Four

MATERNITY AS VULNERABILITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS

Over the thirty years span in which Emmanuel Levinas wrote Time and the Other (1947), Totality and Infinity (1961), and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), the feminine and maternity became increasingly central to his ethics. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that there is tremendous ambiguity in his philosophy, including multiple solid interpretations of his work that are nevertheless at odds with one another. This makes it quite difficult to evaluate the feminist potential of his philosophy. Differences in interpretation frequently stem from whether or not Levinas is taken as describing real, empirical women or if he explains aspects of the feminine and maternal that could be present within everyone. When read as a descriptive phenomenology, his account is incomplete and may even be used to justify the submission of women and their isolation in the home. Were women to recognize themselves in his account of the feminine, they would find themselves in a merely supportive role. His depiction of maternity reveals a profound ignorance of its diverse forms and of the central importance of a mother’s situation in her ability to care for her child. Nevertheless, I think that whether or not Levinas intends to describe real women may not be the most important question. Regardless of his intent, we can see a very clear appropriation of some patriarchal ideals in his philosophy. As he talks about femininity (whether or not he means women), he frequently fails to address women and their concerns.1

When read as a prescriptive (even if non-normative) ethics, the damage may be even worse. Since Levinas affirms the need to care for the other, even to the extent of self-abnegation, his ethic of infinite responsibility advocates a destructive asymmetry. Women traditionally hold the responsibility for care giving at the sacrifice of their own needs and are especially vulnerable to being oppressed under this ideal. Contrary to Levinas’s expectation and intention, mothers find that when they live toward such an unbalanced servitude, it devastates their capacity to care for their children. His solution to conflicts of interest—submission to the needs of the other—denies his own great insight into intersubjective intertwining. And, although he sheds necessary light on the passive element in ethical agency, he does so at the cost of denying the importance of deliberative agency. Given this passivity—that, according to Levinas, being compelled by the epiphany of the face is the ethical motivator—and his acknowledgment that one may also feel incited to violence by others’ vulnerability, it is unclear how he expects the peaceful impulse will win.

So why include Levinas in this book at all? Levinas’s philosophy contains some vital insights as well as some critical half-truths that will contribute to a robust view of ethics. Chief among these is the coercive power that others’ needs and vulnerability exert over us. This helps to make sense of why we might rebel with hostility against the dependency of others. Levinas also describes the radical alterity of others, which points to the insufficiency of mere empathy in meeting other’s needs. This aggression and radical divergence between self and other receive insufficient attention in care ethics, but are starkly prevalent in accounts of maternal ambivalence. Ruddick’s notion of adoption could also be augmented through consideration of the anachronistic temporality of ethical obligation described by Levinas. Both birth and adoptive mothers describe a baffling temporality to their commitment; it hesitates, resists, jerks forward, repeats itself, and yet also finds itself to be always already in place. While care ethics focuses on connection between mothers and children, Levinas makes sense of the feelings that children disrupt our enjoyment and self-possession. Care ethics understands that it is human to be dependent, but they do not make it as explicit that we depend on our dependents to make us ethical creatures.

A SKETCH OF FEMININITY AND MATERNITY IN LEVINAS

Levinas’s Early Work

In Time and the Other, Levinas claims that solitude, which is “an absence of time,” is overcome in the relationship with the other.² “The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with future” (77). After a brief discussion of eros, Levinas concludes that one cannot overcome solitude via the erotic alone (84–90). The subject remains a subject; communication fails (88). Eros remains important, however, in that it leads to fecundity and “time is essentially a new birth” (81). That is, another’s natality can give one time, the future. This birth is construed as the birth of a son to a father:

How can the ego become other to itself? This can happen only in one way: through paternity. Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely whole being Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is nonetheless a stranger to me. . . . I do not have my child; I am in some way my child. But the words “I am” here have significance different from an Eleatic or Platonic significance. . . . The son is an ego, a person. Lastly, the alterity of the son is not that of an alter ego. Paternity is not a sympathy through which I can put myself in the son’s place. It is through my being, not through sympathy, that I am my son.

(91)

It is because the son is so similar to the father, because he seems to be the father himself, that the father identifies with him. However, the father also realizes that the son is not himself, he is a distinctly other person who will inhabit a future that the father will never know. This ambiguity in the relationship between father and son causes the father to recognize his own ambiguity in relationship to himself. Just as his son is both self and other to himself, so he too is self and other to himself. This is how the father discovers the truth of his subjectivity, that he is a stranger to himself.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas recognizes women more explicitly than in previous work, although little is added to the feminine role in ethics. In this later book he identifies the feminine with voluptuosity and hospitality. Feminine voluptuosity is important to ethics because its telos is the birth of the son, and this birth initiates the father into ethical responsibility. Still, the feminine beloved appears without a voice and without a face, which means, in Levinas’s scheme, that she has no ethical standing and no personhood.

The beloved is opposed to me not as a will struggling with my own or subject to my own, but on the contrary as an irresponsible animality which does not speak true words. The beloved, returned to the stage of infancy without responsibility—this coquettish head, this youth, this pure life “a bit silly”—has quit her status as a person. The face fades, and in its impersonal and inexpressive neutrality is prolonged, in ambiguity, into animality. The relations with the Other are enacted in play; one plays with the Other as with a young animal.3

In this passage, the feminine other is a plaything, not taken seriously in her face or voice, having no will, an irresponsible nonperson.

While feminine hospitality is vital to ethics, it does not admit women to participate in ethics. Hospitality is important, according to Levinas, because it prepares the place for the welcoming of the needy stranger. The woman provides that which the man has to offer—good soup, a warm fire. Yet ultimately it is the man’s place to invite the stranger into the home, while the woman remains invisible and inaudible: “And the other whose presence is discretely an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman.”⁴ Though the absent-presence of the woman is essential, she remains an ethical nonentity. She is neither receiver of the stranger, nor is she received. She sets the stage in her domestic service and then fades into the background.

In this exposition I have referred to the feminine as interchangeable with empirical women, however, feminist scholars actively debate whether or not the feminine represents women for Levinas.5 Some scholars argue that he is not referring to concrete women but to a principle that can be found, to a greater or lesser extent, in every person. There is some support for this interpretation in Ethics and Infinity (1982). Speaking of Time and the Other, Levinas says: “Perhaps, on the other hand, all these allusions to the ontological difference between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attribute of every human being.”⁶ This statement seems to indicate Levinas’s own uncertainty about the meaning of the feminine and the masculine. Even though it was spoken by Levinas eight year after the publication of Otherwise Than Being, many scholars see it as an invitation to rethink the meaning of the feminine in his work. Diane Perpich argues: “In fact, the feminine is nowhere identified by Levinas with concrete, really existing beings. It is not a set of characteristics or qualities attributed to a certain class of beings (namely, women); it is not a type, of which individual women would be tokens.”⁷

However, I argue that there are passages in which Levinas may be identifying the feminine with empirical women. Consider this translation of a quote from “Judaism and the Feminine” (1969) in which the feminine, woman, and wife are described interchangeably:

To light eyes that are blind, to restore to equilibrium . . . should be the ontological function of the feminine [du feminine], the vocation of the one “who does not conquer.” Woman [La femme] does not simply come to someone deprived of companionship to keep him company. She answers to a solitude . . . the strange flow of gentleness must enter into the geometry of infinite and cold space. Its name is woman [femme]. . . . The wife [La femme], the betrothed [fiancée], is not the coming together in a human being of all the perfections of tenderness and goodness which subsist in themselves. Everything indicates that the feminine [le feminin] is the original manifestation of these perfections, of gentleness itself, the origin of all gentleness on earth.8

