Reviews Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York, Fordham University Press, 2012), xi + 306 pp. Timothy Secret When do the investigations of a theme stabilise into an established field? At what moment does a topic such as the mother move from being a subject of scattered reflections across history each obliged to step forward apology in hand, begging a patient ear for an apparently marginal concern to being legitimated in advance as a locus of debate where confessions of ignorance or indifference constitute shocking intellectual failures? If it were only a matter of the quantity or temporal density of publications on the theme, then with each fresh intervention one might ask whether the camel s back has finally snapped: is the historically devalued question of life s inauguration, maternity, finally endorsed by the academy as a properly philosophical concern paralleling the long privileged question of life s ending, mortality? On the other hand, perhaps there is much to be said for the refusal of such endorsement and the active undermining of any reification that would produce a static field of known concepts and standard questions. It is here that the force of Marder s book must be acknowledged. In a region threatening to stagnate, Marder launches a batch of operations that destabilise developing hegemonies in favour of a reproblematisation of the conceptual field of maternity. This intervention takes the form of a collection of twelve articles, the majority of which are very recent though the few dating back more than twenty years testify to Marder s abiding concern with the theme. The Oxford Literary Review 36.1 (2014): 137 149 Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/olr
138 Oxford Literary Review Revised, expanded and bound together by a preface on Pandora s jar that returns as a leitmotif throughout the work, the chapters vary as much in style as in their specific thematic focus. What is perhaps surprising then is that the text has the feeling of a book rather than a collection of essays, producing from tonally varied interrogations of wildly diverse cultural material from the Wolf Man to the photographs at Abu Ghraib, from Racine s Phèdre to Ronell s The Telephone Book an effect analogous to peering through a series of very different windows onto the same impenetrable void: the fleshy and uncannily familiar uterine cavern. The rather understated opening spearhead of this disturbance is the paleonymic appropriation of the term maternal function, both narrowing and shifting its usage away from Kristevan orthodoxy. Traditional accounts of the maternal function principally focus on the mother as she is encountered in a child s fledgling consciousness the torn-up Kleinian mother imagos of weaning and infantile sexuality. As such, even many psychoanalytic ears might confess (as Pascal did of truth and justice and as Derrida did of death) that the figure of the mother is not the same on one side of the Pyrenees and the other. Such a confession might reasonably limit our contemporary studies of the maternal to the vast empirical investigative field of a comparative anthropo-maternology. From here, a familiar Fanonian gesture would place firm historical and territorial limits on the applicability of any supposedly universal claims advanced on behalf of the mother or the mother-child dyad by a discourse such as psychoanalysis. Despite the rigorous avoidance of Heideggerian vocabulary, Marder s consistently maintained limitation of the maternal function to the mechanical reproductive processes of the event of birth reaches towards an existential rather than an existentiell notion of the maternal one that might be said to come before all cults of prams. Although this narrowed conception of the maternal function principally emerges from psychoanalysis, Marder s text has little to do with the Jocastas of literary history and, despite its focus on the enigmatic maternal body, it is notable that the word breast barely appears. Marder s instead hones in on the only personal-historical fact whose material contingency is also short of certain approaching technological advances a necessary truth: that we are all (untimely rippedornot)ofwomanborn.weallexistinthewakeofaneventof
Reviews 139 birth that we have no direct access to and that is thus in a sense not our own despite being profoundly and uniquely addressed to us (4). Marder s insistence on the direct inaccessibility of the moment of our birth at which we both were and were not present means that birth only exists for us as a traumatic haunting the recurs as a disturbance in various cultural discourses, even as the nature-culture divide itself is put in question by the mechanical processes of natural reproduction. Since our access to birth can only be through these disturbances, the text divides into three parts that correspond to three different spheres of cultural meaning in which the maternal function has produced legible and significant effects : psychoanalysis, photography and the deconstruction of literature (6). The primal scene of birth as the original inaccessible trauma is thus seen to return via the inevitable force of the death drive across our fantasmatic lives as fables, images and structural figures not only populating but producing discourses in diverse domains. It is in the transposition of this mechanicalreproductive structure onto the domain of contemporary mechanical technologies such as photography that the work is at its most novel, photography functioning both as a prosthetic compensation for the loss of the