior or superior to philosophical inscription, for, as Derrida writes: "Speech is doubtless the first defeat of violence, but paradoxically, violence did not exist before the possibility of speech" (Writing 117, L'Ecriture 173). For Lévinas, on the other hand, "the possibility of metaphysics is the possibility of speech" (Writing 116, L'Ecriture 171). What Lévinas overlooks according to Derrida, however, is the fact that "the speech which must inaugurate and maintain absolute separation is by its essence rooted in space, which cannot conceive separation and absolute alterity" (Writing 116, L'Ecriture 171). Like Rousseau, though for different reasons, Lévinas valorizes the spoken over the written word due to a misguided notion that the supposed materiality of the spoken voice guarantees some level of access to an absolute, if evanescent, presence, and in Lévinas's case, this physical presence (of the other) ultimately translates into metaphysical transcendence.
In his 1967 Of Grammatology, Derrida argues that Rousseau perceives the spoken word, la parole, as the guarantor of a fleeting immediacy of presence, a sort of lost Eden that must unhappily be supplemented by the written word, l'écriture, in order to maintain a certain level of permanence. For Rousseau, then, "[i]n the spoken address, presence is at once promised and refused" (Derrida, Of Grammatology 141). The spoken word (prior to the advent of recording devices) contains within its very nature a frustrating tendency to vanish into thin air, to escape the speaking subject while at the same time positing him as necessarily present. Rousseau, then, regards the written word as an unavoidable evil that allows the writer to inscribe his voice for all posterity, and at the same time mediates that voice, thereby further alienating the speaker from the signs through which he must attempt to make himself understood by others. Explaining Rousseau's conflicted relationship to writing, Derrida proposes:
That is why, straining toward the reconstruction of presence, he valorizes and disqualifies writing at the same time. At the same time; that is to say, in one divided but coherent movement. [End Page 91] We must try not to lose sight of its strange unity. Rousseau condemns writing as destruction of presence and as disease of speech. He rehabilitates it to the extent that he promises the reappropriation of that of which speech allowed itself to be dispossessed. (Of Grammatology 141-42, Grammatologie 204)
The written word apparently has a uniquely ambiguous capacity to reproduce symbolically the preexistent presence of the embodied human voice. Through writing, the writer, by stripping himself of his own material presence, becomes immortal: "Death by writing also inaugurates life" (Of Grammatology 143, Grammatologie 205).
Derrida's reading of Rousseau places the spoken word squarely in the time/mood of the past conditional: "The speech that Rousseau raised above writing is speech as it should be or rather as it should have been [aurait dû être]. And we must pay attention to that mode, to that tense which relates us to presence within living colloquy" (Of Grammatology 141, Grammatologie 203). For while Rousseau may yearn for an edenesque return to a certain plenitude of presence within the context of the face-to-face contact of "collocution," he does in fact realize that, despite what it "should have" been, this presence is "in fact" chimerical and fatally flawed. He admits to the inevitability of writing as an evolutionary result of the mortality of the human body, the transience of the human voice. So while Derrida does maintain that Rousseau has a rather large blind spot in his inability to recognize that it is only through writing that the desire for what presence should have been could have come about in the first place, he does credit him with contextualizing this myth of presence within the correct time and mood, with an understanding that what perhaps should have been never was--and never will be.
Lévinas, on the other hand, lacks this understanding, according to Derrida, and insists on a thoroughly contradictory affirmation of the spoken word as being both mortal and infinite. Furthermore, Lévinas, unlike Rousseau, theorizes written language as unilaterally antithetical to the ethical encounter of the face-to-face, while at the same time claiming to express an "ethics of ethics" from within the very discursive system that would destroy the very possibility of authentic ethicity. Turning Lévinas's paternal metaphor on its head, Derrida formulates the asymmetrical nature of the face-to-face ethical dialogue in the image of the father-son relation, only this time privileging the perspective of the child: "Language is indeed the possibility of the face-to-face and of being-upright, but it [End Page 92] does not exclude inferiority, the humility of the glance at the father as the glance of the child made in memory of having been expulsed before knowing how to walk, and of having been delivered, prone and infans, into the hands of the adult masters" (Writing 107, L'Ecriture 158-59). And while in this (con)text Derrida explicitly refuses any connection with psychoanalytic theory5, he locates the very essence of human nature at the traumatic moment of birth: "Let it suffice us to know that man is born" (Writing 107, L'Ecriture 159). The speaking subject is the one who calls forth through his silent gaze the memory of being torn from the maternal body and thrust helpless into a preexistent world of Being, dominated by a language that he cannot yet speak, at the mercy of those more physically powerful than he. Why, however, does the son, who will have been born into a world that is "already-there," direct his humble gaze toward the father rather than the mother? I would argue that once again, we are being situated in the logical time of future anteriority, a temporality signaled by the child's wordless and necessarily unknowing gaze, a gaze through which the unconscious memory of separation from the completing presence of the maternal body makes itself heard.6 It is the father, however, and not the mother who carries the ethical burden in Lévinas's earlier text. And it will not be until later that he will have looked back from the chimeric ontological presence of the paternal origin.
