1. MAD MOTHERS, BAD MOTHERS, AND WHAT A GOOD MOTHER WOULD DO
1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110416/ap_on_he_me/us_when_mothers_kill.
2. Meyer and Oberman, Mothers Who Kill Their Children, 93.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mother-drowns-kids-20110414,0,221941.story.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110416/ap_on_he_me/us_when_mothers_kill.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. For examples see LaChance Adams and Lundquist “Introduction: The Philosophical Significance of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering,” 3–5.
11. For further examples of feminist phenomenologists see ibid., 13–15.
12. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, vii.
13. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 62.
14. Fisher, “Phenomenology and Feminism,” 33.
15. For more details on this approach and its philosophical background see ibid., 6–13.
16. At this point we may begin to ask whether ethical ambivalence and intersubjective ambiguity exist beyond the Western context. I argue that these structures will exist wherever there is the attempt to negotiate intimacy and separation. Is there a culture on earth or in history in which this was not at issue? This is a question to answer in dialogue with anthropologists and historians. Yet even at this point there is some evidence that these findings will be relevant across cultures. According to some writings by post–World War II Japanese feminists, concerns of maternal ambivalence and intersubjective ambiguity do extend to their context. Some scholars argue that pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing have given Japanese women experiences of ambiguity and intense self-alienation such as those I have described here, which they describe as akin to the Zen realization of no-self. Sakiko, “Living as a Woman and Thinking as a Mother in Japan.” They have also claimed, as I have, that this alienation possesses a positive transformative power. Yusa, “Women Rocking the Boat.” Clearly more research would be required to fully consider the applicability of these terms to additional contexts.
17. Some will already note that I differ from scholars who claim that Levinas does not address actual mothers. I will give my full reasons for this in the chapter on Levinas.
18. I’m thinking here of care ethics, but of others as well, such as Tuana’s Women and the History of Philosophy and Pateman’s The Sexual Contract.
19. Although I don’t think that she fully agrees with me on this point, this inspiration came during a presentation by Claire Katz at the Psychology for the Other symposium at Seattle University in November 2012.
20. The idea of the “primal parasite” came to me during a reading of a paper by David Alexander Craig on primal parricide at the International Association for Environmental Philosophy, October 2012.
21. Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche, 189.
2. THE MOTHER AS ETHICAL EXEMPLAR IN CARE ETHICS
1. Jagger, “Feminist Ethics,” 81.
2. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 30.
3. Gilligan found that both men and women apply both ethical models. Although differences between the groups were not absolute, there were significant recognizable patterns of disparity.
4. Tronto, “Women and Caring,” 103.
5. Noddings is one exception to this. She believes that feminine caretaking arises from women’s “deep feminine psychological structure” and that women should “retain their natural orientation.” Meanwhile, men should not adopt women’s relational patterns but instead “bring their best human and masculine qualities to the experience of parenting.” Noddings, Caring, 129.
6. Bartky, “Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds”; Card, “Gender and Moral Luck”; MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified; Puka, “The Liberation of Caring.”
7. See especially Kittay, Love’s Labor.
8. Puka, “The Liberation of Caring,” 65.
9. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 25.
10. I find it curious that most care ethicists give very little consideration to this radical aspect of Gilligan’s work or to abortion at all.
11. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 210.
12. Ibid., 39.
13. Ibid., 218.
14. Wolff, “Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother.”
15. I’ll elaborate on the manner in which reason and passion work in concert further on in this chapter.
16. Kittay, Love’s Labor, 69.
17. Held, Feminist Morality, 196.
18. I am thinking especially of Held’s essay “Care and Justice in the Global Context” where she brings the perspective of care to provide more balanced and sensible solutions to global issues such as those considered in international relations.
19. Ruddick is one exception to this. I will explain this aspect of her account in the next chapter.
20. Held, Feminist Morality, 198.
21. As an example, consider Manninen’s “The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer.”
22. Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking, 250–251.
23. As Ruddick states: “Any idealized figure of the Good Mother casts a long shadow on many actual mothers’ lives. Our days include few if any perfect moments, perfect children perfectly cared for. . . . Many mothers who live in the Good Mother’s shadow, knowing that they have been angry and resentful and remembering episodes of violence and neglect, come to feel that their lives are riddled with shameful secrets that even the closest friends can’t share.” Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 31.