La femme has been translated alternately as the wife and woman. It could also be that Levinas intended la femme as an archetypal (rather than empirical) woman. However, the translation of la femme as wife, when it is juxtaposed with fiancée, is appropriate; and this would seem to point toward actual women. Ultimately, the idea that the feminine is the origin of all gentleness on earth, whether it is intended as archetypal or empirical, is problematic is either case. I disagree with Perpich that Levinas is not describing a set of characteristics attributed to women, since his description is perfectly in line with a historical, patriarchal image of women. Real women are continually held up against these ideals. Thus, regardless of Levinas’s intention, he perpetuates a limited view of woman as nurturer, erotic beloved, idealized wife, and mother. Woman’s kindness, her passivity, and her conjugal vocation to be the precondition for all virtue.⁹ On this view, women’s engagements in activities outside the kitchen, bedroom, and nursery are a threat to the very existence of ethics; women’s submission is an ethical imperative. This becomes even more disturbing when paired with Levinas’s statements that exclude women from participation in the ethical relation. Recall that the feminine beloved’s face “fades,” that she has “quit her status as a person.”¹⁰ As Irigaray says, “For him, the feminine does not stand for an other to be respected in her human freedom and human identity. The feminine other is left without her own specific face. On this point, his philosophy falls radically short of ethics.”¹¹ If Levinas’s philosophy is to be read in this light, then it would not just be inadequate as a theory of ethics, but would be, itself, unethical. It not only validates but also enforces the traditional feminine role that has been oppressive to so many women. Moreover, since women are without a “face,” this leaves them no recourse to seek justice in response to their exploitation.

Tina Chanter acknowledges a slippage between Levinas’s references to the feminine and to women. “So while Levinas cannot be accused of definitively or intentionally marking the inferiority of the feminine sex, there are ways in which this inferiority is marked in his texts, despite his best intentions.”12 In spite of this equivocation, she believes that Levinas ultimately intends to upset the traditional values of egoism and male dominance.¹³ Donna Brody affirms that Levinas can be read along either interpretation (feminine = woman, or feminine = an aspect of everyone), but that each is problematic in its own way. If we read Levinas as referring to women when he speaks of the feminine, then we must condemn his patriarchal characterization. But if we interpret the masculine and feminine to be aspects in each of us, then he lacks any theory of sexual difference. Given Brody’s estimation that he vacillates between these two positions, it would seem that Levinas remains dually problematic for feminism.

Some scholars applaud Levinas’s ethics as providing a necessary feminine counterpoint to the overly masculine history of ethics for its emphasis on care, charity, and the home; but ultimately the concern remains that it may not be sufficiently feminist. Levinas’s account is problematic whether he intends to speak of actual women or of a feminine principle. His characterization of femininity is anachronistic; it evokes and affirms conditions that feminists have rightly denounced as oppressive. Levinas maintains that he does not want to “ignore the legitimate claims of feminism.”¹⁴ Yet I see no evidence that Levinas is even familiar with their arguments. Feminists have many landmines to negotiate within his texts because he draws on sexist portrayals of women for his characterization of the feminine. In his early works, Levinas writes from a heterosexual, patriarchal point of view.¹⁵ The significant players are all masculine; the feminine and maternal are always depicted from a masculine point of view. In Time and the Other, the father’s relationship to the son is the central human relation; woman’s most important function is to provide a son. Mothers and daughters do not participate in egoism or ambiguity, in time or the future. In this work Levinas disappoints women in the classic way, he fails to acknowledge their participation in humanity. Totality and Infinity adds little to improve this. Even though Levinas seems to try to honor women in his descriptions of hospitality, they are still regarded within their traditional restrictive role. Furthermore, his characterizations of voluptuousness are overtly sexist; insofar as the feminine beloved is voluptuous for Levinas, she has no ethical status.

Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence

In Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, ethics and the emergence of self-understanding begins with the birth of a son; in Otherwise Than Being, they begin before birth, in the maternal body. In contrast to Levinas’s previous focus on the “concrete situation” of paternity,16 he turns to maternity as a metaphor: “The evocation of maternity in this metaphor suggests to us the proper sense of oneself. The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity. In this sense it is the victim of a persecution that paralyzes any assumption that could awaken it, so that it would posit itself for itself. This passivity is that of an attachment that has already been made, as something irreversibly past, prior to all memory and recall.”¹⁷ Levinas is not referring to the fetus or child when he says that the self is passively formed via maternity in a time irrevocably lost to memory. While the mother gives physical existence to the child, the child bestows the mother with the “proper sense of oneself,” “complete being ‘for the other’” (108). It is the mother (with child) who is this absolute passivity, the “victim” who is the prototypical ethical subject, the sufferer of this inevitable amnesia; and pregnancy—“the gestation of the other in the same”—is the archetype for responsibility (105). In this view, to be a mother means to be “devoted to the others, without being able to resign,” “incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give” (105). The maternal metaphor helps Levinas to make clear how subjectivity, properly understood, is “an irreplaceable hostage”; how as ethical beings we are all victimized, held captive, and persecuted (124). He believes that serving the other in this way is not an alienation from oneself because “I am summoned as someone irreplaceable” (114). That is, ethical responsibility is the true foundation of the self; the self is epiphenomenal to its responsibility for the other. Thus, in this text, pregnancy and motherhood are the image of all ethical relations. It is significant, however, that maternity is invoked by Levinas specifically as a metaphor. Men are not excluded from these relations as women were from the “concrete situation” of paternity in the earlier works.

Why does Levinas shift his focus from paternity to maternity? In The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction, Lisa Guenther points out that by introducing maternity Levinas addresses his previous “neglect of the flesh.”18 “The maternal body gives herself, her skin stretching to make room for an Other; she not only provides but actually becomes a dwelling-place for the stranger. For Levinas, the maternal body gives despite herself, without having chosen to give.”¹⁹ It is true that the maternal body gives to the fetus without the mother needing to will it. The very calcium from her bones will be leached for the developing baby if necessary. Empirical facts such as these can support the belief that instances of involuntary generosity exist.²⁰ The example of maternity also helps Levinas to break more completely from the notion of the independently existing ego than he could before. When Levinas works from the example of the father, the subject always exists (albeit imperfectly) before the child arrives, but the mother embodies permeability to the other. In Time and the Other, the self begins in solitude until the other makes communication and, most importantly, time possible; in Totality and Infinity, the other gives one ethics and freedom. However, in Otherwise Than Being, responsibility for the other is the source of one’s own uniqueness; the child is conceived before the mother can be born.

There is no simple conclusion about the feminist (or sexist) potential of Otherwise Than Being. Initially it might appear to be a dramatic overturning of Levinas’s earlier ideas. A relational ontology takes hold. Many feminists have also proclaimed the necessity of such an ontology. Care ethicists, for one, argue that individualist notions of the self stand in stark denial of the mother-child relationship, and of the fact that our existence is dependent on others before we can even entertain the possibility of solipsism. In Otherwise Than Being, ethics and intersubjectivity seem to be a matriarchal affair. However, it is a problem that women gain their selfhood and ethical standing through bearing children. Is a woman’s identity to be entirely derivative? What about women who are childless by choice, by chance, or because of infertility? What about adoptive mothers who did not gestate the other within? Are they not models of the “proper” sense of oneself? Are women not to be as valued for their other achievements and abilities? Is their independence only a barrier to their ethical responsiveness?