Maternity Supplants Paternity
In Otherwise Than Being, Lévinas makes his first forays into a theorization of a maternal origin by introducing the notion of an infinite past that establishes a rhythm of future anteriority, refuses the "reality" of the present, and bears directly on the question of subjective freedom--and, of course, ethicity. Lévinas defines the distinction between chronologic, or "synchronic," time, which claims to draw the past into the present through memory, and infinite, or "diachronic," time, which recognizes the impossibility of making the past present. Describing the gap between synchrony and diachrony, Lévinas writes: "The present is essence that begins and ends, beginning and end assembled in a thematizable conjunction; it is the finite in correlation with a freedom. Diachrony is the refusal of conjunction, the non-totalizable, and in this sense, infinite" (Otherwise 11). Diachronic time, as such, cannot be comprehended in the present, for unlike the memorial representations of synchrony, the irrecuperable past of diachrony cannot take on the form of a conscious, definite recollection. [End Page 93] Diachronic time does, however, find its way into the subjective domain through the ethical movement of Saying (le Dire). For Lévinas, the infinite past of responsibility, which as Derrida argues will have obliged. . . , exists prior to the existence of the subject and expresses itself only through indefinable ruptures in the coherence of the individual psyche's synchronic expressions. Because any sort of individual essence is necessarily preceded by an undeniable connection to this "an-archic" past ethically binding us in our responsibility to the other (a responsibility that I will argue is grounded in the "debt" to the mother). Subjectivity is therefore set into motion before it becomes present to itself through consciousness: "All the negative attributes which state what is beyond essence become positive in responsibility, a response answering to a non-thematizable provocation and thus a non-vocation, a trauma. This response answers, before any understanding, a debt contracted before any freedom and before any consciousness and before any present" (Otherwise 12, my emphasis). For Lévinas, in order for the subject to realize himself as an authentic subject, or to shift from his identity as a "subject in general" to a "me and not an other," the subject must make a renewed connection to the immemorial, unconscious past as that which will have constituted him as an ethical subject.
In Otherwise Than Being, the importance of temporality, the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, bears most directly on Lévinas's insistence on tracing the advent of the ethical subject back to the fundamental disparity between the Saying and the Said [le Dire et le Dit]. In what might appear to be a direct response to Derrida's critique in "Violence et métaphysique"7, Lévinas attempts to vindicate the potential ethical validity of his oeuvre qua written text. He argues that while indeed the synchronic force of the Said may necessarily reduce all discourse to a metaphysical enclosure within the violence of the Greek logos, before and beyond the stasis of a series of words fixed on a page lies the diachronic, ethical transcendence of the Saying in which all that is Said necessarily finds both its past and its future. Recalling the example of Rousseau, Lévinas portrays the Said as a necessary means of synchronically "memorizing" the diachronic movement of the Saying: "It is only in the said, in the epos of saying, that the diachrony of time is synchronized into a time that is recallable, and becomes a theme" (Otherwise 37). For Lévinas, however, the Said does not inevitably foreclose or falsify the Saying; it simply shifts it into another mode of temporality whereby it might become more easily accessible to conscious thought. What is crucial [End Page 94] in terms of subjectivity, then, is to avoid falling into the illusion of identity implied in taking up the position of the nominative "I" of the Said by remaining true to the accusative "me voici" ["here I am"]--the maternal site of the subject of the ethical Saying.
The time of future anteriority comes into play in the nominative, or philosophical, subject's movement back to a subjectivity grounded in a prior, yet future, responsibility to the other--a movement from the active, conscious thought of the Said back into the passive, unconscious sensuality of the Saying. For Lévinas, the subject of jouissance exists prior to the subject of suffering, and ethicity lies not in remaining actively true to the demands of unconscious desire (though this is a necessary moment in the attainment of ethical subjectivity), but rather in an inescapable passive sacrifice of that desire to the desire of an other. In terms of signification, the Saying makes possible the Said and embeds it in a pre-original responsibility to the other:
But the saying extended toward the said received this tension from the other, who forces me to speak before appearing to me. The saying extended toward the said is a being obsessed by the other, a sensibility which the other by vocation calls upon and where no escaping is possible. At least no escape is possible without impunity. The other calls upon that sensibility with a vocation that wounds, calls upon an irrevocable responsibility, and thus the very identity of a subject. Signification is witness or martyrdom. (Otherwise 77-78)
From the bodily site of materiality, the Saying, then, calls forth the very identity of the subject who must respond to the other before the other has made himself present or known as such, a response that instantiates unspeakable suffering through signification. And here we are reminded of Lacan's repeated assertion that within the structure of ethicity, "it is a question of the subject insofar as he suffers from the signifier" (Irigaray Ethique 172, translation mine). For Lacan, the suffering that defines the speaking subject is also indicative of a certain "tension" between the Saying and the Said, in the sense that the desire of the other called into being by the Saying can never truly be expressed or fulfilled by means of the Said. Yet Lévinas offers no solution to this suffering, but rather seeks to raise it to the level of a sort of martyrdom whereby the words ripped from the mouth of the one by the other constitute a first step on the path back to the other, or the mother--the subject qua mother [End Page 95] .
