University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Kindred specters: Mourning, ethics, and "social death"

(USC Thesis Other)

Kindred specters: Mourning, ethics, and "social death"

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content KINDRED SPECTERS: MOURNING, ETHICS, AND "SOCIAL DEATH"
by
Christopher Michael Peterson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERISTY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
December 2002
Copyright 2002 Christopher Michael Peterson
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
UMI N um ber: 3 0 9 3 9 6 7
UMI
UMI Microform 3093967
Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
ProQuest Information and Learning Company
300 North Zeeb Road
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
Christopher Michael Peterson
under the direction of h i s dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director of Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
D OPHY
Director
Date -30^ QO
D' - •
Chair
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
H faut aimer les spectres.
— Jacques Derrida
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
Ill
Acknowledgements
his dissertation could not have been completely had it not been for the
generous support that I received from numerous sources. Financial
support came from USC, The Ahmanson Foundation, The Marta
Feuchtwanger Trust, and the Josephine De Kdrmdn Fellowship Trust. More
important, however, was the support that I received from colleagues, friends,
and family who were kind enough to tolerate my rambling about ghosts and
kinship during the many months that I spent researching and writing. To
begin by designating and acknowledging one's " k in " seems both unusually
fitting and problematic for a dissertation that attempts to remain vigilant
about such distinctions between kin and non-kin, presence and absence, and
that seeks to address the violence that accompanies these very demarcations.
I thus hope that the following designations commit only that violence which,
as I argue in the proceeding chapters, is the necessary condition of kinship.
I thank Bradley Youngston for pointing me in the direction of
important legal texts, Matthew Adler for advising me on historical matters,
and both of them for their continued friendship and support. My parents,
John Peterson and Linda Hoffman-Peterson, as well as my siblings, Ann
Peterson-Miller, Elizabeth Peterson, and Geoff Peterson, all showed much
more than the usual amount of interest and support that "blood relations" are
thought to require. Numerous others were also invaluable to my work as
well as to my sanity. In particular, I thank Cindy Sarver, Christine Coffman,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
iv
Mark Hudson, Vinay Swamy, Gary Riley, Michelle Peterson, and Robert
Byer. Barbara Johnson, Samuel Weber, Eric Anders, and Randy Colvin read
and responded to early drafts of several of the chapters. Judith Jackson
Fossett offered bibliographical and historical suggestions during the early
stages of my research that have since become crucial to the project. Hilary
Schor and Karen Pinkus also advised me in the early stages of my research.
A special thank you goes out to Karen for her long-time support, beginning
during my undergraduate years at Northwestern. I also want to thank those
faculty at Northwestern who inspired me through their teaching to pursue
the study of literature: Michal Ginsburg, Frangoise Lionnet, Jane Winston,
and Helen Deustch.
The students in the Thematic Option Honors Program at USC who
participated in my courses "From Spirits to Spooks" (1999) and "Family
Fictions" (2000) eagerly read many of the primary texts that form this study,
and responded with considerable openness to the ideas that I presented. I
found in my dissertation readers two truly extraordinary scholars: Peter
Starr and Ariela Gross. I thank Peter particularly for his keen sense of critical
reception, and for remaining open to the necessary anachronism of the
spectral. Ariela generously agreed to come on board late in the process, and
provided invaluable historical and legal guidance. Last, I found in Peggy
Kamuf a committee chair and friend who has been the most dedicated
adviser and discerning reader that I could have wanted. It goes without
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
saying that her influence and provocative insights everywhere haunt the
pages that follow. Any errors in judgement or scholarship are obviously
mine alone.
—Los Angeles, October 2002
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
vi
Contents
Epigraph ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vii
Introduction: We "Other" Ghosts 1
1 From Spirit to Specter 34
2 Giving Up the Geist: Slavery, Speciality and 109
Charles Chesnutfs Conjure Woman Tales
3 The Haunted House of Kinship: Miscegenation, 166
Same-Sex Marriage and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
4 Phantoms, Fathers, Friends 247
5 Beloved's Claim 297
Works Cited 351
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
vii
Abstract
T
his dissertation takes the political struggles of Reconstruction America
as the point of departure for an exploration of kinship in terms of
mourning. Given that it witnessed intense legal and political debate centered
on the intersection of civil rights and kinship (the legalization of black
marriage, antimiscegenation rhetoric, etc.), the Reconstruction era is
particularly available for an investigation of the relationship between
kinship, mourning, and what sociologist Orlando Patterson calls "social
death"—understood as a domain of ontological suspension that attends the
negation of slave kinship relations. Taking my cue from historian Eric
Toner's notion that Reconstruction is "unfinished,” together with Jacques
Derrida's notion of "semi-mourning" (demi-deuil), I argue that
Reconstruction is less an historical period in our nation's history—one with
relatively fixed temporal boundaries—than an ongoing, interminable process
of mourning. Hence, many of the texts that I read do not fall within the
temporal parameters that conventional historiography understands as
"Reconstruction": that is, the years from 1863 to 1877. These texts include
literary works by Charles Chesnutt, Toni Morrison, Faulkner and Poe, as
well as legal texts concerned with slavery, segregation and miscegenation.
Understanding Reconstruction in terms of mourning, moreover,
allows us to ask what the ethical and political debates raised by a nation
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
viii
emerging out of the depths of slavery and war might have to say about more
contemporary debates around kinship. Given the centrality of gay marriage
to these debates, I turn to the politics of gay and lesbian kinship as a means
to interrogate the merits of constructing an historical analogue between
Reconstruction and contemporary politics. The objective is to survey the
historical landscape for the ghosts of Reconstruction, slavery, racism,
miscegenation, and homosexuality—precisely where we might least expect
them to appear, and where their convergence results in unanticipated and
aberrant kinships. My central claim is that the process of mourning, contrary
to conventional wisdom, does not begin with the physical loss of the other;
rather, death, absence, and mourning haunt relations of kinship from the
very beginning. Mourning, that is, conditions the possibility of kinship.
Chapter One maintains that normative kinship corresponds to a
dialectical model that disavows mourning. I trace this dialectic as it surfaces
in the Christian construction of the divine family, Hegel's notion of the
family as the sublation of husband and wife, and Plato's and Freud's
proposition that reproduction betrays a certain desire for immortality. If the
dialectic of "mutual recognition" reduces the other to the same, then kinship
is not immune to the negativity that attends slavery, notwithstanding the
tendency of contemporary scholarship to oppose kinship and slavery
(Patterson, Spillers). I argue that normative kinship involves the Aufhebung of
the father's body, that is, the negation, preservation, and supercession of the
father in the reproduction of his body in the body of the son. Kinship
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
ix
emerges as a dialectic between Spirit and Body in which the incarnation of
the father in the son is imagined as immortalizing the father in the becoming
spirit of his mortal body. I maintain that this dialectic of Spirit and Body
forecloses the possibility of a spectral kinship, of a kinship that deconstructs
the distinction between Spirit and Body.
Chapter Two situates the problematic of kinship within the historical
frame of Reconstruction America through a reading of Charles Chesnutt's
Conjure Woman Tales. I suggest that Chesnutt's stories of magical bodily
transformations contest the conventional conception of the body as
container, exemplified by the Christian construction of the body as the
container of the soul. Conjuring thus emerges as a means by which slaves
might resist their social death. Although contemporary investigations of
slavery tend to privilege the body as a site of resistance to appropriation, I
contend that recourse to the body is not as liberating as we might imagine.
Indeed, Chesnutt's tales imagine the possibility of a spectral resistance to
appropriation that eschews recourse to the body.
Chapter Three foregrounds the problematic of miscegenation as it
emerges in Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson and Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom!. Although Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen views miscegenation as
signaling the ruination of his grand "design" of immortal presence, I argue
that the "stain" of blackness comes to stand in for the death that always
already haunts his and any life. The second half of the chapter examines the
so-called "miscegenation analogy," by which legal scholars attempt to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
X
compare the proscription on interracial sex and marriage with the continuing
ban on gay marriage. Taking Quentin and Shreve's homoerotic discussion of
miscegenation at the conclusion of Absalom, Absalom! as my point of
departure—together with the relatively coeval emergence of miscegenation
and homosexuality as words and historical problematics (1864 and 1892
respectively)—I explore their historical and political interimplication. To the
extent that it reduces kinship to the exigencies of reproduction and its aims
of transcendent continuity, normative heterosexuality, I maintain, is always
already haunted by the twin ghosts of miscegenation and homosexuality,
both of which are understood to threaten heterosexuality's dream of
immortal presence.
Chapter Four explores the contemporary gay activist demand for legal
access to the institution of marriage through a reading of Bill Condon's film
Gods and Monsters, and an examination of recent case law involving gay
marriage. Drawing from Judith Butler's theory of "heterosexual
melancholia," by which she seeks to account for the attachment of normative
heterosexuality to a specter of same-sex love that it cannot fully grieve, I ask
both how recent case law allegorizes this unresolved grief, and how the
demand for gay marriage might itself be implicated in its own brand of
"homosexual melancholia." Particularly in light of the recent turn away
from AIDS (despite the absence of a cure), and the attendant turn toward
marriage as the central concern of gay activism and politics, I consider how
the conservative trend toward marriage, family, and reproduction among
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
xi
some gays and lesbians often deploys these categories as a means to sound
the death knell of AIDS—and therefore to disavow mourning.
Chapter Five examines more explicitly the ethics within kinship
through a reading of Toni Morrison's celebrated novel Beloved. I read
Morrison’ s text both with and against Emmanuel Levinas' ethical
philosophy. Pace Levinas, who posits the notion of an ethical relation to the
other that is devoid of violence, I maintain that the relation to the other, and
therefore kinship, is conditioned by violence. I examine this violence in its
most extreme form, Sethe's infanticidal act, and ask after its paradoxical
interpretation in the critical reception of Beloved—and in historical
understandings of infanticide more generally—as both a shocking affront to
kinship and as a testament to pure, motherly love. I argue that these
seemingly opposed readings are enabled by a shared understanding of
maternal love that disavows the violence that opens up any relation to the
other. The latter half of the chapter reads Morrison's novel against the
history of Margaret Gamer, upon whom Morrison loosely based her novel.
Unlike Sethe and Beloved, Gamer and her daughter were mulattas.
Although Racial amalgamation is ubiquitous in Morrison's novel, it is absent
from Sethe's family lineage. I claim that Beloved excludes miscegenation from
Sethe's bloodline precisely because it threatens to undo a certain idealized
conception of maternity. I conclude that the absent presence of
miscegenation in the novel identifies racial amalgamation finally as the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
"real" ghost of 124 Bluestone Road, and of America's haunted house of
kinship more generally—our miscege-nation.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
1
Introduction: We ’ ’ Other"
Ghosts
In an ever-changing world, in a
mobile society, the tomb became
the true house of the family.
—Phillipe Arifes, Essay on the
History of Death in the West
One need not be a chamber to be
haunted. One need not be a house.
— Emily Dickinson
I
N M. NIGHT Shyamalan’ s The Sixth Sense, the young and troubled Cole
Sear (Haley Joel Osment) confides in his therapist the now-infamous
words: ” 1 see dead people." Cole’ s startling admission is later revealed to
have said more than child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis)
originally had thought, that is, that the declaration " I see dead people"
implies Crowe's death as the condition of its veracity. How could the
psychologist not see, as it were, the possibility that ” 1 see dead people" means
"because I see you, because I look at you and tell you this, you, therefore, are
dead"? Cole's words must therefore induce Crowe to a certain blindness, a
disavowal that the film requires of the spectator by extension, in order for
this "surprise" revelation to work. The film counts on the blindness of the
spectator to the possibility that his or her own death is implied by the child's
revelation. Insofar as the film urges us to see (or not to see) through the eyes
of Malcolm Crowe, we are permitted to pass momentarily through the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
2
realm of the spectral, at least until we leave the theater to return to the world
of the living, reassured of our self-presence.
This ghost-sighting that the film offers up as an anomaly or
pathology, however, is also the generalizable condition of the child's speech.
Not only does the "I" always see dead people, but the I/eye can see dead
people only to the extent that he is one of these dead people that other eyes
see. The declaration " I see dead people" is thus reflexive as well as transitive.
It announces the death of the " I " who claims to be haunted only by the
ghosts of others, and not by other ghosts. To recognize oneself as haunted
by other ghosts would be to see oneself as a ghost among ghosts rather than
a self-present T that rests at a safe distance from things spectral. For what is
more troubling than seeing ghosts is discovering that one has oneself been a
ghost all along.
This lesson, of course, is what the psychologist learns at the end of the
film when he finally realizes the full implications of what his patient has been
trying to tell him: that is, that he is nothing less than one of these dead
people who has trespassed the sacred barrier between the living and the
dead. If as spectators we might identify with Malcolm Crowe’ s character,
however, our identification is not likely to go beyond the conclusion of the
film, when we are permitted to leave the spectral in its proper place: the
walls of the imagination or the walls of the theater.
If The Sixth Sense would have us believe that the movie house is the
proper place for the spectral, it does so in imitation of that most familiar of
all spectropia: the haunted house. Although Mark Wigley notes that
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
3
"haunting is always the haunting of a house," what would it mean if haunting
was not always housed?1 What would it mean, that is, if the movie house-
much like the figure of the haunted house-was conditioned by a
generalizable haunting anterior to any structure of containment?
If haunting is anterior rather than interior to its domestication, then
haunting could not claim the (movie) house-or any other structure of
containment-as its proper place. This generalizability is what permits us to
see the spectral as the possibility of the 1/eye who sees ghosts. We too can
see ghosts because, like the aptly named Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense, we are
ghosts ourselves.
That the ghost is always other than us is the assumption which The
Sixth Sense makes tremble. Yet the film also recuperates this supposition
when it allows Cole to remain at a certain distance from the world of the
spectral that he professes to see. This haunted child thus occupies a position
of safety and security that we conventionally call "spectatorship." If, as a
spectator, Cole enjoys a safe distance from what he sees, spectrality, by
contrast, would name a certain collapse between seer and seen, interiority
and exteriority, proximity and distance. Safely protected from the ghostly
visions projected on the screen in front of us-indeed, always spectators and
never specters-we too are permitted to see ghosts without ever being
threatened by the possibility of ’ being" ghosts. This is not to suggest that the
spectral belongs exclusively or primarily to the realm of visual phenomena,
that it is only and always a question of what can and cannot be seen. We
might equally understand spectrality in terms of a responsibility to speak to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
ghosts, as Horatio does in Hamlet, or to listen to them, as Mr. Compson
urges Quentin to do in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Just as the privileging
of the visual in theater, film and other media betrays an effort to control and
survey what is seen from a position of exteriority, the linguistic convention
that joins the spectral to visual phenomena has the consequence of
safeguarding the presumption of self-presence and self-containment.
Yet if "specter" implies vision, the term ghost takes us in the direction of
geist, and therefore to spirit/mind/ consciousness, etc.. This is not to say that
"ghost" necessarily escapes the economy of self-presence and self-
■ containment, however. After all, the exteriorization of the self in relation to
the other would describe Hegel’ s self-conscious subject, or Geist, who, like
the haunted child in The Sixth Sense, sees ghosts as other. Spirit is the
ultimate spectator. There is, then, no rigorous distinction between
specter/ghost/ spirit that would release any one of these terms from the
economy of self-presence. Spirit would be implicated in an exteriorization of
the self in relation to the other that is similar to what we see, as it were, in
film. Insofar as film acts as medium, however, it also serves to mediate the
worlds of the living and the dead. And like any good medium, it conjures up
the dead if only finally to exorcise them. The fantasy of seeing dead people
that The Sixth Sense offers up thus only hyperbolizes the generalized
condition of all spectatorship: to see but not " b e " what one sees. To be what
one sees would be to forfeit one's claim on self-presence and self
containment. To be what one sees is not to be at all.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
5
This position of exteriority that the spectator of ghosts enjoys is
precisely what Emily Dickinson eschews in her poem, "One need not be a
chamber to be haunted," whose opening line suggests something of the
generalizability and uncontainability of haunting. The generality of the "one,"
which encompasses both the singular "one," and the plural "w e" (as in its
French cognate "on” ), means that haunting exceeds the borders of the self-
contained, singular " I ." The one is not a chamber. The one is not one. The
poem's concluding lines, moreover, move toward the possibility of a
"superior spectre-or more—" that is, a specter other than the "one" against
which "The Body-borrows a Revolver-" and "bolts the door."2 Retreating to
the safe haven of the self-present, self-contained subject, the body
" o ’ erlooks” its own spectrality. Another version of the poem states this
blindness more clearly. In this version, the "superior spectre" is said to be
" —more near."3 The dual endings of Dickinson’ s poem map two gravitational
centers around which this dissertation revolves: plurality and proximity. The
specter is both more than, and nearer to, the one, the " I ," the self-contained.
Indeed, the specter is always "more near" precisely because it is more than
one, its originary difference dividing the self, and thereby bringing the self
into contact with finitude. The division of oneself conditions the proximity of
the specter, of that which announces the absence of the self to itself.
We begin by affirming the possibility of other ghosts, of ghosts other
than the ghosts we are, and therefore not simply ghosts as other(s), in order
to foreground the principal concerns that govern this dissertation, and which
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
6
professes to say something about ethics, kinship, and social death. But what
exactly do ghosts have to do with ethics and kinship?
While researching and writing this dissertation, I could always count
on some version of this question to follow on the heels of any one of my
numerous (and often failed) attempts to explain to others, to other ghosts,
the subject of my project. If the relation between specters and kinship
seemed remote to many of my listeners, perhaps that is because in the
modem West we tend to see the barrier that separates the living and the
dead as insurmountable. If we follow Phillipe Arihs on this subject, however,
we see that things were not always so. In contrast to the Middle Ages, where
a certain familiarity with death was displayed, a promiscuous coexistence of
the living and the dead, Aries argues that the rise of modernity witnessed an
effacement and interdiction of death. Death was to be put in its proper place,
whether "its place" be the newly constructed cemeteries on the outside of the
city walls or the hospitals where patients now came to die rather than to get
well: "Mourning is thus no longer a necessary period on which society
imposes respect. It became a morbid state that one must care for, abridge
and erase."4
Nowhere would this interdiction of mourning seem more vigilant
than in America where death is treated almost as an aberration of life. Arifes
reads the rising career of the mortician and the practice of embalming in the
U.S. during the nineteenth century as a testament to the American denial of
death. Death could no longer be either too familiar or common, too
frightening or painful: "To sell death, one must make it agreeable" (69).5 This
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
7
transformation of death into something agreeable—in other words,
something that is not death—symptomatically denies any traffic between
mortals and ghosts that would call into question the modern segregation of
the living from the dead.
If, as Aries maintains, the tomb is indeed the "true house of the
family,” then spectrality would be the most proper subject of the family,
rather than an aberration or pathology of normative kinship (141).6 How
should I respond to a well-meaning friend who implores, no doubt impatient
with my notion of spectral kinship: "But what about living in the present?"?
Everything is at stake in the answer one gives to such a question. For my
ability to respond is conditioned by the spectrality that the question seeks to
exorcise. How do I explain to my friend that mourning is the possibility of
his asking the question at all? That mourning is the condition of our
friendship, and that without it, he could not ask this question that
paradoxically denies our relation to each other? The injunction to live in the
present claims to preserve a relation with the other that it ultimately negates.
If, as Simon Critchley puts it: "One is only a friend of that which is going to
die," then I am mourning from the beginning.7 Indeed, I am not only
mourning the other, in a transitive sense, but I am mourning. As Jacques
Derrida remarks in The Politics of Friendship: " It is thanks to death that
friendship can be declared."8 Friendship is spectrophilia.
Already it will have become clear that what I am calling kinship not
only trespasses the border that separates the living and the dead, but also
the walls that seek to contain kinship within its "proper" domain of the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
8
family. To claim the tomb as the true house of the family is to suggest that
the family has never had a proper place, or at least a place that is not always
divided and cut across by finitude. And indeed, Aries would appear to arrive
at something like this conclusion when he remarks that"... the family vault
is perhaps the only place that corresponds to a patriarchal conception of the
family where several generations and several couples are reunited under the
same roof" (142).9 The patriarchal family lives only in a tomb, which is to say
that it does not live at all, that it has always been dead. Kinship is thus
intimately tied to death. As Creon announces in Sophocles' Antigone, we are
all "in kinship with the dead."1 0 And this is not to say that death is an
aberration that destroys kinship, a cruel "fact of life" that always looms large
over our most intimate and loving relationships, threatening to rear its ugly
head at any moment. Rather, it is thanks to death that we have kinship. An
invitation to death is an invitation to the other. Spectrality welcomes death as
the possibility of kinship.
Through spectrality, I seek, in part, to envision a kinship beyond the
principle of family as conventionally understood in terms of consanguinity
and biology. This "kinship beyond family," however, is less beyond than
before the family. That is, kinship names a relation to the other that is
anterior to the family. Although the search for a "beyond family" is not in
itself new-indeed, many thinkers have sought after its seemingly elusive
possibilities-a kinship otherwise than family has most often been imagined
as existing in a "beyond" so remote that it "overlooks," as Dickinson would
say, " a specter more near." While a kinship beyond family is always to come,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
9
in principle it has always already arrived. It will have come with the arrival
of other ghosts with whom our ethical relation precedes consanguinity. As
David Schneider notes in his Critique of the Study of Kinship, the history of
anthropological studies on kinship is the history of this attempt to escape or
evade the domestication of kinship, an effort that always ends by falling
under the shadow of the family.1 1
Given the investment of the normative family in reproduction, it is
perhaps no accident that non-biological relations of kinship are often
portrayed as unsubstantial, shadowy and unreal. For kinship-as-
reproduetion names the fantasy of my corporeal preservation in the
reproduction of my body in the body of the child. As both Plato and Freud
noted, reproduction displays a lingering belief in immortality.1 2 Reproduction
is associated with a corporeal presence that trumps the seemingly non
present, immateriality of non-reproductive kinship. The tradition of kinship-
as-reproduction is perhaps best exemplified by the Christian model of the
divine family, in which the father/spirit incarnates himself in the finite body
of the son if only to negate the son’ s corporeality in and through the father’ s
transformation into the infinite spirit. This fantasy of immortal
transcendence find its human counterpart in the patriarchal model of kinship
where the reproduction of the child that would secure the father’ s
immortality requires an imagined preservation of the father’ s body above
and beyond his death: the father/spirit retains the corporeality that he
negates.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
10
If by "spectral kinship," we mean to affirm mourning as the condition
of any relation to an other— biological or otherwise—this is not to say that
non-biological kinship necessarily escapes the economy of the same that
characterizes the reproductive model. Displaced from the biological,
"kinship" still says the same kind. Although this dissertation seeks to
reconceptualize kinship as an ethical relation anterior to the family, this does
not mean that the notion of spectral kinship advanced here imagines the
other solely in Levinasian terms, that is, as "absolute." By redeploying the
term kinship, then, I hope to avoid the idealization of ethics that poses the
relation to the other as a "relation without relation," as Levinas would have
it. For Levinas’ relation without relation would be immune to kinship and its
vocabulary of sameness. I thus aim to problematize kinship by alerting us to
the duplicity by which it poses a relation to others through a language of the
same (kind, kin). In short, if alter says "other" and kin says "same," they do so
only in relation to one another. Despite sounding a seemingly oxymoronic
formulation, a kinship based on alterity would elaborate a chiasmatic
relation between kinship and ethics that allows for their cross-contamination.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
11
Reconstruction as
Deconstruction
Slavery... is dead, but the spirit
which animated it still lives.
—Frances W. Harper, lola Leroy
I develop this spectral theory of kinship in relation to a series of
literary and legal texts that thematize the political struggles of
Reconstruction America. Given that it witnessed the emergence of legal
marriage between former black slaves, saw increased antipathy toward
miscegenation (sometimes resulting in the violent lynching of black men for
their supposed "rap e" of white women), and marked a period of intense legal
and political debate around the question of civil rights more generally, the
Reconstruction era is particularly available for an exploration of the
relationship between kinship, mourning, and social death. Yet, while
Reconstruction names the locus around which I organize a series of related
yet diverse political and ethical concerns, many of the texts that I read do not
fall within the temporal parameters that conventional historiography
understands as "Reconstruction": that is, the years from 1863 to 1877. Indeed,
I argue that Reconstruction is less an historical period in our nation's history,
one with relatively fixed temporal boundaries, than an ongoing,
interminable process. This interminability is suggested by Eric Foner's
understanding of Reconstruction as unfinished, indeed, as affirming the
inevitable failure of what Freud called "successful mourning."1 3 In this way
Foner's assessment of Reconstruction resonates with Jacques Derrida’ s
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
12
revision of the Freudian account of mourning. For Derrida, mourning is
"interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit."5 4
Understanding Reconstruction in terms of mourning allows us to ask
what the ethical and political debates raised by a nation emerging out of the
depths of slavery and war might have to say about more contemporary
debates around kinship. As Katherine Franke contends, "contemporary civil
rights struggles must be understood as the legacy of the battles won and lost
by and on behalf of African-Americans in the Reconstruction era."1 5 Broadly
interrogating the tendency within rights-based discourses to ignore the
regulatory nature of those institutions in which minorities seek inclusion,
Franke isolates the political goal of marriage as one example of a discourse
that "fixes as victory participation" in a state institution while remaining blind
to its coercive nature (ibid.). Taking my cue from Franke, I explore
contemporary debates around gay and lesbian kinship, particularly those
involving the demand to extend the definition of marriage to include gays
and lesbians. Indeed, the recent emergence of the so-called "miscegenation
analogy" within political and legal circles suggests how the specter of
interracial sex still haunts current debates around the formation of family
and kinship.
Given that the contemporary political scene is dominated by a rights-
based discourse that can comprehend the relationship between different
social injustices only by posing analogies, antonyms or equivalencies, a turn
toward a spectral politics, or a politics of mourning, offers much in the way
of rethinking the relationship between the political grievances of different
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
13
minority groups. If, as Anne Cheng observes, "we are a nation at ease with
grievance but not with grief," how does the attention paid to political
grievance foreclose an investigation of mourning as a site of political
investment?1 6 How does grievance work to domesticate grief, to house a
more uncontainabie and generalizable haunting? And how might a move
from grievance to grief forestall the effort to enumerate, analogize, and
oppose historical injustices? That is, while the preoccupation with grievance
tends to assume a vocabulary of ownership and possession of one's pain and
injury, grief resists containment in seemingly separate subjectivities,
collectivities, histories and bodies.
I have already noted how the privileging of grievance fails to account
for the coercive aspect of institutions such as marriage. The conferral of
rights on citizens involves much more than mere statist recognition of
liberty and autonomy. Subjecting the citizen to norms and regulations, the
state is implicated in a certain violence. Recent gay and lesbian activism,
however, has tended to focus on the abjection of gays and lesbians from the
sphere of marriage-— as if this exclusion is the only ethical question with
which we should be concerned. Failing to address the coercive effects of
legalized marriage, the focus on exclusion ignores what the experiences of
black Americans during the Reconstruction era might teach us about the
reduction of politics to a discourse of rights—namely, the prosecution of
black men and women who maintained extra-marital relationships, and in
other cases, the forced, retroactive legalization of heterosexual couplings
between former slaves. As Wendy Brown notes, moreover, the violence that
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
14
attends statist conferral of rights was not confined to the postbellum era, but
is a constitutive feature of liberal democracies more generally.1 7 Brown cites
the leftist turn away from critiques of state power toward a paternalistic
view of the state as a source of protection and insulation from domination as
symptomatic of political inattention to the violence that haunts any discourse
of rights.
While not precisely a critique of rights-based politics, this dissertation
does seek to elaborate how liberalism's legacy of "possessive individualism"
subtends the political demand for access to legalized marriage. For
traditional notions of freedom and autonomy allow for the omission of
appropriation from discussions of kinship, family, and marriage. Marriage-
insofar as it represents the consummate ideal of kinship-gets reduced to a
right that forestalls any critique of its ethical import. The political emphasis
on the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the domain of marriage ignores
the possibility that kinship, in all its forms—from marriage to friendship to
love—always carries with it the possibility of the other's appropriation, and
that this violence is both the condition and limit of ethical action. This would
mean that what we tend to understand as being opposed to kinship (enmity,
slavery, etc.), is chiasmatically rather than dialectically related to it. I explore
the implications of this chiasmus in the chapters that follow. From the
discourse of paternalism that dominated antebellum justifications for
slavery, to contemporary accounts of slavery that seek to contest this
ideology by opposing slavery to kinship (Spillers, Patterson), I ask how
kinship and slavery bleed into one another. The problem of appropriation
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
15
and violence is not resolved by contemporary politics, moreover, but is
made all the more acute precisely by the demand for equal access to
marriage. Although rights-based discourses can comprehend only the
violence of exclusion from the institution of marriage, the ethical dimensions
of kinship require an investigation of the exclusions, appropriations and
violence within kinship.
