Abstract

In situating the mother as the ideal ethical agent, however, contemporary French philosophers fail to address the question as to what or who a mother is. Assumed in their ethical readings of maternity is an age-old definition of the mother as somehow inhuman in her selfless devotion for her child. She exists only in relation to the child, and in this capacity she is presumed to be without subjectivity in her own right. As pre-conscious origin and nourishing source for her child, the mother as ethical model is completely devoid of subjective agency. While this dehumanization of mothers poses obvious problems from a feminist standpoint--after all mothers are also women, it also establishes an insufficient model for ethicity. For if only one of the two participants in the ethical relation is truly a subject, how can that relation serve as any sort of paradigm? If the other to the self exists only as a mysterious, unspeakable before and beyond, how does this connection apply to our connections with other others? ;In this study, I examine the maternal metaphor as ethical model in contemporary French philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and fiction. Chapter One examines the use of the Oedipal family romance in Hegel and Lacan as a paradigm for the self/other relation. Chapter Two explores the shift in the works of Levinas from the paternity to maternity as structural ideal for ethical agency. Chapter Three explores Derrida's analysis of post-Freudian theories of memory and the autobiographical thinking of the mother/daughter relation in two novels by Cixous. In Chapter Four, I elaborate a theory of maternal subjectivity based on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Finally, Chapter Five introduces the maternal experience as recounted in the first person in two contemporary novels by Daniele Sallenave and Christine Angot and the psychoanalytic implications of these expressions of maternal love and desire