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PART I
On matricide![]()
1
RETHINKING MATRICIDE
Amber Jacobs
Working on the maternal in the context of psychoanalytic feminism is, for me, motivated by a strong political commitment to working towards what I have termed elsewhere ‘post patriarchal futures’ (Jacobs 2007: 3).
First I want to ask, can the practice of theory making – and in this instance, theorising matricide – have any productive and potentially usable links with the actual practices of mothering, with being a mother, with having a mother, with thinking about being and/or having a mother and representing the vicissitudes of the maternal realm in the sociosymbolic, material, cultural and clinical dimensions? Theorising matricide in the context of feminism and psychoanalysis is one way I have found, to understand, give an account of, if not transform the complex relation between the psychosexual and the social rather than being thought by it.
I must confess that when writing my book On Matricide1 (Jacobs 2007), I did not give much conscious direct attention in my research to the figure of the actual living so-called ‘real’ mothers and the vicissitudes of their practices. The experiential aspect of the maternal realm was obviously present somewhere in my work – how could it not be? I will return to this later but what I initially focused on was the meaning of matricide in contemporary theory and culture and the implications of Irigaray’s contention that matricide underlies Western culture and epistemologies – but is not acknowledged or theorised (Irigaray 1991: 38). Working on matricide was for me a direct way of responding to Irigaray’s call for the necessity to transform and expand psychoanalytic theoretical paradigms so that psychoanalysis’s indispensable insights into the workings of unconscious desire could be used to theorise a maternal sexual subject position.
I was determined to get beyond the impasse that psychoanalytic feminism found itself in when it could not get beyond Lacan’s theory of the symbolic – a theory in which femininity could only function as the limit of representation, as other, and as lack. I was writing and thinking with a force of frustration with the psychoanalytic theories whose potential I could not abandon yet whose models of femininity and the maternal systematically reproduced the terms of a patriarchal phallic binary model of culture and subjectivity that I sought to transform and/or move beyond.
It was then, through turning to the question of matricide via psychoanalysis, structural anthropology and Greek myth that I tried to go some way to rectify this situation and force feminism into a new stage of engagement with psychoanalysis with a view to hypothesising a different model of the symbolic order that did not depend upon Oedipus and castration as its one and only organising centre.
I wanted to construct a theoretical model where femininities and the maternal could function as active agents of meaning that could generate fantasies and underlying cultural laws that could lead to modes of thinking, speaking, remembering, mourning, desiring, knowing and representing that were not reducible to or organised around the Oedipal structure of classical psychoanalysis. My desire was to theorise a structure that could allow for previously foreclosed ontological and epistemological manifestations to have access to the symbolic order/representation and theory without resorting to essentialism or any sense of a pre-given pre-symbolic unmediated notion of the feminine.
Works by theorists and philosophers such as Luce Irigaray (1991), Adriana Cavarero (1995), Jean Laplanche (1989), Juliet Mitchell (2000), Bracha Ettinger (2006), Judith Butler (2000), Alison Stone (2014) and my own work, are, among others, key contributors to the building of a strong contemporary tradition of psychoanalytic feminist theorising beyond Oedipus. The approaches of the theorists just listed are diverse and rooted in different intellectual agendas, but their work with psychoanalysis is linked by a shared commitment to thinking about the unconscious as a genuinely plural and mutable force which is, by definition, resistant to being fixed and reduced to one univocal framework of meaning. Rather than adhering to the phallic binarism that characterises the classical psychoanalytic model of the unconscious, these theorists (via different strategies and intellectual contexts) stay close to the spirit of the unconscious – namely, its core of ineffable unknowability and the fundamental multiplicity of its manifestations, its contents and its structures.
The Oedipal/castration model – with patricide as its organizing centre – can describe only one aspect of the relation between the psychosexual and the social under Western patriarchies. The fierce attachment to this model as the one and only master model/theory in psychoanalysis comprises what I see as an often rigid, heterosexist normative hegemonic monopoly on sanity, on subjectivity, representation and on meaning. This monotheism in contemporary psychoanalysis with regard to Oedipus as the one and only model needs to be contested and rejected if we are going to be able to use psychoanalysis in the service of theorising femininity and the maternal in relation to a specificity rather than as mirror or other to the masculine subject.