Another problem with Otherwise Than Being is that its characterizations of maternity seem to be at odds with women’s reproductive freedom. For example, Sonia Sikka notes that abortion could never be ethical under Levinas’s picture of maternity: “Notice what happens, in this regard, if one introduces, into the portrait of ideal maternity painted by Levinas, the image of a woman who, in order to secure her own well-being, chooses to eject the other whom she harbors within her body. From the perspective of Levinas’s ideal mother, must not this latter woman, whether or not her choice is guaranteed by the law of the land, be judged as monstrous? It must, I think.”21 Obviously, the fact that abortion becomes a quintessentially unethical act in Levinas’s philosophy would be problematic for many feminists. (I will have more to say about this later in this chapter.) Likewise, if a woman is able to use birth control, give her children up for adoption, or even ask for help with the children, then this gives the “irreplaceable hostage” a way out of her bondage. Even when women do want children, they do not necessarily want to become their hostage. In Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, Cynthia Willett expresses concern that the figure of the mother in Levinas is one of a self-sacrificing martyr that “effaces the female self. . . . The verticality of the approach of the Other obliquely renders the mother supine before her infant’s every demand.”²² This problem is compounded by the fact that “Levinas never theorizes the maternal subject as the recipient of care.”²³

Levinas’s image of the suffering, captive mother looks even worse when we pair it with his language, which is evocative of sexual violence. As Chloé Taylor indicates:

Evoking as Cynthia Willett has noted, both the “violation” of a feminized subject and “pregnancy against one’s will,” Levinas writes that the subject has the other “in his skin,” is “penetrated-by-the-other,” and this involuntarily, “despite itself,” “a sacrificed rather than sacrificing itself.” One is “torn up from oneself in the core of one’s unity,” in a “nudity more naked than all destitution,” and “whitens under the harness” in the “form of a corporeal life devoted to expressing and giving. It is devoted, and does not devote itself.” Drawing intentionally or otherwise on metaphors of concubinism, rape and involuntary impregnation, this subject is responsible for the other who is not in “his” skin, like a phallus, like a fetus, whether or not “he” chose to have it there.24

Even if we assume that Levinas does not intend to advocate violence against women, what is to prevent his philosophy from being used to rationalize misogyny? In light of these concerns, Levinas’s nod to feminism in Time and the Other, is not very reassuring²⁵

Is it possible that, while he invokes women’s servitude as a metaphor, Levinas does not intend to enslave women or romanticize their oppression? Certainly, his supporters could argue that he does not intend to single women out. What Levinas says of the mother, he intends for every person: not just mothers’ subjectivity, but everyone’s subjectivity is derivative. It is not that women, in particular, are passive helpers, rather ethical “agency” is constituted in radical passivity and responsiveness to others. Thus, if women appear submissive in Levinas’s account, this actually demonstrates that they are ethically empowered. Levinas’s allies could argue that although women find themselves in their traditional place in Levinas’s writings, he elevates the status of these roles. In this regard, Levinas is in agreement with care ethics theorists who seek to affirm the value of feminine caretaking.²⁶

However, it is important to recognize that the call to prostrate oneself has diverse implications for people who are differently situated. While it may be a radical move to obligate a privileged person to serve others, to make this decree to an exploited person or group merely reinforces an oppressive status quo. In this regard, Levinas’s ethics can be charged with the same criticism that the valuing of “feminine tenderness” conceals a “slave morality.”²⁷ Some feminists argue that to value feminine ethics is to affirm the oppressive conditions in which they arise. In this view, women’s position of social inferiority has damaged them morally, and such women should serve primarily as cautionary tales. What of mothers who do not want to submit to the “proper sense of oneself” according to Levinas? What about women’s desires for political freedom and support in caregiving? Is it never justified to desire some independence, to have a life that is not completely commandeered by the other? Levinas might say that these women suffer from the same delusion as Western philosophy.

To be without a choice can seem to be violence only to an abusive or hasty and imprudent reflection, for it precedes the freedom non-freedom couple, but thereby sets up a vocation that goes beyond the limited and egoist fate of him who is only for-himself, and washes his hands of the faults and misfortunes that do not begin in his own freedom or in his present. It is the setting up of a being that is not for itself, but is for all, is both being and disinterestedness. . . . Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without prior commitment, is human fraternity itself, and it is prior to freedom.28

Feminists have struggled for the rights to make choices, to enjoy freedoms, to be “for-herself” in spite of the compulsion to live for others. Historically, their existence as “responsibility for others” has not been the basis for participation in “human fraternity,” but rather exclusion from it. Levinas does not acknowledge that the desire for freedom from the demands of the other is contextualized by different material, historical, and cultural situations.

The best defense for Levinas comes from Lisa Guenther’s The Gift of the Other and “‘Like a Maternal Body’: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses.” Guenther argues that Levinas is not trying to dictate women’s roles, rights, or behavior; instead, he describes some parallels between the responsibility of mothers and the obligations we all bear. She supports this conclusion through analysis of some of the biblical passages cited by Levinas.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas repeatedly invokes Isaiah 49 where God compares himself to a nursing mother.²⁹ In this verse, god is addressing Zion who has asked why God has abandoned her (Isaiah 49:14):

Can a mother forget her nursing child,

Or show no compassion for the child of

her womb?

Even these may forget,

Yet I will not forget you.

(ISAIAH 49:15)

In reassuring Zion that he will take even better care of her than a nursing mother, god speaks to her as a daughter who still needs the care of a mother. God is a feminine other to Zion and the care that he gives to her can be passed onto the next generation. The implication is that a mother’s care is received from her own mother and is to be paid forward to her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on; the mother-child relationship extends beyond the present dyad to an indefinite number of generations forward and backward.

Zion is much like the imperfect mother to whom God compares himself. She does not feel compassion for her children, she has forgotten them, and they are like strangers to her.

Then you will say in your heart,

“Who has borne me these?

I was bereaved and barren,

Exiled and put away—

So who has reared these?

I was left all alone—

Where then have these come from?”

(ISAIAH 49:21).

However, God’s extended generosity applies not only to one’s own descendents but to strangers as well. Thus God’s generosity allows Zion to care for her own children, even if they seem like strangers. Similarly, Zion can care for the stranger as though it were her own child. “In this sense God becomes for Zion like a ‘feminine Other’ in Totality and Infinity; She gives the capacity to welcome strangers whose arrival on the doorstep commands me to give beyond my present resources for hospitality.”30

Interestingly, when Levinas refers to Isaiah, he is discussing paternity, not maternity. To describe the father in Totality and Infinity, he draws on the model of a mother—Zion—who relies on the strength and compassion of god the father. For Guenther, this is key to undoing Levinas’s seeming rigidity regarding sex and gender roles: “When Levinas cites Isaiah 49 in his discussion of paternity, he makes room for a reader to suggest that the ‘father’ in paternity might also be a mother, that the ‘son’ might also be a daughter, and that the parent’s own parent, God, might be like a mother who inscribes the memory of his child on her hands, and never fails to show ‘compassion for the child of her womb.’”31

Guenther’s claim that Levinas was probably not thinking of maternity in strictly biological terms is further supported by Levinas’s references to Moses in Otherwise Than Being. The context for this discussion comes from the book of Numbers:

Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. The Lord became very angry and Moses was displeased. So Moses said to the Lord, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a suckling child, to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors’?”

(NUMBERS 11:10–12)

Moses clearly invokes motherhood as the model of responsibility. Like Zion, Moses is alienated from the people he is supposed to care for; though he did not conceive or give birth to these people, he must care for them like a mother for her baby. Guenther indicates that in these passages invoked by Levinas caring for others is not strictly mothers’ work; it is only similar to it: “In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas suggests that responsibility for the Other obligates me to bear her ‘like a maternal body’ (OB 67; AE109), even though she is a stranger whom I have ‘neither conceived nor given birth to’ (Num. 11:12, cited in OB 91; AE 145). . . . In this sense, maternity would not refer to a biological or social imperative for women to reproduce, but rather an ethical imperative for each of us to bear the stranger as if she were already under my skin, gestating in my own flesh.”32 Guenther argues that Levinas’s use of Moses also points to the multiple quasi-mothers that made Moses’ own maternity possible. First, there is god, who acts as a mother to Moses. Second, there is the pharaoh’s daughter who finds Moses as a baby and raises him like her own son. Most interestingly, even Moses’s biological mother, Jochebed, is only able raise him by acting like a mother to him. According to the narrative in Exodus, at the time Moses was born, the Israelites were beginning to outnumber their Egyptian captors. So Pharaoh ordered that newborn Israelite boys be killed. Jochebed, unwilling to kill her son, placed him in a basket that gently carried him to the river. After the pharaoh’s daughter finds and adopts Moses, she unknowingly hires the child’s biological mother as his wet nurse. Just as Ruddick claims, even Moses’s biological mother must adopt him. Among these biblical figures who hold the predictable maternal ideal, maternal responsibility is often unbidden, shifting, and unpredictable.