In Otherwise Than Being, the ethical paradigm shifts from paternity to maternity in a way that also recalls the logic of future anteriority and positions the subject as somehow his own absent cause. Taking the subject not back to his own mother's womb as psychoanalysis would have it, but rather into the mother's own pregnant body, maternity becomes a metaphor for the suffering inherent in the ultimate responsibility of the one for the other as expressed through the tension between the Saying and the Said. And though the metaphor begins its development early on in this work, through more subtle evocations of materiality and pre-original debt, Lévinas explicitly introduces the mother as martyr at the moment when he seeks to make the connection between the suffering of signification and its relation to the sensual body:
On the hither side of the zero point which marks the absence of protection and cover, sensibility is being affected by a non-phenomenon, a being put in question by the alterity of the other, before the intervention of a cause, before the appearing to the other. It is a pre-original not resting on oneself, the restlessness of someone persecuted--Where to be? How to be? It is a writhing in the tight dimensions of pain, the unsuspected dimensions of the hither side. It is being torn up from oneself, being less than nothing, a rejection into the negative, behind nothingness; it is maternity, gestation of the other in the same. Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity, the groaning of the wounded entrails by those who will bear or have borne? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor. (Otherwise 75)
In formulating the maternal metaphor here, Lévinas comes closest to defining his conception of the subject of the Saying, the ethical subject who signifies without words, who responds to an other whose phenomenal form has yet to take shape, but whose undeniable affective presence bears within the painful responsibility that both precedes and succeeds the cause of the suffering of the subject of the Said. The unique, universal repetition of the maternal body provides the tropic possibility of incorporating the ethical subject and lending it an easily recognizable, if problematic, [End Page 96] form. At the same time, it calls into question Lévinas's earlier affirmation of paternity, demonization of femininity, and erasure of maternity, and moves us to ask what the mother is being asked to signify here and why.8
The initial sentence of the above citation, a long, winding series of appositive equivalences, can be reduced in its simplest structure to a predication: sensitivity is maternity, or "the gestation of the other in the same." In defining the correspondence between sensitivity and maternity--notwithstanding the descriptive variations that both elaborate upon and spatially separate the two sides of the equation--in terms of being, Lévinas, according to his own reading of the force of the copulative is, introduces a shift in the qualitative status of temporality, la temporalisation du temps, which allows the unconscious echo of the Dire to emerge from the conscious expression of the Dit.
For Lévinas, it is through predication that the diachronic, pre-ontological time of the Dire becomes synchronized through the language of the Dit and can thereby become inscribed in the individual consciousness as memory or in the collective consciousness as history: "[the identical] has meaning only through the kerygma of the said, in which temporality which illuminates resounds for the 'listening eye' in the verb to be" (Otherwise 37). Through this outright expression of predication, or temporalization, then, Lévinas seeks to bring the immemorable into historical consciousness, to modify, in effect, the temporality of maternity as a means of drawing out into the light of day the essence of sensitivity as the alterity of the other.9 So despite an apparent privileging of the Dire, of that which lies beyond and before language--maternity--Lévinas, as philosopher, situates himself in the position of he who, through an intentional, conscious act of putting-into-words, modifies the very essence of maternity. Through this written instantiation of transcendent diachronicity in the self-identical present of the predicative is, Lévinas synchronizes the "pre-original" and positions the mother in a temporally confused relation with regards to the child through whom she passively suffers.
While traces certainly remain of the disturbing invocation of feminine "ultramateriality" described by Lévinas in Totality and Infinity, the displacement of the paternal metaphor appears at last to create a space for the recognition of feminine subjectivity--at least insofar as the feminine might be equated with the maternal. The uniqueness of the mother, what separates her from other women, lies precisely in her bodily, material access to that which escapes the register of synchronic time, the [End Page 97] time of the conscious subject. In order that the metaphor stick, however, the mother must first, prior to pregnancy, have already acquired the status of speaking subject, subject of jouissance, otherwise, of course, only mothers would be capable of ethicity; the other side of the metaphoric equation would be rendered impossible. Referring back to the initial predication, then, we see that while the description of maternity apparently veers into an almost mystical affirmation of maternal uniqueness indicative of a sort of hyper-femininity or "ultramateriality," the copulative is of philosophic, albeit tropic/metaphoric, inscription initially makes the mother present in representation. In addition, we are immediately faced with the question of the cause, the cause in this case being the child who for Lévinas does not exist as such until it becomes separate, or phenomenal--upon its exit from the maternal body.