I am not suggesting that Oedipus and its organising underlying Law-of-the-Father no longer holds and needs to be replaced – but I am saying that it is only one part of the story and should be able to coexist with other models. Thus, my question is not Why Oedipus? But, why only Oedipus?
The ‘law-of-the-father’ remains the dominant model of psyche and culture in psychoanalysis and underpins the organisation of Western societies.2 The law(s) of the mother, however, is an underdeveloped and marginal concept. The occlusion of the laws of the mother points to the entrenched status of patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. My theorisation of the laws of the mother via the matricidal myth of the Oresteia (dramatized by the ancient tragedian Aeschylus) attempts to rectify the marginalisation of the mother and locate her as an active agent for the transmission of symbolic laws that determine our cultural organisation.
The issues then that I try to tackle turn around the question of theorising alternative underlying cultural laws and prohibitions, which inaugurate different passages into symbolic subjectivity, which are not reducible to Oedipus. In this way, we can begin to posit the possibilities of theorising (rather than pathologising) other fields of desire, sexualities and meanings, different kinship arrangements and their concomitant generated unconscious processes and their symbolic representation.
What is in question then is firstly, a symbolic economy that does not solely refer, in the first instance, to the paternal symbolic function but instead resurrects the mother out of the so-called ‘imaginary’ presymbolic primitive realm and places her within the social arena of language, representation and history. And secondly, what is in question is a nonmonolithic model of the symbolic order – a heterogeneous model comprised of more than one process, more than one structure, more than one law that organizes sexed subjectivities. Whilst, in my reading, Lacan theorised a static and historical symbolic order – organized around an immovable one and only law-of-the-father to which we must all submit or negotiate – I am proposing a model with more than one structural process/more than one law that can produce subjectivities whose relation to the social symbolic world can no longer be systematically reduced to the phallic function of Oedipalisation.
Matricide is a term that has hitherto been used (in psychoanalysis and feminism) descriptively in a somewhat vague and loose way. It has been used to point to the subordination, the denigration, the marginalisation of and the silencing of the mother in Western discourses, or it is used to describe a conscious or unconscious fantasy of wanting to kill the mother. However, all these things: killing, marginalizing, silencing, subordinating, and denigrating are not the same – they are not reducible to one another.
What I found then was that matricide had not yet been theorised as an underlying cultural law functioning to determine aspects of our cultural and psychic organization. It had merely been used to describe a culture where the mother as subject did not yet exist.
I want to take a moment to clarify what I mean when I refer to the maternal subject not existing. I am thinking of the large amount of psychoanalytic feminist scholarship that has convincingly deconstructed the many discourses about the mother in the Western tradition and has found that the mother only exists as object – object of need, blame, fantasy, love, hate and ambivalence – a fantasised figure either relentlessly idealised or relentlessly denigrated, or turned into a monstrous abject other to be feared – a phallic controlling castrating mother who threatens to swallow up identity. She is nowhere theorized in terms of her own subjectivity, sexuality and unconscious and nowhere posited as instrumental in the transmission of culture and society on the symbolic level. She only exists in the many projections and fantasies generated from the male imaginary that the dominant symbolic order confirms and reproduces (Irigaray 1995: 34–46).
The centrality of the role of the mother in post-Kleinain and Object Relation traditions of contemporary psychoanalysis provides a paradox for psychoanalytic feminism. That is, despite the relation to the mother being positioned centre stage in the Object Relations psychoanalytic tradition, she is nevertheless rendered as object (of desire and fantasy) with no theorised sexual subjectivity. She is either a monstrous gothic fantasy of the Kleinian infant, or the Winnicottian ‘good enough’ environment destined to determine her infant’s future mental health in her containing function – thus susceptible to blame and/or idealisation. The mother in psychoanalysis is at once ever present in her determining psychic function for the infant and yet all absent in terms of her sexed subjectivity and her symbolic and cultural currency. In addition to this, the different traditions within psychoanalysis all seem to converge around a consensus that ‘matricide is our vital necessity’ (Kristeva 1989: 27).
Whilst the concept of patricide in psychoanalysis theorises a prohibition/law leading to a set of generative organizing fantasies that Lacan termed The-Name-of-the-Father, matricide has not been translated into such clear conceptual terms.
