Philosophy’s Mother EnvyHas There Yet Been a Deconstruction of the Mother Tongue?Michael Eng

Philosophy and the Mimetic Threat

In his critique of onto-typology, Lacoue-Labarthe returns to the scene of philosophy’s first confrontation with mimesis, what Plato referred to and staged in the Republic as the ancient polemos between poetry and philosophy.1616Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’, in Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. and trans. by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 43–138. Initially, we recall, Socrates questions the place of poetry in the just polis, specifically in terms of its role in the education of the guardians. Poetry is immediately suspect because of its depictions of heroes and cowards, as well as because of what Socrates says is its false representations of the gods. This critique, offered in Republic ii, aligns closely, though not completely, with the critique given in Republic x of artistic mimesis being three steps removed from the truth. What gives rise to poetry’s expulsion from the politeia, however, is the fact that the poet often speaks in the voice of an other. When poets speak in their own voice, in the mode of diegesis or narration, everything is fine. But when poets speak in an other’s voice, i.e., when they engage in mimesis, this is unacceptable. In the mimetic mode, the poet is a pantomime, occupying many roles, thus disrupting the just order of the polis, which relies on each doing their share in their assigned role.

If, politically, poetry is the threat of disorder, philosophically, it is the threat of madness. This, too, Plato pursues in such dialogues as the Phaedrus and the Ion. But as Lacoue-Labarthe argues, what we miss when we take Plato’s conception and critique of mimesis at face value is the fact that he gives us a theory of what, properly speaking, cannot be theorized. For mimesis, again, is, properly speaking, the improper as such. This is its threat but also the reason why it is invulnerable to the philosophical concept.1717Ibid., p. 116.

It is at this point also that Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us that Plato connects mimesis’s threat of madness at the beginning of Republic iii to the threat of hysteria, which is to say, the threat of feminization.1818Ibid., p. 129. Yet, while mimesis threatens philosophy with both, they are not completely the same. Madness stands for the loss of control, for the loss of the integrity of the subject; feminization reminds the philosopher (the masculine subject of representation) that he is not the origin of his own existence, despite whatever promises representation makes to him.1919See Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 116–17. Thus, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, in response to this double-edged challenge that mimesis poses to the philosophical logos, Plato offers a theory of mimesis, thereby neutralizing its threat and pulling off what Lacoue-Labarthe describes as a speculative trick designed to ultimately master it.

As we recall, it is Book x where Plato describes the artist as having the demiurgic power of being able to recreate the world through artistic mimesis. But the example Plato calls upon in order to illustrate this power is that of someone taking a mirror and turning it around so that everything it is pointed at is reflected in it. The question Lacoue-Labarthe poses concerns the status of this mirror and the occupation of the demiurge. Which is the demiurge, the one who merely holds the mirror, or the mirror itself? Who or what is doing the work of mimesis? Where is the mimetic act to be located? How is mimesis actually ‘like’ a reflection in the mirror when a mirror’s reflections lack permanence?2020Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’, p. 88.

As Lacoue-Labarthe argues, Plato’s critique of mimesis relies on a series of mimetic gestures that elide or draw a relation of similitude between heterogeneous elements: the demiurge and the mirror; the demiurge and the artist, and; the artist and the poet. And this is all after the originary elision that serves as the condition of Plato’s philosophical corpus — viz., Plato’s ability to speak in the voice of Socrates (among others). This logic of substitution, which is the logic of mimesis, that one thing can stand in for an other, authorizes Plato’s text in its critique of mimesis, which it then mirrors (for example, by appropriating and deploying the dialogue form and speaking in the voice of ‘Socrates’).2121Ibid., p. 135. If Plato is exemplary of Western thought’s relation to mimesis, therefore, it is because he provides the model and direction for all subsequent treatments of mimesis within the Western philosophical tradition: master, through figuration, that which undoes all forms of mastery and all stability of figures.