Yet, if we examine the expression of causality here more closely, we see that the child will have been the cause of the mother's selfless gift-through-suffering. However, the sensitivity that is maternity, in its description as a "mise en cause by the alterity of the other," would indicate that the very nature of maternity, of the experience of an other within one's self, places the mother in cause in terms of her self-identity, her status as a subject unto herself. The future anteriority of the maternal cause blurs the lines between the mother's experience of her pregnant body, of the child within--the experience supposedly at issue here--and the child's experience of the mother as origin, as traumatic cause operating according to the logical time of future anteriority. Lévinas insists upon the fact that the mother as ethical model must first attain to a status as subject of jouissance, a status implicating not only conscious subjectivity, but also a bodily relation to the phenomenal world: in order to suffer for an other, one must first have experienced both satisfaction and lack as constitutive of the "moi." He writes: "Enjoyment [la jouissance] and the singularization of sensibility in an ego take from the supreme passivity of sensibility, from its vulnerability, its exposedness to the other, the anonymousness of the meaningless passivity of the inert. The possibility in suffering of suffering for nothing prevents the passivity in it from reverting into an act" (Otherwise 74). In other words, only a coherent "moi"10, brought forth through the physical experience of desire and its fulfillment, can truly exist "pour-l'autre," can suffer in a meaningful way--through signification.
How is it, then, that the feminine beloved who remained incapable of signification in Totality and Infinity will have become a subject [End Page 98] in her own right, will have supplanted the father as the ultimate ethical agent? For clearly the mother must already exist as a subject in her own right if she is to experience the "persecution" of pregnancy in an ethical way. Otherwise, she would be "suffering for nothing." I would argue that while Lévinas appears here to be making a radical shift away from the psychoanalytic refusal to recognize the mother as a speaking subject and not as simply a "function" in the advent of her child's psyche, his inscription of the maternal body belies a very similar positioning of the mother as the child's unimaginable traumatic cause.
Again, despite a repeated affirmation of maternal subjectivity, a clear distinction seems to exist between the profane, animal lover of Lévinas's early work and the sacred, persecuted mother of Otherwise Than Being: there is no sense that the former becomes transformed into the latter through insemination. The unoriginal split image here, then, defines women according to their two "functions" in relation to men--sexual "partner" and mother--and labels them as bad and good respectively. The mother, though theoretically imbued with subjectivity through tropic necessity (otherwise the metaphor could not be extended to include men), in effect might be seen more as a site of asymbolic signification, the Dire, than as a speaking subject in her own right. Maternity is decidedly distanced from women as mothers and becomes a repository for that which can be neither said nor understood from the site of the conscious comprehension of the reasoned logos (the Dit).
Returning to the longer citation, we recall that Lévinas's model of maternity seems simultaneously to affirm and deny the mother's active, conscious connection with her experience of pregnancy, thereby substantiating the universal claims of the metaphor while maintaining the specificity of the necessarily feminine maternal body.11 In describing persecution as a modality, or modification, of maternity ("une modification de la maternité"), he writes:
Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity [une modification de la maternité], the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself. . . . (Otherwise 75)
Throughout this text, the mother's emblematic passivity places her under the sign of the past participle: she will have been, as an effect of the other [End Page 99] who has grown, or who will grow, within her, persecuted and harmed. Here once again we see the intervention of the past future, an avoidance of the synchronicity of the present which would carry with it the unethical mark of the symbolic logos and undermine the maternal specificity of immemorial time. Maternity as a "groaning of the wounded entrails" (note the metaphoric avoidance, albeit quite literary, of evoking the specifically female reproductive organs) instantiates regional suffering there where those carried within were or will be. The mother, or the one who is persecuted, does not suffer because of the synchronic presence or burden of the persecutor, but rather through the temporally indefinable relation to that other at the crossroads of past and future.
Recall that within the domain of signification the feminine beloved is constitutionally incapable of creating meaning; she inhabits the animal realm of darkness wherein, like the mother, she is "less than nothing." The mother, however, although her ultrapassivity would seem to relegate her to silence, somehow finds herself on the hither side of femininity, prior to the ultramateriality of the feminine, and comes to embody the site from whence the transcendent meaning of the Dire might make itself heard: "In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others [. . . .]" The subject of maternal signification, then, is not the woman or mother, but rather the martyrlike responsibility inherent to her condition. Quite literally, she is the material place wherein responsibility might begin to take on intelligible meaning as: "Signification as witness or martyrdom" (Otherwise 77). The mother becomes the obvious metaphoric choice, both because of and in spite of her femininity, in attempting to get back to the pre-philosophical space of the ethical Saying, a space that, from within the confines of a thoroughly masculinized, logical Said, becomes--as always--a confused locus of sublime, though often terrifying, fulfillment.
