On Matricide: Matricide, Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother (review)

Amber Jacobs sets out “first, to postulate a nonmonolithic theory of the symbolic; second, to theorize a maternal subject position that would lead to a reformulation of the crucial differentiating function of the symbolic; and, third, to bring matricide into theory as a structural concept” (p. xi). She accomplishes this large theoretical set of goals through a rereading of the Orestes myth, in particular Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and especially by restoring the figure of Metis to prominence in that myth. Putting herself in the Lévi-Straussian tradition of myth criticism, Jacobs aims to get beyond description of myth to a theoretical understanding of its structure. Thus, she does not make as much of the overt and explicit matricide in the trilogy as she does of the excluded matricide; that is, she privileges Metis over Clytemnestra.

For the most part, Jacobs addresses the shortcomings of psychoanalytic work on myth for being descriptive rather than sufficiently structural—or for its failure to deal adequately with Metis. She works closely with André Green, Luce Irigaray, and Melanie Klein, though also alluding to Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. She finds that Green’s work offers a way out of traditional psychoanalytic dependence on the Oedipus complex by suggesting that there could be more than one explanatory structure; Jacobs further develops an approach more like a kaleidoscope than a jigsaw puzzle, which requires that everything fit together (pp. 28–30). She also seeks to go beyond both Klein and Irigaray in their approaches to the mother, accepting the potential anger of the mother with Klein, but with Irigaray, recognizing that the problem is not with the mother but with the patriarchal symbolic order (p. 25).

Unlike some psychoanalytic critics, Jacobs refuses to leave the mother at the outside of theory as the unrepresentable boundary to the symbolic but rather wants to find a place for the law of the mother within theory and the social arena of language. She is for that reason skeptical of what she calls the nostalgia of feminist theory that focuses on the beneficent mother-daughter pairs, such as Demeter and Kore (for example, pp. 136, 142). Although Jacobs follows Irigaray to some degree, she is dissatisfied with her dependence on traces of a prepatriarchal order, “an uncontaminated ‘before’” (p. 136, see also p. 139). Unlike Irigaray, she imagines something that is yet to be, not something that predated the patriarchal order, for, as she points out, the mother that Irigaray finds is one who has been created by the male imaginary.

Thus, Jacobs seeks to install the law of the mother in the dominant sociosymbolic order, and she does this by paying attention to Metis—the mythical mother of Athena, who was swallowed by Zeus when she was pregnant; he then acquires her wisdom and gives birth to Athena alone. Jacobs’s point is that this myth represents a phantasy of male self-sufficiency—of the father’s ability to generate life; such a phantasy requires that the death of Metis go unmentioned. There can be no mother for Athena. In the Oresteia, Athena announces that she will side with Orestes’s matricide; she acts for the male in all things, she says, since she never had a mother, ignoring the fact that she did indeed have one—Metis. As a result, according to Jacobs, the democratic order that she establishes at the end of the trilogy depends on her silence about Metis.

Jacobs also situates herself firmly in the third wave of feminism. She notes the difficulty feminists face—the challenges posed by poststructuralism— which make terms like patriarchy and oppression seem inappropriate (p. 3). How, she asks, can we theorize without making the “coercive gestures of mastery” (p. 5)? Her “point of departure” is “based on the attempt to overcome the splitting within feminisms wherein theory, discourse, and textuality are pitted against, or declared to be antithetical to, politics, collectivity...