Yet, while Republic x designates the site where Plato executes his speculative sleight-of-hand by presenting the proper theory of mimesis in its threatening impropriety, it is in Republic ii, says Lacoue-Labarthe, that Plato dramatizes philosophy’s appropriation of both mimesis and the feminine/maternal labour most immediately associated with mimesis. It is at this point in the Republic that Socrates discusses the education of the guardians, specifically, their formation in relation to that language called myth.2222Plato, Republic, 376e–77b, cited in ibid., p. 126. See Plato, Republic, trans. by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004). He has not yet banished the poets from the politeia. In fact, quite the opposite. He argues there that the guardians ought to be told the myths that would make the desired ‘impression’ (tupos) upon their souls.2323Ibid. Explicating the passage, Lacoue-Labarthe writes that mimesis, ‘imitation’, involves ‘the imposition of the sign’ upon ‘the infant soul. That is to say, of course, of the soul that is yet in-fans’, without language.2424Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’, pp. 126–27.

But Lacoue-Labarthe also observes that this site of mimetic appropriation is not without ambivalence in the Platonic text. In one respect, the infant soul’s ‘vulnerability to fables’ makes myth a suitable tool with which to shape the future guardians’ characters; in another respect, this vulnerability underscores the infant’s dependency on the stories ‘mothers and nurses’ tell.2525Republic, 377c, cited in ibid., p. 127. Noting echoes with Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage, particularly its role in clearing the space for the emergence of the subject’s aggressivity, Lacoue-Labarthe submits that this passage from the Republic is thus also a scene where the text of philosophy acts out its envy of and concomitant ‘resentment against the original maternal domination and original feminine education’.2626Ibid., p. 127. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 82–101. The scene is a response to a double ‘panic’, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy characterize it elsewhere:2727Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Panique politique’, trans. by Céline Suprenant, in Retreating the Political, ed. by Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–31. before mimesis’s threat of dissolving the integrity of philosophy’s subjectivity and before the maternal feminine’s intimacy/identification with mimesis. Appropriating mimesis by subsuming it within the education of the guardians, philosophy masters that which threatens it with subjective dissolution, and it also claims ownership over the ‘acquisition of the “mother” tongue’,2828Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’, p. 127. allowing it to disavow the fact that it (i.e., philosophy) must also have received its voice by virtue of feminine/maternal labour.

As Lacoue-Labarthe argues further, the history of philosophy is nothing less than the history of philosophy’s repeated disavowal and appropriation of mimesis in constituting its self-identity as ‘Philosophy’. He shows that, even as they critique Platonism, both Nietzsche and Heidegger inherit and unquestioningly re-enact Plato’s speculative sleight-of-hand, and with it, philosophy’s narcissistic investments. Rather than a rejection of Plato’s critique of mimesis, the enthusiasm for art that characterizes Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s respective philosophical projects clearly amounts, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s eyes, to an attempt to control mimesis and subsume it to philosophy’s self-realization. Tellingly, both Nietzsche and Heidegger theorize mimesis through the figure, the former through Dionysus, and the latter through his recasting/recovery of truth as aletheia (un-concealment).2929Ibid., pp. 61, 122, and 79–80. In so doing, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, they reinforce their commitments to speculative metaphysics in the very moments that they call for its closure.

Yet, this mimetic repetition is just one part of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s ‘mimetology’: another part appears in the ‘mimetic agon’ that they sustain with the Ancients, who they posit, in a gesture Lacoue-Labarthe classifies as emblematic of modern thought, as a model both to imitate and surpass.3030Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. by Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 79. In one respect, such mimetic rivalry explains both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s reaching back to the Greeks as part of their respective critiques of modernity. In another respect, it also exposes the way art and politics are connected in terms of identification: both Nietzsche and Heidegger (and also Hölderlin) identify with the aesthetic practices of the Greeks — particularly, Plato’s appropriation of mimesis in the ‘political Bildung’ of the politeia — in the project of calling for and identifying with a German nation to come.3131Ibid., p. 85. In ‘the case of Heidegger’, then, his adoption of Plato’s mimetology undergirds the metaphysical aspirations he pins to National Socialism (which Lacoue-Labarthe derisively refers to as ‘national-Aestheticism’).3232Ibid., p. 86.