The dead father generates a creative loss that leads to a process of genealogical transmission of cultural bonds between father and son and between sons forming the bedrock or cornerstone of Western cultures and kinship systems, as we know it. Matricide however does not seem to be able to produce that same kind of generative loss and instead functions only to describe the symptoms of the ontological dereliction that Irigaray has persistently diagnosed resulting from women living in a culture where femininity only exists as a fantasy or product of the male imaginary (Irigaray 1995:118–133).
Whilst it is important to continue fleshing out Irigaray’s deconstructive diagnosis of Western cultural production and continue to articulate the damaging symptomology produced by the radical exclusion of the maternal and matricidal fantasies in dominant Western cultures, it is also important to take the project one step further than this powerful deconstructive diagnosis.
In my work, I wanted to go further than describing the symptom and get on to theorizing the latent law of matricide that could hypothesize a different kind of loss pertaining to a different fantasy structure that was organized around a different structural center to that of the name-of-the-father. That is to say, I wanted to do more than use psychoanalysis as a tool to describe and analyze the structures of oppression – which I think can run the risk of the initial politicized description of the symptom becoming ossified and fixed as an immutable and inevitable truth or prescription.
I wanted psychoanalysis to function in a different way for feminism – a way that would move on from a focus on identifying the symptoms surrounding the mother and the daughter and their exclusion from the symbolic order – a way that would move on from repeatedly producing litanies of symptoms associated with needing the mother, fearing her, blaming her, desiring her, loving her, hating her, and all the complex narcissistic borderline neurotic and psychotic processes and fantasies associated to her highly cathected, idealized and denigrated body. The voluminous rich material, clinical, sociological, literary, visual and other that describes the complex symptoms pertaining to the mother and the daughter (Jacobs 2007: 129–148) in a culture that can only theorise the paternal genealogy and sequesters the mother and the daughter to a no-place outside symbolic agency needs to be thought about in relation to an absent or yet-to-be-theorized structural maternal law.
That is to say, psychoanalysis needs to stop settling for mirroring and unwittingly confirming the inevitability of the descriptions of the pathologies pertaining to the mother and needs instead to start building a theory that could help rectify the situation.
Matricide then, is no longer associated (in my work) with pathology and description – that is to say – no longer used to describe the manifest symptoms of the marginalisation of the mother in cultures and discourses – but instead functions as a generative structural organising concept to be utilized by a psychoanalytic feminism committed to post-patriarchal futures and committed to a model of the symbolic and the unconscious that can accommodate a plurality of unconscious structures allowing for the expression of a heterogeneous palimpsest of structural psychosexual processes – not reducible to Oedipal phallic heteronormativity.
The questions now turned around the hypothesis of matricide as producing a generative loss functioning to transmit a maternal genealogy – a transgenerational unconscious structure or law that could work to mediate the mother-daughter and/or between women relations allowing for the specificities of femininities as active participants in the symbolic process and the transmission of a different cultural inheritance or bond.
Now before I try to explain what my theory of a matricidal underlying law/prohibition consists of – and how I arrived at its definition (via working with myth and structural anthropology), I want to quickly address what could be construed as a potentially utopian thrust in all this – together with a hint of wish fulfilment – the wish or belief that if we theorise matricide we will not only cure all the ills of patriarchy but psychoanalysis will become an empowering politicized tool subverting dominant normative theories, the symbolic will be able to accommodate a multitude of subjectivities organised around different laws other than Oedipus, the mother-daughter relation could be given structural mediation and would thus cease to fall into the destructive dynamics concerning too close proximities, destructive envy, collapsed identifications and separation problems and the matricidal law or law of the mother would produce the possibility of a different model of culture – a yet-to-be-future beyond phallic binarism that could finally be pronounced as post-patriarchal.
This is obviously not only a tall order but also reproduces an underlying teleological fantasy of a ‘happily ever after’ resolution. I want to stress now that these are not my hopes or fantasies for a feminist psychoanalytic model of matricide in its theorised form. To my mind – change happens very slowly – the extent to which the dominant structures are internalised and entrenched in the unconscious means that positing any kind of voluntarism whether it be performing gendered identities or theorising a maternal law is only viable if we are rigorous in addressing the complex relation between t...