Derrida's Ouija Board
Given that the primary theoretical point of reference for my
exploration of the possibilities of spectral kinship is Jacques Derrida's notion
of spectrality—understood as an originary mourning that haunts any
assertion of self-presence—it might be worth our time to pause and consider
what is at stake in bringing deconstruction to bear on Reconstruction.
Merely using these terms in the same sentence already invites the possibility
of the worst misapprehensions. Perhaps we are just asking for trouble if we
dare to juxtapose this most contested and misunderstood period in our
nation's history with the work of one of the twentieth centuries most
controversial and misunderstood thinkers. First things first. What you are
about to read is not the deconstruction of Reconstruction, if we understand
by "deconstruction" a negative operation that destroys, annihilates or even
critiques a given structure. Not by accident, we should recall, did Derrida
introduce the term deconstruction as an echo of the Heideggerian
'Destruktion" in order to sound a certain dissonance with structuralism. It
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
16
was picked up and transformed into deconstruction’ s mot clef more by
Derrida's readership (both his critics and his champions) than by Derrida
himself, who has often noted his dissatisfaction with the word. Citing its
assimilation to a "technical operation used to dismantle systems/' Derrida
notes in The Ear of the Other that "the word 'deconstruction' has always
bothered me,"1 8 Against the view of deconstruction as a negative operation,
Derrida goes on to emphasize the preoccupation in his work with an
affirmation that does not begin with a negation, or "deconstruction/' that
must then be "reconstructed."
Elsewhere, notably in "Ulysses Gramophone: Two Words for Joyce,"
Derrida devotes considerable energy to what he understands as the
originary "yes" that conditions any relation to the other.1 9 For Derrida, the
yes is always doubled, an implied yes, yes that "must carry the repetition
within itself" (89).2 0 He likens this doubled yes to the signature that follows
one’ s name on an identification card, and that does not merely repeat the
name, but "takes on the sense of a yes," of a promise, a commitment, an
engagement (94).2 1 "A yes never comes alone, and one is never alone in
saying yes" (110).2 2 For there to be a yes, there must be some other. And this
yes, yes is what refuses the reduction of the other to the same. Although
Derrida argues that the yes is always doubled, if the other also always "says"
yes, yes to my yes, yes, then there will have been (at least) four yeses. In
other words, the two yeses are themselves doubled: there is the relationship
of "one yes to the other yes" (the yes that carries its repetition within itself)
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
17
and that of "one yes to the other," which is also always a relationship of my
(more than) one yes to the other's (more than) one yes.
Deconstruction thus begins with a yes, yes that is distinct from a
negative or nihilistic operation.2 3 It proceeds, that is, according to the logic of
the Ouija, the "talking board" through which participants in a seance address
or welcome the other, saying (even if not speaking) yes yes, oui-ja to this
other. Featuring two people seated at the same table, hands placed on a
"planchette" that spells out messages from the dead, this parlor-room
favorite of late nineteenth century American spiritualism says much about
the relationship of my yes (yes) to the other(’ s) yes (yes). Setting aside all the
familiar claims, beliefs and explanations-spiritualist, scientific, psychological
or otherwise-what Ouija offers is an invitation to the other, an unspoken oui
ja that, in principle at least, forestalls the appropriation of the other to the
self. Of course, this relationship is always open to violence and trespass: I can
appropriate the game for my own purposes, make the planchette move
according to my own will, and so forth. Yet I must "say" yes to the other
even if my yes finally says no, that is, even if my address to the other
involves his/her appropriation. My yes will have been anterior to any
negation, appropriation or calculation of the other, even though this yes
always lends itself to the possibility of such violence. The "essential
repetition" of the yes "lets itself be haunted by an intrinsic threat" (89) .2 “ The
talking board's division of the double yes into two languages other than
English, moreover, allegorizes a certain untranslatability of the other’ s yes,
as if the ja of the other can never be reduced to my oui, and vice versa.2 5 The
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
18
other speaks an-other yes, a yes that is differant from mine, and whose
resistance to translation '’ call[s] for the counter-signature of the other, for a
yes which would resonate in a completely other writing, an other language"
(137).2 6 Notwithstanding the skeptics, the Ouija board permits one to speak
to ghosts and to be addressed by them, if only because communication with
the "other side," despite the claims of spiritualism, always comes back to the
other ghost who faces me from the opposite side of the table.
Although the history of deconstruction and the various misreadings
that have attended its reception are well known, that has not stopped many
from opposing deconstruction to structure or associating it with negativity.
If I continue to use the terms deconstruction and Reconstruction here, I do so
because, for better or worse, this is the vocabulary that we have inherited.
For the risk of juxtaposing these terms is that they lend themselves to a
dialectical formulation of negation/ affirmation, an opposition that is
inadequate to the task of addressing how deconstruction and Reconstruction
bear on one another. Given that the effects of Reconstruction continue to
haunt our political and social landscape, understanding Reconstruction in
terms of a process of interminable mourning—and therefore, as always
already in deconstruction—enables us to address the ongoing effects of
racism as well as to comprehend better the legacy of civil rights discourse. It
allows us, for instance, to contest the often stated claim that racism is over,
that we have achieved a "level playing field," and so there is no need for
programs such as affirmative action, and so on. In short, Reconstruction-as-
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
19
mourning, or reconstruction-as-deconstruction, permits us to challenge the
notion that Reconstruction is dead.
That a self-satisfied triumph over the dead is symptomatic of
contemporary political discourse is confirmed by the ubiquitous
pronouncement of final rites over the dead bodies of Marxism,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, racism, sexism, feminism, etc.. With the
body count so high, it is no wonder that the contemporary political
landscape is peopled with so many "garrulous outraged baffled ghosts," as
Faulkner might say.2 7 Given the by-now-almost-settled view in many
quarters of American literary criticism that deconstruction’ s formalism
disables it from negotiating concerns of material history, deconstruction
might seem an unlikely, or even inappropriate, means of addressing or
perhaps redressing the continued legacy of Reconstruction.2 8 Perhaps it falls
both to Reconstruction and deconstruction, however—in their shared
premature interment—to exhume one another in the name of the other. Yet
this is not precisely to resurrect a dead deconstruction for the sake of a dead
Reconstruction. For is it not the case that deconstruction has been dead all
along? Has not deconstruction always made itself available to the possibility
of its own death if only by not denying the death that haunts its or any other
life? Peggy Kamuf notes that the repetition compulsion that characterizes
the numerous announcements of deconstruction’ s death tirelessly kills off its
nemesis only to return over and over again to the scene of its murder.2 9 Yet
what is also true is that this exhumation of deconstruction as something like
a dying or already dead body misses the possibility that deconstruction has
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
20
always been the name of a specter, cannot be housed in a body, and
therefore does not claim for itself an immortal presence that survives all
attempts on its life. The always hauntological deconstruction is never finally
mortal or immortal. It remains only because it is (or so says the fiction of the
copula) nothing but remains.
From Necropolitics to
Spectropolitics
If Philippe Aries is correct in his assessment of nineteenth-century
America's interdiction of death, then this period would appear to be a good
place to begin any investigation of mourning, politics and kinship. As the
invention of the Ouija board attests, moreover, the latter half of this century
also gave rise to a preoccupation with the occult, the paranormal and all
forms of spiritualism. In Necro Citizenship, Russ Castronovo argues that the
citizen was constructed in relation to a morbid fascination with ghosts,
stances, spirit rappings, mesmerism, etc.. Taking his point of departure from
Patrick Henry's infamous "give me liberty of give me death," Castronovo
explores how admission into the domain of citizenship required a certain
depolitidzation and pacification of the subject: "The afterlife emancipates
souls from passionate debates, everyday engagements, and earthly affairs
that animate the political field."3 0 From Lincoln's rumored dabbling in
spiritualism, to attempts by mediums to contact the departed souls of
famous Americans, to a senator’ s introduction of a petition in 1854 asking
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
21
congress to investigate communications with the "other side"-so numerous
are Castronovo’ s examples of what he calls "spectral politics" that we would
have a difficult time contesting his diagnosis that American political discourse
worked to produce politically and historically dead citizens. That these
citizens were constructed in tandem with the production of a slave
population of non-citizens—socially dead persons who were urged by
slavery proponents and abolitionists alike to believe that emancipation
existed in a promised afterlife—would lend still more credence to the
argument that nineteenth-century America propagated a dematerialized
politics.
One wonders, however, how Castronovo's argument sits in relation
to Aries' contention that American life tends toward an interdiction of death,
and if Castronovo’ s rejection of necropolitics, moreover, is not finally
symptomatic of this very disavowal. If nineteenth-century politics required
that the citizen be disembodied and dematerialized, it does not follow that a
move toward embodiment and materialization remedies such a spiritualized
politics. One has the sense that Castronovo would like to untether politics
from death altogether, as if political life is not always haunted by finitude.
Reversing the terms of political necrophilia, he offers something like a
political necrophobia that sees every intrusion of the spectral as synonymous
with depolititization.
If nineteenth-century spiritualism infused American political life with a
familiar set of distinctions between spirit/ matter, soul/body, that says
nothing about how these binaries might be deconstructed rather than
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
22
merely reversed. In a passage explaining his reluctance to invoke "the body"
as if " it were natural and universal," Castronovo turns toward "specific forms
of corporeality," such as the laboring body, in order to avoid "remscrib[Ing]
patterns of abstraction" (17). Yet this move away from generality toward the
particularity of specific forms of embodiment still retains the notion of "the
body," and therefore of a self-contained, self-present entity. This emphasis
on the living body, a body untouched by finitude, is further proof of the
political necrophobia that this rejection of necropolitics evinces.
The interdiction of death, the equation of the material with what is
visible, present, or containable within a body—both are symptomatic of
political necrophobia. For the presumption of the body's presence attends a
certain disavowal of death. That this disavowal is decidedly modem is
affirmed, as we already noted, by Aries' argument. The modernity of the
equation of the material with the visible and the present, moreover, is noted
by Daniel Tiffany in his Toy Medium, where he seeks to expose a somewhat
buried legacy of materialism, a history that—from the Greek atomists
through positivism to the modernist theories of quantum
mechanics—persistently equates the material with the invisible, with what is
epistemologically uncertain and ontologically suspect: "There is nothing
realistic about the object of scientific materialism, and hence any
foundational claim to authority or authenticity on the basis of materialism in
the humanities is simply without foundation."3 1 The modem equation of the
material with what is visible and presence alerts us to the difficulty that arises
when we invoke the spectral to challenge the assumption that the body is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
23
present to itself. That is, how can we affirm the speciality of the body if not
by miming the very material/presence equation that we seek to displace? If
we say that bodies are always spectral, we do so at the risk of reinscribing
the modem notion that body = presence and ghost = absence. For it is
precisely its ascription to conventional notions of absence, invisibility and
immateriality that makes the vocabulary of spectrality acutely available to
any contestation of bodily presence. Yet there would be no need for us to
make a case for the spectrality of bodies if it were not for the modem
supposition that yokes bodies to presence. From the perspective of the
legacy of materialism that Tiffany traces, then, a certain redundancy would
be involved when we invoke the spectrality of bodies: spectral materiality
will have described the object of materialism from atomism forward. Insofar
as what I am calling spectrality is synonymous with materiality while not
being reducible to the body, we might simply call spectrality "materiality."
Yet because of the contemporary conception of materiality that understands
it as proper to itself-to be itself, nothing more and nothing less-we can call
the spectral "material" only at the risk of reaffirming the modem sense of the
material as that which is present and containable in a body.
* * *
Given the diversity of material that this dissertation seeks to
assemble, a few notes on its organization are perhaps in order. The
trajectory of the text does not progress from the Reconstruction era
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
24
forward—sublating each historical or political problematic that it encounters
into new and higher forms of knowledge, but rather, resists any such
dialectical movement. The organization of the chapters moves back and
forth between various discourses and political problematics. The objective
here is to trace a series of "improper" inheritances and legacies, to survey the
historical landscape for the appearance of those garrulous ghosts of
Reconstruction, deconstruction, slavery, racism, miscegenation, and
homosexuality—precisely where we might least expect them to appear, and
where their convergence results in unanticipated and aberrant kinships.
Chapter One begins by tracing the dialectic of kinship as it surfaces in
the Christian construction of the divine family, Hegel's notion of the family
as the sublation of husband and wife, and Plato's and Freud's account of
reproduction as betraying a certain desire for immortality. If the Hegelian
dialectic of "mutual recognition" involves a reduction of the other to the
same, and if normative kinship corresponds to a dialectical model, then
kinship is implicated in the very violence that it would oppose. I argue that
the reduction of kinship to reproduction within a patriarchal frame involves
the Aufhebung of the father's body, that is, the negation, preservation, and
supercession of the father in the reproduction of his body in the body of the
son. Kinship emerges as a dialectic between Spirit and Body in which the
incarnation of the father in the son is imagined as immortalizing the father in
the becoming spirit of his mortal body.
Following from this notion that "the body" is at the center of
normative kinship, I consider Judith Butler’ s work on corporeality in order
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
25
to explore how the dialectic of Spirit and Body forecloses the possibility of a
spectral kinship, of a kinship that deconstructs the distinction between Spirit
and Body, My turn to Butler might seem unexpected in this context, given
that her theoretical speculations on corporeality make little mention of
kinship.3 2 Yet the Hegelian underpinnings of her work make it particularly
relevant for the differences I seek to mark between spirit, body, and specter,
especially since her focus on corporeality, I maintain, is exemplary of the
very spirit/body dialectic that I seek to displace. Moreover, insofar as Butler
devotes much attention to how abject, socially dead bodies might be
materialized, her work illuminates how even the most apparently radical
’ 'deconstructions'’ of corporeality cannot escape the shadow of Hegelian
dialectics.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’ s "The
Premature Burial," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and Ian
McEwan's The Cement Garden, in order to consider how Poe's repeated
staging of the dead’ s return and McEwan's resituating of that dialectic of
negation/preservation within the context of the normative family help us
both to diagnose the reliance of normative kinship on dialectical
formulations and imagine how it might be deconstructed.
Chapter Two situates the problematic of kinship within the historical
frame of Reconstruction America through a reading of Charles Chesnutt's
Conjure Woman Tales. I suggest that Chesnutt’ s stories of magical bodily
transformations contest the conventional conception of the body as
container, exemplified by the Christian construction of the body as the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
26
container of the soul. Although contemporary investigations of slavery and
other forms of what Orlando Patterson calls "social death” tend to privilege
the body as a site of resistance to appropriation, I contend that recourse to
the body is not as liberating as we might imagine. Taking my cue from
Chesnutt's tale of ”Po' Sandy," in which a slave is magically transformed into
a tree, chopped down and turned into lumber, and then used as the material
ingredients for the slave master's new plantation kitchen, I argue that
Sandy's subsequent haunting and terrorizing of the master's family is
conditioned by his uncontainable materiality. Chesnutt’ s tale thus imagines
the possibility of a spectral resistance to appropriation that eschews recourse
to the body.
Chapter Three brings the question of paternal presence that I explore
in Chapter One to bear on my investigations of spectral materiality in
Chapter Two by foregrounding the problematic of miscegenation as it
emerges in Mark Twain's Puddnhead Wilson, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!,
and Reconstruction-era legal and political discourse. I trace the figure of the
haunted house as it structures the nation (Lincoln's "House Divided"
address), and as it participates in the conception of bodies as containers
(Twain's aptly named "Chambers," whose 1/32 part black blood allows him
to pass for white). I argue that miscegenation always already constitutes the
white body through the "hauntological" (Derrida) condition of corporeality.
Hence, Thomas Sutpen’ s dream of immortal presence-and the failure that
the reproduction of a mixed-race son represents for Sutpen-disavows the
spectrality that is the condition of any-body. The anxiety of racial
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
27
contamination, and its attendant threat of finitude, make blackness stand in
for the death that always already haunts the fantasy of paternal presence.
The latter half of the chapter turns to the Quentin-Shreve dialogue at
the conclusion of Absalom, Absalom!, which "fram es" their discursive
reconstruction of Sutpen’ s failure in a homoerotically charged "marriage of
speaking and hearing." I explore the interimplication of miscegenation and
homosexuality in Faulkner’ s novel, and in their relatively coeval emergence
as words and historical problematics: 1864 and 1892 respectively. To the
extent that it reduces kinship to the exigencies of reproduction and its aims
of transcendent continuity, normative heterosexuality is always already
haunted by the twin ghosts of miscegenation and homosexuality, both of
which curtail the design of immortal presence. If heterosexuality,
homosexuality, and miscegenation always haunt one another from within,
then contemporary political debates around the "miscegenation
analogy"—far from enunciating an historical anachronism that juxtaposes
separate historical concems-allow a point of entry into the politics of kinship
that spans the historical divide between Reconstruction and late-twentieth
century America.
Chapter Four explores in more depth the politics of gay kinship as
well as the activist demand for legal access to the institution of marriage
through a reading of Bill Condon's film, Gods and Monsters, and an
examination of recent case law involving gay marriage. Drawing from
Butler's theory of "heterosexual melancholia," by which she seeks to account
for the attachment of normative heterosexuality to a specter of same-sex
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
28
love that it cannot fully grieve, I ask both how recent case law allegorizes
this unresolved grief, and how the demand for gay marriage might itself be
implicated in its own brand of "homosexual melancholia." Particularly in light
of the recent turn away from AIDS, and the attendant turn toward marriage
as the central concern of gay activism and politics, I consider the
conservative trend toward marriage, family, and reproduction among gays
and lesbians in relation to the rather premature announcement in some
quarters of gay politics that "AIDS is over." Given the absence of a cure or
vaccine, as well as the fact that the virus continues to spread throughout the
world's population, I explore the disavowal of finitude implicit in the writing
of some gay polemicists, particularly in the work of Andrew Sullivan, for
how it deploys marriage and its promises of self-presence as a means to
sound the death knell of AIDS.
Chapter Five returns us to the context of American slavery and
Reconstruction through a reading of Toni Morrison's celebrated novel,
Beloved. Although this dissertation concerns itself throughout with imagining
a kinship beyond the reduction of the other to the same, beyond
appropriation and violence, this chapter probes these ethical questions more
directly by reading Morrison's novel both with and against Emmanuel
Levinas' ethical philosophy. The chapter reformulates, via Derrida’ s critique
of Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics," the Levinasian notion of an ethical
relation to the other that is devoid of violence and appropriation. Pace
Levinas, I maintain that kinship is conditioned by violence. Arguing that
Sethe's claim on her children is not merely opposed to the violence of the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
29
slave master's claim, I examine this maternal violence in its most extreme
form, Sethe's infanticidal act. I ask after its paradoxical interpretation in the
critical reception of Beloved and in historical understandings of infanticide
more generally as both a shocking affront to kinship and as a testament to
pure, motherly love. I argue that these seemingly opposed readings are
enabled by a shared understanding of maternal love that disavows the
violence that opens up any relation to the other.
The latter half of the chapter reads Morrison's novel against the
history of Margaret Garner, upon whom Morrison loosely based her novel.
Gamer became something of a cause celfebre for abolitionists and slavery
proponents alike after she murdered her daughter in 1856. By all available
accounts, however, Gamer was a mulatta, and her daughter, who was
reportedly white in appearance, was more than likely fathered by her
master, Archibald Gaines. While Morrison has stated that she did not
investigate Gamer's story in any great depth, preferring instead to invent
her own version, racial amalgamation is ubiquitous in the novel— except,
that is, in Sethe’ s family lineage. Examining the implications of the novel's
exclusion of miscegenation from Sethe's blood line, I ask how Morrison's
reinvention of Margaret Garner's story conjures up a certain spirit of
abolitionist discourse that would have us read infanticide only in terms of an
idealized motherly love. As a corollary to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!,
where racial admixture destroys the fantasy of paternal presence, the
intrusion of miscegenation in Beloved threatens to undo the idealization of
maternity. I argue that the appearance of Beloved as a fleshy, material ghost,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
30
however—a specter that refuses to stay in its "ghostly place"—displaces the
distinction between spirit and body, and therefore imagines a spectrality that
inadvertently contests the spiritualization of motherly love, and by
extension, the exclusion of miscegenation.3 3 Indeed, the ubiquity of the latter
might tempt us to identify racial amalgamation finally as the " real" ghost of
124 Bluestone Road, and of America’ s haunted house of kinship more
generally—our miscege-nation.
1 Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 163.
2 Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York:
Back Bay Books, 1961), 333.
3 Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems (New York: Barnes and Noble Books,
1993), 218.
4 Philippe Aribs, Essais sur I 'histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age a nos
jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), 70. " L e deuil n’ est done plus un temps
necessaire et dont la societe impose le respect, it est devenu un etat morbide
qu'il faut soigner, abr6ger, effacer." Unless otherwise indicated, all
translations of the French are mine.
5 "Pour vendre la mort, il faut la rendre aimable "
‘ "la tombe est devenue la vraie maison de famille."
7 Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (New York: Verso, 1999), 270.
8 Jacques Derrida, Politiques de Vamitie (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1994), 335.
" C ’ est grace k la mort que 1 ’ amitie peut se declarer."
9"... le caveau de famille est-il peut-6tre le seul lieu qui corresponde k une
conception patriarcale de la famille, ou sont r£unis sous le m§me toit
plusieurs generations et plusieurs manages."
1 0 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 168.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
31
1 1 David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1984).
1 2 Plato, Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sigmund Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1961).
1 3 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988).
1 4 Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la deite, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 160. Specters of Marx: The State of
the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 97.
1 5 Katherine Franke, "Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of
African-American Marriages" in 11 Yale J.L & Human, 253. See also Randall
Kennedy, "Reconstruction and the Politics of Scholarship," in 98 Yale L.J. 521
(1989). Seconding Franke, Kennedy notes that "nothing more clearly links
Reconstruction to the present than the constitutional and statutory law
enacted then that remains on the books, powerfully affecting the texture of
our current political life" (521).
1 6 Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden
Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), x.
1 7 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
4 8 Jacques Derrida, L'oreille de Tautre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions
(Montreal: VLB Editeur, 1982), 85.".., le mot de deconstruction m’ a toujours
ggnA ..."
1 9 Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilee,
1987).
20"... doit porter la repetition en lui-m&ne...."
21"... prend alors le sens d’ un oui "
22"... un oui ne vient jamais seul, et 1'on n'est jamais seul a dire oui."
2 3 For more on Derrida and the question of affirmation, see Peggy Kamuf,
"Deconstruction and Love," in Nicholas Royle ed., Deconstructions: A User's
Guide (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
32
24"... repetition essentielle se laisse hanter par la menace intrinshque...
2 5 Patented by an American novelties company in 1891, the Ouija board, as
legend would have it, was so named because one of its inventors, Charles
Kermard, erroneously believed that the word was Egyptian for "good luck-"
After organizing a hostile takeover of the Kermard Novelty Company in
1892, William Fuld reinvented the history of the name, claiming that it was
intended to combine the French and German words for "yes." See the entry
for " O u ija" in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition (1989). See also
"The History of the Talking Board." [accessed July 15 2002]. Available from
www.museumoftalkingboards.com/history.html; INTERNET.
26"... appellent k la contresignature de l’ autre, a un oui resonnerait dans une
toute autre 6criture, une autre langue...."
2 7 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 4.
2 8 Judging from the vehement response to the revelation of Paul de Man's
war-time journalism, it would seem that-in the minds of many American
scholars-deconstruction has all but disqualified itself from having anything
important to say about questions of historical responsibility. While there is
no shortage of criticism that brands deconstruction with any number of
crimes, from being ahistorical to apolitical or otherwise irresponsible, one
notable example is John Carlos Rowe's "Antebellum Slavery and Modem
Criticism: Edgar Allan Poe’ s Pym and 'The Purloined Letter,"’ in Through the
Custom House: Nineteenth Century American Fictions and Modern Theory
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Aligning Poe's supposed
language games with a caricatured portrayal of Lacan and Derrida, Rowe
illegitimately determines that—if Poe was a racist who was interested in
(immaterial) language rather than (material) history—then the attention that
Lacan and Derrida give to language implicates them in racism. For a critique
of Rowe, see my "Possessed by Poe: Reading Poe in an Age of Intellectual
Guilt," in Cultural Values, vol. 5 no. 2 (April 2001).
2 9 Peggy Kamuf," The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction," in Martin
McQuillan ed., Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2001).
3 0 Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in
the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001),
4.
3 1 Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modem Lyric (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 160.
3 2 Butler's more recent work takes up the question of kinship in relation to
Antigone, but does not focus on the problem of corporeality that occupied
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
33
such a privileged space in her earlier work. See her Antigone's Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
3 3 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 257.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
34
1
From Spirit to Specter
Now here 1 am... in virtue of
kinship with the dead.
—Creon from Sophocles'
Antigone
W
HEN CREON begins his edict forbidding the burial of Polyneices by
voicing a certain "kinship with the dead," he announces a proximity
to death that haunts all affective bonds. Notwithstanding his assertion that
no one "shall. . . honor [Polyneices] with a grave and none shall mourn
[him]," we might understand such mourning as the precondition of his
kinship with his dead nephews,1 Affirming his proximity to the dead, Creon
betrays his implication in the very mourning that his proclamation
ostensibly denies. Although it might at first seem that such kinship is
conditioned by the deaths of Polyneices and Eteoeles, that is, that Creon
mourns for his nephews only on the occasion of their absence, what would it
mean, on the contrary, to understand mourning as the originary possibility
of kinship? Creon's recognition of being in "kinship with the dead" suggests
a way of thinking about kinship that would no longer understand absence,
and therefore death, as posterior to the apparent self-presence that the other
is thought to confirm; rather, absence would register the hauntological
condition of any kinship relation that predicates itself on a self-presence that
requires the recognition of the other. Strictly speaking, then, Creon is in
kinship with the dead prior to the deaths of his kin as kin. They are, to
pervert a familiar turn of phrase, kindred specters, ghosts before they are
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
35
ghosts. And this relation of one ghost to another will have been all along
what we call "kinship."
Creon is certainly not alone in his proximity to the dead. Rejecting her
sister Ismene's proposal to bear some share of the guilt for her act of
burying their brother, Antigone remarks: "Take heart; you [Ismene] are
alive, but my life died long ago, to serve the dead" (183). According to her
own words, Antigone is dead before she is dead: dead even before she is
entombed alive. How are we to explain this strange affiliation between
kinship and the dead? What is the difference between having kin and being
alone, between presence and absence, if kinship is always haunted by death?
As the alienated monster from James Whale's film classic, Bride of
Frankenstein, reminds us: "Alone baaaad . . . friend goood." Being alone is
'bad," the monster seems to suggest, because one's "self-presence" depends
on the recognition of the other. Being alone means being absent to oneself;
being alone is a little too close to being dead. Indeed, one cannot properly be
said to be alone since aloneness seems to put being in jeopardy. Aloneness is
a state of suspended being. One might be tempted to theorize this
ontological evacuation in terms of what Orlando Patterson names "social
death." That is, that Antigone, Creon and Frankenstein's monster—bereft of
any living kin—live in a condition of mourning and alienation, suspended in
a liminal space between life and death. And yet, such a view overlooks the
extent to which all kinship involves an interminable process of mourning.
In her Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Judith Butler
addresses the question of how the transgressions of Sophocles' eponymous
heroine deprive her of the "ontological certainty" reserved for those who
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
36
fall within the norms of kinship (78). For Butler, the socially dead "remain on
the far side of being, as what does not quite qualify as that which is and can
be-..."2 As a mode of ontological suspension, social death, according to
Butler, is directly implicated in the metaphysical problem of "being."
Bemoaning the socially dead's abjection from the ontological sphere,
however, Butler never questions the ontological certainty of the socially
alive. Which is to say that she allows for no hiatus between social life and
ontology, and therefore no gap between social death and the deprivation of
ontology. While the conflation of social life with being may indeed condition
the production of the socially dead, that says nothing of how the fiction of
the former might itself be exposed and stripped of its ontological conceit.
That the kinship relations of the so-called socially alive are also negotiated
"between life and death" is a possibility that eludes Butler's reading of
Antigone, and has important implications for her effort to rethink kinship
beyond the structure of the normative family. For the assumption of self
presence begins by disavowing the death that haunts any life. In this sense,
the production of the socially dead describes the process by which the
hauntological condition of the "socially alive" is disavowed and projected onto
those who transgress the norms of kinship.
