Between Maternity and Paternity: Figuring Ethical Subjectivity

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 Atlantic in large part as a result of its engagement with and reenactment of the nineteenth and twentieth century's principal European purveyors of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Rather than simply renouncing the Hegelian and Freudian projects in their many guises and elaborations, philosophers (or psychoanalysts) such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous sought, with differing methods and ends, to locate, unveil, and "correct" the refusal of the feminine at the heart of these visions of a thoroughly masculine version of humanity. What comes to light, so to speak, as a result of these theoretical engagements is the notion that sexual difference, rather than sexual equality, provides the conceptual key to understanding, and perhaps even overcoming, the patriarchal oppression of women.

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). 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...