Guenther argues that the appearance of such a wide variety of mothers in these important biblical passages suggests that Levinas’s figure of maternity should not be thought of narrowly. She claims that Levinas denies “any strict correlation between women and mothers, or even between motherhood and responsibility.”³³ Thus, she concludes,

The maternity of Moses and of god suggests that one is not born, but rather becomes like a mother. The biological fact of incarnation in a female body need not condemn me to a destiny of childbirth, nor does incarnation in a male body free me from the responsibility of bearing the Other “like a maternal body.” In this sense, maternity becomes more than a social role or fixed biological destiny, either of which would bind the identity of women to childbirth and child rearing. By understanding maternity ethically as the embodied response to an Other whom I may or may not have “conceived and given birth to,” we recognize maternity as a locus of responsibility, without expecting women to bear that responsibility alone.³⁴

For Guenther, Levinas neither sentences women to maternity and gender-based obligations nor frees men of ethical responsibility.

Another of Guenther’s key claims is that since the ethical calling makes one like a mother, then this means that the ideal of mothering need not map onto its reality. Indeed, she acknowledges that while Levinas does not characterize motherhood realistically, she considers this is an appropriate gap between what is and what ought to be:

Motherhood is not always a patient, generous, compassionate practice of ethical substitution. Maternal generosity can spill over into resentment and anger, even to the point of becoming violent. Women and men who raise children, like anyone else, have moments of impatience, fatigue, distraction, selfishness; these moments do not indicate a failure of particular mothers to reach the ideal of maternal sainthood, but rather a confirmation of the difficulty of ethical life and the vulnerability of human creatures who are both limited and responsible for Others who push their limits. If the human were unfailingly saintly, there would be no need for hagiography nor even for an ethics of responsibility; knowing the good, doing the good, and being good would all neatly coincide. . . . To be like a maternal body even when you are one is to admit a gap between mothering as an ethical and political practice, and the mother as an ontological, biological, or social identity. By recognizing that it is possible to be like (or also unlike) a mother even while one “is” a mother, we recognize a difference between ontology and ethics, between being and the otherwise-than-being.35

For Guenther, while we can aspire to ethical sainthood, lapses are not really a failure; they are confirmation of our all-too-human limitations. While Levinas helps us to know the good, we remain limited in how good we can actually be. Mothers, like other mortals, are imperfect, but the figure of the maternal remains instructive for Guenther. The biological relation to another is not the cause of one’s responsibility toward that other, but the gift of care that is passed from one generation to the next is the condition for the possibility of ethics. In stating that ethics is similar to the maternal relationship, Guenther argues, Levinas affirms the possibility that even a stranger can be taken in and cared for like family. As in the poignant ending of the Grapes of Wrath in which a young mother whose baby has died feeds a starving man from her breast, by making one into a mother, the child calls on a radical generosity that can be applied to the stranger.

While Guenther embraces the fallibility of mothers, nowhere does Levinas acknowledge that a mother might lose patience, act selfishly, be violent toward her children, or be limited in any way in her capacity to give. He never equivocates; the mother’s vulnerability, permeability, responsibility, and devotion are complete. In my view, this oversight is even more stark given his invocation of Zion and Moses. Both figures are fallible and unwilling mothers, but Levinas does not mention these limitations in his characterizations of maternity. On the contrary, the mother that Levinas presents is more like the god that supports Zion and Moses when they falter. She is the mother who is always compassionate and always remembers her child.

It might seem that in order to read Levinas as acceptable to feminists our best option is to claim that when he speaks of the feminine, women, and the maternal, he does not intend to invoke or implicate actual female-identified people. In fact, Levinas equivocates a great deal on this point, and arguments on both sides are probably valid. Yet, in some respects, this is beside the point. The deeper concern is that he advocates values that naturalize gendered roles as they have been prescribed by patriarchy and elevates them to an ethical imperative.

As I argued in chapter 3, mothers’ feelings toward their children are much more complex than Levinas would have us believe. Although he attempts to illuminate the meaning of maternity in Otherwise Than Being, his ignorance of the conflicts between mother and child is striking. Nevertheless, it could be argued that Levinas’s use of maternity is only metaphorical: he does not overtly claim to give an accurate description of maternal experience; thus it is inappropriate to critique him on this basis.³⁶ In contradicting this claim, Jacques Derrida’s analysis of philosophical uses of metaphor in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” is helpful. As Derrida asserts, the philosophical use of metaphor is never neutral; philosophers actively establish the meaning of the metaphors they employ.

Derrida argues that, in philosophy, a metaphor “promises more than it gives.”37 And this is clearly the case in Otherwise Than Being, where the metaphorical characterization of motherhood obscures its actual complexity in favor of an obfuscating and worn-out straw figure. Derrida argues that such figures are treated as modes of expression of the idea, but in fact they have a history of their own.³⁸ In fact, the biblical mothers are not, as Levinas treats them, evidence of their lasting truth. They are examples of a historical understanding of motherhood, which, in this case, reveals that certain one-sided tropes of maternity are very long-standing indeed. They cannot be relied on to provide the truth of motherhood, but are instead evidence of past attitudes and impressions.

Derrida claims that when philosophers use metaphors they are not used as mere ornaments; they are treated as an essential, internal link to the phenomenon they are used to elaborate.³⁹ This is definitely true in Levinas’s case. He practices a circular hermeneutics between his notions of motherhood and ethical subjectivity in which elaboration on one phenomenon is also intended to elucidate the other. In the end, we “know” motherhood differently than we initially did, and, to a great extent, this is overdetermined by Levinas’s theory of subjectivity. The image he presents of motherhood is really a concealed metaphysics, an essentialist depiction of motherhood. Levinas has not so much unveiled a truth as he has created one.

Especially given his apparent ignorance of the complexities of motherhood, it is disturbing that Levinas appropriates the maternal perspective and attributes it to all ethical beings. Derrida poses this concern in speaking of Levinas’s quotation of the Song of Songs, “[the] phrase translated and quoted . . . it is torn from the mouth of a woman, so as to be given to the other. Why doesn’t he clarify that in this work?”⁴⁰ This question could be directed to the references to Zion as well. Guenther also mentions this worry with regard to the use of Moses: “We could argue that by referring to Moses as an example of maternity—especially in the absence of any female examples of maternity—Levinas appropriates the female capacity to give birth to the male body.”41 This anxiety is put most vehemently by Donna Brody: “It might also be objected that the female capacity for child-bearing is poached, colonized, and substituted from her to him where it figures as a kind of agamic or parthenogenic [sic] reproduction of other-in-the-same. In other words, she may be read as redetermined according to the most eminent meaning—or she may be read as altogether obliterated, exiled even from the significance of maternity.”⁴²

It is a common and tiresome practice of male philosophers, poets, and other meaning makers to borrow the experiences of women via metaphor. In Beauvoir’s “Myth” chapter in The Second Sex, she gives innumerable examples of how men make woman the other, then identify with that otherness. At least since Plato’s Theaetetus, maternal experience has been exemplary for philosophy, and yet has been appropriated in a way that excludes women from that which they represent. (Women only give birth to bodies, while men give birth to ideas.) Male philosophers have displayed their womb envy in a manner that denigrates the unique capacities of female bodies. A slightly more authentic response than this reaction formation can be seen in the essay “Yogurt Couvade” by Rob Hardy as he describes the experience of observing his pregnant partner’s body:

She crossed the room, loose-jointed and front-heavy, and lifted the yellow maternity blouse up over her head. She looked like a daffodil gone to seed, the withered corona twisting above a plump ovary bursting with seed. As she dropped her blouse into the laundry basket, the brown line under her belly button reminded me of the rust stain in the bathtub stretching from leaky faucet down to the drain. Her body itself was a living metaphor, a noun curled up inside another noun. It was only by metaphors that I could relate to the experience of pregnancy. As a man, I could never experience the thing itself, from the inside; I could only press my hand against the skin of metaphor.⁴³

Hardy claims that it is only through metaphor that men may understand the experience of pregnancy, but this is not fully the case. They may also understand it by asking and listening to women themselves. When philosophers make metaphors about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, divorced from any serious dialogue with those who have lived through it, they don’t come to understand women’s bodily experience, they appropriate it, and often very poorly.