As we will see, Lacoue-Labarthe carries his critique of onto-typology over to his work with Jean-Luc Nancy on the retrait (retreat; retrace) of the political. As indicated above, their focus in their collaborations is on the affective ties that identification employs, and it is in that direction that Lacoue-Labarthe’s various references to psychoanalysis, specifically Freud’s theorization of group or ‘mass’ psychology (as in Massenpsychologie),3333Freud’s Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) is a key point of departure in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s ‘La Panique politique’ and ‘The Unconscious is Destructured Like an Affect’. receive sustained development. The figure of the Mother, in the form of the ‘beyond-mother’, appears in this collective project as well. However, the question that emerges when we look at their investigation into the relation of identification to affect is whether Lacoue-Labarthe’s attention to maternal labour also appears there, or instead becomes buried in the figure once more.

Identification, Mimesis, and the Mother’s Retreat

For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, psychoanalysis, particularly its realization in Freud’s work, opens a new chapter in the legacy of speculative thought’s project to master mimesis. On its face, since identification is central to psychoanalytic accounts of subject formation, it would seem that psychoanalysis might offer a privileged view into the mechanism by which the philosophical subject identifies with the figure. Relatedly, psychoanalysis promises to clarify also how identification works on a political level, as in Heidegger’s identification with National Socialism. For while Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism can be considered exemplary in the way that his thought combines both the philosophical and political instances of identification at once, the problem of identification is not raised by his example alone. Just how identification works — both philosophically and politically, but also in terms of how it connects the philosophical and the political — becomes the focus of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s attention to the text of psychoanalysis, and specifically Freud’s texts on culture: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism.

Yet, despite this promise of psychoanalysis, what Freud’s texts on culture reveal to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy instead is that Freud, too, participates, like Heidegger, in the Western philosophical tradition’s speculative mimetic economy. As they outline in their essays ‘La panique politique’ and ‘The Unconscious is Destructured Like an Affect (Part i of “The Jewish People Do Not Dream”)’,3434Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Unconscious is Destructured Like an Affect (Part i of “The Jewish People Do Not Dream”)’, trans. by Brian Holmes, Stanford Literary Review, 6.2 (1989), pp. 191–209. (Note that this translation is only the first part of ‘Le Peuple juif ne rêve pas’. For the complete essay, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, La Panique politique suivi de Le Peuple juif ne rêve pas (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013).) Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy show that, rather than clarify identification and the mimetic relation identification presupposes, Freud’s texts on culture constitute a continuation of the attempt by speculative thought to master mimesis by proliferating the figure. Each time Freud tries to reconstruct the role of identification in constituting culture, he ends up engaging in a series of substitutions and figures that, like Heidegger with the figure of aletheia, reveals a reliance on mimetic logic that obscures the workings of identification, in effect mimicking mimesis. Rather than explain culture, then, it is identification that results in need of explanation, thereby forming a lacuna in Freud’s thought and exacerbating those questions the concept was projected to answer in the first place, namely: What is the relationship between individual psychology and the psychology of groups? And, how, exactly, does the group’s development mirror (i.e., mimic) the individual’s? For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Freud’s attempts to analogize individual and group psychologies via the figure of the Father reveal how the problem of identification exposes psychoanalysis to its limit and how this limit is the political itself.

Yet, it is within this very lacuna in the psychoanalytic archive that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see an opening: it is precisely in this space, where Freud’s text breaks down and his attempts at theorizing identification lead to the text’s ‘dis-sociation’, that it is possible, in one respect, to see Freud’s theorization of the Father as an artefact of subjective/group ‘panic’ and, in another respect, to identify with the ‘withdrawal’ (retrait) of identification.3535Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, p. 201. ‘Retrait’ is rendered throughout the text as ‘withdrawal’ in this English translation. See Le Peuple juif ne rêve pas, p. 72. According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the ‘infigurable’ figure of this withdrawal would be the Mother.3636Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, p. 201.

In Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s reading, everything centres on the status of ‘affect’ (Fühlen) in Freud’s theorization of identification. It is around Fühlen and its cognates, they contend, such as Einfühlung (empathy) and Gefühlsbindung (affective tie), that Freud’s text both dis-sociates but also coheres.3737Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘La Panique politique’, pp. 16, 19, and 20–21; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, pp. 196–97. Affect leads to the text’s dis-sociation because, although it appears to explain the mechanism of identification, as in the ‘affective tie’ by which a group coheres around a figure of authority (i.e., the Father or Leader), it leads to difficulties that Freud is ultimately unable to resolve. For if his expansion of the Oedipal schema to the political plane is intended to explain the relation of the individual to the social, it does so by ignoring the fact that the Oedipal schema already contains this relation in theorizing the individual subject’s development from the family structure. The ‘sexual “integration” of the ego and socialisation’, write Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, means that the ‘integration to society and the integration of society’ are essentially connected.3838Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘La Panique politique’, p. 10. This is to say that ‘the socius is thus in the ego’.3939Ibid., p. 10.

There is thus already an irreducible intrapsychic dimension to the Oedipus complex. Consequently, Freud’s theory of identification presumes social plurality as a fundamental given. In so doing, the theory of identification, whether on the individual or collective plane, ends up begging the question of the social, as well as that of affect. As a result, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy assess Freud’s theory of identification as a kind of theoretical repetition compulsion, a compulsion that, instead of clarifying the mechanism of identification with the figure of the Father, gives way to a proliferation of figures of identification.4040Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, pp. 200–01.

One such figure is that of Narcissus, who, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy remind us, appears in addition to or on top of the figure of Oedipus that already occupies a position in Freud’s theorization of sociality.4141See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘La Panique politique’, p. 20. Not only is the figure of Narcissus one of a number of figures installed by Freud into the matrix of the socius, it emphasizes the isolation of the subject and exacerbates the question of how the socius is held together through an affective tie. For if the social is basically a collection of ‘several narcissi’, including the Father, who in Group Psychology Freud describes as the ‘absolute Narcissus’, then the question remains of how these narcissi ever break out of their solipsistic confines and relate to others.4242Ibid., p. 21. In their figuration and multiplication as figures, Narcissus and Oedipus are expressions of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy charge is Freud’s ‘archeophilia’, a drive to arrive at an ‘arkhé’ or origin.4343Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, p. 201. Since this drive gives rise to nothing more than ‘a series of [mimetic] displacements’ in the form of the multiplication of figures,4444Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘La Panique politique’, p. 15. Freud’s archeophilia is also, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend, an ‘egology’,4545Ibid., pp. 18–19. a repetition impulse to deploy figures of identification that he shares with Heidegger and the rest of the speculative metaphysical tradition in their attempts to master mimesis. By producing and reproducing ever more figures of identification, identification in Freud simply appropriates mimesis, mimicking its movement, and in no way explains the mimetic relation of an affective tie that it posits among the multiple narcissi constituting the socius. The failure of identification in Freud is thus also a failed theory of mimesis.

In their reading of Freud’s theory of identification as an appropriation of mimesis, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy imply that Freud (or at least his text) betrays an awareness that this theoretical failure also signals that psychoanalysis has encountered its limit. They consequently read Freud’s proliferation of figures as a symptom of theoretical panic: when faced with the inability to explain identification and the affective tie it assumes, Freud, they assert, seeks refuge in the shelter of figuration that theory, as a mode of mimesis, provides. Installed in and through theory, Narcissus serves as a figure for the identification that theory furnishes. ‘Freud seems never to have really shaken off this Narcissus’, write Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. ‘Even when he recognizes it as a theoretical fiction, he emphasizes all the more its function: the Narcissus is the ultimate object of the theory, it offers the theory its absolute figure as a visible form, and so assures the identity of psychoanalysis.’4646Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, p. 201. So while the text of psychoanalysis meets its limit with identification, setting it underway towards dis-sociation, Narcissus, the symptom of this dis-sociation and failure of identification, nonetheless allows psychoanalysis to cohere around the figure in order to consolidate its identity as theory.