3. MOTHERHOOD’S JANUS HEAD
1. Rich, Of Woman Born, 15 and 21.
2. Quoted in Oakley, Becoming a Mother, 142.
3. Jones, “Love with Teeth,” 40–41.
4. Lazarre, The Mother Knot, 46.
5. Ibid., xxii.
6. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 120.
7. Dally, Mothers, 186.
8. Rich, Of Woman Born, 24.
9. Oakley, “Normal Motherhood,” 99.
10. Oakley, Becoming a Mother, 12.
11. Badinter, Mother Love, 4.
12. Hrdy, Mother Nature, 290.
13. “Consider early-twentieth century admission records for Broadmoor, Britain’s state asylum for the criminally insane. Forty-eight percent of the women hospitalized between 1902 and 1927 were women who had committed infanticide.” Ibid., 280. “As in much of Catholic Europe, a ruota, or rotating barrel [in which babies could be left], was installed in 1660 to replace the old marble basin at Florence’s main foundling home, the Innocenti. By 1699, however, it was necessary to place a grill across the opening to prevent parents from shoving in older children as well.” Ibid., 304.
14. Ibid., 303.
15. Parker, Torn in Two, 5.
16. Ibid., 1.
17. Ibid., 103.
18. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 202.
19. Winnicott, “Hate in Countertransference,” 201.
20. Ibid., 202.
21. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 66.
22. Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” 322.
23. Ibid., 318.
24. Both Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty rely a great deal on Deutsch’s work in their characterizations of maternal ambivalence.
25. Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, 294.
26. Freud, “A Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” 240.
27. Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” 299.
28. Freud writes: “The emotional life of man is in general made up of pairs of contraries such as these. Indeed, if it were not so, repression and neurosis would perhaps never come about.” Freud, “Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” 10:113.
29. Gendlin, “Befindlichkeit.”
30. From this point forward I will usually speak of the mother-child relationship (as opposed to mother/children). This is for the sake of simplicity, and not intended to imply that there is always necessarily only one child involved. Having more than one child obviously adds more complexity to the family dynamics. For example, sometimes a mother must decide between meeting the needs of one child versus another, or sometimes a mother’s ambivalence is split between children (one child is experienced as only loved, the other as only hated). In spite of my nominal reference to the relationship as a dyad, I will also explore the dynamics involving more than two people.
31. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 145.
32. Ibid., 142.
33. Ibid., 135–136.
34. Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 50.
35. Ibid., 160.
36. Steingraber, Having Faith, 215.
37. Simms, “Milk and Flesh,” 25–26.
38. Lazarre, The Mother Knot, 28.
39. Shields, Down Came the Rain, 81.
40. Steingraber, Having Faith, 225.
41. Moses, “A Mother’s Body,” 177.
42. Weaver-Zercher, “Afterbirth,” 42–44.
43. Steingraber, Having Faith, 248.
44. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 315, 316, 324, and 325.
45. Quoted in Ballou, The Psychology of Pregnancy, 90.
46. Stringer.
47. Quoted in Ballou, The Psychology of Pregnancy, 97.
48. Rich, Of Woman Born, 63.
49. Trevarthan, “The Self Born”; Piontelli, “Infant Observation.”
50. Stringer.
51. Bondas and Eriksson, “Women’s Lived Experiences of Pregnancy,” 836.
52. Wynn, “The Early Relationship,” 6.
53. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 90–91.
54. Simms, “Milk and Flesh,” 33–34.
55. Quoted in de Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 93–94.
56. Ibid., 94.
57. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 226.
58. Simms, “Milk and Flesh,” 31.
59. When her infant son will not stop crying at dinner, an older child gives words to what the mother is feeling. Jones, “Love with Teeth,” 40.
60. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, viii.
61. Ballou, The Psychology of Pregnancy, 161.
62. Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, 49.
63. Wolf, Misconceptions, 2–3.
64. Parker, Torn in Two, 81.
65. Ibid., 44.
66. http://www.whattoexpect.com/first-year/breastfeeding/breastfeeding-guide/tackling-the-technique.aspx (accessed December 8, 2009).
67. Wolf, Misconceptions, 200 (emphasis added).
68. Shields, Down Came the Rain, 41 and 45.
69. Quoted in Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 137. Hays remarks: “Mothers, she seems to be saying, are like confections that the kids just gobble down—and then they ask for more.”