Ultimately, one should approach Levinas’s maternal metaphor with skepticism, but this is not to say that Levinas is of no use to feminists and others interested in maternal ethics. As Guenther points out, to be like a maternal body is to have dependents that are very hard to shake. The fetus is the vampiric primal parasite—a profound dependency that can suck the nutrients from one’s blood—that suggests the grasping and bottomless needs of others. The biblical quotes referenced by Levinas demonstrate the frustration one might feel at the burden of responsibility for others even though Levinas’s passages on maternity do not directly thematize this problem. Oddly enough, he is most helpful in understanding mothering when he is either not speaking directly of mothers, women, or the feminine or when they are only implied peripherally. One example is his theory of an ambiguous intersubjectivity that is a more accurate reflection of mothers’ lives, as discussed previously in chapter 3.

AMBIGUOUS INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN LEVINAS

Proximity and Subjectivity

In Otherwise Than Being Levinas denies the idea that subjectivity is primarily self-coincidence or self-knowledge and posits that “a subject is a hostage.”⁴⁴ For Levinas, subjectivity is incarnate consciousness; it is exposure and proximity to sensibility and to the other.⁴⁵ The other is not just another point of view, but a primordial disturbance in my appropriation and enjoyment of the world. Levinas’s subject is radically open, destabilized, and, above all, vulnerable. Even sensibility is a radical disruption of the self: “[Sensibility] is being torn up from oneself, being less than nothing, a rejection into the negative, behind nothingness; it is maternity, a gestation of the other in the same.”⁴⁶ For Levinas, to be a subject is to be incessantly undermined by one’s proximity to the other. While some may find Levinas’s language hyperbolic, it has much in common with firsthand accounts of motherhood. As explained in chapter 3, mothers frequently find themselves hostages to their children. A mother sometimes experiences her child as a monstrous Other who keeps her captive, threatens her body, eats away at her vitality, upsets her sense of self, invades her home, and commandeers her life. In many respects, the birth of the child is the death of the mother as she has known herself.

According to Levinas, proximity to the other is substitution, giving one’s material substance to the other, putting myself in her place not as an alter ego, but as the food in her stomach. And my obligation to feed the other is absolute. If we are to understand Levinas concretely, proximity begins in the intertwining of bodies. In pregnancy and nursing, the mother’s bodily boundaries expand to include another. Her body, her blood, and much of her food become sustenance for the other. Yet mothering remains an embodied experience, even beyond these short stages. As argued in chapter 3, older children—adult children as well—get under their mother’s skin in both positive and negative ways.

Proximity describes the way the other draws me toward her, to provide for her, to give over myself. Yet, for Levinas, it extends beyond mere physical contact or seeing the other, beyond “handshakes, caresses, struggle, collaboration, commerce, conversation,”⁴⁷ beyond consciousness or knowledge. This undermining proximity can even persist in spite of a child’s death. Recall the mother in chapter 3 who describes her experience of her adult child’s death: “‘A woman named Elizabeth Stone wrote that having a child is ‘to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,’ Suzanne says. ‘That’s what becoming a parent is like. And now I’ve lost that piece of myself.’”⁴⁸ Like this woman, Levinas describes the other as the pulsing of breath and heartbeat: “the body which makes giving possible makes one other without alienating. For this other is the heart, and the goodness of the same, the inspiration or the very psyche in the soul.”⁴⁹ This statement seems sentimental enough to be embroidered on a pillow. But in fact it is gruesome and cruel for another to be one’s heart, goodness, breathe, psyche, and soul. All that might serve as the center of oneself belongs to another. It is to have one’s vital organs outside one’s body exposed to all the cruelty and indifference in the world, to be “an open cauldron of blood.”50 To become a mother is to be turned inside out and never to be quite right-side in again. According to Levinas, there is no “right-side in;” there is no subject that exists before vulnerability to others. The self only arises in relation to others; there is no preexistent, pure self to return to. Thus, to revert to oneself, to try to find oneself as autonomous, would be to find no self at all; “to revert to oneself . . . is to be like a stranger.”⁵¹

Alterity, Ethics, and Freedom

While it is as near as any intimacy, proximity occurs across an abyss and cannot overcome the insurmountable alterity of the other. Describing the encounter with radical alterity is a central focus in Totality and Infinity. Levinas explains that the face of the other indicates the presence of an unknown infinity. Realized suddenly, it provides an abrupt leap of understanding. However, this understanding is not knowledge of the person, as though one suddenly knows what that person is about. On the contrary, it is an awareness that one does not know, that this person is wholly other to oneself, utterly unique. The other’s infinity is always more than one comprehends it to be. When one sees the other as a body, a personality, a set of thoughts, symptoms, behaviors, attitudes, or feelings, these are signs of an unreachable world. According to Levinas, to have a proper respect for the other means to recognize that one can never fully know him. The mere presence of the other challenges the free reign of one’s spontaneity, because when one moves about the world without regard for the other, one bumps into her. Thus the face tells us that to be impetuous is to be violent. The face exposes the other to us. To expose another is to leave him in a dangerous situation; to expose a baby means to leave it outside to die. Thus the other’s face reveals him to us, but he is revealed as unprotected. For this reason, Levinas says “the epiphany of the face is ethical.”⁵² The appearance of infinity in the face is accompanied by the awareness of vulnerability and thus the call to be ethical.

Mothers provide numerous accounts of the ethical epiphany of the face. In Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, Brooke Shields describes the moment when she felt suddenly compelled to protect and care for her daughter:

At the hospital exit, as expected, we were met by cameras and comments. The photographers asked the baby’s name and tried to get a close-up of our five-day-old daughter. I was struck by how much of an intrusion this was. I was accustomed to it, but it felt different where she was concerned. It felt extremely personal and even more invasive. Suddenly I didn’t want them to know her name, nor did I want the cameras in her little face. I regretted putting her through this but felt as if I didn’t have a choice. A wave of fear washed over me, and I instantly thought something was going to happen to her out there. I sought the refuge of the locked car. Rowan didn’t cry once. As I entered the waiting vehicle, a smile frozen on my face, Rowan looked straight up at me as if to say, “Mom, these people are too close.” I looked down at her and was taken aback by the directness of her gaze. Once again, she seemed wiser than I felt. Silently I made a promise to protect her.53

Shields’s daughter is exposed by the cameras. They reveal both the vulnerability and the wisdom that are displayed on her face, and, in Levinas’s terms, Rowan’s infinity calls Shields to protect her.

