![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay outlines a Lévinas- and Derrida-inspired politics of reproduction, via opening the ethics of reproduction, something previous work on the topic has omitted. It does so via a reassessment of two notable publications on Lévinas and feminism, Stella Sandford’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Lévinas (2002) and Lisa Guenther’s volume The Gift of the Other: Lévinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2006).Footnote1
1 Stella Sandford, ‘Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine’. I particularly focus on this essay as its negative presentation of Lévinas’ potential for feminism in one of the main introductory texts on his work is an apparently definite dismissal. There is no space to undertake a full analysis of what Sandford has to say in The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. There is no doubting her familiarity with Lévinas’ texts, but the way in which she reads them is highly questionable. Her basic assumption is that texts can be treated systematically and she openly rejects Derrida’s suggestion that we can find a number of different “voices” at work in Lévinas. She thus prosecutes a reading which constantly attempts to restrain the radical potential of Lévinas’ text. Indeed, when she cannot find a suitably negative reading she puts words in his mouth by finding supposed parallels with writers such as Bloy, Rav Abbahu or Ebreo, on which basis he is accordingly condemned. The stunning radicality of Lévinas’ conception of subjectivity as fecundity is overlooked. Rather than being a celebration of masculine power, it is the discovery of the powerlessness at the heart of masculinity or any other subjectivity, a dissolution of virility. Sandford wrongly states that fraternity is for Lévinas a simple universality and her treatment of it is underelaborated compared to Howard Caygill’s account of the same term in Lévinas and the Political. Sandford comes very close to recognizing that the fecundity of Totality and Infinity and the maternity of Otherwise than Being are very much two sides of the same coin. Yet again, rather than commend this move, she rejects the way of thinking at work, what I will call “metaphorical thought”, as a debiologizing. The phrase which will be so important for Guenther, “becoming like a maternal body”, is not even mentioned.
Both of these are 10 or more years old years, yet have received little or no extended discussion despite a number of significant problems in their readings of Lévinas. In particular, I challenge Sandford’s insistence on a systematic rather than plurivocal reading of Lévinas on questions of gender and sexual difference. I further stress the importance of a certain thought of metaphor as a way of thinking beyond existing relations. In Guenther’s work I observe a tension between a desire to explore the potential of the metaphoric expression “like a maternal body” and a commitment to phenomenologize the act of giving birth. Arising out of the latter, I note the problematic characterization of maternity as a gift and a very Lévinasian effacement of violence from the maternal relation. The latter tendency, together with an unwillingness to question accepted doxa on the topic, is partly responsible for Guenther’s failure to proceed to the ethics of reproduction which should, in a Lévinas-inspired work, inform and be informed by any politics of reproduction.Notes
1 Stella Sandford, ‘Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine’. I particularly focus on this essay as its negative presentation of Lévinas’ potential for feminism in one of the main introductory texts on his work is an apparently definite dismissal. There is no space to undertake a full analysis of what Sandford has to say in The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. There is no doubting her familiarity with Lévinas’ texts, but the way in which she reads them is highly questionable. Her basic assumption is that texts can be treated systematically and she openly rejects Derrida’s suggestion that we can find a number of different “voices” at work in Lévinas. She thus prosecutes a reading which constantly attempts to restrain the radical potential of Lévinas’ text. Indeed, when she cannot find a suitably negative reading she puts words in his mouth by finding supposed parallels with writers such as Bloy, Rav Abbahu or Ebreo, on which basis he is accordingly condemned. The stunning radicality of Lévinas’ conception of subjectivity as fecundity is overlooked. Rather than being a celebration of masculine power, it is the discovery of the powerlessness at the heart of masculinity or any other subjectivity, a dissolution of virility. Sandford wrongly states that fraternity is for Lévinas a simple universality and her treatment of it is underelaborated compared to Howard Caygill’s account of the same term in Lévinas and the Political. Sandford comes very close to recognizing that the fecundity of Totality and Infinity and the maternity of Otherwise than Being are very much two sides of the same coin. Yet again, rather than commend this move, she rejects the way of thinking at work, what I will call “metaphorical thought”, as a debiologizing. The phrase which will be so important for Guenther, “becoming like a maternal body”, is not even mentioned.
2 In her “Introduction” to Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas, Tina Chanter criticizes de Beauvoir for misreading him: “given that Lévinas, against the Western philosophical tradition inaugurated by Parmenides, claims a priority for alterity over the one, the idea that alterity is accomplished in the feminine amounts to a radical claim, which must alter the traditional association of the feminine with otherness”. Tina Chanter, “Introduction”, 5. She does point out, to be fair to de Beauvoir, that her comment came before Lévinas major works had been published when the import of his thought might have been harder to discern.