This metaphoric choice, however, becomes problematic, as we have seen, when we attempt to negotiate the distances between the mother viewed from the child's perspective and the mother as a woman and subject of the Said in her own right. Though of course there is no mother without a child, and the very designation "mother" establishes a certain relation with regard to a child, the incredible power of this sign to erase and annul the personhood of the woman so designated would appear to derive from the fact that the "mother," especially the mother as metaphor, is generally so defined through the discourse of the now adult, male child and only very rarely through the words of the mother herself. [End Page 100] So, despite his obvious desire to make of the mother a model of ethical subjectivity or personhood, Lévinas remains attached to his own position as a mother's child, a child for whom the mother's body represents a certain presymbolic experience, and might come to represent a return--through the temporality of the past future--to an ethical space that he has been previously unable to reach through philosophical discourse or paternal metaphor. The mother is required to stand in for that which transcends the seemingly inescapable binds of human consciousness and attains to an immediate, primordial connection to a quasi-mystical, pre-human, pre-ontological form of existence: "Rather than a nature, earlier than nature, immediacy is this vulnerability, this maternity, this pre-birth or pre-nature in which the sensibility belongs" (Otherwise 75-76). A shift from the name of the father to the body of the mother has allowed Lévinas to transcend theoretically the written word of the philosophical text through the evocation of a place that would be, for the child, both before and beyond rational, conscious thought--before birth. The impossible becomes possible. From a secure position within the symbolic order, the mother's body is imagined as that space that will have been a metaphoric assurance of the Saying of an ethical selflessness beyond and before that which we can know through the inevitable mediation of our own consciousness.
In many ways Lévinas's vision is quite appealing and might even be seen to privilege a feminine version of ethicity (cf. Chalier). In constructing this ethical paradise lost and found in terms of the maternal body, having already discounted femininity, and in particular feminine sexuality, as profane and inherently unethical, Lévinas, like many philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists before and after, has established an imaginary rift between woman and mother, thereby stripping the maternal body of subjective desire and setting up a metaphoric subject that is not one. The maternal metaphor allows Lévinas to theorize a certain movement of ethical expression, the diachronic Saying, within the philosophical mastery of the synchronic Said, to transcend the limitations of symbolic discourse through a thoroughly conscious movement of future anteriority wherein, as in psychoanalytic discourse, the mother is posited as the traumatic cause, in this case of ethicity.
This is not to say, however, that the woman as mother might not present an ethical model specific to her unique physical, emotional, intellectual connection to the child who is both part of her yet separate from her. In accepting, and even embracing, the personhood of the woman [End Page 101] in the mother as well as the mother in the woman, the metaphor more easily bears the weight it is being asked to carry and touches upon the maternal experience that is being called upon to teach us something about ethicity. Neither is this to say that explorations of the child's conscious or unconscious perceptions of its mother are without meaning or value, or even that these perceptions might not have an enormous effect on the woman's experience of maternity. However, it appears that all too often, philosophical, literary, and religious attempts to explain or theorize the maternal experience cannot help but fall back into expressions of the experience that is, after all, universal--the experience of being of woman born.
Julia Kristeva, for example, takes a first step toward a recognition of maternal subjectivity in some of her earlier essays, which in turn allows for the beginnings of an important dialectic between the mother's experience of mother-child fusion and the child's.12 Like Lévinas, Kristeva formulates a notion of a maternal space defined primarily through its primal asymbolicity. Borrowing from Plato, Kristeva locates the origin of those material drives that escape conscious expression in the maternal chora, a theoretical, unknowable site of presymbolic energy that underlies and precedes all subjective expression. Describing the Freudian primary processes at work in the infantile psyche, she qualifies the presymbolic drives (pulsions) as constitutive of the chora: "the drives, which are 'energy' charges as well as 'psychical' marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated" (Revolution 25). So while the chora maintains a theoretical connection to the maternal body, it is clearly the child's developing psyche that is in question here. And the chora, like the Freudian unconscious, remains a theoretical unknown metonymically linked to the child's immemorable experience of the maternal body. Furthermore, the theoretical distance of the philosopher is always rendered present and visible, drawn into question, and distinguished as such: "Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality" (Revolution 26). In other words, while the chora in some sense drives the philosopher to write, it escapes her attempts at representation, not only because it is somehow beyond and before symbolicity, but because, as such, it is a purely theoretical construct whose existence is posited, yet by its very nature unknown. [End Page 102]
For the chora, like the unconscious, is distinguishable only through its effects, in this case through its outbursts in symbolic representation. Kristeva, like Lévinas, theorizes a model of signification comprised of two distinct modalities: the semiotic (le sémiotique) and the symbolic (le symbolique), both of which are necessarily at play in the constitution of an individual subject's relation to language. The semiotic, grounded in the maternal chora, refers to the bodily drives (pulsions) through which the pre-oedipal individual relates to the world around her and, in particular, to her mother. Again, the maternal body is constructed as a spatio-temporal position determined in relation to that of the child. This time, however, it will become quite clear that it is not the mother herself who is this position, but rather it is the child's pre-oedipal experience of her that defines her as such within this particular context. The maternal body becomes, for the child, the mediator between the symbolic order of the social and the asymbolic disorder of its bodily drives: "The mother's body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora" (Revolution 27). The maternal body is eventually translated into a "principal," named by Kristeva as the chora, whereby the child is able to make the move into the symbolic order and become a speaking subject in its own right: "the semiotic chora is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him" (Revolution 28). The chora, then, despite its obvious connection with the maternal body in the burgeoning psyche of the child, is quite clearly not conflated with the mother, who, as we will see, is a subject in her own right. As such she establishes not only her child's relation to the bodily rhythms of the semiotic, but also its entry into the symbolic.