Eva Kittay describes a similar experience in “‘Not My Way Sesha, Your Way, Slowly’: ‘Maternal Thinking’ in the Raising of a Child with Profound Intellectual Disabilities.” Kittay describes an interaction between her disabled daughter Sesha and Sesha’s caregiver Peggy. Peggy had not wanted to take the job, but agreed to a trial week. During this week, Peggy was working on some exhausting physical therapy with Sesha:

I sat her down in her stroller and sat down on a park bench. I realized I was simply too exhausted from the effort. I thought, how am I going to do this? How can I possibly do this job? When I looked down at Sesha and saw her little head pushed back against her stroller moving first to one side then to another. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Until I traced what her eyes were fixed on. She had spotted a leaf falling, and she was following its descent. I said ‘Thank you for being my teacher, Sesha. I see now. Not my way, your way, slowly.’ After that I fully gave myself over to Sesha. That forged the bond.54

In both these accounts the women feel compelled to care for the child after witnessing the child’s vulnerability and uniqueness. As Levinas predicts, the child herself induces the mothering person to care. Their vulnerability has a certain power: “Infinity presents itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyzes my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution.”⁵⁵ George Kunz has named this phenomenon “the paradox of power and weakness.”⁵⁶ The weak person is powerful because she calls the powerful to respond to her needs. “The child and the ill person calling me to their aid, those suffering poverty inspiring my compassion, even the irresponsibility of an enemy urging me to help them become responsible points to this paradox.”⁵⁷ In this sense the ethical person is rendered passive by the other. This susceptibility compels protection. Sesha’s observance of the leaf and the expression of wisdom in Rowan’s eyes are indications of their unique perceptions of the world, suggestions of an inaccessible infinity. For Levinas, to have a proper respect for the other means to recognize that one can never fully know her. In both cases the mothering person witnesses something in the face of the child—wisdom, intentionality, and also vulnerability. This epiphany compels her to give herself over, to promise to protect.

According to Levinas, we are constantly constrained and motivated by others. Yet this does not mean that we are not free. No person is a sovereign subject, and the ability to assert one’s will against others is domination, not freedom. Instead he argues that freedom is made possible by ethical responsibility. “Conscience . . . is the revelation of a resistance to my powers that does not counter them as a greater force, but calls in question the naïve right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being. Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent.”⁵⁸ Ethics is freedom called into question, but freedom is also defined by the opportunity to be ethical. Freedom begins when one suspends her rights in favor of another, when he controls his caprices, when she restricts her reign. Freedom is not an exertion of power, but the exercise of restraint. And this possibility for ethical freedom is not recognized until one notices that one has already violated the other. Levinas writes: “The first consciousness of my immorality is not my subordination to facts, but to the Other, to the Infinite.”59 The other causes me to realize my “moral unworthiness,”⁶⁰ that I have already harmed her; thus the possibility of restrained freedom becomes possible. It is the reconfiguring of “innocent spontaneity” as arbitrary, violent, and shameful. This is a paradoxical opportunity; one’s response to the other is not enforced, but it is coerced by her vulnerability. In Shields’s case, as for many others, she cares for her daughter even when the difficulty of doing so leads her to suicidal and murderous thoughts.

Peggy’s choice to become Sesha’s caregiver was also freely obligatory. In caring for Sesha, she enters voluntary servitude. Kittay says that Peggy had not wanted to take the job, but that by the end of the one-week trial “it was already nearly too late to quit. Sesha had worked her way into Peggy’s heart.”⁶¹ As Kittay describes it here, Peggy’s commitment to Sesha was not a simple choice. She had not wanted to take the job, and it was not forced on her, yet she felt compelled to take it. Her adoption of Sesha, in Ruddick’s terms, had an odd temporality to it. “It was already nearly too late too quit.” In fact, the time to commit or quit would have been right then, at the end of the one-week trial. While she could point to a moment of commitment—when she witnessed Sesha’s infinity—it was also as though the obligation began before any deliberate or reflective choice.

The awkward temporality of adoption, whether by a biological parent, a paid caregiver, or a legally adoptive parent, describes for Levinas the temporal structure of all ethical commitment. He does not think that responsibility arises from commitment, but that commitment already presupposes obligation. “The relationship of proximity . . . [is] anachronously prior to any commitment.”⁶² Ambiguous intersubjectivity, characterized by both proximity and alterity, is obligation. And obligation is perpetually anachronistic; its time is never the present. Indeed, this could also be said of Shields’s commitment to Rowan. When she pledges to care for Rowan outside the hospital, she is already obligated to her. But when did this obligation begin? When she decided to conceive? When she began fertility treatments? When Rowan was conceived? When she was born? There is no clear answer, no clear origin for her obligation. “This is an anarchic plot, for it is neither the underside of a freedom, a free commitment undertaken in a present or a past that could be remembered, nor slave’s alienation, despite the gestation of the other in the same, which responsibility for the other signifies” (105). Obligation is an-archic; it is without arché. An arché establishes the beginning of linear time, but we are always already within time. We cannot witness the arché.

For Levinas, proximity and alterity form an irresolvable ambivalence, “not a dialectical unity of unity and difference” (83). Proximity cannot overcome alterity; alterity cannot abolish proximity. Dialectical unity is a mere exercise of reason (84), but the relation to the other precedes and defies reason. This ambivalence is “the thorn in the flesh of reason, which is the shudder of subjectivity” (84). Subjectivity seeks unity with itself; it seeks understanding, but self-coherence would eliminate the necessary intrusion of the other. As there is no unity with oneself, there is also no unity to be found with the other; this would imply reciprocity between two equal terms—self and other. But the relationship to the other is always asymmetrical, “going to the other without concerning oneself with his movement toward me” (84). The other and oneself are not two magnets that are mutually drawn to one another. The other is a magnet that draws oneself, an uncharged piece of metal, closer. Yet, despite this attraction, these two never overcome the chasm of alterity. According to Levinas, the allure of ethics is never satiated.

ETHICAL AMBIVALENCE

Levinas thinks that the other appears to be in conflict with the self when one understands the self through enjoyment and self-creation (72–73). From this perspective, alterity is the interruption of self-fulfillment and nourishment. Levinas illustrates this repeatedly with the example of taking the bread from one’s own mouth to feed another. To be sure, mothers frequently blame an inability to nurture themselves (both literally and metaphorically) for the loss of their independent selves. Recall Naomi Wolf’s lament for “the self that is not food for others,63 but eats and drinks the world” and Jane Lazarre’s “mother knot”:

I turned to that self inside of me, that girlwoman who had once been all I needed to know of myself, whom I had fought to understand, to love, to free—I turned to her now and I banished her. Into a protective shell tied in a knot, she retreated, four, five, six times a day, whenever Benjamin wanted to nurse. Soon, even when I sought her, she would not come, but began to stay out of reach longer and longer, sometimes not reappearing for whole days. For if she was present when the baby needed me, she was of necessity pushed aside, sent to go hungry. She who had been in my life, whom I know I had to nourish daily in order to be fed in return, hid for weeks, hoarding her gentleness and her strength, placing no gifts in my outstretched hands.⁶⁴

The part of one’s identity that finds itself in satisfaction of its own needs, in the “singularization” of the ego, encounters the needs of others to be an intrusion.⁶⁵ As I demonstrate in chapter 3, mothers frequently set aside self-creation, fulfillment, and expression to respond to their children’s needs, and, as Levinas predicts, it is a responsibility that cannot easily be shifted to another. Yet, for Levinas, the self that mourns her lost independence has a mistaken view of freedom; we are only free insofar as we are ethically obligated to others.

Although we may remember a commitment made to the other, the obligation that is its origin is immemorial. This emphasizes the passivity of the ethical “agent,” but it also stresses that the obligation arising from the other’s face is not causal. Causal relationships presuppose a linear temporality, but obligation does not submit to this temporality. Ethical obligation has no present, it has always already happened. So, although we are compelled by it, we are not determined by the face of the other. The opportunity to be ethical establishes freedom, and with this freedom comes the possibility to abandon or even to murder.

