Staying Alive: Matricide and the Ethical-Political Aspect of Mother-Daughter Relations

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue that an account of nonmatricidal relations between mothers and daughters should include an account of the transformative process through which mothers and daughters can overcome the damage of phallocentrism. I further argue that as a lived experience, mother-daughter relations are always actualized in relations with a normative background, authoritative discursive practices, and social institutions, all of which constitute motherhood in different contexts. Transforming this space means challenging these contents and practices. Thus, it follows that creating nonmatricidal relations includes an aspect of witnessing in which the mother addresses to the daughter her refusal of phallocentric practices and values. By becoming the addressee of the mother’s subjectivity, as expressed in her ethico-political refusal, the daughter constitutes relations of difference. Reading the biblical story of Lot’s wife and her daughters, I suggest that the act of witnessing the violence of divine law has constituted a space between Lot’s wife and her daughters wherein they could create a lineage based on resistance to phallocentric law and affirmation of an alternative ethics.

Notes

¹ The notion of subjectivation as it is used by Foucault and then Butler denotes the process of becoming a subject in the sense of being addressed by demands, norms, and rules. This notion stresses the connection between subjectivity and the social conditions that make it sustainable.

² Throughout this article, I employ the notion of nonmatricidal or intersubjective space in order to stress that what we usually call relations are something constituted and maintained in actions, gestures, and other forms of corporeal presence, all of which receive their meaning within a symbolic and material social world. Theorizing the notion of space in this context goes beyond the scope of the present study. I only briefly mention that it is based on the phenomenological view of lived experience as an integration of social conditions and subjectivity. How this notion is made to work in this article is inspired by Levinas’s spatial notions of proximity and desire, which are both situated in a material and subjective space (Levinas, 1979, pp. 33–35; 1981, pp. 81–86), and Irigaray’s (1999) critique of phallocentric metaphors of space.

³ See, for example, Fanon (1967), Hill Collins (1990), and Chakravorty Spivak (1988).

⁴ On the relations between phallocentric logic and dehumanization as a new form of modern violence, see Cavarero (2007) and Peprich (2003).

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Notes on contributors

Miri Rozmarin

Miri Rozmarin, Ph.D., teaches at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, in the Gender Studies Program. Her research and publications concern a range of topics in feminist philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary postliberal ethics. Her first book, titled Creating Oneself (Peter Lang, 2011), addresses the question of agency in a postmodern world. Her upcoming book Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts (Peter Lang) aims to provide an account of the ethical significance of vulnerability as a basis for transformative lineages.