In arguing for such an alternative theory of kinship that would take
mourning as its point of departure, I do not mean to suggest that traditional
systems of kinship eschew mourning altogether. In his The Ancient City,
Fustel de Coulanges—who, along with Morgan, Durkheim and others,
counts among kinship's key "inventors” —traced a certain "cult of the dead"
back to ancient Greece and Rome:
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
37
This religion of the dead would seem to be the oldest that existed in
this race of men. Before conceiving and adoring Indra or Zeus, man
loved the dead; he was afraid of them, and he addressed his prayers
to them. It seems that religious sentiment began with this. It was
perhaps in regarding the dead that man had for the first time the idea
of the supernatural and a hope beyond what he saw. The dead were
the first mystery; it put man on the path to other mysteries. It raised
his thoughts from the visible to the invisible, from the transient to the
eternal, from the human to the divine.3
While later, especially Christian, understandings of death would take the
soul to be both immortal and separable from the finite body, for the ancient
Greco-Romans the soul remained and continued to live with the body: "The
rites of the sepulture show clearly that when one put a body in the tomb,
one believed at the same time to be placing something living in it."4 This
"kinship with the dead" involved bringing wine and food to the grave for the
dead to consume. Some Roman tombs, according to Fustel, even contained
kitchens especially for this purpose. Although Fustel suggests that these
"rites lasted until the triumph of Christianity," it is not altogether clear how
Christianity can be said to have surpassed this worship of the dead.5 That
"one would fear death less than the deprivation of sepulture" is certainly
borne out by modem burial practices which must meet certain requirements
(from embalming to epitaphs) in order to be considered "proper" (ll).6
Fustel remarks that "one wrote on the tomb that man rested there, an
expression that has survived these beliefs and has come down to us through
the centuries. We still use it, although no one today thinks that an immortal
being rests in a tomb" (9). Yes and no. For the Christian soul, despite being
conceived as separate from the body, still requires that body for its
immortalization. That is, Christianity preserves the very body that it negates
by inventing a transcendent soul which, as Nietzsche reminds us, is "only a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
38
word for something about the body/'7 In short the soul would be nothing
without the body.
This relationship between mourning and kinship would account for
why the body, or more specifically, the dead body, inhabits a site of great
difficulty and anxiety in many texts that foreground the problem of kinship.
We began with Creon's decree against the proper burial of Polyneices' body,
an edict that, as I suggested above, is implicated in the very mourning that it
proscribes. Echoing the Antigonian problematic of proper burial, Hitchcock's
comedy of death, The Trouble With Harry, chronicles a series of romantic
liaisons triggered by the sudden appearance of a dead body. The trouble
with kinship is that, like Harry, it always seems to find itself suspended
between life and death. Recalling both Sophocles and Hitchcock, Ian
McEwan's The Cement Garden offers what at first seems to constitute an
aberration of the rite of proper burial when the children of a deceased
mother preserve her body in a box filled with cement so that the authorities
will not find out about her death and put them up for adoption.8 Despite its
seemingly aberrant nature, what if we were to read this preservation as
symptomatic of normative kinship? While Slavof Zizek suggests that the
dead return "because they were not properly buried," perhaps the ritual of
proper burial is nothing more than an exorcism, an effort to ward off the
ghost in advance of its return, even though the "return" is always already a
repetition.9 While the proper burial would seem to mark the transition from
what Freud calls "melancholia"—understood as an attachment to an
ungrieved loss— to "mourning"—a final severing of the cathexis with the lost
object—if kinship itself is an interminable process of mourning, then the love
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
39
object that would appear to become lost on the occasion of its death is
always already absent. Strictly speaking, then, there can be no such act as a
"proper burial," for the work of mourning has always already begun and is
never for that reason ever done.
The above formulation of kinship-as-mourning might find leverage in
what Simon Critchley, enabled by Derrida's reading of Antigone in Glas, calls
an "ethics of the singular."1 0 He continues:
Such an ethics would not be based upon the recognition of the other,
which is always self-recognition, but would begin with the
expropriation of the self in the face of other’s approach. Ethics would begin
with the recognition that the other is not an object of cognition or
comprehension, but precisely that which exceeds my grasp and
powers In mourning, the self is consumed by the pain of the
other's death and is possessed by the alterity of that which it cannot
possess: the absence of the beloved. Might not the death of the
beloved, of love itself, and the work of mourning be the basis for a
non-Christian and non-philosophical ethicality and friendship?
The ethics that Critchley outlines here is something other than a Hegelian
dialectic of mutual recognition, one that inevitably cancels the other in and
through the return to the self. To understand the other as always already
absent is to refuse the closed circuit of dialectical recognition that absorbs
and contains all otherness. Our relation to others would be anterior to the
ontological violence of a self-presence that always appropriates the other to
itself. As Emmanuel Levinas would have it: "The relation with the other
person is not an ontology. This bond with the other .. . is not reducible to
the representation of the other, but to its invocation... /m For Levinas, the
invocation of the other would precede ontology. Which is to say that the
distinction between the dialectic of self-recognition and an ethics "otherwise
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
40
than being" is something like the difference between addressing oneself to
others who are ghosts and speaking to other ghosts.
The conventional notion of kinship as a bond of love or affection
tends to disavow the dialectical absorption of otherness. This disavowal is
rather odd given that the term "kin" poses a relation to others of the same
kind. Even when displaced from the biological, that is, kinship still retains the
threat of this reduction of the other to the same. In the most literal sense, the
term kin not only bears the possibility of the erasure of difference, but
actually denotes it: you are my kin means we are the same, we are of the
same kind or kin. Which is to say that any relation to an other— biological or
otherwise—remains haunted by kinship and its posing of the same against
difference. Yet even an ethics otherwise than being, an ethics that professes
to begin with the other, could not claim immunity to the violence of
appropriation. Ethics could not oppose itself to kinship, to a relation to the
same. There would, in fact, be nothing that rigorously separates ethics from
kinship if the relation to the other, as Derrida observes in his reading of
Levinas in "Violence and Metaphysics," is not a relation to some "absolute"
other, but rather, to an other who is other than me, and who can remain
other only by being posed in relation to me, and therefore to the same.1 2
That one cannot get away from kinship's positing of sameness against
non-sameness, then, does not mean that the terms kin or kinship ought to
be abandoned. Neither should we cast aside an ethics based on alterity
simply because it fails in its effort to pose an "absolute" other. On the
contrary, to continue to use the terms kinship and ethics is to problematize
them in and through their cross-contamination. If the duplicity of "kinship"
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
41
is that it poses a relation to others through the language of sameness, the
duplicity of ethics is that it imagines the possibility of an absolute other that
can only be posed in relation to me, to the same, and therefore, to kinship.
Much of this dissertation traces the cross-contamination of ethics and kinship
in order to show how the relation to the same that kinship poses and the
relation to others that ethics inaugurates haunt one another. If, as Derrida
maintains in "Violence and Metaphysics," Levinas' pure non-violent relation
to an "absolute" other is pure violence, then ethics can never divorce itself
from its implication in the same (kind, kin).
The disavowal of one's own absence emerges in the dialectical relation
to the other that negates this other by posing it as the "proof" of one's self
presence. This obliteration of the other is precisely what is effaced,
moreover, by the distinction that Freud marks between mourning and
melancholia, the former of which is said to terminate in the substitution of a
new love object for the one that has been lost: "When the work of mourning
is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again."1 3 For Freud,
mourning ends after "reality-testing" shows that "the loved object no longer
exists" (ibid. 244). The melancholic, according to Freud, is unable to displace
his libidinal investment in the lost object onto a new one, which results in an
incorporation of the object into the ego. Like Antigone who insists on the
irreplaceability of Polyneices, the melancholic refuses the act of substitution
that Freud claims would put an end to mourning.
It remains unclear, however, how this substitution can be separated
from the work of mourning that it ostensibly terminates. Indeed, in The Ego
and the Id (1923), Freud will remark that "the character of the ego is a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
42
precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of
those object-choices."1 4 Although Freud writes that, in melancholia, "the
shadow of the object [falls] upon the ego," it might be said that this "shadow"
haunts all egos, despite their having substituted a "new" object for the lost
one. That is why Derrida insists that mourning is "interminable, without
possible normality, without reliable limit."1 5 If melancholia is in some sense
the precondition of mourning—in that both modes of grief must struggle
with an attachment to a lost love object—the substitution of a new object for
the old one does not mean that in mourning the loss has been overcome. " It
is the end of mourning that we would be able to dream," Derrida remarks.
"But this end is the process normally completed by mourning. How to affirm
an other end?"1 6 Derrida goes on to imagine a "beyond of the principle of
mourning," only to confirm that this "beyond of mourning can always be put
in the service of the work of mourning."1 7 This mourning of "successful"
mourning can no longer "sound a death knell that is its own (its knell)
without debris or remains/'1 8 Indeed, the notion that loss can be overcome
through substitution assumes a certain logic of self-presence whereby the "I"
that is mourning a love object can confirm and reaffirm its presence in and
through the presence of some other Other. To understand mourning as
having a proper point of termination is to preserve one's presence in the
presence/absence of the other. Notwithstanding the ethics of the singular
that says "this Other and no other Other," the dialectic of so-called "mutual
recognition" requires a certain obliteration of the other, one that recognizes
the other as "present" if only to negate its presence through one's own
coming into being, one's own self-presence. To understand one's self-
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
43
presence in terms of an originary mourning would be to eschew the priority
granted to being over the other, to affirm a pre-ontological responsibility to
the other, an openness to alterity that does not begin with the self. The T
that says " I am mourning . . might be read, then, less transitively than
reflexively, insofar as the "I" that announces its self-presence is always
already mourning its own death.
This economy of self-presence can be observed in the reproductive
model of kinship, for instance, where the body reproduces itself,
immortalizes itself, in the body of the child. The child's body is in this way
canceled in and through the return of the parents' seed to themselves, and
especially to the father. Reproduction emerges as a dialectical structure in
which the relation to the other is first and foremost a relation to the other’ s
body. As Jean-Luc Nancy remarks in Corpus, "An other is a body because only
a body is an other."1 9 Nancy goes on to suggest that—given the ob-jection, the
expropriation, of one’ s own, proper body—’ "other/ ’ others’ are not even the
right words, but only bodies.... It is the world of bodies."2 0 In this sense,
the expropriation of one’ s body in the body (of the)/ other, is present, as it
were, in any kinship relation—reproductive or otherwise—that nevertheless
predicates itself on the presence of one body to another. The body is
implicated in kinship insofar as the latter weds itself to the ontological, to the
presence of one body to another, a presence that depends on a conception of
bodies as being either finite or immortal.
This dialectic between finite and immortal body is exemplified in the
Christian construction of the divine family in which, as Derrida reminds us in
Glas, "the infinite father gives himself, by .. . self-insemination.. . a finite son
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
44
who ... dies as the finite son, lets himself be buried, clasped in bandages he
will soon undo for the infinite son to be reborn."2 1 Derrida goes on to
remark that the human family is not merely modeled on its divine
counterpart, but is indissoluble from it
The human family is not something other than the divine family.
Man’ s relation of father-to son is not something other than God's
father-to-son relation. Since these two relations are not
distinguishable, above all not opposed, one cannot feign to see in the
one the figure or metaphor of the other. One would not know how to
compare one to the other, to feign knowing what can be one term of
the comparison before the other. One cannot know, outside of
Christianity, what is the relation of a father to his son, even... to his
children.2 2
As in the Divine family, the human family names a spiritual relation between
father and son, a relation in which the mother, like Mary, is figured as a
temporary detour through materiality, one that enables and conditions the
return of the father/spirit to itself. This oscillation engenders the sublation of
spirit/matter, of father and mother, a synthesis that is achieved in the
reproduction of the father in the child. -A s Hegel writes in -the-section "T he
True Spirit: The Ethical Order," from the Phenomenology of Spirit: "This
relationship [between husband and wife]... has its actual existence not in
itself but in the child—an 'other', whose coming into existence is the
relationship."2 3 Here Hegel's characteristic use of the copula does not merely
describe but, indeed, performs the linking of subject to predicate whose
implied reference is husband and wife: the copula copulates. While the
Father-Spirit of Christianity should not be conflated with Hegel’ s Spirit, a
similar dialectical logic obtains in the former's movement out from itself, its
incarnation in the son of God. The immortality of God-Father-Spirit is
conditioned by his becoming finite, his becoming mortal, his eventual death
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
45
and resurrection. Although Hegel does not ..align husband and wife at .either
end of the spirit/matter polarity, his designation of the child as the sublation
of husband and wife rehearses the circular movement of the spirit's return to
itself that we see in the divine family. For Hegel, the child is the relationship
because the former is "that in which the relationship itself gradually passes
away" (273). Or as Derrida writes in Glas regarding Hegel’ s family: "They
guard there [in the child's becoming] their own disappearance, regard their
child as their own death."2 4 The child is at once the sign of their mortality
and its refusal. Regarding their disappearance,
they retard it, appropriate it; they maintain in the monumental
presence of their seed—in the name—the living sign that they are
dead, not that they are dead, but that dead they are, which is another
thing. Ideality is death, certainly, but to be dead—that is the whole
question of dissemination—is that to be dead or to be dead? This very
slight difference of stress, conceptually imperceptible, the inner
fragility of each attribute produces this oscillation between the
presence of being as death -and the death of being as presence.2 5
This "death of being as presence" signals a mode of being other than the
ontological one, a shift from being dead to being dead. But this other manner
of being, what Derrida, in Specters of Marx, will call "hauntoiogy,” is
disavowed by the parents who seek to retard and appropriate death, to
maintain the "presence of their seed," that is, to secure their own
immortality: "One’ s own proper death, when contemplated in one's child, is
the death that one denies, the death that is, that is to say denied. When one
says ’ death is/ one says ’ death is denied.'"2 6 The reproduction of the parents
in the child posits a death that is, a death that is denied is so far as it is
posited. The positing of death marks the return of ontology at the moment
of finita.de, a return that recovers (from) ail loss, all absence. That is why
Demda identifies this positing of death with the Hegelian Aufhebung:
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
46
cancellation, preservation, supercession: "The Aufkebung is the amortization
of death."2 7
Derrida's association of reproduction with the disavowal of death
echoes Freud's argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that reproduction
signals a certain desire for immortality: "These germ-cells . . . work against
the death of the living substance and succeed in winning for it what we can
only regard as potential immortality, though that may mean no more than a
lengthening of the road to death."2 8 Assimilating reproduction to the life
instinct, Freud recognizes a desire for immortality that moves within the
same dialectical logic that we see in both the divine and Hegel's family.
Recognizing the finitude of life, the life instinct seeks to move out from itself,
to reproduce itself in a finite other (the child) in whom the life instinct refuses
the very death that it at first appears to recognize. Like the divine father, the
human father accomplishes for himself his own immortality in the
reproduction of the child. The life instinct, then, is nothing more than a
disavowal of death, one that both cancels and preserves life in the face of
finitude.
And yet, to understand the life instinct, and by extension,
reproduction, as a disavowal of death is already to displace the strict
opposition that Freud constructs between the death instincts and the life
instincts. For Freud, the death instincts involve a compulsion to repeat that
"we cannot ascribe to the sexual instinct" insofar as the former "tend toward
the restoration of an earlier state of things" (50, 31). While Freud
acknowledges that repetition inheres in the life instinct as well as in the death
instinct, he nevertheless maintains that " it is actually only of the . . . [latter]
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
47
.group of instincts .that we can predicate a conservative, or rather, retr.ogra.de,
character corresponding to a compulsion to repeat" (38). Here it would
appear that the distinction between the life instincts and the death instincts
rests on the difference between progression and regression. Seeking to
restore the ego to an inanimate state prior to life, the death instinct is a
conservative move that contrasts sharply with the life instinct which moves
out from itself and reproduces itself in (an)other. Although Freud
understands reproduction as "winning for it what we can only regard as
potential immortality," his assimilation of reproduction to the life instinct
seems to take such potential immortality quite seriously, as if one might
truly become immortal by virtue of sexual reproduction (34). To recognize
one's eventual death, to reproduce oneself as both compensation for and
refusal of that death, is to deny one’ s finitude at the very moment that it is
recognized. Freud's text, then, appears to perform this very disavowal when
he simultaneously identifies immortality as both potential and guarantee:
"(The coalescence of two cell-bodies] alone is what guarantees the
immortality of the living substance in the higher organisms" (50),
As the desire for immortality, then, reproduction seeks to preserve
one's presence beyond one's absence, and to preserve that presence in
(an)other. But if, as I suggested above, absence is neither anterior nor
posterior to the self-presence that one’ s kin seems to confirm, indeed, if
normative kinship names nothing more than an interminable process of
mourning that nevertheless weds itself to the ontological, then the presence
of the self, and by extension, the presence of the other, is nothing more than
a ghost.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
48
Given that aloneness and kinship .cannot .be opposed in terms of
absence versus presence, how are we to distinguish between those forms of
alienation that produce what Patterson calls the "socially dead" and this other
'(n0 n)bemg-for~death that is kinship? What, in other words, is the difference
between sodal death and what Derrida calls "spectrality"?
In his Slavery and Social Death, Patterson maintains that, in its various
historical forms, slavery emerges as a substitute for death, a forced bargain
by ■ which the slave retains his/her life only to enter into the liminal existence
of the socially dead. As .a substitution for death, slavery does not "absolve or
erase the prospect of death," for the specter of material death looms over the
slave's existence as an irreducible remainder.2 9 This primary stage in the
construction of the -socially dead person is followed by what Patterson refers
to as the slave’ s "natal alienation," his/her alienation from all rights or claims
of birth: in short, a severing of all genealogical ties and claims both to the
slave's living blood relatives, and to his/her remote ancestors and future
descendants. Insofar as Patterson’ s notion of "sodal death" metaphorically
draws upon a prior understanding of "material death," his formulation
already complicates how we understand the phenomenality of sodal death
as a state of being/non-being. Having escaped material death, the slave is in
some sense haunted by the specter of death. But here it seems that the slave
is not merely haunted by death, but becomes a figure of death: the slave's
"natal alienation" provides that the slave enters into the liminal existence of
the undead.
While Patterson elaborates his theory in relation to the institution of
slavery, we might indeed extend this notion of sodal death to consider other
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
49
.populations who .are alienated from kinship. In Chapter Three, I turn toward
antebellum slavery and its aftermath in Reconstruction in order to consider
more directly the relationship between the social death of slaves and
spectrality, as well as to theorize the historical inhabiting of Reconstruction
era anxieties around miscegenation and interracial marriage in more recent
debates involving gay and lesbian kinship and marriage. For the moment,
however, I want to consider the implications of Derrida's notion of
spectrality for the state of being/non-being that is social death.
For Derrida, -spectrality is implicated in, yet not finally reducible to,
alienation, invisibility, and absence: "The specter is of the spirit, it participates
in the latter and stems from it even as it follows it as its ghostly double" (SM
201 /125). While spirit is pure abstraction, a specter assumes a certain
materiality: "For there is no ghost, there is never any becoming specter of
the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh. For there to be a ghost,
there must be a return to a body, but to a body that is more abstract than
ever" (SM 202/126). Although spectrality attempts to account for how the
body is -always in some sense .an idealization, this is not the same as saying
that the body is pure spirit, pure abstraction: "The spectrogenic process
corresponds to ... a paradoxical incorporation . . . not by returning to the
living body from which ideas and thoughts have been tom loose, but by
incarnating the latter in another artifactml body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of
spirit" (SM 202/126, his italics). For Derrida, spectrality corresponds to the
logic of the revenant, that is, to a body that can never fully return to itself as a
living presence. Far from resuscitating the Spirit of Hegelian idealism—the
very Spirit that Marx identifies as alienating man both from himself and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
50
from Ms .body—Demda introduces .the specter .as .that which .in some sense
mediates Hegel's idealism and Marx’ s materialism. But tMs is a mediation
unlike the Hegelian one in which radical difference can always be
synthesized into identity. TMs is a "mediation" (if we can call it that) with a
spectral remainder that demands that we ask not what is the difference
between idealism and materialism, but rather, what is the difference? That is,
how are the spirit and the body finally unmediateable such that every effort
to sublate the two results in a specter irreducible either to the one or the
other? In this sense, the specter is not so much the mediation of spirit and
body; rather, the specter is the remainder that attests to the very
impossibility of synthesizing body and spirit.
If kinship names -an originary relationship to death, then no set of
kinship relations—even those of the "socially alive"—can claim immunity
from the spectral. This is neither to say that we are all socially dead in one
form or another, nor to affirm the spectrality of kinship as an alibi for not
addressing how slaves and other abject populations are alienated from the
domain of normative kinship. Although I want to maintain that spectrality is
generalizable, this is not to say that its effects homogenize the multiple
manifestations of social death: the social deaths that slaves, racial minorities,
women, gays, and lesbians experience are the effects of
incommensurate—yet often intersecting—sociohistorical forces. Nor is the
emphasis here on the generalizability of spectrality meant to suggest that it
is historically homogeneous, that it always appears in the same form without
regard to historical transformations or specificity. Yet it is also not enough to
ask: does spectrality have a history? For if the spectralization of history
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
51
requires an alternative vision of the p ast one that troubles our attem pt to
access any past present, any event that is now passed yet continues to divide
what will have been its future present—and what we now call the present
present—we will do well to take seriously what Derrida, taking his cue from
Hamlet, describes as the dis-adjusted out-of-joint time of the spectral. The
spectral names the possibility not so much of redressing but addressing the
past. And is precisely the affirmation of mourning that makes such an
address possible. Spectrality is the anhistorical condition of historical address.
What we are calling the spectrality of kinship would seem to be
confirmed and denied by Freud's analysis of the life instinct, in which death
is both recognized and refused in and through the reproduction of the self in
the child, an other whose existence appears to confer upon the self a certain
immortality. Freud's understanding of the life instinct rehearses the
dialectical logic of the divine incarnation whereby the materiality of the
relation is both canceled and preserved through the materialization of that
relation in the mother, on the one hand, and its inevitable evacuation in the
father/spirit on the other. To be more precise, however, the dialectic that
obtains between the father and mother is not simply that between
spirit/matter, but rather, between spirit/body. It is, after all, the body of
Mary that functions as the receptacle for the divine insemination. The body,
then, is what is both canceled and preserved in the reproductive model of
kinship. While the mother's body is negated in and through the patriarchal
dialectic that returns the father/spirit to himself, the father's body is always
already negated and conserved in the reproduction of his body in the body
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
52
of the child. Following from Weismann's division of substance into mortal
and immortal parts, Freud remarks that
the mortal part is the body in the narrower sense—the 'soma'—which
alone is subject to natural death. The germ-cells, on the other hand,
are potentially immortal, in so far as they are able, under certain
favourable conditions, to develop into a -new individual, or, in other
words, to surround themselves with a new soma. (40)
And yet, this immortalization of the finite body in the reproduction of a new
soma involves nothing less than the Aufhebung of the body. The body
becomes immortal only on the condition that its finitude be disavowed.
According to the dialectical model of reproduction, "the body" can only be
either immortal or finite, a logic that disallows the possibility of the specter,
of that which remains beyond the sublation of body/spirit
Although Derrida finds the divine family to be indissoluble from an
unmarked, culturally non-specific generality that he calls, via Hegel, the
"human family," we might imagine that he has in mind various incarnations
of the Christian family in the West That what operates under the signifier of
"the family" in Western cultures is implicated in the either/or of spirit/matter
seems to be confirmed if one consults the anthropological literature on
kinship, in his Critique of the Study of Kinship, David Schneider argues that the
fundamental assumption in kinship studies is that 'blood is thicker than
water."3 0 Schneider goes on to show how nineteenth-century researchers on
the question of kinship—from Morgan to Durkheim—were preoccupied
with whether or not kinship had a biological, material basis. In his
voluminous Systems of Consanguinity and the Affinity of the Human family,
Morgan claimed that
The family relationships are as ancient as the family. They exist in
virtue of the law of derivation, which is expressed by the perpetuation
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
53
of the species through the marriage relation. A system of
consanguinity, which is founded upon a community of blood, is but
the formal expression and recognition of these relationships.3 1
While Morgan identified consanguinity as synonymous with the family,
Durkheim, in one of his many contributions to L'Annee Sociologique,
suggested that "one has the right to wonder if, by itself and in a general
way, kinship is not an essentially religious thing, of which consanguinity
may be the ordinary condition, secondary but not essential."3 2 This
religiosity by which all kinship is rendered "artificial" is further reflected, as
Marc Shell notes, in the "emphasis placed on male procreation by the
Christian religious and legal traditions," which evince a "fearful uncertainty
about paternity." He continues: "To call any child some man's son or
daughter—or any particular man someone's father—is a fiction insofar as all
paternity is inevitably indeterminable."3 3 Contemporary American law, as
Jacqueline Stevens argues, compensates for this indeterminability of
paternity by fabricating a distinction between legal and biological fathers.
Insofar as the legal father always trumps the biological one, "the effect... is
to sacralize paternity in comparison with the apparent materiality and
determinacy of maternity."3 4
Schneider's account of the various historical definitions of kinship is
particularly interesting for the ways in which it attempts to interrogate the
blood-is-thicker-than-water assumption only to end up anchoring kinship
once again in the material. After identifying in the anthropological literature
on kinship a consistent tautology whereby the very effort to free kinship
from biological referents only seems to reaffirm the material basis that it
wants to displace, Schneider concludes his chapter on "The History of Some
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
54
Definitions of Kinship" with a curious analogy: "To do this fto free kinship
from reproduction] would have been as much as to take all the sense of the
supernatural out of the idea of religion. Robbed of its grounding in biology,
kinship is nothing; robbed of its -grounding in the supernatural, religion is
everyday life" (112). While it remains unclear whether Schneider seeks to
prescribe such an analogy or if he intends it merely as a description of the
conventional view of kinship, the analogy would seem to appeal to the
following logic: whereas religion depends on that which transcends the
material and the corporeal (the soul, the afterlife, the spirit, etc.)—kinship is
ostensibly grounded in all that religion appears to scorn. Schneider's analogy
is significant for two reasons: (1) it metonymically links kinship with the
supernatural of which religion has been robbed. Kinship risks becoming kin
to the supernatural: it becomes, in other words, something spectral and
ghostly; (2) the appearance of religion as the second term in the analogy
speaks to the duplicity inherent to normative kinship (by which we mean
"the family") in which the material is both negated and preserved. What does
it mean to claim that ungrounding kinship from the biological or the
material transforms it into "nothing" if kinship names a spiritual relation
between father and son on the one hand, and a material one between
mother and child on the other? Has not kinship always been about the
father/spirit, with the consequence that matter J mater emerges only on the
condition of its erasure, that is, of its absence?3 5 How might we read in .
Schneider's claim a certain disavowal of the patriarchal, Christian model of
kinship in which the spiritual relation between father and son always
supercedes the materiality of the mother/child relation? It would make no
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
55
sense, .then, to talk of .ungrounding kinship from the material if ..the material
is that which kinship ultimately seeks to cancel and suppress. The
question—"is there a material basis for kinship?"—only makes sense if we
reduce kinship to biology, a move that denies or forgets the supplanting of
father/spirit for mother/matter that obtains in both the divine family and its
various human incarnations. To articulate a move from what we might call
the "spirit of kinship" to something like its specter—far from emancipating
kinship from the material—is rather to free kinship from the reproduction of
the father./spirit in and for itself.
That this "spiritual kinship" which we have been tracing in a Western
context is articulated in profoundly dialectical terms is further suggested by
Schneider's 1968 Study, American Kinship: A Cultural Account.3 6 According to
his research, the symbolic system of American kinship corresponds to a
crude dialectical model:
As a symbol of unity, or oneness, love is the union of flesh, of
opposites, male and female, man and woman. The unity of opposites
is not only affirmed in the embrace, but also in the outcome of that
■union, the unity of blood, the child. For the child brings together and
unifies in one person the different biogenetic substances of both
parents. (39)
Schneider goes on to remark that "love is what American kinship is all about"
(40). While his research does not suggest that Americans explicitly subscribe
to the model of the divine family in which father/spirit supplants
mother/matter, this appeal to a form of "spiritual love" cannot but refer,
tacitly at least, to the Christian model of the family. For Schneider, "all of the
significant symbols of American kinship are contained within the figure of
sexual intercourse" because it is through sexual intercourse that the union of
opposites is realized (40). Schneider makes it dear that "sexual intercourse" is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
56
itself a "symbol," the latter of which he defines as "something which stands
for or represents something else to which it is not intrinsically related" (31).