3 Diane Perpich provides an admirable overview of the shifts that occur between Lévinas’ postwar volumes Time and the Other and Existence and Existents and his mature work, particularly charting how “he abandons the feminine as the privileged example of alterity and the caress as the principle figure of transcendence”. Diane Perpich, “From the Caress to the Word”, 44.
4 Emmanuel Lévinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania (then part of Tsarist Russia) in 1906. His family were observant Orthodox Jews from the Litvak tradition. He commenced study in Strasbourg in 1923 and later spent two semesters in Freiburg where he became close to Husserl. In the 1930s his publications and translations were one of the main routes by which the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger became well-known in France. Indeed, his translation of the Cartesian Meditations appeared in print 20 years before the German original.
5 Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”, 40.
6 Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 136.
7 Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, 12.
8 Derrida, “At This Very Moment”, 12.
9 Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, 136.
10 Derrida, “At This Very Moment”, 16.
11 Ibid., 38.
12 Critchley, Ethics of Deconstruction, 125.
13 Derrida, “At This Very Moment”, 44.
14 Derrida also acknowledges that at different times one must work on different levels: “the real conditions in which women’s struggles develop … often require the preservation (within longer or shorter phases) of metaphysical presupposition that one must (and knows already that one must) question in a latter phase – or an other phase – because they belong to the dominant system that one is deconstructing on a practical level”. Jacques Derrida, “Choreographies”, 171.
15 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, 44.
16 Derrida, Writing and Differance, 312.
17 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 132.
18 Derrida, “The Retrait of Metaphor”, 18.
19 Stellardi, Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor, 110.
20 Derrida, “Retrait”, 103.
21 Derrida, Given Time, 80.
22 Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations With Philippe Nemo, 67.
23 Ibid., 68.
24 Chanter, “Introduction”, 21–22.
25 The extent to which the female gender can be said to be defined biologically is a notable point of dispute among older and younger generations of feminists and was the central issue in the recent ban on Germaine Greer speaking at Cardiff University.
26 Mark King, “Stay-at-home dads on the up: one in seven fathers are the main childcarers”, The Guardian, 25 October 2011. www.theguardian.com/money/2011/oct/25/stay-at-home-dads-fathers-childcarers
27 Nancy Fraser, “How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it”, The Guardian, 14 October 2013. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal. Gary Gutting and Nancy Farser, “A Feminism Where ‘Lean In’ Means Leaning On Others”, The New York Times, 15 October 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/a-feminism-where-leaning-in-means-leaning-on-others/
28 28. Sandford, “Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine”, 28.
29 Derrida, Adieu, 21.
30 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 27.
31 Derrida, Adieu, 40.
32 Ibid., 42.
33 Ibid., 43.
34 Chanter, “Introduction”, 16.
35 Ibid., 21.
36 Ibid.
37 Raffoul, “The Subject of the Welcome: On Jacques Derrida’s ‘Adieu a Emmanuel Lévinas’”, 219.
38 Guenther, The Gift of the Other, 5–6.
39 Ibid., 50.
40 Ibid., 129–40.
41 Her comments gloss over Derrida’s conclusion that: “if neither the gift nor time exist as such, then the gift that there can be [qu’il peut y avoir] cannot in any case give time, since it is nothing”. Derrida, Given Time, 28.
42 Guenther, The Gift of the Other, 50–53.
43 Derrida, “Villanova Roundtable”, 18.
44 Bernasconi, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics”, 126.
45 Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, 14.
46 See, for example, statements such as “my loss of the maternal thing need not signify only (or predominantly) a violent act of matricide; the pain of loss might also be interpreted as a mark of alterity, an acknowledgement of the embodied and sensible difference between self and Other”. Guenther, The Gift of the Other, 121.
47 Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 12–13.
48 Katz, Lévinas, Judasim and the Feminine, 140–45. See also the footnotes 12, 13, 14 on page 180, in particular the statement: “Lévinas’ conception of maternity … might actually be useful for understanding why the abortion issue is so complex and for making an argument in favour of maintaining women’s safe and legal access to this procedure”.
49 Cornell, “Bodily Integrity and the Right to Abortion”.
50 Ibid., 21.
51 There is no reference to work that is critical of Cornell’s appropriation of Derrida. de Ville, “Deconstruction and Law”, 31–61 is a comprehensive treatment of the problematic nature of Cornell’s readings.
52 Derrida, Points, 163.
53 Habermas argues for conditions for individuation as the basis for ethics in his late work on genetics, a position I have challenged with Derrida’s ethics founded in alterity as elaborated in his much overlooked writings on these technologies. Evans, ‘”The Ethical Self after Genetics”.
54 The title of an important essay: Lévinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy”, 75–87.
55 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 39.
56 Derrida, Adieu, 54, 50.
57 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 213.
58 Lévinas, Totality and Inifinty, 305. The argument of Mark Dooley’s paper “A Civic Religion of Social Hope” fails for not taking this into account. A comprehensive response can be found in: Plant, “Doing Justice to the Derrida–Lévinas Connection”, 427–50.