70. Quoted in Parker, Torn in Two, 131–132.
71. Quoted ibid., 120.
72. Wolf, Misconceptions, 247.
73. Quoted in Brown et al., Missing Voices, 179.
74. Quoted in Oakley, Becoming a Mother, 144.
75. Quoted in Wolf, Misconceptions, 247.
76. Shields, Down Came the Rain, 131.
77. Quoted in Brown et al., Missing Voices, 182.
78. Lazarre, Mother Knot, 29.
79. Lamott, “Maternal Anger,” 90.
80. Kessler, “Epidemiology of Women and Depression,” 5–13.
81. Robins and Regier, Psychiatric Disorders in America; Burke et al. “Comparing Age at Onset of Major Depression”; Gaynes, “Perinatal Depression.”
82. Harris, “Biological and Hormonal”; O’Hara, Postpartum Depression.
83. Goodman, “Paternal Postpartum Depression.” Also Wolff, “Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother.”
84. See, for example, www.rainbowkids.com/expertarticledetails.aspx?id=272; www.adoptionissues.org/post-adoption-depression.html; http://library.adoption.com/articles/post-adoption-depression-.html.
85. Wolff, “Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother.”
86. Parker, Torn in Two, 5.
87. Oakley, “Normal Motherhood,” 89.
88. Ibid., 99–100; Oakley, Becoming a Mother, 13.
89. Rich, Of Woman Born, 23.
90. Quoted in Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 136.
91. Quoted in Oakley, Becoming a Mother, 252
92. Quoted in Lazarre, Mother Knott, 68.
93. Rich, Of Woman Born, 29.
94. Lazarre, Mother Knot, 28.
95. Wolf, Misconceptions, 60 and 106.
96. Ibid., 211.
97. Lazarre, Mother Knot, 50 and 56.
98. McMahon, Engendering Motherhood, 168.
99. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 49.
100. Ibid., 52.
101. Liss, “Maternal CARE,” 43–67.
102. Ibid., 65.
103. Tisdale, “Double Dare,” 253–254.
104. Moses, “A Mother’s Body,” 179.
105. Keller, “You’ll Get Used to It,” 119.
106. Moses, “A Mother’s Body,” 180.
107. Peri, “Dancing with Death,” 271.
108. Moses “A Mother’s Body,” 176.
109. Keller, “You’ll Get Used to It,” 11.
110. Chandler writes, “[Mothering] is a series of responses to the fundamental needs of another who is so interconnected with the self that there exists no definitive line of differentiation. When one mothers one is not one’s own person. This is most acute when mothering an infant. Although one is not one’s own person, one is not someone else’s person either, for the infant is both neither ‘other’ than the mother nor the same thing. . . . In summation, ‘mother’ is an identity formed through a repetition of practices which constitute one as so profoundly interconnected that one is not one, but is simultaneously more and less than one.” Chandler, “Emancipated Subjectivities,” 274.
111. Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” 39.
112. Rouch quoted ibid., 39.
113. Ibid., 41.
114. Steingraber, Having Faith, 32.
115. Ibid., 31.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., 32.
118. Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” 41.
119. Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood, 40–41.
120. Dunlop, “Child,” 105.
121. Dunlop, “Written on the Body,” 106.
122. Nemzoff, “Untitled Poem,” 20.
123. Frye. “Making a Living,” 21.
124. Chandler, “Emancipated Subjectivities,” 271.
125. Consider, for example, Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman’s The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, where they chronicle the “individuation-separation” process in infant development.
126. Rich, Of Woman Born, 36–37.
127. Parker, Torn in Two, 121.
128. Ibid., 22.
129. Smith, The Daddy Shift, 129.
130. Quoted in Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 65.
131. Ibid., 67.
132. Ibid. Next to this account, Noddings’s theory is a gross oversimplification. In particular, this statement: “Responding to my own child crying in the night may require a physical effort, but it does not usually require what might be called an ethical effort. I naturally want to relieve my child’s distress.” Noddings, Caring, 17.
133. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 199 and 200.
134. Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” in Martin Buber, 4.
135. Ibid., 6.
136. Ibid., 15.
4. MATERNITY AS VULNERABILITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Some of these ideas appeared previously in LaChance Adams, “The Pregnable Subject.”
1. This interpretation is owed, at least in part, to Nancy Tuana’s suggestions on how to “read philosophy as a woman” in Women and the History of Philosophy.
2. Levinas, Time and the Other, 57.
3. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 263.