This understanding of kinship in terms of a symbolic system in which only
an arbitrary relation holds between signrfier and signified forms the basis of
Schneider's analysis of American kinship. What is curious about this system
of symbols, however, is that it is understood to be independent of how
Americans say, think, and do kinship:
This book is not to be understood as an account of what Americans
say when they talk about kinship and family, although it is based on
what Americans say. It is not about what Americans think, -as a
rational, conscious, cognitive process, about kinship and family,
although it is based in no small part on what Americans say they
think about kinship and family. This book should not be construed as
a description of roles and relationships which Americans can be
observed actually to undertake in their day-to-day life, although it is
based on what Americans say they do and on what they have been
observed to do. This book is about symbols, the symbols which are
American kinship. (18, his italics)
Not reducible to speech, thought or even performance, American kinship is
a purely symbolic system which need not correspond to any given "reality."
Among the examples that Schneider offers of different symbolic systems or
"cultural units," as he sometimes calls them, are "a person, place, thing,
feeling, state of affairs, sense of foreboding, fantasy, hallucination, hope, or
idea" (2). Even if kinship is nothing more than a hallucination or a fantasy,
Schneider insists, it exists as a symbol.
To illustrate his claim that a cultural unit need not refer to any "object
elsewhere in the real world," Schneider asks us to consider the "cultural
construct" of the ghost and the dead man:
The ghost of a dead man and the dead man are two cultural
constructs or cultural units. Both exist in the real world as cultural
constructs, culturally defined and differentiated entities. But a good
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
57
deal of empirical testing has shown that at a quite different level of
reality the ghost does not exist at all, though there may or may not be
a dead man at a given time and place, and under given conditions. Yet
at the level of their cultural definition there is no question about their
existence, nor is either one any more or less real than the other. (2)
What is striking about Schneider's example of the ghost is that it is
introduced in a completely arbitrary manner, as if it has no relation to the
cultural construct of kinship whose status as symbol the ghost is nonetheless
intended to illustrate. This despite his claim that American kinship articulates
itself through a dialectic of "spiritual love," one in which the presence of the
other is both assumed and consumed through the union of opposites. How
are to understand the appearance of this ghost here in the opening pages of
a text that purports to tell us something about American kinship as a
symbolic system? It is as if the spiritual kinship that will later come to reveal
itself as spirit emerges first as a certain ghost of spirit. O r as Derrida remarks
in Specters of Marx, "the first spiritualization also, and already, produces
some specter" (203/126). Would it be going too far, then, to suggest that the
specter is anticipated in the spirit of kinship, that the spirit of kinship is
always haunted by this "second" ghost, the specter that remains, that cannot
be assimilated into identity, to unity and oneness? This "second" ghost will
have already been the "first" ghost, the specter that resists totalization. That
this ghost of spirit comes on stage in the company of the "dead man,"
moreover, reminds us of Creoris /im)mortal words: "Here 1 am... in virtue
of kinship with the dead." I am here, I am present, Creon proclaims, not
despite of, but rather, because of m y proximity to death. But this " I am here,
now," this presence, is always spectralized by virtue of the "T s" kinship with
death.3 7 The ghost and the dead man are thus not two distinct cultural units,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
58
for the man who becomes dead is already a ghost prior to becoming a ghost
as such. "It is a dead man that you kill again," Creon announces upon
hearing of the Queen's suicide (210). But death is on the program from the
start, prior to the "social death" with which Creon is afflicted after the deaths
of Haemon and the Queen leave him bereft of kin.
The dead return later in Schneider's study as a "problem," one that
emerges on account of some informants' uncertainty as to whether they
should indude the deceased on their list of relatives (70). Remarking on the
tendency on the part of informants to wonder whether the dead constitute a
relative, Schneider writes:
Death terminates a relationship but does not undo or erase what is
and was a fact. A dead person remains person enough to be located
on a genealogy; person enough to be counted as an ascendant or
descendant; person enough to be remembered if there is some reason
to do so. Marriage is'... until death do us part.' The person was and
is; the relationship is no longer. (71, his italics)
While Schneider's account gives oblique reference here to the work of
mourning by noting the status that remembrance achieves for the dead
person as "person enough to be counted," his claim that "the person was
and is," but "the relationship is no longer" disavows the haunting effect that
the very question—"Do you want me to list the dead ones too?"—brings
into play. Insofar as the informants pause to consider their relationship to
the dead, how can the relation be said no longer to exist? Does not the
reflection on one's relation to the dead betray the very effort to establish
that relationship as terminated, as fully mourned and forgotten? Moreover,
to suggest that the dead person both was and is is to constitute the dead
person as present both in some past present and in the present present,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
59
against -the possibility that a dead person is a relative because a relative is
always, in some sense, a dead person,
American kinship, then, would appear to correspond to a certain
"metaphysics of presence" insofar as it turns around a dialectic of "spiritual
love," one in which the presence of the other must be assumed, consumed
and assimilated into a structure of identity that suppresses difference.
American kinship in this way constitutes a "restricted economy," to cite the
designation that Georges Bataille gives to Hegelian dialectics, which involves
a closed system of meaning that recovers (from) all of its losses—including
that loss and absence which is death. Bataille contrasts such an economy with
a "general one," the latter of which Derrida refers to in his reading of Bataille
in Writing and Difference as a "Hegelianism without reserve" (WD 369). A
general economy, such as Derrida’ s notion of difference, resists the
amortization of death that we see in Hegel, that is, the resurrection of that
which the movement of the Aufhebung cancels yet always preserves.3 8 This
disavowal of death, moreover, might be understood as the defining
characteristic of Hegel's Spirit that always manages to recover from its
failures within the movement of the dialectic. As Judith Butler remarks with
regard to Spirit: "There is little time for grief in the Phenomenology because
renewal is so close at hand."3 9 Butler's reading of Spirit's failure / resurrection
figures Spirit as disavowing its own death, a disavowal, 1 would suggest, that
is conditioned by the Aufhebung of the body—that is, the cancellation,
preservation, and supercession of the corporeal.
Insofar as they are both implicated in a certain negation/ preservation
of the body, kinship and slavery are intimately connected. This is not to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
60
suggest that all forms of kinship are tantamount to slavery* only that they
both involve a relation between one spectral body and another* a "kindred
possession," to invoke Saidiya Hartman's words, of one body in and by
another.4 0 Understood in terms of such "kindred possession,” the restricted
economy of slavery is not as distinct from the economy of kinship as we
might imagine and want it to be. To the extent that it fabricates self-presence
through the production and disavowal of the other's presence, normative
kinship substantiates an obliteration of the other/body that is not fully
separable from that which slavery performs.
In a reading of Hegel's chapter on "Lordship and Bondage," Butler
attempts to revise the master/slave dialectic in terms of this negated
corporeality. In the context of this dialectic, the body, Butler maintains,
emerges as that which the master must disavow and project onto the slave.
The slave in this sense is/becomes the body of the master in and through
this disavowal. The master's negation of his bodily life, Butler suggests
further, allegorizes Hegel's idealist enterprise more generally; " In Hegel’ s
Phenomenology bodies are almost never to be found as objects of
philosophical reflection, much less as sites of experience, for bodies are, in
Hegel, always and only referred to indirectly as the encasement, location or
specificity of consciousness."4 1 Butler seems to suggest here that Hegel is
compJicit in the very refusal of the body that the master performs within the
terms of the master/slave dialectic. Her rewriting of this dialectic in terms of
the body thus makes the body into the very object of "philosophical
reflection" that Hegel denies.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
■ 6 1
Butler's concern with questions of corporeality* of course, extends
well beyond her explicit engagements with Hegel, and would seem to be
confirmed by the position that she has achieved among the most well-
known and most often cited exponents of what we might simply call, for
lack of a better vocabulary, "body theory." From her 1993 book Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex,” to her essay, '"How Can I Deny That
These Hands and This Body Are M ine?'," in Qui Parle (1997), to an interview
published in Signs (1998), "How Bodies Come to Matter," Butler explicitly
affirms her philosophical and political task as, in part, that of making the
body "more relevant."4 2 But as she laments in "How can I D eny...," some
critics (the example that she gives is feminist historian Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese) have interpreted her work as doing quite the opposite, of
negating and dismissing the body altogether. And yet, this question as to
whether she has inadvertently "made the body less rather than more
relevant," I want to suggest, only makes sense within a dialectical logic
whereby the body can only be either affirmed or negated—that is, made
more or less (1).
Whether Butler's rewriting of Hegel does or does not remedy the
disavowal of the body that she identifies in his text, it would appear that
Butler inserts the body into Hegel's dialectical apparatus without making
explicit her relationship to dialectical thinking. Does Butler seek and/or
succeed in displacing the dialectical logic that she identifies in the Spirit/Body
opposition, or does she simply invert the structure such that Body now
comes to occupy the privileged position that Spirit once enjoyed? As Andrzej
Warminski reminds us, "for dialectical thought it makes no difference which
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
62
[term] determines which as long as their relation remains one of
determination."4 3 In this sense, if the preservation of both Spirit and Body
require the negation of one another, then Body is always already Spirit and
Spirit is always already Body. I want to suggest that Butler's larger work on
"the body" performs an implicit move from Spirit to Body, one that is not
reducible to the move from Spirit to specter that I seek to articulate in this
project. While her emphasis on imagining how the bodies of the abject might
"come to matter" resonates in certain ways with my effort to theorize how
the socially dead might be reanimated, my departure from her project
begins with articulating the differance between Body (and therefore Spirit)
and specter. What follows is a detour through Butler's theorizations of
corporeality for what they have to say about the preservation of the body
within the restricted economy of dialectics. I maintain that what Butler
performs in her work, over and over again, is the death of the body, a death
that is nevertheless denied by the body's resurrection as an immortal object
of philosophical reflection. In the final section of this chapter I turn to Poe's
"The Premature Burial," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and Ian
McEwan's The Cement Garden to consider how articulating a move from
preservation to remainder would allow for an elaboration of a spectral
theory of kinship, one that exceeds the normative (i.e. spiritual) frame.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
63
he Corps Revemnt: Judith
Butler’ s Dialectical
Corporealism
Ail of its life, the body is also a dead
body, the body of a dead person, of
this death that I am living.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus
The emergence of the body from the shadows into the daylight of
contemporary scholarship must certainly mark an unprecedented event.
According to the novelty ascribed to criticism and theory that makes the
body into the center of its concerns, the appearance of the body on the
academic scene must be a first appearance. Which is to say that the body
presents itself rather than re-presents itself. Yet what if its first appearance
was already a repetition? What if the very turn to the body that promised a
departure from the supposed linguistic idealism of poststructuralism
occasioned a certain return of the metaphysics of presence, only now bearing
the name or rather the spirit of "the body"?
American cultural studies in particular, together with race, dass,
gender, sexuality, and ethnicity studies, has often turned to the body as a
material marker of identity. The body thus operates in much cultural studies
work as a kind of metonymy for identity, one that ostensibly signifies one's
"blackness," one's "womanness," or one’ s "gayness." Given the historical
violence of erasure, invisibility, and death (both social and material) to which
such bodies have often been subjected, it has also seemed to many that the
ontology of these bodies as presence must be insisted upon in the face of this
nihilistic threat. As Sharon Holland announces in Raising the Dead: Readings of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
64
Death ami. (Black) Subjectivity, "Bringing back the dead (or saving the living
from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act/'4 4 In the introduction to
her seminal, 1991 collection of essays on queer theory, Inside/Out, Diana Fuss
notes how "a striking feature of many of the essays collected in this volume
is a fascination with the specter of abjection, a certain preoccupation with the
figure of the homosexual as specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant,
abject and undead."4 5 Yet despite its concern with abjection, rarely has queer
scholarship addressed itself to the spectral except by way of contesting its
pervasiveness in dominant representations of homosexuality. As Derrida
notes in Specters of Marx, "the traditional scholar does not believe in
ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality" (33/11).
If the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, that is because "there has
never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction
between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and
the non-living, being and non-being” (34/11). For Derrida, a capacity to
speak to ghosts would be the mark of a new sort of scholar. Although it
might seem odd to yoke queer theorists to the figure of the traditional
scholar, so ingrained is the anti-spectral character of queer scholarship that
Holland can declare the ultimate queemess of raising the dead as a "fact," and
support this claim only by referring us to ACT UP's famous political slogan:
"silence = death." If saving us from the shadow of death names the "ultimate
queer act,” such so-called "raising" of the dead relieves us of any sustained
engagement with spectrality, understood, in part, as an interminable process
of mourning that is the condition of all life, indeed, of any-body. Spectrality,
as such, would not be reducible to a problem of representation, or rather,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
65
mis-representation, ..a s queer scholarship .tends to .suppose. Although
Holland glosses "postmodernism" as "the attractive zombie theory of the
academy, a place where the living travel through death and are reborn to
utter the truths of such a journey," this amusing yet somewhat
unsympathetic description does little to challenge the cliche that scholarship
which addresses the subject of death is simply lugubrious and melancholic
rather than affirmative. In queer theory and American cultural studies more
generally, then, the body emerges most often as a marker of both identity
and presence. While the former would appear to have received its most well-
known and persistent challenge in Judith Butler's anti-epistemological
accounts of corporeality, the latter has been the subject of little or no
interrogation.
In The Apparitional Lesbian, for instance, Terry Castle elaborates her
notion of the lesbian "ghost effect" primarily as it operates as a trope of
absence and invisibility.4 6 Understanding the lesbian as having been
"vaporized by metaphor" throughout the modem, Western literary
tradition, Castle insists that "it is time ... to focus on presence instead of
absence, plenitude instead of scarcity" (19). It is time, now, in the present,
Castle implores us, to insist on the presence of the lesbian. Making the
lesbian present involves looking "within the very image of negativity"
where "lies the possibility of recovery—a way of conjuring up, or bringing
back into view, that which has been denied. Take the metaphor far enough,
and the invisible will rematerialize, the spirit will become flesh" (7). We could
perhaps not ask for a more neatly transposed, albeit implicit, account of
Hegelian negativity in this claim that what is canceled—here the lesbian—is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
66
also preserved and so can. he recovered, made .present again. But whereas
Hegel would understand being as that which emerges only via negativity,
Castle imagines the ontology of the lesbian as given prior to the social
mechanisms of homophobia that would appear to jeopardize it. There is no
room in Castle for "looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it," to
invoke Hegel's well-known phrase from the preface to the Phenomenology
(93). Although she addresses the possibility that the spectral metaphor can
be used in the service of rematerialization, because she understands
negativity in terms that are both pre-dialectical and non-deconstructive,
Castle, I would maintain, deprives the lesbian body of its spectrality. Such
spectrality would name a ghostliness irreducible to the social and historical
"violence that erases the lesbian from view, and thus, of those linguistic
tropes that produce that invisibility. While my argument that Castle deprives
the lesbian body of its spectrality might seem troubling to those for whom
the ontologization of the lesbian is a political and ethical requirement, what I
want to underscore is how the spectral lesbian, as it were, is not reducible to
the apparitional one. This is not to suggest, moreover, that we might isolate
the lesbian as being uniquely available for such specialization, that is, that
gay male bodies, black bodies, white bodies, straight bodies and others are
not also implicated in the problem of spectrality. For every-body is spectral
insofar as it is finite.
This specialization of bodies would find leverage in Hegel's
negativity if it were not for his positing of being as the emergent possibility
of the former, that is, of being as full presence mediated through a "fight to
the death" with the other. In Kojfeve's widely influential reading of Hegel, it
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
67
is precisely this confrontation with negativity that characterizes Hegel's
philosophy as a "philosophy of death."4 7 According to Kojfeve, Hegel
understood that man's spiritual being could only be attained by severing
spirit from Judeo-Christian theology that posits spirit in a "beyond," and not
in "man-in-the-world":
After Hegel, "spiritual" or "dialectical" being is necessarily temporal
and finite. The Christian notion of an infinite and eternal Spirit is
contradictory in itself: the infinite being is necessarily the "natural"
given-static-Being, eternally identical to itself; and the "dynamic"
being created or creative, even historical or "spiritual," is necessarily
limited in time, that is to say, essentially m ortal4 8
Despite his recognition that man, in Kojeve’ s words, is "death living a
human life," Hegel nonetheless posits being as ultimately possible on this
earth, an ontological claim anathema to Derrida's notion of spectrality. And
yet, Specters of Marx begins by addressing an "off-screen" voice who says: " I
would like to learn to live finally" (13/xvii). Echoing Hegel's assertion that
one must dwell with the negative, Derrida maintains that this sentence "has
no sense and cannot be just unless it comes to terms with death" (14/xviii).
Both dialectics and deconstruction, then, involve a recognition of finitude.
But whereas Hegel remarks that Spirit "endures {death] and maintains itself
in it," for Derrida, "being" is always haunted by finitude (19). Deconstruction
announces the death of being as presence.
The insistence on presence within certain versions of identity politics
might be understood as inherently dialectical insofar as it involves a
reduction of plurality to the one. Or perhaps identity politics would be better
understood as not yet dialectical if being is taken to be given rather than
mediated. In any event, that questions of corporeality and embodiment so
often emerge within a language that denies plurality—as evidenced by the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
■ 6 8
now commonplace reference to "the body," indeed, "the one body"— should
immediately call our attention to the invocation of the body as presence. It
remains unclear, moreover, how the interrogation of identity, of the body's
sameness to itself, can proceed without an attendant critique of the body's
presence to itself. For the fiction of presence, as Derrida had so often insisted,
is enabled by the reduction of difference to identity. Despite what would
appear to be the radicalness of Butler's anti-epistemological argument about
the body— -in short, that the body is unknowable outside of discourse, Butler,
like most of the purveyors of identity politics that she critiques, consistently
refers to the body in terms of the one. Although Chapter two will explore in
greater depth how the master/slave dialectic involves a preservation of the
body that disables the spectrality of bodies, we can already note in Butler's
rewriting of the master /slave dialectic a certain reduction of the differance
between the master's and the slave's bodily lives into identity. The strength
of Butler's account of bodily exchange in the master/slave dialectic lies in her
implicit recognition of a certain chiasmatic relation between the body of the
master and the body of the slave. Against the liberatory claim that would
want to insist on the radical integrity of individual bodies—of a body that
cannot be divided in itself—Butler shows the master('s) and the slave('s)
bodies to be related in a chiasmatic way. Which is to say that their bodies
cross over and divide one another, inhabit one another from within. And
yet, to demonstrate that their bodies are not fully separable is not the same
as saying that the slave's body is the body of the master. This later claim
only makes sense within the restricted economy of the master/ slave
relation, a dialectic that predicates itself on the fiction that the slave's body
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
69
can fully transmogrify into the master's body without any remainder or
surplus. When Butler remarks that the suppression of "the body" requires
that body as the instrument of its suppression, her language appears
inadvertently to mime the fiction of this dialectical logic by which the
difference between master/slave—like all binary differences—is subsumed
under the universal sign of the one body. For the duplicitous premise of the
master/slave relation is that there are two bodies in the dialectic and that
there is only one body in the dialectic. To daim that the suppression of the
body requires the preservation of that body is still not to displace the terms
by which the spectral differance within bodies gets transposed into a mere
difference; a difference that is not a difference, a difference that is one. In
short, while Butler shows us how bodies can never be fully different from
one another, she fails to interrogate how they can never be fully the same.
What begins as a chiasmatic relation within and between bodies is
supplanted by this return to the one.
in this sense, Butler's reading of Hegel reproduces a logic of presence
insofar as it understands the master's and the slave's bodies as present to
one another both spatially and temporally. This spatiotemporal presence
occasions the fiction that they are in fact one body, a logic of identity by
which the master preserves his disavowed body in the body of the slave. At
stake here in my reading of Butler, and more generally for my project, is the
difference between preservation and remainder, between a body that is
preserved within a restricted economy of dialectics and a body that is always
already specialized by virtue of its non-contemporaneity with itself. To
consider bodies as spectral is to understand their ghostliness as inhabiting a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
70
temporality other than that of anteriority or posteriority, a ghostliness
otherwise than the temporality of life and death. As Warren Montag
remarks in a canny gloss on spectrality: "The linear time of birth, life and
death, of the beginning and the end, has no place in the hauntic, which latter
alone allows us to speak of what persists beyond the end, beyond death, of
what was never alive enough to die, never present enough to become
absent."4 9 The socially dead—those who were "never alive enough to die,
never present enough to become absent"—can be reanimated only on the
condition that such reanimation be thought within the non-linear time of the
hauntic. To paraphrase Hamlet, the body is out of joint. Its time is not that of
the present.
Notwithstanding this temporal disjointedness of the body, Butler, like
Castle, proceeds as if the presence of the body need not be called into
question. This reticence to interrogate presence might at first seem
surprising given the radicalness of some of her claims, or at least the
radicalness that is often attributed to them. As is perhaps well known,
Butler's central argument about the body claims that it is unknowable
outside of those linguistic tropes that occasion its survivability within
language. Pushing the Foucauldian paradigm of what Americans like to refer
to as "discursive construction" to its absolute limit, Butler insists that any
effort to posit a body prior to discourse is nothing more than a ruse, one that
does not take into account how bodies congeal and materialize by virtue of
their implication in language.5 0 This argument that the materiality of the
body is not a given but a discursive construction has often been interpreted
as somehow overriding the material to the point of negating it altogether. I
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
71
would argue, however, that the question as to whether this theory does or
does not negate the body distracts us from how it performs the possibility of
the body's death if only to bring us as readers to the brink of a
poststructuralist nihilism that always almost arrives, a brush with death as
discourse and language that the body nonetheless survives. The claim that
would understand Butler's theory as doing away with the body thus misses
the dialectical logic by which the body always survives its death. The body is
always present in her work, but that is precisely the problem. For it is the
very figuration of the body as presence that marks this theory as idealist and
not any simple negation of corporeality. The frequent anxiety that greets her
theorizations of the body has more to do with a perceived threat to a certain
version of identity politics that understands philosophical speculation about
bodies and materiality as politically risky and nihilistic than with any
interrogation of the ways in which the "metaphysics of presence" haunts
Butler's work.5 1
If Castle's call to make the lesbian present begins with given-static-
being, Butler's philosophy of the body might be understood, paradoxically,
as a negative constructivism.5 2 The ontology of the body is not a given in her
texts, but rather, the emergent possibility of the body's "mediation" through
language and discourse. This mediation, tacitly modeled on Hegel's dialectic
of negativity, involves a negation/ affirmation of bodily life in and through
which the body comes into being only by risking its possible dissolution in
language. It is not simply the case, then, that Butler's critics have
misunderstood her by reading into her work a negation or evacuation of the
body that is not in some sense performed by her texts. That Butler
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
72
understands herself to be embattled in a polemic with regard to the all-too-
feequent charge of nihilism aimed at poststructuralist theory is confirmed by
the sarcasm that pervades her preface to Bodies That Matter. Relaying an
anecdote involving an unnamed critic who, exasperated with her theoretical
musings, reportedly asked her '"What about the materiality of the body,
Judy?’ ," Butler wryly responds:
I took it that the addition of "Judy" was an effort to dislodge me from
the more formal "Judith" and to recall me to a bodily life that could
not be theorized away.... If I persisted in this notion that bodies
were in some way constructed, perhaps I really thought that words
alone had the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic
substance? Couldn’ t someone simply take me aside? (x)
Although Butler goes to great lengths to show how the body always
"escapejsj" and "eludes its capture" by language, is not this threat of the
body's dissolution, its full and final subsumption into language, precisely the
nihilistic possibility that her texts rehearse over and over again—to the
aggravation of her critics—if only to win for the body a sense of triumph
over death (HC 4,18)? Responding in another context to the paranoid
conditionality of sentences that begin ’ " If real bodies do not exist...,"’ Butler
writes: "The sentence begins as a warning against an impending nihilism, for
if the conjured content of these series of conditional clauses proves to be
true, then, and there is always a then, some set of dangerous consequences
will surely follow."5 3
Writing in a post-de Man-scandal era, Butler's effort to counter this
familiar caricature is understandable. For my purposes, however, I would
like to ask if and when does the effort to refute the
caricature—poststructuralism = nihilism—end up disavowing death, indeed,
putting in place the very metaphysics of presence that decons traction, in
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
73
particular, has sought to displace. Does the charge of nihilism always have to
be answered by insisting on poststracturalism as "life affirming"? Might this
defense in the name of something called "poststructuralism" be nothing
more than an ironic '"will to the denial of life/" as Nietzsche said of the
defense of Christianity?5 4 Might there be something like a politics of
spectrality that refuses the welding of the political to the ontological?
Although Derrida has always insisted on the affirmative possibilities of
deconstructiorv he is mindful not to oppose -affirmation to negation.
Affirmation begins with possibility rather than negation. For the assimilation
of finitude to negativity presumes that any theory that would affirm death
must first negate or "deconstruct" what it also necessarily reconstructs. Yet
"deconstruction" must be understood as naming an affirmation without
negation, a possibility without negativity. Indeed, "affirmation"—inasmuch
at it is conventionally opposed to negation—may not even be the best word
to name what deconstruction does. What deconstruction does not do,
however, despite its name, is deconstruct.5 5
Given the polemic in which Butler appears to see herself, how are we
to understand the preoccupation with "discursive construction" that haunts
her work? Following from Foucault, Butler's use of the term "discourse"
would appear to bear a set of meanings that line up quite neatly with those
of the French philosopher. "Discourse" in Foucault is not only language, but
carries the multiple valences of power, disciplinarity, institutionality,
regulation and idealization. Although Butler’ s texts clearly exploit these
multiple meanings, above all discourse comes to name something of a threat
to the body. Understanding discourse as anterior to the body, Butler
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
74
announces something like the death of the body as a thing-in-itself. This is
made abundantly clear in a section from Bodies That Matter that bears the
interrogative title: "'Are Bodies Purely Discursive?'” One wonders about the
source of all of these questions and conditional sentences ("What about the
materiality of the body, Judy?" " If real bodies do not exist. ^ 7') that haunt her
texts. They never seem to be attached to a name, indeed, to any-body, as if
they arrive from some ghostly chorus that insists on making itself heard.
While I do not intend to suggest that these voices are products of Butler's
imagination, I do want to consider how— by not interrogating what
understanding of negativity is involved in these various accusations—her
argument sidesteps the problem of finitude altogether. This failure to
address the question of finitude thus wins for the theory of discursive
construction a certain felicity that is at once too pessimistic and too
optimistic. As for the version of negativity that subtends the charge of
nihilism, the logic would appear to go something like this: negativity leads to
consequences so dangerous that we cannot possibly look it in the face. O r as
the refrain often goes in contemporary identity politics: the socially dead
cannot afford, at this historical moment, when they are just now emerging
from the shadows of abjection, to dwell with the negative, when as figures
of death, that has been the only the space that they have been allowed to
inhabit. Recognizing this too easy assimilation of negativity to that which
cancels yet neither preserves (dialectics) nor produces any remainder
(deconstruction), Butler proceeds to elaborate a meticulous answer to the
question—"Are bodies purely discursive?"—that shows how "the body"
emerges only on the condition of its evacuation via the negativity of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
75
discourse. Her answer begins with the following assertion: "To posit a
materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and the
materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition"
(67).
We should note, before going forward, how "the body" and
"materiality" operate interchangeably throughout this section independent
and in lieu of any consideration of how the latter exceeds the figuration of
containment that is conventionally associated with the former, as in both the
Platonic and Christian notion of the body as the "prison" of the soul. While
we will return to this question of containment in Chapter Two, what I seek
to underscore here is how this argument both refuses and falls prey to the
seduction of dialectical thinking. Against the reading that would understand
the theory of discursive construction to be reducing body/matter to
language, the text asserts quite clearly that materiality cannot be "collapsed
into an identity with language" (68). The passage continues:
Language and materiality are fully embedded in one another,
chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one
■another, i.e., reduced to one another, -and yet neither fully ever
exceeds the other. Always already implicated in each other, always
already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never
fully identical nor fully different (69)
Resisting the dialectical logic that would want to sublate the difference
between language and materiality in the name of some greater synthesis,
this argument would appear to write a certain differance into the relation
between language and materiality. Any possibility of identity is inevitably
deferred by virtue of their "chiasmic" interdependency. But what is lost, if
you will, in this recognizably decortstractive strategy is recovered when we
move from the question of the relationship between language and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
76
materiality to that of the ontology of .the body. Although this passage seems
designed to allay ours fears that the body might dissolve into language,,
what would happen, we might ask, if the reverse were to happen? That is,
what if language was absorbed into materiality such that bodies became
nothing but material stuff without ideality, indeed, without any discursive
life? That such a question is not even on the horizon confirms that this
argument concerning discursive construction means to perform a certain
risk to bodily life. According to the tacit logic of this polemic, the possibility
of everything becoming nothing but material is so in line with conventional
thinking that it cannot even be considered a risk, despite the possibility that a
material world without ideality would be, as Warren Montag reminds us, a
"material world without anything ..., a body that has given up the ghost"
(77,78). But if the possibility of a materiality emptied of all idealizations is so
remote that we need not even entertain it as a possibility, the same might be
said of its corollary: "Do not be afraid (of poststructuralism), the body still
lives,” seems to be the subtext of this argument.
