The Mother of All Things: War, Reason, and the Gendering of Pain

War, it seems, is the male's way of giving birth. The atomic bomb springs forth as "Oppenheimer's baby." Revolutions are the "labor pains" announcing new societies. Nations, in prolonged absence of military conflict, lie "fallow," turn "barren," or risk falling "sterile." Indeed, in the view of a number of social theorists, as we shall see, the war-birth trope traverses Western thinking from Plato and Aristotle to military-historical treatises, to the contemporary discourses of journalism and politics. In the present essay, I would like to clarify, in the wake of feminist critiques, how the patriarchal appropriation of birthing metaphors serves to naturalize belligerent national ideologies. More specifically, I shall reexamine the institution and the practice of war as a central feature of state fetishism. For gender and sexuality have been linked to war, historically, just as war has been linked to the concept of the nation—by an idealist assumption of teleological necessity that is based on a myth of bodily unity. ¹ In popular, political, and philosophical discourses, why, I ask, is the birthing body of "woman" invoked as the antithesis of metaphysical reason? Biologically, cognitively, socially, and psychoanalytically, what is it about this imaginary body that a masculine sublime of "rational" violence disavows on the one hand, yet on the other hand appropriates, incorporates, and projects—in abstract and "self-evident" metaphors of Truth?

As the very manner in which I frame these questions suggests, my argument presupposes a fundamental structural affinity between fetishism, sublimity, and conventional forms of war discourse. The first section of this essay, "Making War and Making Sense,"sets forth the basic metaphorical continuities and discontinuities between conceptions of birthing, warring, and "reason" or "common sense." The second section, "Translation, Reference, and the Problem of the Open Body," links the repressions and expressions governing these sublime metaphors to the collective act of "translation" by means of which nations at war symbolically substantiate their moral and political claims. The third section, "How Pain Got Her Gender," elaborates some of the psychoanalytic, neurocognitive, and biological bases for this anxiety-driven "translation" as well as for its peculiar cultural gendering. The final section, "Sexing the Body Politic," explores in greater detail my hypothesis of a deeply embodied connection between rhetorical violence and the identity-securing violences performed by modern nation-states.

Making War and Making Sense

"After biological reproduction," note the editors of Gendering War Talk, "war is perhaps the arena where division of labor along gender lines has been the most obvious, and thus where sexual difference has seemed the most absolute and natural" (emphasis added; Cooke and Woollacott 1993, ix). "After biological reproduction, war": I do not betray the spirit of this phrase if I take "after" to mean not, or not only, "second to," "behind in place," but its less frequently encountered acceptation "in imitation of." "War," writes Klaus Theweleit (1993, 284), "ranks high among the male ways of giving birth." And indeed, for some social theorists, war must be understood as a male appropriation of the specifically female capacity for bearing and producing children. Nancy Huston, for example, in her study of mythical and historical narratives that feature the analogy between childbearing and war, speculates that men, envious and fearful of women's procreative powers, traditionally have felt compelled to devise for themselves a "similarly distinctive trait," a form of violence and suffering "as dignified, as meritorious and as spectacular in its results as that of childbirth" (1986, 127, 131).

Now the prevalence of what Huston calls the "reciprocal metaphorization" (131) of war and childbirth seems to me undeniable. Sara Ruddick and Carol Cohn, among others, have shown that the war-birth trope permeates Western thinking, from Plato and Aristotle to the "techno-strategic rationality" of contemporary "defense intellectuals" (Cohn 1987). But one can, I think, admit the fact of symbolic reciprocation—and even the hypothesis of a latent womb envy, or...