Though Kristeva valorizes "revolutionary" texts in which the semiotic, musical, rhythmic elements of language call into question the hegemony of the symbolic order, throughout her work she remains emphatic as to the necessity of the stabilizing force of symbolicity without which lies the risk of psychosis. And while the semiotic chora chronologically precedes the onset of subjectivity, it remains in synchronic co-presence with the symbolic and imbues the speaking subject with the very desires that drive her to create meaning. Speaking of psychological theories of language acquisition, she writes: "Theory can 'situate' such [primary] processes and relations diachronically within the process of the constitution of the subject precisely because they function synchronically within the signifying process of the subject himself, i.e., the subject [End Page 103] of the cogitatio" (Revolution 28). In other words, if these semiotic forces underlying language did not make themselves heard, in dreams, poetry, music, they would remain buried in the subject's unconscious memories of her pre-linguistic experience. Maternity, or the mother, as imagined by the philosopher does not grant us some sort of distanced, nostalgic access to an immemorable, fusional recognition of pre-symbolic expression. Rather, the maternal function, figured here as the space of the semiotic chora, is understood to exist as a modality of signification within the individual psyche, not to be confused with the mother, who as a woman and speaking subject has a far more dynamic and complex relation to/with the developing child, and consequently, potentially raises far more interesting questions as an ethical paradigm than her passive counterpart of pure suffering.
Kristeva might be contested on many counts from a feminist perspective in her consistent valorization of psychoanalytic models that uphold the primacy of the phallus, even if we recognize that the phallus is not a penis, nor inherently connected with masculinity as such. Her earlier essays on maternity nonetheless problematize scientific, philosophic, and religious models of maternity and, in affirming the subjectivity of the mother as woman, provide a construct within which we might more fruitfully begin to conceive the ethical specificity of maternity. In her 1975 essay "Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini," Kristeva argues that not only do dominant versions of maternity negate the subjectivity of the woman who is a mother, but by extension, they also fail to recognize the complicated relation of mother and child which must now be acknowledged as a very particular intersubjective, ethical relation lying at the heart of the subjective constitution of human beings.
Explaining the pseudo-deification of the Mother as an attempt to refuse the "dangerous" liminality of the maternal body, our inability to place her definitively on either side of the culture/nature divide, Kristeva suggests that the mother quite literally embodies the oscillation between the semiotic and the symbolic that creates us as speaking subjects. Because the mother is a subject, her relation to the child within is both biological and social. She is subject to the biological drives that govern the gestational process over which she has no real control, as well as to the symbolic order that defines her conscious experience of maternity. Rather than reading this biologic element of maternity as indicative of passivity or suffering, however, Kristeva argues that the mother's chiasmic situation at the border of the semiotic and the symbolic creates in [End Page 104] her a certain jouissance that moves beyond the phallic jouissance of the male libido and its dependence on an object and points toward a more peaceful acceptance of her own, inescapable human condition as a speaking subject constantly negotiating her own movement between the semiotic and the symbolic.
The mother's unique capacity to touch upon the deeply buried primal drives at the heart of the unconscious allow her to make a return to her own mother, to recognize--whether consciously or unconsciously--the causal repression of the maternal Thing (to use Lacan's term) whereby she rejected the maternal body to enter into the paternal order of the symbolic. The maternal condition instantiates the temporality of the past future and reenacts, in a sense, the liminal moment between subjectivity and a-subjectivity: "The ultimate risk for identity, but also the supreme power of the symbolic instance thereby returning to its cause" ("Maternité" 412, translation mine). It is important to note that maternity is not being defined here as a primal regression into infancy (although mothers are often infantilized through some strange conflation of woman and baby). Rather, the mother, like the analysand, makes a return to the original cause of her subjecthood--castration--from a powerful position within the symbolic that allows her to call her "identity" into question and survive with her sanity intact (most of the time).
Though the mother is not unique in her ability to make this dangerous journey, she holds the only biological or social position whose very functionality depends upon it. Interestingly, Kristeva locates the most forceful instance of this split in identity at the moment of violent separation that is childbirth: the physical movement of the child across the threshold between the biological and the social. So, contrary to Lévinas, who locates the essence of maternal suffering at the place where the other inhabits the body of the maternal "self," Kristeva sees the most significant and painful experience of maternity as the disunion of the two bodies, which enacts the perceived disconnection of nature and culture that has been belied for nine months by the maternal body. She writes of childbirth: "Archaic process of socialization, and even of civilization, childbirth functions such that the mother, unknowingly, immediately invests the physiological operations and the drives which divide and multiply her in a teleology which is at first biological, and finally social" ("Maternité" 412, translation mine). So, while the mother has no subjective mastery over the biological processes of pregnancy, an important part of the maternal function consists in her "investment" of the symbolic [End Page 105] splitting of childbirth with a sociosymbolic meaning that will create a fluid continuity between nature and culture, the conscious and the unconscious. Which meaning will in turn provide the child with some sort of stable footing as a split subject who will be obliged to negotiate these in-between spaces as a speaking subject in its own right.