We know, however, that the body lives on beyond its encounter with
discourse-as-the-threat-of-death because it returns four years after the
publication of Bodies That Matter in a reading of Hegel's master/slave
dialectic from The Psychic Life of Power (1997), an essay published in Qui Parle,
"How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine" (1997) and in
an interview from the journal Signs, "How Bodies Come to Matter" (1998).
This return to the body sets in motion another series of confrontations
between discourse and the body in which the latter once again proves to be
the victor. Less a turning away from the negative than a turning away from
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
77
finitude, Butler's constructivism continues to invoke the body as that which
is preserved above and beyond its death.
In "How can I Deny . . . it is Butler's own insomnolent body that is
figured, anecdotally, as having risen from a bad dream only to find
(imagine?) herself as the tacit object of criticism on television's C-Span. As
Butler relates the anecdote, feminist historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
commented to an interviewer that she disliked the feminist view that "no
stable distinction between the sexes could be drawn or known, a view that
suggests that the difference between the sexes is itself culturally variable or,
worse, discursively fabricated, as if it is all a matter of language." Butler
continues: "O f course, this did not help my project of falling asleep, and I
became aware of being, as it were, a sleepless body in the world accused, at
least obliquely, with having made the body less rather than more relevant”
(1). Accused, once again, of having negated "the body" as an object of
intellectual inquiry, Butler nonetheless awakens to the experience of her own
insomnolent body, called back from the dead of sleep. These calls to Butler
"from the beyond," interpellations that seem to demand a certain return to
that bodily life that the theory of "discursive construction" threatens to
destroy, are becoming rather frequent visitants. That Butler is all too ready
to respond to these calls, to perform for us yet again the failure of language
to absorb materiality into itself, is telling, for it suggests that the relation of
differance that she at first seems to theorize between the body and discourse
involves something that looks more like the preservation of the body rather
than its remainder. In other words, Butler's theory appears to be more
interested in what remains of "the body" rather than in the spectral remains
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
78
themselves. If the ontology of the body is temporarily threatened by virtue
of its embeddedness in language, Butler resists specializing the body in any
temporal sense that would refuse its return in every present.
Butler responds to this call that she receives via C-Span, a call to
return not only to the body, but indeed, to return to her own, proper body,
by performing for us once again both the possibility and ultimate resistance
of the body’ s full subsumption into discourse. For what follows from her
opening anecdote involving the -dissonance that obtains between the
(undeniable?) presence of her sleepless body and "the body" that Fox-
Genovese argues Butler has negated is yet another rehearsal of the body's
amortization of discourse-as-death. Butler's uncertainty as to whether she is
the subject of Fox-Genovese's interpellation anticipates Descartes' corporeal
dubitability in the Meditations^ which Butler reads in the body, as it were, of
her essay. What is more, the question that Descartes asks and that Butler
echoes—"How can I deny that these hands and this body are mine"-— is
transposed, tacitly by Butler, into something like "how can I deny that this
corpus is mine?" For in the discussion of discursive construction that follows,
the "scandal” that her earlier work seemed to provoke is made to appear
other to her own work:
There is, of course, something quite scandalous involved in the strong
version of construction that is sometimes at work, when, for instance,
the -doctrine of construction implies -that the body is not only made by
language, but made of language, or that the body is somehow
reducible to the linguistic coordinates by which it is identified and
identifiable, as if there is no non-linguistic stuff at issue. (3)
One wonders what "strong version of construction" Butler has in mind here.
For how could it not be the one that is attributed to her? The curious lack of
attribution that we can observe in this allusion to a strong constructivism is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
79
striking, especially given -her .opening anecdote in which she recognizes
herself, Althusserian style, as the addressee of an accusation that associates
her with a form of feminism that supposedly reduces the body to a
discursive fabrication. Unnamed by Fox-Genovese, Butler nonetheless asks:
"W as i t . . . paranoia to think that she was talking about me, and was there
really any way to know? If it was me, then how would I know that I am the
one to whom she refers" (1) Although Butler does proceed as if she is the
proper addressee of this missive, the discussion of constructivism that
follows would appear to forget or deny her implication in the "strong
version of construction" that she purports only to describe. How can she
deny that this corpus is hers? This denial enables her to exhume the body
from its untimely grave so that it might once again become subject to the
negativity of discourse. For while the extradiscursive body may be
"unknowable," the intradiscursive one certainly is, and what we know most
about it, indeed, what this argument suggests we need never not know,
need never interrogate, is its knowability as presence. Whether the body
lives inside or outside of discourse, it lives on.
Does the articulation of this chiasmus between the body and discourse
demonstrate a coming to grips with death that Derrida maintains is
necessary if one "would like to leam to live -finally"? Or does the body
merely live on as before, contaminated by language to be sure, but, oddly
enough, not contaminated by that death whose figuration is compelled in
and by language (SM 13/xvii)? Remarking on the effort to describe a body
outside of language, Butler writes that "we have already contaminated,
though not contained, the very body w e seek to establish in its ontological
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
80
purity" (HC 4), Although the body is neither reducible to, nor contained by,
the linguistic figures that contaminate it, its being is still there, somewhere in
the chiasmus between body and discourse. What begins as a risk to bodily
life via the dialectic between discourse and body is ultimately recuperated. In
this sense, discourse emerges as something like a pseudonym for Spirit, for a
death that is not death, for a death that is "denied,” as Derrida puts it in Glas.
This positing/denial of death marks the return of ontology at the moment of
finitude.
Insofar we know in advance that the body will emerge as the winner
in this struggle to the death, the Butlerian enterprise reveals itself to be an
inevitable comedy. This is not to suggest, however, that Butler's comedic
performance is utterly inadvertent Speaking of Hegel’ s Spirit in a manner
that in turn describes the travails of the body in her own work, Butler writes:
What seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic
myopia of Mr. Magoo whose automobile careening through the
neighbor’ s chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels. Like
such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning
cartoon, Hegel’ s protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare
for a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological
insights—and fail again. As readers, we have no other narrative
-option but to join in this bumpy ride, for we cannot anticipate this
journey without embarking on it ourselves. (S 21)
Perhaps Butler is laughing along with us;5 6 As I have been attempting to
show, Butler's Body shows the same comic resiliency as Hegel’ s Spirit
Insofar as reading any one of her texts requires that we travel along with the
body on the treacherous path that she has marked out for it, this comedy of
the body does not arrive altogether unanticipated. The laughter that such a
return of the dead provokes is none other than that which Bataiile locates at
the center of the Hegelian Aufhebung. Derrida maintains that, for Bataiile, the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
81
Aufhebung is "laughable in that it signifies the activity of a discourse
exhausting itself to reappropriate every negativity/'5 7 In his reading of
Bataille's "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," Derrida goes on to suggest that
Bataiile marks "the point of no return of the destruction, the instance of an
expenditure without reserve that no longer leaves us with the resource of
thought as negativity. Because negativity is a resource."5 8 Following from
Kojkve's anthropological reading of Hegel in which Spirit is necessarily
temporal and finite, Bataiile writes that
the death of Jesus partakes of comedy to the extent that one cannot
unarbitrarily introduce forgetting of his eternal divinity... . Before
Hegel's 'absolute knowledge,' the Christian myth was already based
precisely on the fact that nothing divine is possible which is finite ....
In order to misrepresent a figure of God that limited the infinite as the
totality, it was possible to add on, in contradiction with its basis, a
movement toward the finite.5 9
The source of the Hegelian comedy of Spirit, and by extension, the Butierian
comedy of the Body, is none other than negativity as resource, as that
"magic power that converts the negative into being" (93).
In this sense, Derrida's understanding of the "work of
mourning"—while a rhetorical nod to Freud—might also be read as a
strategic displacement of Hegel's "work of the negative." Mourning, for
Derrida, is not a resource from which the negative might be converted into
being. And while he maintains in Specters of Marx that learning how to live
necessitates coming to grips with death, "life" is not unhaunted by that
negativity, that finitude, that it seeks to have it out with. Indeed, it is not
altogether clear that negativity and finitude involve the same movement
toward death, given that negativity would appear to "represent," to posture
as, finitude, all the while planning for that moment when it will roll the stone
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
82
away from the tomb. Despite Kojeve's central claim, then, that Hegel's Spirit
is necessarily finite, such finitude is belied by the dialectical movement itself
which breathes life into the negative on its upward flight toward being.
That the body's "tarrying" with discourse is but the condition of its
ontologization would seem to be confirmed in "How Bodies Come to
Matter: An Interview With Judith Butler," where she remarks that, "to live as
.. . [an abject] body in the world is to live in the shadowy regions of
ontology. I'm enraged by the ontological claims that codes of legitimacy
make on bodies in the world, and I try, when I can, to imagine against that"
(277).6 0 While Butler also remarks that her work "has always been
undertaken with the aim to expand and enhance a field of possibilities for
bodily life," it would seem that such corporeal "possibilities" are imagined
separately from any interrogation of the body as presence. Yet this political
imaginary cannot be so quickly labeled "metaphysical," if only because it
promises to "produce ontology itself as a contested field" (279). Responding
to her interlocutors' question as to the ubiquitous presence, as it were, of the
copula in her work (in particular as it appears in the phrase "there are abject
bodies..."), Butler asks that we understand her rhetoric as performing a
"contradiction" in which she "endowjs] ontology to precisely that which has
been systematically deprived of the privilege of ontology" (280). The point
of such a "performative contradiction," Butler goes on to say, "is to roundly
inaugurate an ontological domain..., not to presuppose an already given
one. It is discursively to institute one" (280).
We could perhaps not ask for a better illustration of the "work of the
negative" (here allied with the performative), which does not presuppose an
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
83
ontological domain, but rather* produces it,, indeed* "brings it into being" in
the Austinian sense. The ontologization of the abject* then* emerges as an
effect of this "performative contradiction," one that is produced in writing,
but is nonetheless dressed up in the guise of speech* of an oddly Divine
utterance capable of endowing ontology to those who have been deprived
of it. Thankfully* Butler's performative turns out to exhibit less of a God-like
character than it would at first appear to claim for itself: "My speech does not
necessarily have to presuppose Or, if it does* fine! Perhaps if s producing
the effect of a presupposition through its performance* OK? And that's fine!
Get used to it!" (280). This disclaiming of the power of the performative to
bring the abject into being resonates with the claim that the "there is..."
"producejs] a counterimaginary to the dominant metaphysics," She
continues: "The point is not to level a prohibition against using ontological
terms but, on the contrary, to use them more, to exploit and restage them,
subject them to abuse so that they can no longer do their usual work" (279).
This restaging and abusive reappropriation of ontological terms might
sound rather deconstractive, yet one still wonders what "work" ontological
terms might perform within this new metaphysical counterimaginary. The
notion that there is no absolute outside to metaphysics, that one must
inhabit metaphysics in order to displace it, seems consistent with
deconstructive thought. In Writing and Difference, Derrida remarks that
Bataille's laughter exceeds dialectical oppositions only to find that "this excess
must yield the discourse to a strange contorsion. And of course, force it to
come to terms with Hegel indefinitely" (... cet exchs devait pHer le discours
en tine strange contorsion. Et, bien sur, le contraindre a s'expliquer
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
84
ind&animent avec Hegel] (371). S ’ 'expliquer avec.... also has the more
colloquial sense of having it out with someone or something, as if the
negotiation between dialectics and deconstruction is an inevitable and
m ending struggle. And-Derrida’ s use of the verb "contraindre," which can
mean not only to force but also to constrain or restrict, reminds us that there
is finally no getting outside of dialectics, that there is always a force that
draws us into its restricted economy if only to compel us to resist and
displace its totalizing gestures. Derrida's recognition of a certain proximity
between deconstruction and dialectics—a chiasmatic relation in which both
terms can be neither fully identical with, nor fully different from, the
other—is echoed by Arkady Plotnitsky’ s claim that "even the most radical
departures from H egel, . . cannot escape, if not Hegel himself, at least not
his shadow or the (en)closure of Hegelianism" (xiii).6 1 Indeed, to insist on the
absolute difference of deconstruction from dialectics would be to understand
dialectics and deconstruction as dialectically opposed, thus reconstructing the
closed economy that differance is meant to displace.
That said, however, to underscore that dialectics and deconstruction
are not opposed is not to say that any and every effort to displace Hegel's
idealist project is doomed from the start, if the negation of Spirit by-Body
only preserves the return to Spirit that it works to displace, that is, if the very
effort to confound the "reflexive suppression of... 'the body" inevitably
negates the body that it wants to affirm, then Butler's corporealism remains
caught in an inevitable circuit of dematerialization / rematerialization, one in
which Body and Spirit appear as interchangeable poles in the dialectical
machinery (PLP 57). This polarization of Spirit/Body is all the more strange
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
85
.given that "matter"—to ..the .extent that it signifies an instrumental yet
uneontainable ingredient (hyle)—would seem more properly to be the
determinate negation of Spirit. Moreover, matter does not bear a necessary
relationship to containment, and therefore, to any one body. That Butler
substitutes Body for Spirit (rather than matter) is telling insofar as her
figuration of the body—of a body that matters, indeed, a body that is
imagined as containing that matter which, as I have been arguing, always
exceeds its containment— rehearses a peculiarly idealist (both Platonic and
Christian) notion of the body-as-presence. We might simply call the spectral
"m atter" if it were not for the tendency of contemporary scholarship to
equate matter with what is visible, tangible, and above all, present: to insist
that what matters is the m aterial For is not matter really there, present for all
to see? To call m atter "spectral" is to foreground the anteriority of the
spectral in relation to the body. The spectral is the originary possibility of the
body.
If, for Butler, Spirit names a certain disavowal of the body, a negation
that enables and conditions the immortality of the former, then Spirit is
nothing more than the disavowal of death. As we have said, it is the defining
characteristic of Spirit that it resurrect itself on the occasion of its repeated
failures. And while Butler's effort to write the body into the Hegelian project
of Spirit means to derail its inevitable return to itself, the sublation of
body/spirit that her texts perform makes the body into an immortal
presence that survives all threats to its existence.
The conflation of body/matter that enables the return of the body to
itself is performed by the pun of Butler's title: Bodies Thai Matter, As her
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
86
interlocutors remark,, .this .pun is extremely "felicitous" (279), The title
achieves this felicity by gathering together under the sigrdfier "matter" the
multiple valences of materialization, signification, intelligibility and
legitimacy. But if the title seeks to represent these various registers, it also
serves to conflate them. It promises that bodies can matter, ethically and
politically, in and through their materialization, and hence, their
ontologization. But do bodies need to materialize in order to matter? Is there
some way of separating out the ontological from the ethical and the
political? Can bodies matter ethically and politically without materializing?
How does this insistence on materialization yoke the body to ontology,
without considering how the reanimation of the abject might be thought
within the spectral terms of the hauntic?
Indeed, this return of ontology raises important ethical questions with
regard to Butler's effort to counter the abjection of those bodies deemed
expendable, "gay people, prostitutes, drug users, among others .. . [who] are
dying or already dead" (FTP 27). While she asks us to consider if "social
existence" for the majority is conditioned by "the production .and
maintenance of the socially dead," she does not go very far toward
interrogating how the figuration of the socially dead is predicated on the
fiction of social being, of being us presence (PLP 27). Dedicating her work
toward expanding " a field of possibilities for bodily life," Butler theorizes
against the seemingly insidious means by which the abjection of all minority
bodies produces them as "shadowy contentless figure[s] for something not
yet made real" (281). This evocation of ontology, intoned in the suggestion
that these ghostly shadows might some day be materialized, would appear
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
87
to conflate .social death with what w e are .calling speciality. Such a conflation
speaks directly to the distinction between Derrida's and Butler's respective
"returns" to the body. Following from Derrida, we might consider that all
bodies live in the "shadowy regions of ontology," all bodies are
"hauntological" not ontological. Only by virtue of the fiction of presence do
certain bodies appear to be more ontological than others. Indeed, only by
disavowing death can we say that some bodies are while others are not. The
social existence of the majority, of those white, male bodies that supposedly
matter, is conditioned by a certain disavowal and projection of the body’ s
finitude. The socially dead in this way become the signifiers of this
disavowed death. They are made to stand in for the death that haunts each
and every-body. The production of the minority bodies as ghostly, abject
and dead is not so much a question of re-presentation as it is one of a
presumptive de-presentation, a deontologization conditioned by the
ontological conceit of the socially "alive." To re-present the bodies of the
socially dead, to "endow" them with ontology, is to preserve the strict
distinction between being and non-being, presence and absence. The
ontologization of the abject fails to address the ethics of a politics that weds
itself to the ontological. It fails to ask whether an ontological politics is not
indeed finally unethical.
A spectral theory of bodies, however, would correspond to the logic
of the revenant, that is, to a body that can never fully, return to itself as a
living presence. At the risk of being too free with the specificity of Derrida’ s
language, the return to the body that he theorizes as that which
distinguishes specter from spirit (retour an corps), might be better described
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
88
.as a return .of the body. Such .a "paradoxical incorporation" would thus
disrupt Spirit’ s return to itself, and yet resist the reflexive suppression of
Spirit by Body that characterizes Butler’ s return to the body. Or perhaps we
might follow the grammatical possibilities of the French, It corps revemnt
(the ghostly body/the returning body), insofar as it marks a middle voice
between the active and the passive: neither a return to nor a return of the
body. This difference between the return to or of (the body) and the body in
return, marks the difference between preservation and remainder
respectively. For the latter names an interminable return, the body as the
site of its own loss and mourning.
From Preservation
To Remainder
While Butler's comedy of the body is remarkably idealist, it is also
reminiscent of that which obtains in the Gothic, a genre that regularly stages
the return of the dead. In her trenchant study of Edgar Allan Poe, Fables of
Mind, Joan Dayan maintains that Poe converts the opposition between mind
and matter in such a way that "his dissolutions never utterly destroy physical
fact.... If something decays in Poe, something else materializes” (9).6 2
Arguing that Poe’ s stories of premature burials and bodies that will not die
"takes on the idea of resurrection and defines it expressly as resurrection of
the body," Dayan maintains that "nowhere does Poe give us an idea delivered
of its fleshly traces.” She continues:" ... when he writes tales that most fully
tackle big ideas,’ he makes sure that... they have the most earthly smell,
the most material and tangible outline" (177,199). Although Dayan's purpose
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
8 9
here is to challenge the argument that Poe's work is "idealist," Poe's
resurrection of the body is implicated in a version of dialectical corporealism
that resonates in certain ways with Butler's. One need not look very far into
Poe's oeuvre to find a body that will not die, a body that is shown
confronting the horrors of death -if only to -prove itself-the victor.
In Poe's The Premature Burial, the narrator, suffering from repeated
attacks of catalepsy, is obsessed with the fear that he might become subject
to a premature interment if one of'Ms episodes of prolonged slumber be
mistaken for death.6 3 Haunted by this "one sepulchral idea," the narrator
becomes "lost in reveries of death" at the same time that he guards against
his premature burial by remodeling the family vault so that it can be opened
from within (176). He makes his closest friends vow not to bury his body
"until-decomposition had-so materially advanced as - t o render farther
preservation impossible" (178). Eventually, of course, the narrator ends up
trapped in a small wooden box, not in his family fault but in "some ordinary
and nameless grave" (180). After a short period of pure terror and agony, the
narrator wakes up to find himself surrounded by Mends in the cabin of a
small sloop, apparently having mistaken the narrow dimensions of the berth
for a coffin. Reflecting on his live entombment, the narrator remarks:
The tortures endured, however, were indubitably quite equal, for the
time, to those of actual sepulture. They were fearfully—they were
inconceivably hideous; but out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very
excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired
tone—acquired temper. I went abroad, I took vigorous exercise. I
breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than
Death. I discarded my medical books. 'Buchan' I burned. I 'read' no
'Night Thoughts'—no fustian about churchyards—no bugaboo
tales—such as this. (181, his italics)
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
90
Distilling for the reader his apparent trium ph over death the narrator
suggests that he can now turn away from negativity as if "it is nothing or
false" (P19). But this turning away from death is comical not only because it
so boldly claims victory for itself (out of Evil proceeded Goodi), but also
because together with -this disavowal -emerges -yet another, something like
the negation of the negation of the negation. Good/life cancels out
Evil/death, but the narrator also tells us that he reads no more "fustian"
tales "such as this." What could be more extravagant and bombastic than
this very tale? Moreover, to reference his own tale as "fustian" or
"bugaboo" is to implicate himself in the very tale of death that he claims to
have discarded: " I thought upon (no) other subjects than Death"? Or " I no
longer read bugaboo tales, 1 only tell them." The preoccupation with death
that the telling of the tale -evinces belies -the -narrator's daim that death has
been surmounted or superceded. This despite his final claim that, while "the
grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful
..., they must sleep, or they will devour us—they must be suffered to
slumber, or we perish" (181).
If this putting death to sleep sounds familiar, it should. Recall that in
"How can I Deny ..." Butler describes herself as waking up from a
nightmare only to find herself accused of having placed the body
prematurely in its -grave. For Butler, the accusation-of-negating the -body
occasions a certain tension between the presence of her sleepless body and
"the body" of philosophical inquiry that she has supposedly denied. Like the
narrator in Foe's tale/Butler is not dead, b u t only sleeping. And like Foe's
narrator, Butler links the slumber of death to the slumber of the body. For
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
91
Poe and for Butler, sleep figures a certain liminal space between life and
death. Sleep does not simply amortize death; sleep does not precisely
announce the death of death. Rather, sleep retards death, delays its final
approach, all in the name of the body's ineluctable return to itself. In short,
sleep is negativity posing as finitude.
As Dayan argues, Poe's idea of resurrection marks a perversion of the
Christian one in which the father/spirit returns to itself via the resurrection
of the finite son. Por Dayan, this resurrection of the foody is exemplified
earlier in The Premature Burial in the narrator's story of an unnamed
Congressman's wife who was deposited in her family's vault prior to
expiration. Having died, evidently on account of her struggles to free herself
from her tomb, the wife was found "entangled in some iron-work which
projected interiorly. Thus -she remained, and thus -she rotted, -erect" (170).
Poe's tale parodies the resurrection, Dayan suggests, by stopping it short of
the body's transformation into spirit, leaving us only with the gruesome
materiality of a foody hanging on a piece of iron. Yet given the narrator's
turning away from death, together with Poe's refiguring of the resurrection
in terms of the body, we might indeed ask whether Poe performs an
inversion of Spirit/Body similar to the one that we have been tracing in
Butler's work.
-But -if, -in The Premature -Burial, -Poe figures -negativity in -terms-of-sleep,
as that which retards and delays the approach of death, in his The Facts in the
Case ofM. Voldemar, sleep, this time brought about through mesmerism,
delays death, but it is also the occasion for another "kind of comedy, one in
which death emerges in the speaking " I" of the seemingly deceased
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
92
Valdemar. Responding to P—'s question, "Do you still sleep," several
minutes after the doctors have pronounced him dead, Valdemar answers :
"Yes!—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead’" (57). If we
read Valdemar's sentence against the passage I cited earlier from Derrida's
Glas, where he remarks the distinction between being dead and being dead,
Poe's italics may not help us here. Poe writes neither "I am dead" or " I am
dead," but "I am dead, emphasizing at once both the presence of "being" and
the absence of "non-being." But perhaps what the italics perform might be
read as extending the undeddability of the "Yes!—no" that begins
Valdemar7 s sentence: "Yes I am sleeping, or rather, no I have been sleeping,
and now I am dead." This "now—now," repeated twice, and thus insisting on
the speaker's presence to himself, is nonetheless in contradiction with what
he is now, which is dead. The " I" can emerge only on account of this
prosopopeic voice, of this voice that speaks from beyond the grave, and so
says what it cannot properly say. The " I" announces itself as present, but it
also presents that presence as dead, leaving the living, breathing, speaking
" I" haunted by that death which it, properly speaking, cannot be. If, in "The
Premature Burial," the narrator returns to his bodily being only on the
condition of his "tarrying with the negative," in "M . Valdemar," presence,
the "now—now," is shown to be always already haunted by absence. In this
sense, the "I am dead” might be taken as uncovering the suppressed or
disavowed death that inhabits any constative that begins " I am... ." 6 4
What follows after Valdemar7 s announcement is a prolonged
mesmeric-induced sleep, a sleep that delays the coming of death. Upon
attempting to wake him, Valdemar screams: "For God's sake!—quick!
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
93
—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken me!—quick!—I say to you that
I am deadl'" (58, his italics). Put me to sleep or wake me up, implores
Valdemar. Caught in a liminal space between sleep and death, that is,
between negativity and finitude, Valdemar begs for a resolution to this
undecidability. Finally, he gets his wish:
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead!
dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of
the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single
minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled, absolutely rotted away
beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there
lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity. (59, his
italics)
Once again Poe leaves us only with the body. And yet, what we are left with
is not the resurrected body of "The Premature Burial," but a body decaying
underneath the narrator's hands, as if the repetition of "dead! dead!"
occasions a perversion of the performative utterance, which according to J.L .
Austin, "brings into being what it names.” 6 5 Here the utterance performs
Valdemar's demise, brings his death into being, which is to say that it brings
him into (non)being. Against the ontological conceit of Austin's
performative utterance, Valdemar's explosive speech performs a certain
implosion of the body, depriving the reader of both the return to the Body as
living presence and its transformation into Spirit. Insofar as Poe refuses here
to give us either the Body or Spirit, what we are left with is something like a
specter, the remains that are left behind after the deconstruction of the
Body/Spirit duality. This spectrality, intoned in Valdemar's speech—" I am
dead"—recalls the citation from Creon: "Now here I am... in virtue of
kinship with the dead." If, as I suggested above, the " I am dead" haunts any
constative that announces " I am ...," Creon's language both reveals and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
94
conceals this haunting effect. Creon can say that he is, and that what he is is
king, ostensibly because his nephews, the pretenders to the throne, are
dead. But this "I am," taken together with his confessed "kinship with the
dead," might be rewritten as: "Now here I am, dead, by virtue of my
proximity to, my affiliation with, death."
We have seen how the restricted economy in Butler and (to a lesser
extent) in Poe involves a certain preservation of the body as presence. As I
suggested at the beginning of this chapter, moreover, the question of
preservation versus remainder is central to the problematic of kinship-as-
mouming, that is, of the relation of one (finite?) body to another. For it
would seem that it is the finite character of the body that marks it as spectral.
And yet, the invocation of the body as presence depends on its being either
finite or immortal. In this sense, to understand the body as finite is to
disavow mourning, to deny the body its spectrality. Yet if immortality
describes a body that lives on beyond its death, spectrality names a body
that is already ghostly prior to its material death. That the body remains
beyond its death is confirmed by kinship, a relation to the other where
"other," as Nancy reminds us, might be more properly understood as
"body." To repeat an earlier citation: "An other is a body because only a
body is an other" (29). Insofar as the finite character of the body is belied by
mourning, this spectral body affirms a relation between itself and other
bodies, which is to say that it affirms mourning as the possibility of kinship.
To be mourned, my body must bear a relationship to other bodies. Given the
originary spectrality of the body, a body that is neither finite nor immortal,
kinship would appear to be not merely conditioned by mourning, but no
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
95
less than a pseudonym for it. Kinship is mourning insofar as it involves a
relation to the other/body that "would begin with the expropriation of the
self in the face of the other's approach/' or to bring Nancy to bear on
Critchley: the expropriation of one's own body in the approach of the
other/body. If, as Nancy so provocatively insists, the cultural truism, "this is
my body," is not only "an impossible appropriation," but signals the
"impossibility of appropriation in general," then kinship names a chiasmatic
relation between bodies in which the sublation of the other body is finally
impossible. This body certainly is not mine, but that does not mean that the
other body was, is or ever will be mine. Absence, loss, and therefore
mourning are inscribed here in what we might be tempted to call the work of
kinship.
The preservation of the body in the name of normative kinship, and
thus, in the name of negativity, is at the center of Ian McEwan's The Cement
Garden, a text whose penchant for the comedy of death is reminiscent of
Poe's. What the text presents as an aberration of kinship—that is, the
children's preservation of their dead mother's body in a box of
cement—emerges as something like the paradigm of normative kinship (the
family) in which remainder is denied and presence affirmed. We should be
horrified, the text would seem to suggest, at what the children do with their
mother's body. But perhaps the real horror lies in the realization that this
preservation of the body is not a perversion of normative kinship, but
rather, the condition of its emergence.
That the mother's body is preserved in this way (as opposed to their
dead father, of whose body the novel never details its obsequies), would
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
96
seem to reaffirm the materiality/corporeality of the mother/child relation.