4. Ibid., 155.
5. See, for example, Ainley, “Levinas and Kant”; Chanter, “Introduction”; Brody, “Levinas’s Maternal Method”; Perpich, “From the Caress to the Word.”
6. Levinas, Time and the Other, 68.
7. Perpich, “From the Caress,” 47.
8. Levinas, “Judaism and the Feminine,” 33, Difficile liberté, 53–54.
9. This critique is parallel to that of social contract origin myths in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract. Pateman argues that, according to social contract, it is only through subjugating a woman that a man can gain status as an individual.
10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 263.
11. Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” 113.
12. Chanter, “Introduction,” 17.
13. Chanter, “Feminism and the Other,” 36.
14. Levinas, Time and the Other, 86.
15. This problem has been thoroughly documented. See, for example: Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Bernasconi and Critchley, Re-reading Levinas; Chanter, Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas; Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress” and An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
16. Levinas, Time and the Other, 78 (emphasis added).
17. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 104.
18. Guenther, The Gift of the Other, 95.
19. Ibid., 95–96.
20. It is worth noting that many women do not experience such happenings as an example of the generosity of the maternal body, but instead as a parasitic leaching by the fetus. Furthermore, as discussed in the previous chapter, in cases of denied pregnancy, a fetus may be deprived of nutrients even when they are available. This suggests that a woman’s conscious acknowledgment of her pregnancy (even if not her deliberate choice) is central to the “generosity” of the pregnant body.
21. Sikka, “The Delightful Other,” 109.
22. Willett, Maternal Ethics, 84–85.
23. Taylor, “Levinasian Ethics,” 222.
24. Ibid., 229. Taylor quotes Willett, Maternal Ethics, 84; Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 49–51; and Levinas, Entre Nous, 49.
25. Levinas, Time and the Other, 86.
26. Some examples include Kittay, Love’s Labor; and Noddings, Caring. Still, it is important to note some important differences between these theorists, such as Noddings’s affirmation of caregiving as women’s role versus Kittay’s extension of caregiving responsibilities to men. The actual content of what is meant by the value of feminine caretaking will differ among these theorists.
27. See, for example, Bartky, “Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds”; Card, “Gender and Moral Luck”; MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified; Puka, “The Liberation of Caring.”
28. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 116.
29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 278, 267, and 277.
30. Guenther, The Gift of the Other, 92.
31. Ibid., 94.
32. Ibid., 6–7.
33. Guenther, “Like a Maternal Body,” 119.
34. Ibid., 131.
35. Ibid., 128 and 132.
36. Thanks to Lisa Guenther for pointing out this possible critique of my work.
37. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 209.
38. Ibid., 223.
39. Ibid., 221–222.
40. Derrida, “At this Moment,” 19.
41. Guenther, “Like a Maternal Body,” 124.
42. Brody, “Levinas’s Maternal Method,” 74.
43. Hardy, “Yogurt Couvade,” 22.
44. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 83, 99, 100, and 112.
45. “Sensibility is exposedness to the other.” Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 83.
48. Peri, “Dancing with Death,” 271.
49. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 109.
50. Wolf’s description of the appearance of her abdomen during her cesarean section in progress. Wolf, Misconceptions, 141.
51. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 92.
52. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.
53. Shields, Down Came the Rain, 59–60.
54. Kittay, “Not My Way Sesha,” 12.
55. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199–200.
56. Kunz, The Paradox of Power and Weakness .
57. Ibid., 133.
58. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84.
59. Ibid., 83.
60. Ibid.
61. Kittay, “‘Not My Way Sesha,” 12.
62. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 100–101.
63. Wolf, Misconceptions, 200 (emphasis added).
64. Lazarre, Mother Knot, 28.
65. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 76.
66. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 232.
67. Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” 167.
68. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199.
69. Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas.”
70. Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” 318.
71. Guenther, “Like a Maternal Body,” 128.
72. Miller, For Your Own Good, 258.
73. Quoted in Parker, Torn in Two, 23.
74. Ibid., 8–9.
75. Tsing, “Monster Stories,” 284.
76. Ibid., 283.
77. Gentleman, “Cameron to Look at Case of Mother.”
78. Arcana, “Abortion Is a Motherhood Issue,” 226.
79. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 112.
80. Consider, for example, the Tennessee woman who sent her adoptive Russian son back.
81. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 105.
82. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 202.
5. MATERNITY AS DEHISCENCE IN THE FLESH IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
1. He writes, “a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two.” Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 123.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 278.