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes murder as a paradoxical power. Murder seeks to annihilate the other, but the other’s face “expresses my moral impossibility of annihilating.”66 This “impossibility” is not complete; it contains within it the option to kill. Yet it remains unclear in Levinas’s philosophy how murder can actually occur. In “Peace and Proximity” he writes: “By starting with this extreme straightforwardness of the face of the other (autrui), we have previously been able to write that the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’ The face which already accuses me makes me suspicious but already claims me and demands me.”⁶⁷ On the one hand, it is because violence would be so easy that the command “thou shalt not kill” makes sense. The other’s vulnerability, therefore, is no straightforward call to be ethical. We may want to make way for the passing cyclist and also to push him down. We may want to soothe the crying baby and also toss her out the window. Mothers are often shocked by their desire to do violence to their children, especially when they are small and defenseless, but weakness can inspire malice as well as nurturance. On the other hand, according to Levinas, the impulse to harmonious coexistence is more fundamental: “War presupposes peace, the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the Other; it does not represent the first event of the encounter.”⁶⁸ He thinks that one does not usually feel hostile toward the other; that existence does not chafe us. Pacifism, not murder, is precedent. To say that war presupposes peace begs the question; it does not explain how violent impulses can be overcome.

In these passages Levinas seems to deny the fact that ethical living is often a struggle. Certainly his language is the language of struggle, and it would not be accurate to say that he is dismissive of the devastating impact of the other’s demands. Yet his simple assertion that war presupposes peace seems rather weak when juxtaposed with mothers’ accounts of murderous rage. Although he understands that maternity involves sacrifice, that it undoes a person at both visceral and metaphysical levels, he is relatively unconcerned with the devastation caused by the demands of the other. In his account the mother is always compassionate, she always remembers and cares for her child. In this respect, Levinas thinks that ethics is not really a struggle at all, that there should be no maternal ambivalence. In his model, then, mothers ought to be rather poor ethical exemplars. At this point, we are compelled to return to the earlier question of whether or not Levinas is describing what is or what ought to be. Is he describing the way mothers are, even if incompletely? Or is he describing the way that they should be, even if his demands are impossible?

It is a common and justifiable reading of Levinas to consider his work as descriptive phenomenology. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Bettina Bergo begins her discussion of Levinas as follows:

Levinas’s philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas’s philosophy is not an ethics. Levinas claimed, in 1961, that he was developing a “first philosophy.” This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however. It is an interpretive, phenomenological description of the rise and repetition of the face-to-face encounter, or the intersubjective relation at its precognitive core; viz., being called by another and responding to that other. . . . He proposes phenomenological description and a hermeneutics of lived experience in the world. He lays bare levels of experience described neither by Husserl nor by Heidegger. These layers of experience concern the encounter with the world, with the human other, and a reconstruction of a layered interiority characterized by sensibility and affectivity.69

If we are to take Levinas as an existential phenomenologist, as describing intersubjectivity and its implications for ethics, then he does capture the intersubjective ambiguity between mother and child, but he does not recognize that infinite demands actually deplete us, making it difficult or impossible to serve the other. His attitude is reminiscent of Melanie Klein, who claims that a girl’s desire for a baby, present from early childhood, diminishes the aggressive tendencies she might feel toward her actual baby. Her child’s helplessness and vulnerability fulfill her lifelong desire to offer “more love than can be given to any other person.”70

Perhaps Levinas slips between describing the world as it appears and as it should be. As Lisa Guenther argues, there may be an appropriate gap between what is and what ought to be.⁷¹ This is also a viable interpretation, as there is much in Levinas that is not verifiable through phenomenological description. Consider the fact that, for Levinas, our responsibility for the other is infinite. Most people hold that there are limits to one’s responsibility for others. One can only be responsible for what one is aware of and when one has the power and resources to help; it is fair to weigh one’s own well-being against what would be sacrificed for the other; we cannot be responsible for what others choose to do. In short, people generally believe that what we should do is limited by what we can do. The question of what we can do may be addressed empirically. However, for Levinas, the ought exceeds the can and is therefore outside the purview of descriptive phenomenology.

Yet if Levinas describes an ideal to which mothers can aspire, then he lets us down in this regard as well. Idealizations of mothering only make its practice that much more difficult. When mothers think they should be able to give to their children infinitely and are unable to do so (as no human could), they feel guilty, angry, worthless, ashamed, depressed, and fearful of the judgment of others. These feelings paralyze mind and body, making it difficult to respond to one’s child at all, let alone appropriately. As Alice Miller writes in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence: “I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me.”⁷² Levinas’s denial of maternal ambivalence, or any substantial ethical conflict, takes him too far from what is to help us with what ought to be. His idealization of maternal sainthood is out of touch with the struggles of mothers, and this will only be counterproductive. What is more helpful to women is an accurate understanding of their own experiences; for this the maternal icon must be dethroned.

In Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, Rozsika Parker describes ambivalence as an achievement that can ultimately enhance the mother’s responsivity to her child. However, this requires that she let go of the maternal ideal and recognize her own limitations in the face of the tremendous weight of her responsibility. One mother, Selma, attests to this: “Last week when he wouldn’t stop crying, I shook him, which I know is a really bad thing to do. Afterwards I thought about it, and found myself admitting, really for the first time, the full weight of his dependence on me—acknowledging that the baby is entirely dependent on me for twenty-four hours a day—and what a huge drain that is. The funny thing is that since then his crying has not got to me in the same way.”73

As Selma lets go of the maternal ideal and its accompanying guilt, she recognizes her own limitations. This diminishes her hostility toward her son and enables her to respond more appropriately to his needs. Parker states: “I think the conflict between love and hate actually spurs mothers on to struggle to understand and know their [child]. In other words, the suffering of ambivalence can promote thought—and the capacity to think about the baby and child is arguably the single most important aspect of mothering.”⁷⁴ Thoughtful recognition of one’s limitations as a mother is essential to a practical ethical response to one’s child. Yet, as I will argue, deliberation is a critical dimension of ethical life that Levinas mistakenly denies in his emphasis on the passivity of ethical responsiveness.

Understanding maternal ambivalence is not only necessary to the psychological well-being of individual women. There is a political dimension to the naturalizing of maternal care as well. By eliminating any sense of conflict that mothers might justifiably feel against their children, Levinas supports a status quo that demonizes women who fail at mothering. In “Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment,” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes the persecution of women in the courts and the media who may have been responsible for the deaths of their perinatal infants. One example is “Marlene Harris,” a twenty-five-year-old maid. She had planned to give her baby up for adoption, but was having second thoughts at the time labor began. She was afraid that the baby would be taken away from her before she got to hold him. Instead of driving to the hospital, she went to a motel where she gave birth alone. Cold and disoriented after giving birth, she got into a warm bath with the baby and fell asleep. The baby drowned. Tsing also describes the case of “Donna Sloan,” a nineteen-year-old college student who gave birth to her baby in her dormitory bathroom. She had not realized she was pregnant and thought that her labor pains were gas. The baby was stillborn. At the heart of the legal cases against each of these women was the assumption that she should have “direct intuitive knowledge gained from her bodily experiences. Within this convention, a woman unaware of her pregnancy or labor must be a physical or psychological anomaly.”75 The courts and media believed that Donna Sloan could not have been unaware of her pregnancy and Marlene Harris had to have known she put her baby at risk by getting into the bath with him. Maternal instinct should have alerted them to the correct course of action. Thus, they wondered: “What kind of a woman could endanger her own offspring at the moment of birth, the moment which should excite her most maternal sentiments? This question generated its own answer: Only a person completely lacking in parental—and human—sensibilities could commit such an act. To those who considered their cases, these women were, as one prosecutor put it, ‘unnatural,’ ‘bizarre,’ and ‘without basic human emotion.’”⁷⁶ The accusation that women like Sloan and Harris are “without basic human emotion” is the flip side of the claim that mothers are, or should be, always able to respond appropriately to their children.