Following the model of the divine family, the mother is figured as being
nothing but a body. While Jack, the narrator, tells us that he "smoothed
away his [father's] impression in the soft, fresh concrete" after his father falls
onto the ground, dead from a heart attack, the mother's presence cannot be
so easily erased (24). Indeed, her presence is preserved by the children, a
refusal of the "proper" burial rite that signals a certain denial of mourning.
As the narrator informs us, the children decide to preserve their mother in
cement in order to "keep the family together." But Jack goes on to ask:
"Was that a good reason? It might have been more interesting to be apart"
(98). What Jack suggests here is that not keeping the family together might
allow for a reorganization of kinship beyond the frame of the normative
ideal. Despite the aberrations of normativity in which the children involve
themselves (incest between Julie and Jack, Tom's crossdressing, etc.), the
preservation of the mother's body would seem to perform a certain
conservation of the normative, ideal family. Her preservation thus marks
not only a refusal to mourn her loss, but a refusal to mourn the loss of the
normative family. The ideal family is dead, and has always already been
dead. Refusing to recognize the death of the ideal family, the children
attempt to cement it, to turn it into something durable, indestructible, that is,
until the cement quite literally begins to form cracks.
In The Cement Garden, this refusal to mourn the loss of normative
kinship also involves an effort to articulate a domain of kinship wholly
separate from the state. After all, the children preserve their mother in
cement in order to avoid being put into foster care, and thus being
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
97
subsumed under the power of the state. The novel in this way produces the
fantasy of a kinship structure anterior to the state, a sphere of kinship
hermetically sealed from state intervention. Entombed below the surface of
state regulation, however, the normative ideal is preserved by the children
at the same time that they adopt aberrant forms of kinship and gender
performance anathema to the state. This Antigonian problematic of family
versus state is ultimately resolved when Julie's boyfriend Derek, the only
outsider allowed to penetrate the familial sphere, begins to suspect the
children of their deed, and takes a sledgehammer to the concrete. Derek
thus destroys the symbol of the ideal family's indestructibility at the same
time that his actions also bring the family back under the state's power:
"Through a chink in the curtain a revolving blue light made a spinning
pattern on the wall" (153). In contrast to the force of Derek's
sledgehammer, the state announces its return silently in the image of a
police car's flashing blue light.
If, as in The Cement Garden, the preservation of the body is yoked to a
refusal of mourning, a denial that is not so much an aberration as it is the
constitutive condition of normative kinship, how might kinship be
re articulated beyond such an economy of presence? Moreover, how does
the invocation of the body as presence, of a body that is either finite or
immortal, disallow the possibility of a spectral form of kinship, of an
alternative idiom of kinship that would resist the restricted economy, the
comedy of death, that is normative kinship? We should not forget that what
Nancy identifies as one of the prevailing truisms of Western culture—"This is
my body"—is performed by the finite son of God before his disciples, his
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
98
kin. But with regard to the bread, Jesus says not only, "this is my body," but
"this is my body, given to you. Eat this in remembrance of me." The giving
over of Jesus' body for consumption by his disciples performs the sublation
of the finite and the infinite, the transfiguration of the finite body into infinite
spirit. This proffering up of one's body enables the return of the father/spirit
to itself, and inaugurates the paradigm of Christian kinship: the relation
between God-the-father and his children. This gift of the body, however, this
offering up of the body for consumption, belies the indexical force of the
"this" as well as the propriety of the "my." If the finite body can be given in
this way to others, for consumption and assimilation, then that body can no
longer be understood as one's own. Nancy's claim that this is my body is "an
impossible appropriation," that the relation to one's body is never proper,
suggests by implication that the appropriation of the other/body is finally
impossible as well (29). The relation to one’ s own body is always improper,
which means that it is not finally distinguishable from the relation to the
other's body as other and not me/mine. The body is always other to
oneself, and the fiction that occasions the belief that "this is my body"—far
from disallowing the appropriation of the other/body—is the enabling
possibility of this very appropriation that it would seem to deny. Only on
the condition of the fiction of one's own bodily possession can the possibility
of possessing the other emerge as a possible impossibility. The implication of
such an improper relation to one’ s body would be that the ethical relation to
the other/body does not proceed by way of affirming the body of the other
as his/her own, and no-body else’ s. For only by being his/her own body
does the other become available for what we name "appropriation." Only on
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
99
account of the conceit that this is my body can the body of the other become
my body through appropriation.
While Nancy's suggestion that "body" is synonymous with "other" has
important implications with regard to an analysis of kinship, it also begins to
account for the logic that subtends various historical forms of human
slavery. Remarking on the apparent contradiction in Western forms of
slavery in which slavery bears an intimate relationship to the idea of
freedom, Orlando Patterson observes that "Plato and Aristotle and the great
Roman jurists were not wrong in recognizing the necessary correlation
between their love of their own freedom and its denial to others" (ix).
Indeed, there is nothing "peculiar" about the peculiar institution if the
affirmation of one's freedom, one's self-possession, does not contradict but
rather conditions the enslavement of others. That slavery is intimately
connected to kinship is the central argument of Patterson’ s Slavery and Social
Death, which attempts to account for how slavery involves an alienation
from kinship that produces slaves as figures of the living dead. As I hope to
show in my reading of Charles Chesnutf s Conjure Tales in Chapter Two, it is
only on the condition of one's improper relation to one's body that
resistance to appropriation is possible. Indeed, this impropriety of one's
proper body asks us to rethink the notion of appropriation altogether. If my
body is not finally my own, indeed, if I can no longer say with certainty that
this is my body, what forms of resistance are available to counter what we
name "expropriation" ? How in particular can the socially dead slave body be
reanimated if there can be no final coming into possession of one's body?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
1 0 0
1 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 168.
2 Judith, Butler. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 81.
3 Cette religion des morts parait etre la plus ancienne qu'il y ait eu dans cette
race d'hommes. Avant de concevoir et d'adorer Indra or Zeus, l'homme
adora les morts; it eut peur d’ eux, il leur adressa des prieres. 1 1 semble que le
sentiment religieux ait commence par lh. C'est peut-gtre & la vue de la mort
que l’ homme a eu pour la premiere fois Fidee du supematurel et qu’ il a
voulu espgrer au dela de ce qu-il voyait. La mort fut le premier mystere; elle
mit l’ homme sur la voie des autres mysferes. Elle 61eva sa perts6e du visible k
l’ invisible, du passager h . l’ gtemel, de Fhumain au divin," La Cite Antique:
Etude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grece et de Rome (Paris: Librairie
Hachette et Cie, 1917), 20; See also Thomas Trautmann, Lewis Morgan and the
Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
4 "Les rites de la sepulture montrent clairement que lorsqu’ on mettait un
corps au sepulture, on croyait en mgme temps y mettre quelque chose de
vivant" (8).
5" . . . rites ont dur6 jusqu’ au triomphe du christianisme" (16).
6 "On craignait moins le mort que la privation de sepulture" (11).
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Penguin, 1966), 34.
8 Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (New York: Vintage, 1978). We could
certainly continue with our list of texts that thematize the problem of the
body and kinship, perhaps turning to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, where
Pilate performs the properly Antigonian act of burying the long unburied
bones of her father. See Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Plume,
1987).
9 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular
Culture (Cambridge: October Books, 1991), 23, his italics.
1 0 Simon Critchley, "A Commentary Upon Derrida's Reading of Hegel in
Glas" in Stuart Barnett ed. Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998),
211, my italics,
1 1 Emanuel Levinas, " L ’ ontologie est-elle fondamentale?," in Entre Nous:
Essais sur le penser-a-Vautre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 20. "La relation avec autrui
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
1 0 1
n'est pas ontologie. Ce lien avec autrui... ne se reduit pas & la
representation d'autrui, mais & son invocation "
1 2 Jacques Derrida, IfEcriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967).
Cited in the text as WD.
1 3 Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition,
vol. 14, (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 245.
1 4 Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the ID ," in The Standard Edition (New York:
Norton, 1960), 24.
1 5 Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 160. Specters of Marx: The State of
the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 97. Cited in the text as SM.
1 6 Jacques Derrida, " J a , ou le faux-bond," Diagraphe, no. 11, Avril 1977,100.
"C e dont on pourrait rever, c'est la fin du deuil. Mais cette fin est le processus
normalement acheve du deuil. Comment faire affirmation d'une autre fin?"
17"... au-dela du principe du deuil." "... l'au-dela du deuil peut toujours se
mettre 'au service' du travail du deuil...." (101).
18"... sonner un glas qui lui soit propre (son glas) sans bris or debris" (100).
1 9 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Editions MetaiJM, 1992), 29, his italics. "Un
autre est un corps parce que seul un corps est un autre."
2 0 " . . . 'autre/ 'autres' ne sont mfime pas les mots justes, mais seulement
'corps'.... C'est le monde des corps" (30).
2 1 Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974), 29. "Le pere infini se
donne, par auto-fellation, auto~ins6mination et auto-conception, un fils fini
qui
.. . devient infini, meurt comme fils fini, se laisse ensevelir, serrer dans des
bandelettes qu'il d6fera bientdt pour renaitre fils infini." For help with
Derrida's sometimes unwieldy text, the reader may consult John Leavey's
"key" to Glas. See John Leavey, GLASsary (Lincoln, Neb.: University of
Nebraska Press, 1986).
2 2 "La famille humaine n'est pas autre chose que la famille divine. Le rapport
du pfere-au-fils de l'homme n'est pas autre chose que le rapport du pere-au-fils
de Dieu. Ces deux rapports ne se distinguant pas, ne s'opposant surtout pas,
on ne peut feindre de voir en l'un la figure ou la m£taphore de l'autre. C hi ne
saurait comparer l'un a l'autre, faire semblant de savoir ce que peut gtre un
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
102
terme de la comparison avant l'autre. On ne peut nfeme savoir, en dehors du
christianisme, ce qu'est le rapport d'un pfere a son fils, voire a ses enfants
(76).
2 3 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 273, my italics. Cited in the text as P. See also Patricia
Mills, "Hegel's Antigone" in Patricia Mills ed. Feminist Interpretations of
G.W.F. Hegel (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1996).
2 4 Us y gardent leur propre disparition, regardent leur enfant comme leur
propre mort...(151).
2 5 " ... ils la retardent, se l'approprient, ils maintiennent dans la presence
monumentale de leur semence— -dans le nom—le signe vivant qu'ils sont
morts, non pas qu'ils sont morts, mais que morts ils sont, ce qui est autre
chose. L'id6alitfe est la mort, certes, mais §tre mort—c'est toute la question de
la dissemination—est-ce etre mort ou §tre mortl La difference si feghre de
l'appui, conceptuellement imperceptible, la fragility inferieure de chaque
attribut produit 1 'oscillation entre la presence de 1'etre comme mort et la
mort de l'§tre comme presence" (ibid.).
2 6 Sa propre mort, quand on la contemple dans son enfant, c'est la mort
qu'on m ie, le mort qui est, c'est-a-dire nfee. Quand on dit la 'mort est,' on dit
'la mort est nfee'" (ibid.).
2 7 VAufhebung est 1 'amortissement de la mort" (ibid.).
2 8 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition, trans.
James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 34. Of course, Plato's Symposium
functions as something like the urtext for modem notions of reproduction as
immortality, or what Socrates describes as the "permanent possession of
goodness for oneself." See Plato, Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 48. See also my discussion of the Symposium in Chapter Three.
2 9 Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 5. For a study that explores the haunting of the social
see Avery Gordon, Ghostly matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
3 0 David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1984), 165.
3 1 Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and the Affinity of the Human
Family (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 10.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
103
3 2 Emile Durkheim, Contributions to L'Annee Sociologique (New York: Free
Press, 1980),175.
3 3 Marc Shell, The End of Kinship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1988), 5. Shell uses the phrase "spiritual kinship" in a somewhat different
sense than I use it here to describe a "relationship between a nun or a monk
and any other person in the world, which establishes a kinship in God and
outlaws as 'spiritual incest' sexual intercourse between them" (10). This
Christian doctrine of universal siblinghood, moreover, "puts into question,
not merely the status of consanguinity as the standard for kinship, but also
the distinction between kin and nonkin and thus between incest and chastity
on which all other structures of kinship rely and, some say, on which society
itself is founded" (11). For L6vi-Strauss, the prohibition on incest "is the
fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the
transition from nature to culture is accomplished." Claiming further that
"the prohibition of incest is where nature transcends itself," L6vi-Strauss
suggests that all kinship is fictive or artificial, indeed, as he will intimate in the
final chapter of Elementary Structures, a linguistic phenomenon. See The
Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 24-25.
3 4 Jacqueline Stevens, Reproducing the State (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 233. Stevens notes that in Michael H. v. Gerald D. 491 U.S. 110
(1989), the U.S. Supreme Court awarded a marital father custody of a
biological father's son because, in the language of the court, "California law,
like nature itself, makes no provision for dual fatherhood" (Cited in Stevens
232).
3 5 The association of materiality with femininity and maternity, as feminist
philosophers from Luce Mgaray to Judith Butler have shown, has a long and
troubled history. In Plato's Timaeus, the receptacle which is said to receive all
bodies is likened to a mother. This matrix thus receives the unchangeable
and indestructible paternal forms by itself being formless. For the receptacle
cannot be called "earth or air or fire or water, nor any other compounds or
components; but we shall not be deceived if we call it a nature invisible and
characterless, aU-receiving, partaking in some very puzzling way of the
intelligible and very hard to apprehend." See The Timaeus, trans. Francis
Comford (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 51. In her reading of
Plato, Irigaray argues that the material receptacle "is nothing, but shares in
everything She is in excess of any identification of presence." See "Plato's
Hystera" in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 307. Following from Irigaray, Butler maintains in
Bodies That Matter that femininity emerges within a phallocentric economy as
synonymous with the material only to become subject to a violent erasure,
one that produces two kinds of matter: a specular matter that secures the
form/matter binary in which "the masculine occupies both terms of the
opposition," and an excessive matter that "cannot be said to be anything, to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
104
participate in ontology at all" (39). The association of femininity and
motherhood with the material, then, is but the precondition of its
evacuation, of its becoming masculine/ father/spirit. While the masculine
form bodies forth as a "body which is no body," the feminine, Butler
maintains, is constructed as "matter which is no body" (49). See Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
3 6 David Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1968).
3 7 I allude here to the central argument of Speech and Phenomena, where,
laying out the groundwork for what he would later term deconstruction,
Derrida asserts: "The appearance of I to itself in the I am is thus originally a
relation to its own possible disappearance. I am thus originally means I am
mortal" [L'apparaitre d u je a lui~m§me dans le je suis est done originairement
rapport b sa propre disparition possible. Je suis veut done dire
originairement je suis mortel"]. La voix et le phenomena (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1967), 60. For an exegesis of Derrida’ s text that also
considers its implications for "the subject" of feminism, see Peggy Kamuf,
"Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition" in Nancy Holland ed., Feminist
Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1997).
3 8 For more on restricted and general economies see Arkady Plonitsky, In
the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History and the Unconscious (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 1993); Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General
Economy (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1993); Complementarity: Anti-
Epistemology After Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
3 9 Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Cen tury
France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 21. Cited in the text as
S.
4 0 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21.
4 1 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 35. Cited in the text as PLP.
4 2 Judith Butler, '"How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are
Mine,’ " in Qui Parle, vol. 11 no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1997), 1. Cited in the text as
HC.
4 3 Andrzej Warminski, "Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life" in Stuart
Barnett ed., Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998), 173.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
105
4 4 Sharon Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 103.
4 5 Diana Fuss ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories!Gay Theories (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 3.
4 6 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
4 7 Alexandre Kojfeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947),
539.
4 8 Or, d'aprfes Hegel, 1'gtre 'spirituel' or 'dialectique' est n6cessairement
temporel et fini. La notion chtetienne d'un Esprit infini et £temel est
contradictoire en elle-nteme: T6tre infini est n6cessairement Tfetre-statique-
dorute 'naturel/ 6temellement identique & lui-nteme; et l'etre 'dynamique'
cre€ ou ateateur, voire historique ou 'spirituel/ est necessairement limits
dans le temps, c'est-a-dire essentiellement mortel" (537).
4 9 Warren Montag, "Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida's Specters of
M arx," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of
Marx (New York: Verso, 1999), 71.
501 mean to underscore that the discourse of "constructivism" is a peculiarly
American phenomenon, one enabled by the translation of Foucauldian
thought into an American context. Although this problem of translation is
both linguistic and cultural—in that it is not merely a question of language
difference but also of the uniquely American political investments that
Foucault's thought has often been enlisted to address—the former might be
said to enable, or at least reinforce, the latter. This possibility is suggested by
Robert Hurley's translation of Histoire de la Sexualite. In an often-cited
passage, Hurley's text reads: "Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of
natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain
which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given
to a historical construct..(105). The term that Hurley translates as
"construct" is given in the original as "dispositif," although when it appears in
the chapter title, " L e Dispositif de Sexualite," he translates it as "deployment."
Dispositif (aiso "device," or "mechanism") has a much different connotation
from the English "construct," which, as Butler notes, implies that there is
some sort of agent doing the constructing (See Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8. When coupled with
the notion of "discourse," construction also suggests something much more
radical than dispositif As Butler remarks in "How Can I deny...," the discourse
of constructivism risks a certain linguistification, a certain reduction of
everything to language. This linguistidsm, however, ought to be read in the
context of the American appropriation and assimilation of various French,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
106
"poststructuralist" theories (another American invention) rather than as a
testament to an idealism inherent to contemporary French thought. See
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction (New York: Vintage,
1978); Histoire de la sexualite (Paris, fiditions Gallimard, 1976).
5 1 Assimilating Butler's work to a caricatured view of deconstruction, Nancy
Frazer writes that "feminists need both deconstruction and reconstruction,
destabilization of meaning and projection of utopian hope." See Seyla
Benhabib et al, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 71. Contra Frazer, I would suggest that this dialectical
opposition between deconstruction and reconstruction is precisely Butler's
modus operandi, and thereby what positions her squarely within the very
metaphysics that Frazer sees Butler as "deconstructing."
5 2 My characterization of Butler's politics as a negative constructivism is less
generously described by Herman Rapaport as indecisiveness. For Rapaport,
such indecisiveness is characteristic of much recent theoretical work,
particularly in the domain of cultural studies and new historicism, and is
"quite different from Derridean undecidability in that undecidability is a
productive rupturing of boundaries . . . while indecision is an unproductive
impasse that limits research to alternatives that are contradictory and that
can only be appeased by a compulsive swinging back and forth that resolves
nothing." See his The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), 121. While Rapaport sometimes sets up
binaries of his own making (most notably between what he calls "social
studies" and deconstruction), and offers an exegesis of Butler's work that
disingenuously portrays it as naively devoted to a "social studies" program,
Rapaport correctly diagnoses a certain dialectical movement between
oppositions that, while often deployed in the name of deconstruction,
resembles more a vulgar application of it.
5 3 Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations" in Seyla Benhabib et al, Feminist
Contentions, 35.
5 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Attempt at Self-Criticism" in The Birth of Tragedy,
trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 1993), 9.
5 5 As Peggy Kamuf reminds us, Derrida introduced the word
"deconstruction" as one of many possible terms by which we might
understand his displacement of Western metaphysics. The critical reception
of Derrida's work isolated this word largely because it sounded a powerful
dissonance within the discourse of structuralism, which was, in the 1960’ s,
the reigning theory. The privileging of "deconstruction," I would add, has
had the unfortunate effect of overdetermining its relation to structuralism.
This overdetermination has not only fueled the belief that deconstruction is
concerned with nothing but language, but has also had the effect of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
107
obscuring the relation between deconstruction and other dominant
philosophical epistemes, such as Hegelianism. See Kamuf's preface to A
Derrida Reader: Between The Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991). See also her "Deconstruction and Love," in Nicholas Royle ed.,
Deconstructions: A User's Guide (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000). For more on
affirmation in Derrida, see David Farrell Krell, The Purest of Bastards: Works of
Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
561 hope that my reading of Butler avoids the spirit, as it were, of a certain
aU-too-fashionable iconoclasm, that is, of the sort that Martha Nussbaum has
offered us of Butler: a critique seething with a violent sense of self-purpose
and that can barely conceal its glee at having exposed this "professor of
parody" to an ostensibly deluded readership. I hope that my reading
replicates none of this violence. I seek not so much to "out" Butler as a
closeted Hegelian than to suggest how we might better understand the
relation between dialectical and deconstractive thinking. See Nussbaum’ s
"The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler," in The New
Republic, February 22,1999.
5 7 "... risible en ce qu'elle signifie Vaffairement d'un discours s'essoufflant a se
reapproprier toute n6gativite .. (WD 377).
5 8 "...the point de non-retour de la destruction, l'instance d'une d^pense sans
reserve qui ne nous laisse done non plus la ressource de la penser comme
negativite. Car la n6gativit£ est une ressource" (WD 381, his italics).
5 9 Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale
French Studies, vol. 0 no. 78 (1990), 9-28,13.
6 0 Baukje Prins and Irene Costera Meijer, "How Bodies Come To Matter: An
Interview With Judith Butler," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
vol. 23 no. 2 (1998), 277.
6 1 See Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel.
6 2 Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry Into Poe's Fiction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
6 3 Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: Bantam, 1982).
6 4 This passage from The Facts in Case ofM. Valdemar appears as an epigraph
to Derrida's Speech and Phenomena. Following from Poe, Derrida writes: "M y
death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I.... The utterance
I am living' is accompanied by my being-dead and its possibility requires the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
108
possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary story
by Poe here, but the ordinary story of language." [Ma mort est
structurellement necessaire au prononc6 du Je .... L’ 6nonc6 'je suis vivant’
s'accompagne de mon ytre-mort et sa possibility requiert la possibility que je
soit mort; et inversement. Ce n’ est pas 1 & une histoire extraordinaire de Poe,
mais l'histoire ordinaire du langage"](108).
6 5 J.L . Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
109
2
Giving Up the Geisi: Slavery,
Spectrality and Charles
Chesnutt's Conjure Woman
Tales1
Metaphysics always returns ...,
and Geist is the most fatal figure of
this revenance.
—Jacques Derrida, O f Spirit:
Heidegger and the Question
W
HAT ARE the implications of understanding the master/ slave
dialectic as itself a kinship relation? If the term "kinship," as I noted
in Chapter One, always says relation to the same—even as the concept of kin
poses (as) a relation to an other—then the suggestion that slavery might be
read in terms of kinship is altogether commensurate with the duplicity
inherent to kinship as such. Yet one cannot read slavery through kinship
without hearing an echo of the ideology of paternalism through which
white, antebellum Southerners justified the institution of slavery. Given the
pervasiveness of paternalism, the suggestion that we read slavery in terms
of kinship might seem troublesomely familiar. For "the proslavery
argument had justified slavery as part of a household system, on a
continuum with marriage and childhood."2 This "'moral economy of
dependency/" involved a "concept of dependent rights and reciprocal
duties" in which slaves were believed to exert as much control over their
masters as the latter exercised over their dependents (874, 878). Thus, any
proposal to rethink the relationship between kinship and slavery must
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
110
necessarily distinguish itself from the discourse of paternalism as it surfaces
in images of contented and docile slaves. The propagandist notion of ” a
good, painless, or benign slavery" was played out in the construction of the
slave as childlike and therefore in need of guidance and protection.3 Yet
given that whatever affection the slave master might have exhibited toward
his slaves could so easily slip into violence and tyranny means that an
analysis that considers the interimplication of kinship and slavery must
interrogate the assumption that the term "kinship" unequivocally signifies a
bond of love or affection. Indeed, an interrogation of paternalism requires
taking into account the reduction of the other to the same intrinsic to the
language of kinship. It requires, in other words, that we hear the term
kinship not only in terms of love and affection, but also in terms of
negativity and violence.
Notwithstanding the negativity that haunts all kinship, contemporary
analyses of antebellum slavery most often seek to disentangle slavery from
the family, if not to oppose these terms altogether. Orlando Patterson's
seminal work on "social death" is exemplary of this line of thinking.4 For
Patterson, slavery is what destroys kinship among slave families, even as it
works to justify itself by reintegrating slaves into its own domestic economy.
The slave is alienated from all rights or claims of birth, severed from all
genealogical ties to his/her living blood relatives, and to his/her ancestors
and descendants. For Patterson, then, to oppose kinship to slavery is both to
contest the negation of slave kinship relations, and to expose the
familialization of slavery that justifies the institution's existence.
One of the unanticipated consequences of this formulation is that it
tends to idealize the domain of kinship, chiefly by rendering it immune to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
I l l
property relations. The kinship-slavery opposition thus serves to protect the
domain of kinship from interrogation. In her widely-influential essay,
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Hortense Spillers claims that "kinship loses
meaning" at the hands of slavery, "since it can be invaded at any given and
arbitrary moment by the property relations."5 Spillers, like Patterson, preserves
kinship as the sphere of positive affect, bloodlines, love, and connectedness.
Although she shifts the terms of kinship away from the patrilineal focus of
Patterson's theory of social death toward an exploration of the captive
mother's relation to her offspring, Spillers does little to challenge the
primacy of what David Schneider has called the "idiom of kinship."6 Kinship
becomes the foil to the violent negativity of the master/slave dialectic,
notwithstanding the possibility that kinship, both paternal and maternal,
might be implicated in that very negativity. While it may be true that kinship
has the potential to undermine the institution of slavery insofar as the
recognition of slave kinship would affirm that one's offspring "'belong' to a
mother and a father” and not to the slave master, what are we to make of
this displacement of one set of property relations for another (75)? Although
the property relations that obtain between parent and offspring and those
between master and slave are certainly not equivalent, they are both
property relations nonetheless. In this sense, slavery and kinship are
chiasmatically related. Which is to say that they intersect with one another
without being fully identical.
If the master exploits the body of the slave by making him in some
sense be the master's body, such corporeal inhabiting is not far removed
from the model of the divine family in which the father/spirit incarnates
himself in the body of the finite son if only to negate that body in and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
112
through its transfiguration into spirit. In his rather idiosyncratic reading of
Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve insists that the dialectic of master and slave
reproduces in anthropological terms the Christian dialectic of the infinite and
the finite. While the violence of the paternal/son relation has been well
remarked (and we will explore its ramifications for miscegenation and same-
sex desire in Chapters Three and Four), the negativity of the mother/child
relation has received less attention, in large part because that relation is
understood to be devoid of violence. Indeed, its negativity emerges only
through what has historically been read as a shocking affront to kinship, as
in Euripides Medea, or more recently, Morrison's Beloved. It is this later text
that, in Chapter Five, will offer us an exploration of the ethics of kinship that
problematizes the relationship between the mother's claim on her daughter
and the master's claim on his property.
Spillers frames her discussion of kinship by making a crucial
distinction between what she calls the "body" and the "flesh," terms
understood as signifying captive and liberated subjects respectively. The
liberated flesh, as anterior to the captive body, is aligned with the affirmation
of slave kinship. The flesh names that which escapes the enslavement of the
body. Yet it is telling that Spillers invokes the body and not the flesh when
she characterizes the institutionalization of New World slavery. Slavery
marks a "theft of the body—a willful and violent... severing of the captive
body from its motive will, its active desire" (67). If the flesh escapes captivity,
then it might be more accurate to say that slavery marks a theft of the flesh,
indeed, an imprisoning of the flesh within the master's disavowed body. In
this sense, there would be no notion of the body without appropriation. For
the principle of "the [one] body," as the self-contained "material frame of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
113
man/' to offer the OED's definition, emerges only on the occasion of its
appropriation, on its becoming other/more than one.
To claim that the master disavows and projects his body onto the
slave, then, is to assume that "the body" in question is unproblematically his.
It is just this assumption that Jean-Luc Nancy takes as one of the prevailing
truisms in the West. In the First Meditation, for instance, Descartes remarks
that the denial of one's body and hands as one's own manifests a certain
madness. He writes:
And how can I deny that these hands and this body here belong to
me? if not perhaps by comparing myself to the insane, for whom the
brain is so disturbed and offended by black vapors of bile, that they
constantly assure themselves they are kings, when they are very
poor; that they are dressed in gold and purple, when they are
completely nude; or imagine themselves to be earthenware pitchers,
or to have a body of glass.7
In her "How Can I Deny.. . however, Butler contests Descartes'
association of this corporeal dubitability with insanity, asking:
If one can pose the question whether one's hands and one's body are
not one's own, then what has happened that the question has become
posable? In other words, how is it that my hands and my body
became something other than me, or at least appeared to be other
than me, such that the question could even be posed whether or not
they belong to me?8
Butler goes on to remark that, while Descartes "shows us that such a doubt
is possible," that does not mean that "the doubt is finally sustainable, or that
no indubitability emerges to put an end to such doubt" (HC 9). While Butler
begins by suggesting that doubt is occasioned by a certain estrangement of
the body from the "'I' who asks the question and the bodily 'me' that it
interrogates," she also imagines the possibility that such doubt might be put
to rest, that the body that has become "other than me" might become mine
once again (HC 9). After all, she asks "what has happened that... my hands
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
114
and my body became something other than me/' grammatically supposing a
body prior to its becoming estranged from itself. This estrangement appears
to be an effect of the interrogative, which suggests that the estrangement of
the body might not have existed prior to the question that puts it in doubt.