If identification’s failure is one way Freud’s text undergoes dis-sociation, then the second way it comes under dis-sociation is as an expression of a theoretical panic before identification’s explanatory impotence. Curiously, this panic also announces the return of affect, but the affective tie does not refer to the mechanism of identification within the social writ large. Rather, it refers to Freud’s affective tie and identification with theory and the theoretical community that is psychoanalysis. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy observe,

identification, for Freud, is first and foremost identification with the Father — and the Father means here: he who is always-already identified, he who has presented himself before disappearing, he who has symbolized himself before being symbolic.4747Ibid., pp. 200–01.

In place of a theory of identification, Freud identifies with theory as such, and psychoanalytic theory specifically. It is an identification that consequently places Freud himself as Father and absolute Narcissus.

So, if the Father proves to be a vanishing point on the horizon of psychoanalysis, this leaves open the question of how to think the figure of the Mother. If the Father is the figure for the role of figuration in (psychoanalytic) theory, for the narcissism of theory, the narcissism that is theory, and the identification with this narcissism, then what is the status of the Mother? Does the Mother stand outside of theory? Is the Mother a figure at all? Does the Mother make possible an untying of the affective tie to theory?

According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it cannot be as simple as a turn to the Mother once the emptiness of the Father is exposed. ‘One must not, above all, simply let the original Narcissus of the Father figure return in a figure of the Mother’, they caution.4848Ibid., p. 202. For this reason, they eschew the terminology of ‘the Mother’ and refer instead to ‘the maternal substance’, the ‘beyond-mother’ (outre-mère) which would resist serving as yet another narcissistic figure for identification.4949Ibid., pp. 202 and 203. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the beyond-mother would be the name for ‘the infigurable’, and the task for thought would be to identify with the beyond-mother as the withdrawal of identity.5050Ibid., pp. 201 and 203. In Retreating the Political, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identify this withdrawal of the Mother with ‘the retreat (retrait) of the political’ (pp. 119 and 133–34). With the Mother, or, to be more precise, the beyond-mother, then, there is the promise of ‘de-figuration’,5151Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect’, p. 204. the promise, in other words, of breaking free of the speculative metaphysical economy.

There is, however, one hazard that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy do not fully acknowledge. While they may recognize that this turn to the beyond-mother risks participating once more in the economy of figuration, and therefore, risks a reinscription of the speculative theoretical drive, they appear to overlook the fact that they are still putting the Mother to work. Assigning the beyond-mother the work of delineating the outside of the theoretical is no different than the reproductive labour that both French feminist thought and Lacoue-Labarthe in his earlier work proved the Mother has been assigned historically within the speculative tradition. Whether for theory or against it, the Mother still appears in order to disappear. Positing the Mother, even as the infigurable, would amount once more to appropriating the maternal and using ‘her’ to accomplish what theory cannot do on its own.

As it concerns the project of untying the mother tongue, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s engagement with Freud’s affective tie to theory shows that it is not simply a matter of dismantling the theoretical apparatus. For how would one theorize doing so without being entangled further in the affective ties that put the Mother to work? Untying the mother tongue perhaps requires then an ‘other’ tongue, a tongue other to and otherwise than theory. It is perhaps here that we reach the limits of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s text as well and that we might realize the need to come into dialogue with those discourses that attend to actual work that actual (not only figural or theoretical) women perform in maintaining the fiction of the mother tongue and its theories.