The mother's experience of pregnancy, and above all of childbirth, prefigures the oedipal split, which will sever the child from the a-symbolic fusion with the mother's body. The latter does not, however, erase the unconscious traces of this fusion which, for Kristeva, are most evident in the ever-presence of the semiotic chora and preclude any vision of the human subject as a purely symbolic or social being. The maternal body, in effect, encodes the child's psyche in a way that permits the child to live her biologic-symbolic continuity without lapsing into psychosis. In this sense, the maternal body can be seen as the arbiter of what it means to be a speaking subject, and therefore, again, a potentially invaluable source when posing questions of ethicity. Describing this function of the maternal body, she explains: "Her enjoyment [jouissance]--mute--is nothing other than the inscription on the screen of the preconscious of messages which the conscious mind, in its analytic trajectory, then captures of this encoding, and the classification of these messages as an empty bottom, an a-subjective doubling of our meaningful exchanges as social beings" ("Maternité" 413, translation mine). The maternal body, described in terms of jouissance rather than suffering, can only serve this function if the mother is a speaking subject who has already made the trajectory into the symbolic and becomes thereby able to invest the "mute" jouissance of transgression (of the symbolic order) with a clear social meaning within the preconsciousness of the child. Like Lacan, Kristeva believes that the unconscious operates according to the logic of language, and it is precisely through the mother's experience of the unique condition of pregnancy that the child's biological drives become conscious desires and that the precarious dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic is able to hold in most cases.
In another essay on maternity, "Stabat Mater," Kristeva reiterates much of what she has proposed in the earlier essay, but concludes with an assertion as to the ethical implications of such a reading of the maternal body. Having transposed a poetic, subjective narrative of her own experience of childbirth with a critique of idealized images of maternity as exemplified by the Marial traditions of the Catholic church, she concludes that with the demise of Christianity as a universal discourse [End Page 106] with answers as to the mysteries of motherhood, women must take up their own definitions of maternity, incorporative of femininity and sexual difference, which might lead to a formulation of a feminine ethics incorporative of the maternal experience. In the wake of the death of traditional moralities, she calls upon mothers to lend their unique understanding of the inextricability of the biologic and the social to a mere human, or feminine, vision of ethicity: "Because the heretic dissociated from morality, the herethical [heréthique], is perhaps only what in life renders the ties, thought, and thus the thought of death, bearable: the herethical is to/against-death [a-mort], love [amour]" ("Stabat" 247, translation mine). The maternal experience, then, in all its uniqueness and universality, might have something to teach us in a search for a post-Christian ethics; but it is important that the mother be recognized for who she is and not only in our idealized images of her. For Kristeva, she is someone with a privileged access to a knowledge, both bodily and intellectual, of love and death, of the ties that bind, and even--despite Kristeva's very vocal refusals of feminism--the specificity of a uniquely feminine experience both before and beyond the masculine myth of a sociosymbolic world wherein true human connection can only be spoken as a utopic dream, or place of origin.
Conclusion
My purpose in introducing Kristeva's essays on maternity at the end of this essay is by no means an attempt to erect her response to the question of the relation between maternity and ethics as a definitive answer. It is rather an attempt to further demonstrate that Lévinas's negation of feminine, and by extension, maternal subjectivity not only deprives more than half of all human beings of an essential element of their humanity, but also fails to make a meaningful connection between the experience of maternity and the potential implications of that experience for a rethinking of traditional ethics. For in spite of Kristeva's consistent affirmation of the ascendancy of the paternal order over the maternal, and her insistence on the finality and violence of the oedipal break between mother and child, the very acknowledgement that the mother is also a woman--that the one does not necessarily exclude the other--allows her to advance much further toward an understanding of what it is about the experience of motherhood that almost instinctively leads us to believe that mothers, by their very nature, have some privileged access to what [End Page 107] it is to have an ethical relation with an other person. This recognition that within the mother-child dyad exist two different people with a very particular, yet universal connection to each other forces us to ask more difficult questions and enrich our understanding as to what the maternal body might come to signify in our search for a more solid comprehension of this radical yet somehow familiar intersubjective experience.
For many feminists, the valorization of the maternal as ethical raises fears that, as with Lévinas (among many others, of course), women as individuals will become crushed under the weight of the stereotype of the mother as all-giving, all-suffering, all-accepting martyr. Though it is important to recognize that all women are not mothers and should not be exclusively defined in terms of their biological capacity to bear children, it does not, to me, seem helpful to refuse then to acknowledge and even explore the reality that all mothers are women and that all of us were born of women's bodies and had our first intersubjective experiences therein. And while traditional psychoanalysis may have some rather problematic notions with respect to women and maternity, I believe that in bringing us back to the very basics of this most common and universal of experiences in theorizing who we are and why, it can be a useful tool (if used with cautionary discretion) in seeking out the connotations of this primal bond in forming our earliest intersubjective understandings. This cannot be done, however, through looking at the mother only through the eyes of the adult male child as has most often been done throughout history, for what we will most likely end up with are distorted, idealized images of what might have been. We must listen to the voices of women as mothers, and daughters, take into account both sides of the intersubjective equation, if we are to get to the heart of the matter, so to speak, of what it means to be connected--or not--to an other who is not oneself.