While neither Descartes nor Butler are explicitly concerned with the problem
of autonomy that this question concerning the dubitability of the body
raises, such an interrogation is crucial to an investigation of the cultural
truism, "this is my body," either as it appears in the Christian tradition,
various political responses to slavery that insist on corporeal autonomy, or
as it emerges in the dialectical model of kinship, which, as I argued in
Chapter One, predicates itself on the presence of the other, and thus, on the
other's body being either finite or immortal. For the very question—"How
has the body become estranged from itself?"—proceeds from a more
fundamental fantasy that the body might have been, or might finally be or
become mine—that is, if not in this present, then in some past or future
present. As a rejoinder to Descartes, we might ask: how can I not deny that
this body is mine? What conceit of a proper relation to one's body occasions
the "madness," as it were, that this body, was, is and will ever be my own?
Descartes' question seeks to interrogate not only the reality of his
body but also that of his hands. He thus inadvertently directs us to those
bodily appendages that are implicated in corporeal labor. While Butler asks
us to consider these hands in relation to Descartes' own writing, a labor that
calls into question the reality of the hands that perform the writing, we
might also reformulate Descartes' question vis-a-vis the chiasmatic relation
that obtains between one spectral body and another.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
115
Speaking specifically of labor, Locke remarks in an often-cited passage
from his Second Treatise of Government: "Every man has a Property in his own
Person, This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body,
and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his."9 Yet this doctrine
of "possessive individualism” must come to terms with the often remarked
paradox that "freedom," as Toni Morrison puts it, "has no
meaning... without the specter of enslavement."1 0 Paul Gilroy's conception
of the "black atlantic" as a counter narrative to an ethnocentric and
particularist account of black consciousness likewise takes its point of
departure from the "intimate association of modernity and slavery."1 1 That
modem conceptions of freedom do not so much accommodate as require
slavery is echoed by Patterson, who concludes his Slavery and Social Death
with the following admission: "Throughout this work..., the ghost of
another concept has haunted my analysis, and in this final chapter I have
tried to exorcise it. That is the problem of freedom" (341). The fiction of the
liberal subject, as Patterson suggests, seems to mark slavery not so much as
the "peculiar" institution, but rather, the "embarrassing institution" (ix). The
doctrine of possessive autonomy thus presupposes slavery. For the
appropriation of the other can emerge only on the condition that one's
"proper" relation to one's self has already been established. The possession
of the other is first occasioned by the conceit that this body is my body. Yet if
the other's body is understood to be alienable, how is it that my body is
exempt from this corporeal estrangement? How might bodies be
reconceived as neither fully alienable nor fully inalienable?
Slavery predicates itself on the fiction that the body of the other might
be instrumentalized such that it becomes an extension of the master's body.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
116
In this way, slavery involves a reduction of difference to identity whereby
the other/body is/becomes the body of the master. But if, as Nancy argues,
" m y" body is always other, then it makes little sense to talk about “the body
of the other/' for such language implies that there is a body prior to its
coming into relation with other bodies, a body that is autonomous prior to
any act of appropriation.1 2 Strictly speaking, slavery (or kinship for that
matter) ought not to be construed as a relation of one body to another, a
relation in which the propriety of "the body" is suspended in and through
its expropriation. For "the [one] body" is always already implicated in the
other/body, which means that we can never speak of "the body" in the
singular. The ethical abrogation that is slavery lies not in the transformation
of "the body" of the slave into "the body" of the master, but rather, in the
violence that reduces the hauntological relation between and within bodies
to the idea of "the one." Slavery involves an exploitation of the hauntological
condition of all bodies insofar as the other/body is understood to
transmogrify fully into the body of the master without remainder. This logic
of identity thus operates within the fiction of a restricted economy, one in
which the master preserves his disavowed body in the body of the slave.
And yet, the terms by which we understand the master's disavowal
ask to be read beyond the logic of possession implicit in Butler's claim that
the master's body is his prior to its disavowal and projection onto the slave.
For what is disavowed here is not so much his body but the fiction of bodily
possession that conditions the very possibility of the master's disavowal.
Only on account of the conceit that his body is his own does that body
become available for its denial. In short, the master's body is never properly
his to disavow.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
117
Nancy's claim of a fundamental corporeal impropriety also offers an
implicit means of challenging Marx's understanding of estranged labor in
the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f1844. Marx's daim that capitalist
labor "estranges man's own body from him" assumes that the body of the
laborer is his prior to its estrangement.1 3 His account of estranged labor thus
prefigures the distinction between use-value and exchange-value that he will
make in the first volume of Capital. The production of commodities as so
many exchange values confers upon the worker his own exchangeability,
which is to say that it alienates him from his own body. While Nancy
maintains that the body is always already estranged from itself, this does
not mean that all bodies are estranged in the same way, or to the same
degree. Nancy's claim, however, might be enlisted to address the limitations
of an account of alienated labor that proceeds from the premise of a
laboring body that is not in some sense already different from itself, not
already implicated in the illimitable plurality of what Nancy calls the "world
of bodies." An account of alienated labor, and by extension, slavery, ought
not to begin with an uninterrogated distinction between use-value and
exchange-value. For if all bodies are in some sense estranged from
themselves, then the difference between the non-alienated laborer and the
alienated one, or the non-slave and the slave, does not mark a stable
distinction between the "species being" and the worker-become-exchange
value—the former understood as a living, universal and free being (75).
Rather, the difference between free and unfree labor would be the
difference between two forms of exchange value.
For Marx, commodities represent the "congelation" of labor—that is,
the materialization of the labor power expended in their production. Given
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
118
that he understands exchange-values as containing "not an atom of use-
value/' the difference between the concept of use-value and that of
exchange-value would appear to rest on a prior distinction between the
material and the immaterial.1 4 Yet this rigid determination of the material
against the immaterial, despite Marx's affirmation of the materiality of the
use-value, is also the condition of slavery. Indeed, the institution of slavery
stresses the "thingliness” of the slave, and thus, only inadvertently confirms
the materiality of the slave body. The affirmation of the slave's materiality,
moreover, does little to contest the captivation of the flesh in the body. If the
emergence of the body is conditioned by appropriation, then recourse to the
body as resistance to enslavement never fully escapes the violence of
appropriation that it contests.
While resistance to bodily appropriation would seem to require that
we insist on the non-exchangeability of the body—of a fully autonomous,
non-surrogate body—what would it mean if exchangeability marks the
body as being available not only to the possibility of "expropriation," but to
resistance and agency as well? Consider that Hegel's chapter on "Lordship
and Bondage," while famous for the dialectical reversal that it charts
between master and slave, concludes by remarking that "having a 'mind of
one's own' is self-will, a freedom still enmeshed in servitude."1 5 Hegel's free
slave—like many black Americans in the postbellum era who found
themselves still tethered to servitude—leaves his subjection to the master
behind only to discover himself as an "unhappy consciousness," one for
whom lordship and bondage is internalized within a single consciousness.
The ambiguities involved in the distinction between free and unfree labor
have been well remarked.1 6 In Reconstruction America, black Americans
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
119
were subjected to forced contract labor, often on the very plantations where
they had formally been slaves, both by the infamous Black Codes and the
strict rules of conduct mandated by the Freedmen's Bureau. And yet, as
Saidiya Hartman reminds us, the rhetoric of accountability attendant to the
construction of the "free subject" makes it difficult to separate out the
historical conditions of forced free labor from the "unhappy consciousness"
that would seem to haunt all supposedly autonomous subjects:1 7
The joyfully bent back of the laborer conjures up a repertoire of
familiar images that traverse the divide between slavery and freedom.
If this figure encodes freedom, then it does so by making it difficult, if
not impossible, to distinguish the subjection of slavery from the
satisfied self-interest of die free laborer.1 8
Hartman recognizes here the difficulty in determining whether the often
acknowledged failure of Reconstruction ought to be attributed only to
specific historical forces that reproduced the servitude of black Americans in
a postbellum context, or if the very longing for freedom finally reaffirms the
construction of the liberal subject that "effectively yielded modem forms of
bonded labor" in the first place.1 9 And yet, Hartman wants to insist that the
"disappointments of freedom constantly reiterated in slave testimony," far
from evincing a "longing for slavery," demonstrate a "longing for an as yet
realized freedom, the nonevent of emancipation, and the reversals of
slavery and freedom" (139). That Hartman subscribes to this "longing" is
made clear in her description of her work as constituting, in part, "an
examination of eclipsed possibility and another lament of failed
reconstruction" (126). If freedom and servitude are bound up, as it were, in
one another, such that the rhetoric of the liberal subject only produces the
enslavement that it was meant to refuse, then must we still await the final
"reversals of slavery and freedom"?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
120
Hartman's ultimate acquiescence to the fiction of the liberal subject is
rather unanticipated given her claim that slave resistance is too often
excluded from the "proper locus of politics" because it fails "when measured
against traditional notions of... the unencumbered self, the citizen, the self-
possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject" (61).
Focusing on the "inadvertent, contingent, and submerged forms of
contestation" performed by slaves, Hartman would appear to understand
autonomy as that sphere of politics from which slaves are excluded as such,
but that nonetheless becomes available to free individuals on the occasion of
their emancipation (62). But if the "everyday practices of the enslaved occur
in default of the political," and if the "unhappy consciousness" of the free
laborer is not simply reducible to those historical forces that circumscribed
his freedom, then the question of "submerged contestation" ought not to be
asked only of the enslaved, properly speaking, but of the "free" laborer as
well.
Goophering the Black Body
Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Woman Tales are particularly ripe for an
exploration of such questions as slave resistance, autonomy, and the
paradoxes of "free labor."2 0 Published in 1899, yet set in the Reconstruction-
era South, Chesnutt's stories are told in dialect by a former slave named
Julius, who becomes the hired hand of John after the latter, a carpet-bagging
opportunist, arrives in the South with his sickly wife Annie.
Julius is introduced in "The Goophered Grapevine," the first in the
series of the Conjure Woman Tales, which explains how John buys an
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
121
abandoned plantation "for a mere song" (31), notwithstanding Julius' claim
that the land is "goophered/' that is, bewitched by a conjure woman. At the
close of "The Goophered Grapevine," John discovers that Julius has been
living on the property for many years and "had derived a respectable
revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines" (43). John thus
determines that the story of the bewitched grapevine was meant to dissuade
him from buying the land. This is just the first of many occasions upon
which Julius' conjure tales are dismissed as mere fiction precisely because
they appear to conceal hidden motivations on the part of Julius. Julius'
stories of slaves transformed into trees and slave masters magically turned
into slaves cannot possibly be true, according to John's logic, because they
always reveal Julius to be a trickster who tells stories to get what he
wants—the vineyard in "The Goophered Grapevine" or a place of worship
in 'TV Sandy," to name but two examples, Yet it is worth pausing to
consider John's appeal to reason if only because it is so oddly unreasonable.
For we might indeed ask why John seeks recourse to empirical evidence in
order to dismiss Julius' tales as fiction. That John needs to discover an
explanation behind the conjure tales other than the one that Julius supplies
(i.e., that it is simply witchcraft) suggests that John not only believes in the
tales on some level, but that this belief betrays a curiously literal reading of
the tales themselves, one that seems completely deaf to both their ironic and
allegorical significance. John's duplicity runs something like this: on the one
hand, he seems to interpret the tales as the quaint musings of an ignorant
and superstitious former slave; on the other, he suggests that Julius knows
full well what he is trying to accomplish by telling these stories, and thus,
that he is well aware that they are fiction. But if Julius knows that the stories
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
122
are fiction, and uses them accordingly to dupe John and his wife Annie, then
why does John repeatedly explain away the tales by uncovering Julius'
hidden motivations? There would be no need to anxiously reassert the
fictitious status of the stories if John was finally secure in his belief, as it
were, that he does not believe.
The question of belief is complicated by the dialectic between Julius-
as-storyteller and John-as-solicitor of those stories insofar as we read the act
of solicitation itself is as an act of conjuring. In this sense, John's empiricist
doubt recalls that of Descartes, who imagines the hallucinations of others
(i.e., that they are kings, dressed in gold and purple, etc.) only to deny his
implication in the production of these very fantasies. As Butler puts it,
Descartes "conjures such possibilities precisely at the moment in which he
also renounces such possibilities as mad, raising the question whether there
is a difference between the kind of conjuring that is a constitutive part of the
meditative method and those hallucinations that the method is supposed to
refute" (HC 11). This emergent collapse between empiricist doubt and
conjuration is revealed in " Sis' Becky’ s Pickaninny," where John instructs
Julius that his "people will never rise in the world until they throw off these
childish superstitions and learn to live by the light of reason and common
sense" (83). The tale concludes, however, with John's discovery of Julius'
lucky rabbit's foot tucked in the pocket of his sickly wife's dress (83). Given
that his wife's condition has taken a turn for the better, John pauses to
consider if the rabbit's foot has anything to do with his wife's recovery.
John’ s ambivalent relation to conjuring is further unveiled in the tale directly
following "The Gray Wolf’ s Ha'nt," where, at the request of his wife, John
reads aloud the following passage of the book he is reading:
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
123
The difficulty of dealing with transformations so many-sided as those
which all existences have undergone, or are undergoing, is such as to
make a complete and deductive interpretation almost hopeless. So to
grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to
see simultaneously its necessary results in their actual
interdependence is scarcely possible.... (94)
Despite the caricatured philosophical language, we are to conclude that John
is seeking out possible explanations for the transmogrifications that Julius'
conjure tales suggest. While John’ s wife calls the philosophical passage
nonsense (a designation that echoes her response to Julius' tale of "The
Conjurer's Revenge"), John appears to be beginning to wonder about the
possibility that conjuring is not merely a superstition.
Although Robert Bone suggests that "Julius is a kind of conjurer, who
works his roots and plies his magic through the art of storytelling," if we
understand the relation between John and Julius as mirroring in a
postbellum context the antebellum dialectic of master and slave, then if
should come as no surprise that the relation between the two would
replicate a series of dialectical reversals in which the question of who is
conjuring and who is being conjured, or who is the trickster and who is
being tricked, is repeatedly staged and renegotiated.2 1 Moreover, by staging
the telling of the tales in terms of an act of solicitation from John, the would-
be plantation owner, to Julius the would-be slave, Chesnutt reveals how
John's ostensible disbelief of the conjure tales folds over onto belief. If,
notwithstanding the official discourse of plantation life, the slave master not
only believes in ghosts, but actively produces ghosts in the formless form of
the socially dead slave body, then the master/ slave dialectic that obtains
between John and Julius reproduces the phantasmatic climate of antebellum
plantation life where conjuring— by which I mean both that of the master
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
124
and that of the slave—centers on questions of belief, epistemology, and
power,2 2
The relationship that obtains in the frame story between John the
proprietor and Julius the hired hand would appear to underscore black
servitude and white mastery even as it shows John to be rather dull to the
possibility that Julius often exceeds his role as would-be slave. As the
narrator of the frame story, John informs us at the beginning of "Mars
Jeems' Nightmare" that Julius was "very useful when we moved into our
new residence" (55). Detailing Julius’ uncanny familiarity with their property,
John remarks that Julius' "attitude" toward it
might be called predial rather than proprietary. He had been
accustomed, until long after middle life, to look upon himself as the
property of another. When this relation was longer possible . . . he
had been unable to break off entirely the mental habits of a lifetime,
but had attached himself to the old plantation, of which he seemed to
consider himself an appurtenance. (55)
Just as the slave master Mars Jeems—who in a later tale is conjured into a
slave—cannot be broken in by slavery, Julius, according to John, cannot be
broken from it. He is "attached" to the plantation in much the same way as
Henry is turned into a grapevine in "The Goophered Grapevine," or Sandy
whom the conjure woman turns into a tree in ” Po' Sandy." Moreover, this
figuration of Julius as an appurtenance of the plantation, an appendage of
the land, mirrors the means by which the slave functions as an extension of
the master’ s body, a tool or prosthesis through which the will of the master
is exercised. Just as the slave's laboring body is positioned as being in some
sense closer to things material than that of the master, Julius is figured in
John’ s description as being closer in proximity to the land, indeed, as being
so "close to nature" that he becomes a naturalized extension of it (55). To the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
125
extent that he exploits Julius for his peculiar affinity with the land, John
effectively naturalizes black servitude.
What is most striking, however, about John's understanding of Julius'
"attachment" to the plantation is how John gets it both so right and so
wrong. Never mind that, historically speaking, a proprietary attitude toward
their former plantations was exactly what many newly emancipated slaves
vociferously asserted.2 3 That John can only disavow Julius' proprietary claim
is made clear by his initial recognition that Julius "derived a respectable
revenue" from the vineyard (43). John's dismissal of Julius' proprietary
attitude thus reinscribes Julius' servitude. His resistance to seeing Julius as
anything but servile would thus seem to lend credence to the historical claim
that compulsory free labor in the form of forced labor contracts, and the
promise and inevitable denial of land to former slaves (among other
egregious acts), can ultimately account for the failure of Reconstruction to
reanimate the socially dead. Yet the problem with this argument, as I
indicated above, is that it assumes that slavery and freedom are ultimately
opposable, that they are antithetical poles rather than the condition of each
other's emergence. This implication of one term by the other suggests that
the very assertion of the liberal subject cannot but evoke the specter of its
continued subjection.
In this sense, John is not entirely wrong is his assertion that Julius is
attached to the plantation. And yet, Julius is "attached" in a manner that
allows him to resist the relation of identity between master/slave that
reduces the slave to a mere extension of the master's body. As I argued in
Chapter One, this prosthetic relation between bodies ought not to be
considered merely in terms of slavery, the latter understood as a spectral
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
126
relation within bodies whereby difference is always supplanted by identity.
For the prosthetic, and therefore spectral, relation between bodies traverses
the difference, as it were, between free and unfree labor. That labor is never
entirely free registers one explanation for why the work of Reconstruction,
like the work of mourning that it is, remains inevitably unfinished. To claim
that the work of Reconstruction is interminable is not the same as saying
that it is doomed to failure. On the contrary, to measure the "success" of
Reconstruction by its termination yokes failure to interminability and success
with historical closure. In a paradoxical sense, the possibility of
Reconstruction lies precisely in its remaining unfinished and
"unreconstructed."
In this regard, Eric Toner's celebrated work, Reconstruction: America's
Unfinished Revolution, marks by its very title the interminability of mourning
that "consists always," as Derrida reminds us, "in attempting to ontologize
remains, to make them present."2 4 One might argue, as Hartman does, that
the unfinished work of Reconstruction lies in the future emancipation of a
"burdened subject no longer enslaved, but not yet free" (206). According to
this view, Reconstruction may be unfinished now, but its end can be sought
after in some as yet unrealized future. The assimilation of the end of
Reconstruction to success, however, mimes contemporary calls to "get over"
race. If also fails to grasp the legacy of Reconstruction as manifested in
contemporary civil rights discourse. While this latter inheritance forms the
locus of investigation into the relation between miscegenation and gay
marriage in Chapter Three, this chapter explores more specifically the notion
that mourning is not only an effect of slavery but what enables its
contestation. Remarking on the ubiquitous and pejorative invocation of the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
127
"race card" in contemporary politics, Anne Cheng asks: "What does it mean
that the deep wound of race in this country has come to be euphemized as a
card, a metaphor that acknowledges the rhetoric as such yet simultaneously
materializes race into a finite object that can be dealt, withheld, or
trumped?"2 5 Race can be so easily trumped precisely because it is held either
to be problem of the past or a problem that will eventually go away.
Foner's text, however, opens itself up to the interminability of racial
grief and mourning only to give us the conventional historical restriction:
1863-1877. This acquiescence to the proper historical narrative denies the
interminability of the work of mourning from which Foner's own textual
labor cannot be separated. For the work of mourning, as Derrida insists, "is
not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the
trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of
production" (97). Understood in these terms, mourning would emerge in
Marx's account of alienated labor in "objectification as loss of the object and
object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation" (72). But this
estrangement of the worker from the object, and ultimately from the self, is
on the program from the start. It is this work of mourning that manifests
itself in the becoming other of one's body and one's hands.
This originary mourning of my body is what is denied in
Maupassant's short story En Mer, which tells of a young sailor who loses his
arm in a fishing boat accident only to discover that he is unable to let go of
the arm. Although his older brother instructs him to cast the amputated limb
into the sea, Javel refuses, examines the arm sadly, and gives it to his fellow
sailors who pass it "de main en main." They finally decide to preserve the
arm in a barrel of ice that they mark with a cross. When the sailor returns
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
128
home, his wife and children repeat the gesture of examining the arm,
passing it among themselves before placing it in a tiny coffin. The tale thus
concludes with the final interment of the detached arm. If Javel refuses to let
go of his arm, that refusal is marked from the beginning by an originary
otherness of his body that the amputation only literalizes, We might read the
retention of the arm and its circulation among the community of sailors as
dramatizing the failure of mourning. Yet their fascination with the lost
appendage betrays the possibility that their bodies, their hands and their
arms are already in some sense other. Indeed, only by becoming physically
other does Javel’ s arm become available for him to grasp it as his own. As
Javel asserts to his older brother: " It belongs to me, does it not, since it is my
arm."2 6 Yet it only appears to become present to himself at the very moment
when he holds it in his remaining hand as something other. Its phantasmatic
return to him in the present is allegorized by the linguistic chain that links
the present, the now, to the main-temnt: literally "holding in hand". To hold
on to one's lost appendage is to fantasize the convergence of the present
with one's body, la main with the maintenant, notwithstanding any spectral
discontinuity between the two.
The finite character of " m y" body is thus always already anticipated in
the becoming other of this body. This originary loss and absence of " m y"
body in its coming to inhabit the other—its coming to live in and as the
other—marks that body from the beginning as being available to the
possibility of its death. As Cheng notes in her reading of Maupassant's
novella, the gangrenous arm (which she reminds us was synonymous with
"mortification" prior to the invention of antibiotics) "literalizes an embrace of
the morbid" (98). Contesting the Freudian paradigm of "successful
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
129
mourning," Cheng argues that "the story tells of young Javel's success in not
abandoning his arm " (98, her italics). To claim, however, that Javel is
successful in his failure to mourn is still to assume that the arm is his prior to
its physical loss. That no refusal of absence is complete is confirmed not so
much by the retention of the arm as by its return as absent, as always
already detached and lost.2 7
Cheng goes on to propose that the circulation of the mortified arm
among Javel’ s ship mates and family asks us to consider "how a community
might be constituted and imagined through a kind of enlivening morbidity"
(99). Similarly, Gilroy takes Patterson’ s notion of "social death" as "pointfing]
to the value of seeing the consciousness of the slave as involving an
extended act of mourning" (63). Mourning is not merely occasioned by the
violence of slavery, however, but is the condition of any relation to the
other. Mourning signals an originary loss inherent to all bodies. The
ontological conceit of the master's social life proceeds by way of figuring the
slave as the signifier of the death that haunts his and any other life. In other
words, what Patterson calls "social death" constitutes a projection and
disavowal of finitude.
Resistance emerges in The Conjure Woman Tales from within the terms
of this spectral corporeality, one in which the exchangeability of the body
occasions both its appropriation—as difference reduced to identity—and the
contestation of that very reduction. This refusal of identity, this
spatiotemporal deferral of the slave body's final transformation into the
body of the master resists the restricted economy of the master/ slave
relation. According to Butler's rewriting of Hegel in terms of the body, the
master/ slave dialectic institutes a coerced exchange in which the master
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
130
forces the slave to be his body for him, "but be it in such a way that the lord
forgets or disavows his own activity in producing the bondsman/'2 8 Butler
further notes that "this forgetting involves a clever trick" in which the master
commands the slave: "You be my body for me, but do not let me know that
the body you are is my body" (PUP 35). Butler’ s use of the term " trick" to
designate this transmogrification of the slave’ s body into the body of the
master echoes Robert Bone's suggestion that "slavery is itself an act of
conjuration,” indeed, a "magic trick" by which the master takes possession of
the slave's body, forces the slave to labor for him, and thus, in some sense,
forces the slave to be the laboring body that the master refuses to be (89). In
this sense, slavery performs a kind of transmogrification of the slave's body.
Whether into a mule, a tree, a grapevine or a ghost, such transformations
invite us to read slavery as a "form of witchcraft in which one man takes
possession of the body of another and uses it for his own purposes" (92).
Butler’ s rewriting of the master/slave dialectic, however, invokes a
certain spectralization of the body only to conjure it away by remaining fully
within the terms of Hegel's restricted economy. Insofar as the master takes
possession of the slave's body and demands that he be his body—the slave
would appear to become possessed by the master's body. Giving up his
body to the slave, the master himself becomes a kind of ghost. But to the
extent that the master reanimates his body by suppressing that of the slave,
the master reassumes his bodily life in and through that suppression. Butler
notes that "if the suppression of the body is itself an instrumental move of
and by the body, then the body is inadvertently preserved in and by the
instrument of its suppression" (PLP 57, my italics). Which is to say that the
body suppresses the body. From within the fiction of this restricted
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
131
economy, the master's disavowed body returns as his own body, whereas
the materiality of the slave’ s body remains bound to the terms of a contract
that requires that he forfeit all claims to his bodily life. The ghostliness that
the master/slave dialectic would seem to engender is thus always recovered
by a certain resurrection of the body. This return of the body is conditioned
by the fiction of bodily possession whereby the body of the master can be
said to preserve itself in and through the movement of its own negation.
Although both the body of the master and that of the slave are in some
sense preserved, the terms of this preservation are not reciprocal: the
master's body returns as his own body, whereas the slave's body is
dematerialized in and through the reflexive logic by which the master's body
returns to itself.
To the extent, then, that the chapter on "Lordship and Bondage" in
the Phenomenology describes for us a dialectical reversal whereby the slave in
some sense "becomes" the master, such becoming is always provisional,
indeed, circumscribed by a set of inversions through which the slave as such
is never fully materialized, but only made to move back and forth in that
liminal space between embodiment and disembodiment. In this sense, the
restricted economy of the master/slave dialectic determines that the body of
the slave always matters either too much or too little, that the slave is
figured as both all and no body. To claim that the materialization of the slave
is provisional, then, is not to naturalize the servitude of the slave; rather, it is
the very naturalization of servitude that thwarts any attempt to reanimate
the socially dead from within the terms of the master/slave dialectic. Such
reanimation requires a displacement of the dialectic, not a temporary
reversal within its own logic. As I argued in my reading of Butler's
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
132
"dialectical corporealism" in Chapter One, her insertion of "the body" into
Hegel's dialectic of Spirit as that which is preserved above and beyond its
suppression fails to account for how such a restricted economy can only
proceed by way of negating or affirming the body in an endless circuit of
dematerialization and rematerialization. To what extent does this
preservation of the body prevent us from imagining new life forms that
exceed the boundaries of the corporeal? How might we move beyond the
polarization of body versus spirit toward the life form of the specter?
As a figure of speech, to "give up the ghost" means not merely to die,
but to release the immortal spirit or soul from its bodily container, a vessel
that—in its Platonic and Christian conceptions—is understood to be a
contamination, a "prison" of the soul. In its conventional usage, then, the
trope of giving up the ghost is enabled by a certain idealism— rPlatonic,
Christian or otherwise—that understands absence as either anterior or
posterior to being-as-presence. To consider bodies as spectral is to
understand their ghostliness as inhabiting a temporality other than that of
anteriority or posteriority, a ghostliness anathema to the linear temporality
of life then death.
In what follows I read three of Chesnutt's tales, "The Goophered
Grapevine," "Mars Jeems' Nightmare" and " P o' Sandy," for how they
foreground the provisionality of such an internal dialectical reversal. Indeed,
Chesnutt's tales explore both the potential and limitation of the slaves'
attempt to intervene in the Master's refusal to recognize kinship relations,
and thus, of any reversal of the master/slave relation. In Julius' stories,
conjurers are most often called upon to intervene in the slave master's
violent refusal to recognize blood ties. Conjure emerges, then, as a means by
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
133
which slaves might counter their social death. Chesnutt's fictional tales thus
reflect the historical role that conjure played in plantation life—that is, as a
mode of resistance to the master's domination.2 9 Such acts of intervention
range from turning a slave into a tree to prevent him from being torn away
from his wife ("P o' Sandy"), to temporarily turning a slave master into a
slave because he refuses to allow his slaves to marry ("M ars Jeems’
Nightmare".)