59 Derrida, Adieu, 110.
60 Ibid., 45–46.
61 Ibid., 67.
62 Ibid., 66.
63 Derrida does, in his essay on “The Rhetoric of Drugs”, no more than raise the question of female athletes who get pregnant in order to experience its stimulating hormonal effects and then have an abortion. Derrida, Points … : Interviews, 1974–1994, 248.
64 Singer, “Taking Life”, 135–74.
65 The entire British debate takes place without any acknowledgement of the situation in the rest of Europe. The shadow minister for health, Diane Abbott, can say when the minister for Health, Jeremy Hunt, gives his personal view on abortion term limits that: “It’s almost like he has plucked the figure of twelve weeks out of the air” without anyone pointing out that this is the upper term limit in many of the European states that the UK has been in a political union with for nearly 40 years! www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/06/jeremy-hunt-12-week-abortion-limit
66 We might then note the way she singles out for criticism a story from the British Guardian newspaper which concerns the prospect of children being born who have no physical, corporeal mother and who are the product of an ovum created from aborted foetal tissue. She seems to raise this, in particular, in order to object to the argument made by Life (a UK campaign group) that the lack of a physical biological mother may cause great psychological damage to the resultant child. We might suggest that Guenther’s argument here is somewhat undermined by her previous appeal to Cornell’s defence of the right to abortion on the grounds of a naturalistic “wholeness”. Interestingly, a similar point was argued when a law was brought in in the UK in 2005 to make it impossible to donate sperm anonymously (although proponents also argued the importance of knowing one’s genetic origins and hence potential associated risks). “Sperm donor anonymity ends”, BBC News 31 March 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4397249.stm
68 A well-known Irish scholar of Derrida in a public letter to a newspaper rejects the idea abortion is murder, but fails to address the need to establish this limit: “one cannot say that abortion is murder without reducing to absurdity what it means to be a human – the insubstantial notion that humanity just pops into existence when the soul supposedly enters into the foetus at the moment of conception. From where, we might well ask?” Rejecting the idea of a soul (the basis of which Roman Catholics oppose abortion) still leaves us with the question of where the boundary between the human and the pre-human lies. http://safeandlegal.blogspot.be/2008/01/letters-in-irish-examiner-tuesday.html
69 Davies, “Premature (m)othering”, 186–87.
70 Ibid., 188.
71 We might also note the way in which the use of ultrasound imaging in the attempt to lower the term limit is automatically seen to be something against its use.
72 Although Davis discusses the gaze she fails to note Lévinas’ highly pertinent statement that the face resists the gaze because “it is what cannot become a content”. Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity, 86–87. I discuss the face and its pertinence to the ethical debate about term limits below.
73 Davies, “Premature (m)othering”, 189.
74 Ibid., 190.
75 We might also note that rather too much space is taken up in the paper citing rather poor examples of rhetoric from anti-abortion campaigners. The regular appearance of these straw men and their immediate knocking over rather detracts from the coherence of the argument. It must be said that the way in which images are presumed to be misleading does fit with Lévinas’ noted iconoclasm, but Davis seems unaware of this (Lévinas has been heavily criticized for this position).
76 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 262.
77 Foetal imaging technology is beside the point when it comes to the Lévinasian face (even if we should not necessarily dismiss the possibility that it could give us some ethical experience or even medical or scientific knowledge).
78 Houle, “Abortion as the Work of Mourning”, 142. While Houle is nowhere near as fluent a reader of Derrida as Guenther is of Lévinas, and doesn’t touch on the latter at all, her essay is remarkable in the way that does not shy away from what must be called the experience of the face. In her later book Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion she only speaks of Lévinas on three occasions, on one of them promising an encounter with his thought that is not subsequently fulfilled. She mistakenly calls both Derrida and Lévinas “post-structuralists”, a slip which is telling of her lack of command of their thought. See Houle, Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion, 17, 189, 221.
79 Houle, Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion. Her book approaches the question of abortion from a number of theoretical approaches and one can only feel that this was an unfortunate decision. Far more satisfactory would have been to achieve a fluent presentation in a single philosophical vocabulary, such as that of Derrida or Lévinas, rather to try the topic from a number of angles, none of which has Houle a firm grasp of.
80 Morgan, Discovering Lévinas, 234.
81 Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, 148.
82 Ibid., 126.
83 Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love, 26.
84 The exact phrasing is that of Elissa Marder but based on a reading of Cixous’ So Close. Marder, The Mother in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction, 186. Her readings of Barthes’ comments on photography are somewhat undermined by her hasty dismissal of Derrida’s objections to Barthes and reliance on Cixous (who was, ironically or not, the subject of similar criticisms from Derrida personally, as is recounted in the text itself!).