3. Karen, Becoming Attached, 143–161; and Ainsworth et al., Patterns of Attachment.
4. Ibid.
5. Karen, Becoming Attached, 13–25; and James, Handbook for the Treatment of Attachment-Trauma.
6. De Marneffe, Maternal Desire, 90.
7. Moses, “A Mother’s Body,” 77.
8. Ibid.
9. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 119.
10. It is not entirely clear if Merleau-Ponty gets the idea that the child has an anonymous relation to the mother from psychoanalysis or if he has simply found a like-minded theory here. In “Anonymity and Sociality,” Stawarska argues that the developmental psychology of Merleau-Ponty’s day influenced his theory of intersubjectivity. “Specifically, the psychological hypothesis about the anonymous and fusional form initially taken by human sociality appears to play a determining role in his conception of interpersonal life formulated on the ontological plane” (1).
11. Simms, “Milk and Flesh,” 29. Simms cites Ayers, “Sensory Integration and the Child”; and Dennis, Children of the Creche.
12. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 100.
13. However, as I argue in chapter 2, the “integrity” of the body can vary dramatically from one person to another, both in its distinctness from others and in its sense of internal unity.
14. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 10.
15. Lisa Guenther provides a thorough account and analysis of these metaphors in her essay “The Birth of Sexual Difference.” She writes:
On a number of occasions throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty compares the relation between self and other to a pregnancy. In ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow,’ for example, he claims that ‘each one of us is pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body.’ In ‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,’ Merleau-Ponty describes the other as ‘reproduced from me,’ born through ‘that strange filiation which makes the other forever my second, even when I prefer him to myself.’” The Birth of Sexual Difference,” 89. In “Dialogue,” he asks: “To the infinity that was me something else still adds itself; a sprout shoots forth, I grow; I give birth, this other is made from my flesh and blood and yet is no longer me. How is that possible? How can the cogito emigrate beyond me, since it is me?”
Ibid., 90.
Merleau-Ponty’s use of maternity as a metaphor is not so obnoxious as with the typical philosopher, probably because Merleau-Ponty did some research on the experiences of mothers. I will refer to some of this research further on in this chapter.
16. Trevarthan, “The Self Born”; and Piontelli, “Infant Observation from Before Birth.”
17. Sears, Sears, and Holt, The Pregnancy Book; and Sears et al., The Baby Book.
18. Simms, “Milk and Flesh,” 23.
19. Ibid., 26.
20. Ibid., 27.
21. Ibid., 35.
22. Olkowski, “Only Nature Is Mother to the Child,” 51.
23. Irigaray, “The Invisible of the Flesh,” 154.
24. See Guenther quoted in “The Birth of Sexual Difference,” 88–94.
25. Butler, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description,” 95.
26. Allen, “Through the Wild Region,” 245.
27. Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins, 66.
28. Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” 155.
29. Stawarska, “From the Body Proper to Flesh,” 104, 103.
30. Ibid., 92.
31. Ibid., 93.
32. Interestingly, Levinas has the same reading of reversibility in “Intersubjectivity.”
33. Stawarska, “From the Body Proper to Flesh,” 94.
34. Stoller, “Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism,” 176.
35. Weiss, “The Anonymous Intentions of Transactional Bodies,” 194.
36. Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh,” 155.
37. See, for example, Beauvoir, The Second Sex; Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body”; Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Guenther, The Gift of the Other; Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference; Simms, “Milk and Flesh”; Wynn, “The Early Relationship of Mother and Pre-Infant”; and Young, Throwing Like a Girl.
38. Al-Saji, “Vision, Mirror, and Expression,” 53.
39. Weiss, “Ecart,” 205.
40. Ibid., 214.
41. Ibid., 208.
42. Fielding, “Grounding Agency in Depth,” 180.
43. Fielding, “Envisioning the Other,” 194.
44. Some of these ideas appeared previously in LaChance Adams, “The Need of Philosophy in Hegel.”
45. Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” 656.
46. Ibid., 64.
47. “The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94.
48. See for example Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, 127–128.
49. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 123.
50. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
51. Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic, 2.
52. See part 1 of Grier, Identity and Difference.
53. Maker, “Identity, Difference, and the Logic of Otherness,” 15.
54. Ibid., 18.
55. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 142.
56. Ibid., 145.
57. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 124.