maternal body and as an uncanny medium that purports to bear witness to the unverifiable primal passage through the mother s body (148). An assortment of other mechanical devices populate the text, the most powerful of which is surely the early reflection on the Courjault affair of a mother who kept her murdered baby preserved in her freezer in the heart of her home framing the freezer as an external, prosthetic womb, the continuation of maternity by other means (24 26). The Scylla and Charybdis between which Marder s text forges a singular path consists on one side in the outright acceptance of (to adopt a Lacanian vocabulary) the real dimension of birth trauma and its interminable repetition in both producing and distorting the imaginary and symbolic domains (which would fall into the metaphysical gesture of endorsing the maternal function as the singular arché from whence everything emerges), and on the other side a simple reduction of the maternal function to an imaginary or symbolic fiction with no actual relation to the enigmatic unspeakability of the event of birth or the brute fact of anxiety. I would suggest here that Marder s text is strategically plural in refusing to give a single response. The mobile
140 Oxford Literary Review empty vessel of the mother as irretrievable site (148) figures as origin, void and indigestible material remains: its uncanny status refusing to be pinned down as merely a site of fantasy or as an actual bodily event that occurred prior to our constitutive actions. The maternal function marks a genuine limit of human reason, the antimony of a transcendental dialectic where multiple answers are true and false as no intuition serves to ground our faculties. Marder s mother is not accidentally enigmatic: the real bodily fact of birth emerges only through its iteration in image and fable. The most serious bone of contention that might challenge Marder s project is that she so freely embraces playing on the fragile border of life and death. While Marder shows unquestionably that our culture s poetic imaginary since Hesiod s Pandora with her womblike and tomblike jar has traded on slippages between birth and death, Marder gives little space to attempts to radically rethink maternity in militant opposition to a theoretical culture obsessed with death and finitude. One might pose to Marder questions descending from Ricoeur s framing in Memory, History, Forgetting of Arendt s jubilant account of natality in The Human Condition against Heidegger and the metaphysical tradition as whole s anguished obsession with death and silence on birth. 1 Is contemporary theory so entrenched in thoughts of loss that we can only allow birth on stage if it comes in mourning clothes and as ghostly haunting? A more polemical counterpoint to Marder s work would be the late Grace Jantzen s incomplete Death and the Displacement of Beauty series. 2 According to Jantzen our culture is in love with death, necrophilic, but this is nevertheless a contingent hegemony against which we must highlight and marshal a countertradition originating in Sappho that offers natality entirely shorn of deathly veils. The question that Jantzen s largely posthumous works would pose (not only to Marder and Derrida but even to those on the side of life like Cixous) is whether an account of birth must draw resources from finitude and death. Even if necrophilia runs in the blood of the cultural discourses engaged with in Marder s project psychoanalysis, photography, literature does this exhaust the maternal function s signature? The question is urgent insofar as if we accept Derrida s charge that a justice worth of the name must extend to les fantômes of not only the dead but also the unborn, then is that accomplished by extending the familiar mourning-melancholic
Reviews 141 relation we bear to our dead to the unborn or is some as yet untheorised natality called on? Before we dismiss out of hand the deconstructive naivety of a maternal function uncontaminated by death, we must perhaps ask ourselves whether that s just the necrophile in us talking. DOI: 10.3366/olr.2014.0091 Notes 1 Paul Ricoeur: Memory, History, Forgetting, translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 357. 2 Grace Jantzen: Death and the Displacement of Beauty: Foundations of Violence (London, Routledge, 2004), Violence to Eternity (Abingdon, Routledge, 2009), A Place of Springs (Abingdon, Routledge, 2010). Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: an Essay on Destructive Plasticity, translated by Carolyn Shread (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2012), ix + 103 pp. Joe Palmer The Ontology of the Accident (2009, trans. 2012) forms a pendant to Malabou s earlier book, The New Wounded (2007, trans. 2012) and the aesthetic sense of this metaphor is relevant. In the latter work, Malabou argues for the ultimate inseparability of the effects of organic and sociopolitical trauma. The indifference common to Alzheimer s patients and war veterans reveals that whether psychic disturbance is caused by neuronal change (as in neuropathological cases), or neuronal change is caused by psychic disturbance (as in sociopolitical trauma), the same economy of the accident obtains. The fact of neuronal change, however, renders such psychic disturbance inexplicable in terms of the aetiology of sexuality privileged in psychoanalysis. Against Freud, Malabou argues for the recognition of an alternative regime of events which she names cerebrality to which sexuality is always exposed: namely, the shock and the contingency of the ruptures that