Levinas denies that there are any practical limitations in women’s abilities to care for their children. Yet there are innumerable factors that play into this capacity to care for another, including the material, physical, and psychological. Decent caregiving takes skill, thought, emotional intelligence, and resources. Recognition of these necessities is absolutely critical to providing proper support for mothers and children. In many cases the abuse, neglect, and abandonment of children is a failure of the social system that ought to support mothering work, not a failure of mothers themselves. For example, currently in Great Britain decreased social support for families with disabled children has put many families in the tragic position of having to place their disabled children in institutions. Riven Vincent, a mother of a child with severe quadriplegic cerebral palsy and epilepsy, was recently quoted in the Guardian as saying: “I have no wish to put my daughter into a home. We want to look after her, all I am asking for is a little more support. Without this we simply cannot cope and nor can families up and down the country just like ours.”77 In order for children to receive proper care in our society, the limitations of mothers absolutely must be recognized.

When mothers lack the resources to care for a child, giving that child up may be an important act of ethical mothering. The options available to some women (alternatives that Levinas denies) include giving a child up for adoption or having an abortion. In “Abortion Is a Motherhood Issue,” Judith Arcana argues that when a woman has an abortion she is not eschewing accountability; she is, in fact, taking responsibility for the life of her child:

[Women] considered the conditions surrounding the mother, and the probability of her child’s life being a strong one, including joy, good work, health, maturity, and usefulness. In their considerations then, as now, women sometimes judged that that probability was too slight, uncertain or simply absent. Their choices, like our own when we abort were never made in a vacuum; even in our time, in this woman-hating, mother-blaming society, there is always the decision made on balance, weighing both the potential years of the child’s life and the mother’s struggle to nurture it against great odds.⁷⁸

Sometimes it is simply not possible for a mother to provide for a child’s well-being. Ending a new life, instead of leaving it to an existence of pain, may be the most ethical choice. Above all, the choice to have an abortion is not a means to escape responsibility; many women find it to be the best way to meet their obligations. In Levinas’s universe, we are not allowed to think about our limitations in caring for others, and so these factors never come into play.

Levinas’s metaphorical use of the maternal body as a model for ethics is obsolete in the face of some women’s abilities to have abortions, use birth control, or give their children up for adoption. He prefers the image of the maternal body since it gives without willing to give. We need not dispense with the idea that the obligation to care begins before deliberation, but this is an insufficient account of ethical motivation. The ethical response does not always take the form of an epiphany. The daily drudgery and joys of mothering require all of one’s creativity and deliberation. It requires a daily commitment that is usually more mundane than transcendent, but Levinas does not speak to the earthly tedium of breasts leaking milk at inopportune moments, the smells of dirty diapers and sweaty socks, and fights over appropriate clothing and curfews.

It is not getting pregnant that makes one a mother, in this way being like a maternal body is not a comprehensive image for ethical responsibility. Being pregnant does not necessarily compel one to take care of a child. It is the daily commitment to take care of a child that makes a woman (broadly defined) into a mother. Importantly, this expands the idea of who can be considered a mother. A woman who gives up her child for adoption or has an abortion can still be regarded as a mother, if she does so with a sense that this is the best way to provide for her child. Adoptive mothers are just as authentic as those who give birth to their children and perhaps provide a better metaphor of ethical responsibility. People seem more willing to understand the adoptive child as initially a stranger toward whom one might have mixed feelings, but for whom one feels drawn to care due to her vulnerability. Adoption asserts that choice is involved in the care of a child; it is not automatic, immediate, or grounded in maternal instinct. As Kittay says, it is a bond, a duty, and a commitment all in one. It is both voluntary and compelled, both reasoned and felt. Of course, Ruddick’s solution might not appeal to Levinas, since his vision of a subject as a hostage means that she is “obsessed with responsibilities which did not arise in decisions taken by a subject ‘contemplating freely.’”79 The paradigm of adoption might make it clearer that an epiphany is an insufficient motivation for ongoing commitment to care for another.⁸⁰ While Ruddick wants to ally ethical behavior with ethical thought, Levinas seems largely indifferent to this. Yet maternal experience with the phenomenon of adoption confirms that a conscious commitment to the other works in concert with the repeated realization of the other’s infinity and vulnerability as well as other factors. There is no reason why we must affirm epiphany at the cost of denying the centrality of deliberation and daily commitment to ethical life.

Levinas’s account of ambiguous intersubjectivity is, in some aspects, accurate to the experience of mothers. Ethical obligation indicates the limits of self-knowledge and disrupts the complacence within ourselves. It is an interruption of personal projects and aspirations. It shows how we are deeply indebted to others, not just as a baby is indebted to his mother, for providing for our needs, securing our survival, and flourishing. We are also indebted to those who need us, those who interrupt our flourishing, our enjoyment, and compel us to face our responsibility to others. Ultimately, ethics can lead us to a more robust identity, an identity that is not just seeing who we expect to see when we look in the mirror and finding a consistent unity across time. Others force us to recognize that we must continually take up the question Who am I? As Levinas says, “The oneself is a creature, but an orphan by birth or an atheist no doubt ignorant of its Creator, for if it knew it it would again be taking up its commencement.”81 We are all infants in the sense defined by Winnicott, one who “cannot understand what he owes to his mother.”⁸² True, we cannot fathom what we owe our mothers, but we also cannot comprehend what we owe the other who upsets our self-satisfaction.

While some scholars applaud Levinas’s ethics as replacing a tradition of individualism with a relational ontology, as providing a necessary feminine counterpoint to the overly masculine history of ethics, the concern remains that it may not be sufficiently feminist. In Levinas’s account women gain selfhood and ethical status in their roles as housekeepers, lovers to men, and mothers. He has been thoroughly and rightly criticized by feminists for these failures and therefore no simple appropriation of his ideas is possible. If Levinas’s hagiography is meant to show us the way to be good mothers, then his efforts are also potentially destructive. It is more helpful to mothers to understand the reality of their situation, and, while Levinas’s account of ambiguity does contribute to this aim, his ignorance of maternal ambivalence does not.

Unfortunately, Levinas appropriates the maternal perspective without consideration of the experience for actual women. Careful attention to the phenomenon might have helped him to avoid his easy appropriation of patriarchal values. Instead, he ignores vital aspects of maternity that are part of all of ethical life—the desire to flee from one’s obligations, fantasies of murder and suicide, and feelings of rage. Mothers have the intense desire to protect, to even sacrifice themselves for their children, but these same children can become sacrificial victims both in fantasy and on suburban front lawns. Even when a mother loves her child as deeply as Levinas predicts, this does not eliminate the intensity of her conflicted feelings. Mothers do have an individuated sense of self that existed before the birth of the child and that does not exist only to serve, but also to flourish in and of itself. And the flourishing of a woman can sometimes be at odds with the raising of children, even when it is also necessary to it. Levinas’s philosophy could be amended by taking adoption as the paradigm example. This removes the assumption that mothers will be the automatic and natural caregiver. In this view, all children are strangers—orphans in need—and their care is not to be taken for granted by anyone.

Levinas believes that conflicts of interests can be resolved by yielding to the Other; the self has no robust ethical standing. To take this stance is to ignore one of his own best insights, our simultaneous proximity and distance. If we take seriously the intertwining of self and other, it is not possible to simply put the other before oneself. An unbalanced asymmetry renders ethics impossible, especially when there is no broader context of social support. He misses the important insight, articulated by Kittay and other care ethicists, that the caregiver must be provided for. In order to be edible, one must also eat. Levinas is missing several critical components that can be furnished by Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir: a more careful logic of ambiguous intersubjectivity, an understanding of how asymmetrical relations can nevertheless be balanced, the factor of social context and support, and, finally, a better idea of how ethical failure relates to ethical success.