58. Ibid., 83.
59. Ibid., 84.
60. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 288.
61. As I argue in “Becoming with Child,” Sartre provides us with a manner of understanding these conflicts in a positive light in Notebooks for an Ethics.
62. Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” 105.
63. Taminiaux, “Merleau-Ponty.”
64. Weaver-Zercher, “Afterbirth,” 42–44.
65. Peri, “Dancing with Death,” 271.
66. Quoted in Yusa, “Women Rocking the Boat,” 155.
67. Tuvel, “Exposing the Breast.”
68. Ibid.
69. Thanks to Bonnie Mann for this point.
70. Moses, “A Mother’s Body,” 177.
71. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 78.
72. Note the difference between this statement and Carol Bigwood’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty in “Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of Merleau-Ponty).” She claims that Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm or intertwining provides a helpful alternative to the subject-object dichotomy in making sense of the mother’s relation to her fetus. She states that “it becomes especially clear in the case of pregnancy that, as Merleau-Ponty argues, the metaphysical dichotomous categories of subject and object, and self and other, fail to describe the incarnate situation, for the ‘subject’ is blurred and diffused in pregnancy. A woman is inhabited by a growing sentience that is not truly ‘other’ to herself.” Ibid., 68.
73. Andrews, “Vision, Violence, and the Other,” 177.
74. Low, “The Foundations of Merleau-Ponty’s Ethical Theory,” 181.
75. Gantt and Reber, “Sociobiological and Social Constructionist Accounts,” 26.
76. Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body,” 94.
77. Ibid., 99.
78. Ibid., 102.
79. Al-Saji, “Vision, Mirror, and Expression,” 54.
80. Ibid., 56.
81. Murphy, “All Things Considered,” 436.
82. Ibid., 447.
83. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” 11.
84. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 83.
85. Merleau-Ponty, Hegel’s Existentialism, 65.
86. Carbone, “FLESH,” 57.
87. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” 6.
88. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 35.
89. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 68.
90. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 566.
6. MATERNITY AS NEGOTIATING MUTUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
1. Beauvoir, “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity,” 292.
2. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 9.
3. As Beauvoir writes,
One cannot fulfill a man; he is not a vessel that docilely allows itself to be filled up. His condition is to surpass everything given. . . . Since man is project, his happiness, like his pleasures, can only be projects. The man who has made a fortune immediately dreams of making another. Pascal said it perfectly: it is not the hare that interests the hunter, it is the hunt. . . . A goal is always the meaning and the result of an effort. Separated from that effort, no reality is a goal but only a given made to be surpassed. . . . The notion of end is ambiguous since every end is a point of departure at the same time. But this does not prevent it from being seen as an end. Man’s freedom resides in this power.
Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 98–99.
4. “And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the power given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.” Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 91.
5. Ibid., 72.
6. “As soon as a child has finished a drawing or a page of writing, he runs to show them to his parents. He needs their approval as much as candy or toys; the drawing requires an eye that looks at it. These disorganized lines must become a boat or a horse for someone. . . . By himself, he would not have dared to put confidence in those hesitant lines.” Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 116.
7. Ibid., 109.
8. “Men are free, and I am thrown into the world among these foreign freedoms. I need them because once I have surpassed my own goals, my actions will fall back upon themselves, inert and useless, if they have not been carried off toward a new future by new projects.” Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 135. “What is mine is therefore first what I do. But as soon as I have done it, the object goes and separates itself from me; it escapes me. The thought that I expressed a moment ago, is it still my thought? In order for it to be mine, I must make it mine again each instant by taking it toward my future.” Ibid., 93.
9. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 67.
10. “The sick man who wears himself out by struggling against sickness or the slave against slavery care for neither poetry, nor astronomy, nor the improvement of aviation. They first need health, leisure, security, and the freedom to do with themselves what they want.” Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 137).
11. “A man alone in the world would be paralyzed by the manifest vision of the vanity of all his goals. He would undoubtedly not be able to stand living. But man is not alone in the world.” Ibid., 115.
12. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 24.
13. Beauvoir, “Pyrrrhus,” 93.
14. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 156.
15. Ibid., 24.
16. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 159.
17. Ibid.
18. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 25.
19. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 131.
20. Ibid., 127.
21. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 61, 65–66, 83, and 96.
22. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 126.
23. I claim that The Second Sex is the most mature of Beauvoir’s ethical texts because she is the least moralistic in tone (a tone that she herself found irritating in her earlier work) and more understanding of the power of situation over an individual’s ability to be ethical in her sense of the term.
24. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 16.
25. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 96.
26. Ibid., 37.
27. Ibid., 76.
28. Ibid., 82.
29. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 159–160.
30. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 124.
31. See Andrew, “Care, Freedom, and Reciprocity”; Gothlin, “Beauvoir and Sartre on Appeal”; Kruks, “Teaching Sartre About Freedom”; Scarth, The Other Within; Tidd, “The Self-Other Relation”; Ward, “Reciprocity and Friendship in Beauvoir’s Thought.”
32. Andrew, “Care, Freedom, and Reciprocity,” 291.
33. Ibid., 290.
34. Ibid.
35. Tidd, “The Self-Other Relation,” 230.
36. Scarth, The Other Within, 7.
37. Ward, “Reciprocity and Friendship in Beauvoir’s Thought,” 41.
38. Kruks, “Teaching Sartre About Freedom,” 88.
39. See, for example, Simons, “Confronting an Impasse” and “Beauvoir’s Philosophical Independence in a Dialogue with Sartre.”
40. See, for example, Collins and Pierce, “Holes and Slime”; Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy and “Toward a Feminist Philosophy of the Body”; Greens, “Sartre, Sexuality and The Second Sex”; Lloyd, Man of Reason; Spelman, “Woman as Body” and Inessential Woman; Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture; Strickling, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Value of Immanence.”
41. Lloyd, Man of Reason, 99–100.
42. Ibid., 101
43. Jardin, “Death Sentences, 90.
44. Scarth, The Other Within, 156. This is Scarth’s own description of her project.
45. Ibid., 140 and 165.
46. Ibid., 156.
47. Ibid., 140.
48. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 207.
49. Ibid., 208.
50. Ibid., 209.
51. Ibid.
52. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 159 (emphasis added).
53. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 73.
54. Iris Marion Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in Throwing Like a Girl, 46.
55. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 531.
56. Ibid., 524.
57. Ibid., 539.
58. Simons, “Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir,” 18.
59. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 55.
60. Ibid., 48–49.
61. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 554.
62. Ibid., 524.
63. Ibid., 525.
64. The same critique is often made regarding current discourse on children and abortion.
65. Lerner, The War on Moms, 63.
66. U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, “Indicators of Welfare Dependence.”
67. Lerner, The War on Moms, 70.
68. MTV, No Easy Decision.
69. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 540.
70. Ibid., 533.
71. Ibid.
72. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 117.
73. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 66.
74. Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 71.
75. Levine, “Throwing the Book,” 20.
76. Ibid., 21.
77. Ibid., 21–22.
78. Ibid., 22.
79. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 119.
80. Ibid., 118.
81. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 142.
82. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 539.
83. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 194.
84. Mirvish, “Sartre, Embodied Minds, Authenticity, and Childhood,” 27.
85. Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 138.
86. Ibid., 117.
87. Ibid., 121.
88. Ibid., 123.
89. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 569.
90. Lerner, The War on Moms, 2, 39, 63.
91. Mezey, Greenberg, and Schumacher, “The Vast Majority.”
92. Lerner, The War on Moms, 20.
93. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 556.
94. Parker, Torn in Two, 121.
95. Rich, Of Woman Born, 36–37.
96. Parker, Torn in Two, 22.
97. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 71.
98. Kovacic, “Salvation Road,” 61.
99. “Without failure, no ethics. For a being who, from the outset, is an exact coincidence with himself, a perfect plenitude, the notion ‘ought to be’ [devoir être] would not make sense. One does not propose ethics to a god. It is impossible to propose one to man if he is defined as nature, as given. . . . This means that there can be an ‘ought to be’ [devoir être] only for a being who, according to the existentialist definition, questions himself within his being.” Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 291.
100. Beauvoir, “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” 187.
101. Ibid., 188.
102. Beauvoir, “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity,” 292.
103. Ibid.
104. Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, 108.
105. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 134.
CONCLUSION
1. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/02/angela_mcanulty_eugene_mom_ple.php.
2. http://www.klcc.org/Feature.asp?FeatureID=2246.
3. http://special.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/24249180–41/maples-family-jeanette-mcanulty-death.csp.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/02/angela_mcanulty_eugene_mom_ple.php
7. Meyer and Oberman, Mothers Who Kill Their Children, 175.
8. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 112.