Lisa Walsh is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Southwestern University. Her first book, Subjects of Love and Desire: Readings of Maternity and Ethicity, is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield. She is currently at work on a new book on paternity and melancholy.
Notes
1 For a thorough discussion of the role of language in Lévinas's ehtical ontology see his Autrement qu'être. Tina Chanter also dicusses the distinction of "le dire" and "le dit" in her discussion of Lévinas (170-224).
2 See Irigaray:
The child should be for himself, not for the parent. When one intends to create a child, giving the child to himself appears as an ethical necessity. The son should not be the place where the father confers being or existence on himself, the place where he finds the resources to return to himself in relation to the same as and other than himself constituted by the son. ("Questions" 111)
3 In a 1996 lecture given at an Hommage à Emmanuel Lévinas organized by the Collége International de Philosophie, Derrida links the recurrence of certain negations to an incursion of feminine alterity into philosophical discourse.
4 In his 1990 essay, "Donner la mort," Derrida further elaborates on the implications of the mortality of the other in Lévinas's thinking. Again addressing the question of temporal priority, Derrida writes:
The oldest, here that would be the other, the possibility of dying of the other or of dying for the other. This death does not give itself first as annihilation. It institutes responsibility as a giving-onself-death or offering-one's-death, that is to say, one's life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice. (51, translation mine)
5 With regard to the positioning of the birth trauma as that which makes us human, Derrida writes: "And we are not referring, here, to the themes known under the name of psychoanalysis, nor to the embryological or anthropological hypothesis on the the structurally premature birth of man's offspring" (Writing 107, L'Ecriture 159).
6 In his discussion of Rousseau's work, Derrida makes explicit allusion to the role of the maternal body as the only true form of presence upon which symbolic representation might rest. At the beginning of his essay he writes: "If, premeditating the theme of writing, I began by speaking of the substitution of mothers, it is because, as Roussea himself will say, 'more depends on this than you realize'" (Grammatology 146, Grammatologie 210).
7 Critchley addresses Lévinas's exploration of the ethical Saying as a response to Derrida's critiques within the context of a discussion of scepticism. See chapter four, section two.
8 See Chalier for a thorough explication of the many metaphoric apparitions of the feminine (including, of course, the maternal) in Lévinas's works.
9 With regard to the relation between essence and temporality, Lévinas writes: "There is no essence or entity behind the said, behind the Logos. The said, as a verb, is the essence of essence. Essence is the very fact that there is a theme, exhibition, doxa or logos, and thus truth. Essence is not only conveyed, it is temporalized in a predicative statement" (Otherwise 39).
10 Though Lévinas's stated reason for avoiding the use of the nominative "je" to designate the subject is a refusal of the syntaxic implications of agency, his alternative use of the tonic pronoun "moi," of course, brings to mind the Freudian "moi," or ego, and despite Lévinas's explicit disavowals of psychoanlytic theory, one oftens hears echoes of Freud, intentional or not, throughout his writings. See Gans for an interesting essay connecting Freud and Lévinas as Talmudic readers.
11 In her analysis of representations of maternity in the Bible, Chalier argues that while the desire for a child might at times remain quite distinct from the amorous connection between man and woman, i.e. the mother of a man's child is not necessarily his beloved, maternity is depicted as the achievement of femininity. And like Lévinas, she relates the maternal body as by its very nature ethical:
This does not mean that feminine ethics only allows the mother's voice to be heard, nor that maternity is carried only as the excellence of this care [souci] for the other, but rather, it teaches that the feminine body, or more precisely the maternal body, as a disinterested body, through its interest for an other that it self, inasmuch as it responds to this other, up to the dispossession of its breath, possesses this original ethical knowledge. (Chalier 201, translation mine)
We see at play here in this very Levinasian reading of maternity the same ambiguity with regards to the relation between femininity and maternity: feminine ethics is not, for Chalier, completely subsumed under the "name of the mother," and yet the feminine body as ethical body is "more precisely" a maternal body.
12 For a fascinating clinical account of the maternal experience from a Lacanian perspective, see Lemoine-Luccioni.
Works Cited
Chalier, Catherine. Figures du féminin: Lecture d'Emmanuel Lévnias. Paris: La nuit surveillée, 1982.
----. "Le Rire de Sarah." Autrement 90 (May 1987): 196-201.
Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Galilée, 1997.
----. De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967.
----. "Donner la morte."
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----. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
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----. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Gans, Steven. "Levinas and Freud: Talmudic Reflections in Ethics and Psychoanalysis." Facing the Other: The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Seán Hand.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill.
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----. "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas." Trans. Margaret Whitford. Re-Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconí and Simon Critchley.
----. Sexes et parentés.
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----. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller.
----. "Stabat Mater." Histoires d'amour.
Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie. Partage des femmes.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence.
----. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
----. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
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