While conjure is often employed by slaves as a means of resistance, in
"The Goophered Grapevine" Mars Dugal' McAdoo, in an effort to prevent
his slaves from eating grapes off the vines, calls on the resources of a near
by conjure woman, aunt Peggy, who goophers the vines so that "w'at eat
dem grapes 'ud be sho to die inside'n twel' monfs" (37). Henry, a stray slave
from the next plantation, stumbles across the vineyard and, unaware of
Aunt Peggy's conjure, eats some of McAdoo's grapes. Because he is ignorant
of the goopher, however, Aunt Peggy takes pity on Henry and gives him a
potion to stave off the effects of the conjure until the following spring. At
that time, Aunt Peggy instructs Henry that, as long as he rubs some of the
sap from the vines on his bald head every year, the goopher will continue to
have no effect on him. Henry acts accordingly only to discover that grapes
have begun to grow out of the top of his head. Indistinguishable from the
crop that he grows and harvests, Henry becomes inextricably tied to the
seasonal changes in the vines: when the vines are bare Henry becomes just
as bald as he was before, and when the vines begin to bear fruit the
following spring, the grapes shoot out of his head once again. Ever the
opportunist, Mars McAdoo sees how spry Henry acts every spring and
decides that he would make more money off him if he sold him for fifteen-
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
134
hundred dollars and bought him back for five-hundred in the fall when
Henry, like the vines that he has become, begins to whither away. The next
year along comes a "Yankee" who convinces McAdoo that he can make the
vines bear twice as many grapes if he follows his techniques. But when the
Yankee cuts too dose to the vines, the grapes, and thus Henry, wither away
and die.
For Robert Bone, the allegory of "The Goophered Grapevine" lies in
its "lesson in the economics of slavery." He continues:
The slaves were in fact worth more in the spring, with the growing
season still to come; in the fall prices dedined, for an owner was
responsible for supporting his slaves through the unproductive
winter season. These fluctuations in price underscore the slave's status
as commodity, his helpless dependence on the impersonal forces of the
market. (85)
Indeed, the metonymic relation that obtains between Henry and the
grapevines affirms Marx's claim that the commodity represents the
congelation of labor. Given this metonymic relation between labor and
commodity, whatever becomes of the commodity becomes of the labor that
produced it. If the commodity becomes an exchange value and is thus
abstracted of its use value, so too does the worker whose labor is embodied
in the commodity. In "The Goophered Grapevine," the fluctuations in the
value of the grapes produce an attendant effect on Henry's body. His body
withers away every fall only to resurrect itself every spring. Henry's annual
"return from the dead" asks to be read from within the terms of the
restricted economy of slavery that can only negate and preserve the body of
the slave in an endless cycle of death and resurrection. Although in Chapter
One we considered this negation/preservation in terms of the Butlerian
"comedy" of the body, in "The Goophered Grapevine" the violence of this
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
135
economy is more tragic than comic given that it ultimately leads to a
negation of Henry's body from which he can never recover. What remains
of Henry? Nothing, that is, from within the terms of this economy that
"exhaust[s] itself to appropriate every negativity.3 0 Mars Dugal gets the
vineyard up and running within a year's time and thus the economy of
slavery is restored. If there is some trace of Henry, some remainder, we
might look for it in the figure of Julius who, by telling Henry's story,
produces a discursive excess that cannot be assimilated into the economic
system of slavery. Henry remains in the figure of Julius, of an ostensibly
"free-laborer" who is "attached" to the plantation, but in a prosthetic
manner irreducible to the insidious means by which Henry becomes
identical with the plantation. Denying Julius' proprietary claim to the
vineyard, however, John attempts to reinsert Julius into the economy of
(un)free labor by employing the latter as his coachman. Julius may not
succeed in maintaining the vineyard as his own, but he does win other,
smaller victories by telling his stories. "Mars Jeems' Nightmare," Julius' story
about the devastating consequences of a slave master's excessive violence,
convinces Annie to allow Julius' grandson Tom, who John thinks is lazy and
careless, to continue in their employment. And in "Po' Sandy," Julius' tale of
the haunted timber scares Annie away from having the schoolhouse torn
down to use the wood in the construction of a new kitchen. Julius thus wins
a venue where his church can hold their meetings. These admittedly non
heroic victories nonetheless accomplish for Julius the articulation of a
prosthetic relation between John and himself whereby the presumption that
Julius is merely an extension of the land, or even of John's own body, is
repeatedly contested and redeployed.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
136
While "The Goophered Grapevine" shows the devastating effects of
the restricted economy of slavery that allows for nothing to escape its
reduction of the other to the same, "Mars Jeems' Nightmare" explores both
the potential and limitation of slave conjuring as a form of resistance to this
erasure of difference. "M ars Jeems' Nightmare" tells the story of a slave
master who, refusing to allow his slaves to marry, sells one of his female
slaves (unnamed in the tale) to another plantation far away from her lover,
Solomon. Solomon then turns to Aunt Peggy, a conjure woman, and asks
her to conjure Mars Jeems. Aunt Peggy puts together a "goopher mix try"
and tells Solomon to ask the cook at the "big house" to put it in "M ars Jeems'
soup de fus cloudy day she hab okra soup fer dinnah" (60). The next day
Mars Jeems leaves the plantation to take care of some business, leaving the
overseer in charge. Soon after, Mars Dunkin McSwayne shows up at the
plantation with a "stray nigger," and asks the overseer, Mars Johnson, to
break him in. Resistant to his attempts to break him in, Mars Jeems decides
to send him back to Mars Dunkin McSwayne who in turn sells the would-be
slave down the river. Before he leaves, however, Aunt Peggy intervenes
once again with her goopher mixtry. She tells Solomon to go find the slave
and feed him a "sweet'n 'tater" while he is sleeping. The next day, Solomon
runs into a poor, raggedy dressed white man who, on closer inspection,
turns out to be Mars Jeems. Although Mars Jeems tells Solomon that he had
a horrible nightmare and that a man robbed him and swapped his clothes, at
the end of the tale we find out that the nightmare to which he refers was in
fact the effect of Aunt Peggy's goopher that turned him into the resistant
slave that Mars Johnson almost sent down the river.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
137
If Mars Jeems' brief stint as a slave bespeaks the provisionality of the
Hegelian dialectical reversal, then it also works to naturalize black servitude
Indeed, Jeems' lingering whiteness prevents him from being broken in by
slavery: "He didn' mix' wid ner talk much ter res' er de niggers, en eouldn'
'pear ter git it th’ oo his min' dat he wuz a slabe en had ter wuk an min’ de
w'ite folks, spite er de fac' dat Ole Nick gtm 'im a lesson eve'y day" (62). Mars
Jeems' resistance to becoming a slave recalls the concluding dialogue
between Delano and Don Benito in Melville’ s "Benito Cereno" in which
"again and again it was repeated how hard it had been to enact the part
forced on the Spaniard by Babo."3 1 The overall moral of the story would
appear to be that, despite such temporary reversals, the master is still the
master and the slave is still a slave.
Although Mars Jeems' life as a slave is short lived, indeed, only a
"nightmare” from which he eventually awakes, the conclusion of the tale
would have us believe that Aunt Peggy’ s goopher was at least successful
both in making him a kinder, gentler master, and in countering his refusal to
allow his slaves to marry. Indeed, Mars Jeems sends for Solomon’ s "junesey,"
and the "niggers. . . tuk ter sweethea'tin en juneseyin' en singin’ en dancin',
en eight er ten couples got married" (68). And yet, any social transformation
that Mars Jeems' nightmare might have engendered is immediately
undercut by this stock plantation tradition image of the "happy darkies." The
very improbability of such a transformation in Mars Jeems obscures the
violence of his earlier refusal to recognize kinship relations among his slaves,
making such an easy reanimation of the socially dead hard to swallow.
Indeed, we might be able to digest such a transformation if we, like Mars
Jeems and his "sweet'ri ’ tater," were made to eat it while we were asleep.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
138
The transformation of the slave back into Mars Jeems by the means of
a goophered "sweet’ n’ ’ tater" is particularly interesting in terms of how Aunt
Peggy’ s conjuring both resists the master's act of conjuring that produces the
socially dead slave body and yet finds itself in some sense mirroring its racist
imaginary. After instructing Solomon to find the slave and make him eat the
"sweet’ n' 'tater/' Aunt Peggy sprinkles him with a mixture that makes him
invisible to the white "patteroles." Although the white "patteroles" cannot see
Solomon, Aunt Peggy's goopher allows him to see in the dark: "De nigger
eouldn’ see ’ im, ob co’ se, en he eouldn' 'a ' seed de nigger in de da'k, ef it
hadn’ be'n fer de stuff Aun' Peggy gun 'im ter rub on 'is eyes" (64). While the
slave ostensibly cannot see Solomon in the dark because he lacks Aunt
Peggy’ s power of conjure, we might also read the slave's/Mars Jeems'
inability to see Solomon as rehearsing the familiar racist trope of the "spook,"
a cognate of the Dutch term whose English usage can be traced back to
1801.3 2 Conventionally connoting the difficulty of seeing a black person at
night, the racial epithet of the spook bespeaks the ghostliness of the socially
dead black body. If the slave cannot see Solomon, perhaps that is because he
is, after all, still seeing through Mars Jeems' white vision, eyes that cannot
see the black body as anything else than ghostly and invisible.
Although Aunt Peggy's goopher makes Solomon invisible, and in that
way appears at first to conform to the slave master's conjuration that
effectively dematerializes black bodies, his invisibility is intended to work as
a mode of resistance by which he can stealthily goopher the slave, and thus,
change him back into the new-and-improved slave master. But this final
goopher that Aunt Peggy works on Mars Jeems performs the recuperative
gesture by which he reassumes his bodily life as slave master. The
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
139
restoration of the master/ slave dialectic is thus made possible once Aunt
Peggy's conjuring begins to shadow the racist imaginary of the master's
own acts of conjuration. As competing modes of phantasmatic power, then,
the master's and the slaves' acts of conjuration are not necessarily opposed
in Chesnutt’ s tales. That is, despite the final image of the "happy darkies" that
the tale would have us read as signaling the restoration of slave kinship
relations, it is less the body of the slave than that of the master that gets
reanimated. Given the well-known politics that surrounded the publishing of
Chesnutt's tales—that is, the fact that Chesnutt could and effectively did pass
as white when his publishers withheld his racial identity from the public—we
might well pause to consider how Chesnutt's tales might be read as in part a
product of a white imagination.3 3 Conjure risks, in Chesnutt's hands, being
assimilated to the very insidious institution that goophers the black body
into slavery. And yet, to the extent that Chesnutt’ s stories of
transmogrification expose the final transformation of the black body into a
mule, a tree, a grapevine or a ghost as nothing less than a ruse, his tales are
not finally reducible to the projection of a white imaginary. Indeed, while
"M ars Jeems' Nightmare" allegorizes the provisionality of the master/slave
reversal, the tales as a whole also reveal the failure of the institution of
slavery to fully transmogrify the black body. Chesnutt's tales betray the
institution’ s own acts of conjuration, its reliance on the "irrational" and the
magical that conspire against the materiality of the black body.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
140
The Betrayal of Presence
Such a failure to transform fully the black body into the laboring body
that the master refuses to be is allegorized in Chesnutt's ” Po' Sandy,” a
conjure tale about a slave named Sandy who is shuttled back and forth
between different plantations, until finally his "junesey," Tenie, turns him into
a tree so that he will not have to move anymore. Tenie then promises to
turn the two of them into foxes so they can escape the plantation, but before
she can accomplish the transformation, Sandy is chopped down. After
Sandy's body is made into timber, his master uses the timber to construct a
new kitchen. Upon discovering that his new kitchen is haunted, the slave
master takes the kitchen apart and uses the timber to build a schoolhouse.
The frame story picks up at this point when John's wife Annie asks him to
build her a new kitchen. Deciding to tear down the old schoolhouse, John
takes the lumber to the sawmill, at which point Julius tells John Sandy's
story.
The violent act of cutting down the tree sets in motion a complex
series of transformations in which the materiality of Sandy's body is
repeatedly negotiated. Such transformations of Sandy's body follow from
Tenie's initial conjuration of Sandy into a tree. In this sense, the
transmogrifications of Sandy subsequently performed by his master ask to
be read as themselves acts of conjuring, transformations that violently
recuperate Tenie’ s original intention to employ conjure as a means of
resistance to Mars Marrabo's negation of slave kinship relations. Sandy thus
does not escape slavery as he and Tenie had planned, but becomes a material
part of the plantation. Indissoluble from the materiality of Mars Marrabo's
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
141
plantation kitchen however, Sandy manages in some sense to reverse the
proprietary terms of the master/slave relation. Although Mars Marrabo
appears to achieve the ultimate means by which he can possess his slave, he
is less in possession of Sandy than he is possessed by him.
When Sandy haunts his master's kitchen, he performs an act of
resistance to the slave master's conjuration that resonates with what Teresa
Goddu aptly refers to as "haunting back."3 4 For Goddu, such haunting back
involves a rematerialization of the "ghosts of America's racial history."
Dematerialized by slavery, and by extension, those sometimes
"sensationalist" aspects of Gothic accounts of slavery, slaves such as Stowe's
Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, according to Goddu, manage to resist the terms
by which the Gothic "dematerializes" history. These supposedly
dematerializing effects of the Gothic would thus appear to mirror the
institution of slavery that dematerializes slaves and thereby produces them
as figures of ghostliness. Goddu's argument that the Gothic tends to
dematerialize history assumes, however, that the problem with both the
Gothic and the institution of slavery lies only in their respective tendencies
toward dematerialization, when, as we have seen, slavery does not simply
negate or dematerialize the bodies of slaves, but also preserves them, if only
so they can be reassimilated back into its restricted economy. In short,
Goddu "forgets" that slaves are always constructed as both all and no body,
which means that recourse to their materialization is far less insurrectionary
than it might seem. Sandy's "haunting back," on the contrary, charts less a
move from dematerialization to rematerialization than a spectralization that
is unsettling precisely because it marks a return "not to the living body," to
cite an earlier quotation, but to "a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit" (SM
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
142
202/126, italics in the original). Becoming a ghost, Sandy reconfigures the
terms by which Mars Marrabo renders him "socially dead." That is, Sandy's
"haunting back" effectively resignifies the trope of social death such that his
ghostliness transforms itself from an effect of the master's conjuration to an
act of revenge and terrorization of the master and his family.
Sandy's spectral resistance thus involves what Derrida understands as
a "paradoxical incorporation" that refuses any return to the body as
presence. That the presence of the body is as burdensome as it is liberating is
a persistent theme in African-American literature. In Richard Wright's Native
Son, for instance, Bigger finds himself in the bedroom of the inebriated and
sleeping Mary Dalton, protected from discovery only by the blind eyes of
her mother who stands by the bedroom door, "a white blur ..., silent,
ghostlike."3 5 Although whiteness has become ghostly in this dialectical
reversal, Bigger's corporeality fails to exonerate him of the threat that he
supposedly is to white womanhood. Indeed, Bigger stands petrified, "afraid
to move for fear of bumping into something in the dark and betraying his
presence" (97, my italics). The entire scene hinges on this "betrayal," which
connotes, on the one hand, Bigger's inadvertent revelation of his presence,
and on the other, the assimilation of this presence to the cultural stereotype
of the sexually-violent black male, and by extension, to his always-already
betrayal of white womanhood. For Bigger's "agency" in Mary's murder is
circumscribed by his effort to guard against becoming the violent presence
that the murder only shows him to be. He murders Mary, who is beginning
to stir from her slumber, so that she will not reveal his presence to the blind,
white eyes of Mrs. Dalton. The act that is intended to conceal his presence
thus only seems to betray it.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
143
Wright's account of Bigger's betrayed presence prefigures the famous
opening passage of Ellison's The Invisible Man where—in an inversion of the
scene in Mary's bedroom—the narrator remarks upon what it is like to be
"bumped against by those of poor vision," that is, by those who can only see
the black male as a "spook" or a "phantom."3 6 Angered by the blindness of
white eyes, the narrator begins to "bump people back" (4). Rather than
demonstrating that he is a "man of substance" (3), however, his violent,
bodily confrontation with a white man in the street only seems to affirm his
ghostliness:
In my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right
there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the
collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it
occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far
as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped
the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to
the street.... He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost
killed by a phantom. (4, his italics)
Whereas Bigger's violence makes him menacingly present, almost overly
corporeal, the invisible man's violence does very little in the way of
materializing his body. But if Bigger becomes the "man of substance" that
the invisible man endeavors to be, he does so only to experience the betrayal
of that materialization. Although the invisible man asserts that he is "not a
spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe ...," but a "man of
substance," that substantiality demands to be read other than as a move
from dematerialization to rematerialization. That he is not a "spook" would
seem irrefutable. But this refusal of pure disembodiment does not preclude
the possibility of his spectralization. Spectrality, as I have been using the
term, is inclusive of the material while not for that reason reducible to it. As
the narrator informs us, " I did not become alive until I discovered my
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
144
invisibility/' which suggests that from within the terms of his spectrality lies
the possibility of a resistance and agency that recourse to materialization will
always and only betray (7).
In this sense, spectrality names a surplus of materiality that is not
reducible to "substance" or even to a "body." If Sandy manages to terrorize
his master's family from beyond the grave, such so-called "haunting back"
suggests that Sandy is never fully transformed into Mars Marrado's
property, indeed, that there is a surplus of Sandy irreducible to the violent,
re(de)materializing effects of slavery. Although Sandy’ s body is transformed
into the timber with which his master constructs his new kitchen, the
materiality of his body persists even after it has become wood. Sandy's body
does not become "wooden" in the sense of its being without feeling,
insentient. On the contrary, the wood moans and groans as "the circular
saw... eatfs] its way through the log," and the plantation family hears
groaning noises coming from the timber after it has been used to construct
the kitchen (45). Still capable of feeling pain, the wood has failed to become
strictly timber. Indeed, the material traces of Sandy's body cannot fully be
erased either after Tenie turns him into a tree and Sandy endures the painful
pecks of a woodpecker, or when he receives scars after one of Mars
Marrabo's slaves taps the tree for turpentine, or even later when he is finally
cut down and made into the master's kitchen. This wood that still feels pain
continues to bear the material traces of the slave master's violence.
In this way, the transmogrification of Sandy's body into wood
resignifies the trope of "woodenness" or ''thingliness" beyond the slave
master's disavowal of black pain, even as this transformation allegorizes the
denial of black sentience that effectively provides an alibi for the master’ s
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
145
violence. At first the replaceability and interchangeability of the tree, the
timber, and Sandy would appear to underscore what Hartman refers to as
the "fungibility" of the slave body—that is, the function of the black body as
a commodity, a "dispossessed body" that is "the surrogate for the master's
body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of
his power and dominion" (21). Hartman's notion of slave fungibility echoes
Butler's claim that the master/slave relation involves the substitution of the
slave’ s body for that of the master. Transformed into the disavowed,
laboring body of the master, the slave's body is temporarily materialized.
But while being the body of the master would appear to materialize the
slave body if only by proxy, the "materiality of suffering regularly eludes
(re)cognition by virtue" of the slave body's replaceability (21).
And yet, Sandy's capacity to feel pain even after he has been conjured
by his master into a material part of the plantation exposes the disavowal of
black sentience that infuses the institution of slavery. Sandy's "woodenness"
allows for the affirmation of his pain rather than its negation. Consider that
as an exemplary ingredient, wood can compose many things. But its
participation in the construction of things does not "contain" wood in the
same way that we might conventionally think of the body as a container, as
in both the Platonic and Christian conception of the body as the container of
the soul. In this way, Sandy's return as wood recalls the exemplary Greek
figure used to signify matter, hyle, which signifies both wood—or more
specifically, timber—and the more general category of matter. Sandy's
ghostly return in and as wood figures his materiality—by virtue of its
participation in the infinitely transformable material of wood—as that which
cannot be contained by a body. To the extent that Sandy-as-wood remains
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
146
sentient despite his uncontainability, this raises the question of whether the
affirmation of the slave as a sentient being requires the assertion of the
slave's corporeality. While Hartman’ s argument about slave fungibility
recalls Marx's claim that exchange-value is synonymous with alienation and
expropriation, Sandy's capacity to feel pain despite his
exchangeability—despite his having no body in the proper sense—asks us to
reconsider the conventional materialist claim that understands exchange
value only in terms of estrangement. Does being an exchange value
necessarily entail alienation and expropriation? Perhaps the laboring body
always risks expropriation insofar as it is always already an exchange value.
As we see in the case of Sandy, however, the exchangeability of the laboring
body can lead both to a violent reappropriation and a powerful resistance.
Only on the condition of his exchangeability does Sandy amass the
phantasmatic agency to haunt back, to resist his social death. Only as a
specter can Sandy resist the terms by which the master/ slave dialectic
figures him as either all or no body. For if the "thingliness" of the slave is
produced by maintaining a rigid distinction between the material and the
immaterial, then when does the materialist insistence on the corporeality of
the laboring body reproduce, despite its aims to the contrary, the logic that
conditions the reduction of the slave to the status of mere thing?3 7
As Orlando Patterson reminds us, the Roman doctrine of absolute
property affirmed that only material things could be objects of property, a
determination that in turn conditioned the designation of the slave as
thing. Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value in the
opening pages of Capital is exemplary of how the rigid determination of the
material over and against the immaterial reasserts itself even as Marx begins
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
147
to uncover the phantasmatic quality of the commodity. Although he goes to
great lengths to show how the laborer is a "corporeal, living, real, sensuous"
being, his effort to affirm the materiality of labor inadvertently mimes the
strict demarcation between the corporeal and the incorporeal that affirms
the slave's thingliness (EM 115). For Marx, commodities represent the
"congelation" of labor—that is, the homogenization of the fundamentally
different forms of labor power expended in their production. The abstraction
of the use value into an exchange value erases the qualitative differences in
the labor that produces it, which means that the exchangeability of the
commodity entails the exchangeability, and therefore the alienability, of the
laborer. This odd formulation whereby what is done to the commodity is
also necessarily done to the laborer who produces it sets up a kind of
chiasmatic relation between labor and commodity, one in which the
abstraction of use value is to be understood as strangely acting upon the one
who produced the object. If exchange value "represents human labour in the
abstract," to abstract the use value of a thing—to turn it into ghostly non-
thing—is effectively to turn the laborer into a kind of ghost (C 310).
To take Marx's example of the coat and ten yards of linen, the value of
the coat is set at twice that of the latter. If the value of the coat is double that
of the linen, then twenty yards of linen would equal one coat: " So far as they
are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective
expressions of essentially identical labor" (C 310). But tailoring and weaving,
as Marx immediately points out, are different kinds of labor. As Marx sees it,
the transformation of these use values into exchange values erases the
qualitative differences in their respective labor. As exchange values, the coat
and the linen become "mere homogeneous congelations of undifferentiated
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
148
labor" (C 311). To erase the differences between the labor that is embodied in
different objects is to dematerialize commodities. It is this "coarse
materiality" that Marx wants to "save," as it were, from idealist abstractions
of exchange value in which "not an atom of matter enters into its
composition" (C 313). How are we to understand this chiasmatic relation that
Marx theorizes between the commodity and labor alongside his other claim
that both the substance of each use value and the labor expended in the
production of each object are fundamentally different? That is, insofar as the
abstraction of the commodity abstracts the labor embodied in the
commodity by extension, the substantive integrity of labor and commodity
is called into question. Although Marx argues that the becoming exchange
value of the commodity dematerializes both the thing and the labor that
produced it—finally estranging the laborer's body from himself—if the
commodity, labor, and the laboring body are related in this phantasmatic
way, then they become—within the terms of Marx’ s own
argument—fundamentally ghostly things. It is precisely this ghostliness,
pace Marx, that always already haunts the use value of the commodity.
For Marx, then, exchange-value is alienation. As he remarks in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the laborer as commodity "is
related to the product ofhis labor as to an alien object" (72). Marx thus returns
to the conundrum that Hegel already elaborates in the Phenomenology
concerning how the bondsman recognizes himself in the objects upon which
he labors and yet is always already under the compulsion to give such
objects up: "Through work," Hegel writes, "the bondsman becomes
consciousness of what he truly is" (118). And yet, the slave recognizes
himself, as Butler puts it, not so much "by reading back his signature on the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
149
object," but rather, "in the very forfeiture of the signature" (PUP 39). For
Marx, such forfeiture leads precisely to the laborer's self-estrangement, his
alienation from the product of his labor, and ultimately his own body: " If the
product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an
alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the
worker" (EM 78).
Although both Hegel and Marx agree that slavery (or capitalist labor
more generally for Marx) alienates the worker from himself, Marx is quick
to criticize Hegel for seeing only the "positive, not the negative side of
labour. [For Hegel] labour is man's coming-to-be for himself within alienation,
or as alienated man" (EM 112). While Marx posits communism as that which
would transcend such an alienated state, for Hegel there is no absolute
outside to such alienation. To re-cite an earlier quotation: "freedom ..."
remains "enmeshed in servitude" (119). While on the one hand Marx
applauds Hegel for recognizing man's self-estrangement through labor, on
the other hand, Marx critiques him for "positing man as equivalent to self-
consciousness," for suggesting that estrangement is the "essential reality of
man" (EM 122). Marx then goes on to align self-estrangement with the figure
of the idealist thinker himself, suggesting that idealism is a kind of
pseudonym for such estrangement.
In the opening lines of Capital, Marx writes that "to discover the
various uses of things is the work of history" (303). It is this thingliness that
Marx wants to affirm in the commodity. If the commodity and the laborer
haunt one another from within the terms of their chiasmatic relation, then
the exorcism of exchange value is crucial to the affirmation of the laborer as
a corporeal being. But given this phantasmatic relationship that obtains
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
150
between the laboring body and the commodity, together with the
consequential blurring of the demarcation between use-value and exchange-
value, can we any longer seek recourse to the materiality of the commodity
in order to affirm the laborer as a living, corporeal being? And does not
Marx's insistence that the use-value is "not a thing of air," that it is a "material
thing," finally construe the laboring body as thingly by extension (C 303)? 3 8
For this is a body that materializes in relation to the production of the
commodity as use-value and dematerializes in relation to the becoming
ghostly of the commodity-as-exchange value. If the laboring body is
whatever becomes of the commodity, then it follows that Marx's own
affirmation of the object’ s "thingliness" inadvertently confers a certain
thingly status to the laboring body. Moreover, Marx’ s claim that the
dematerialization of the laboring body follows only on the occasion of the
abstraction of the commodity denies the chiasmatic relation that he theorizes
between the commodity and labor by reasserting the very material integrity
that the chiasmus calls into question.
Marx's well-known example of a certain wooden table in this same
passage from Capital recalls the magical conjurations of Sandy, and in a
manner that inadvertently deconstructs the strict distinction between use-
value and exchange value. Despite its transformation into a table, the wood
out of which the table is constructed, according to Marx, continues to be
wood, " a common, every-day thing, wood" (320). But once it "steps forth as a
commodity, it changes into something transcendent. It not only stands with
its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on
its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more
wonderful than 'table-turning' ever was" (320). In the German, there is no
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
151
explicit reference to "table turning" or conjuring (although the
Moore/ Aveling translation cited here captures the reference to nineteenth-
century spiritualism that is only implied by Marx's figure of the dancing
table). The phrase that their translation renders here as "far more wonderful
than 'table-turning' ever was" is given in the original as "viel wunderlicher,
als wenn er aus freien Stricken zu tanzen begarme" [more wonderful than if
it had begun to dance of its own free will].3 9 The phrase aus freien
Stucken — literally, "out of free pieces"—suggests that the coming together of
the table is conditioned by a certain imprisoning effect, one that contains a
more disparate, "free" materiality. These "free pieces" recall Sandy's
materiality, which becomes scattered and dispersed by virtue of its
uncontainability. If "aus freien Stucken" suggests, however, that the table
dances because it comes together from disparate parts, its translation as
"table turning" associates the table with a ghostliness that Marx very much
wants to exorcise. For Marx, the becoming commodity of the thing is
conditioned by a certain conjuring trick that transmogrifies the ordinary,
everyday materiality of the thing into a ghost. And yet, as Derrida remarks
of this passage in Specters of Marx:
the said use-value of the said ordinary sensuous thing, simple hule,
must indeed have promised it to iterability, to substitution, to
exchange, to value; it must have made a start, however minimal it
may have been, on an idealization that permits one to identify it as
the same throughout repetitions.... If the commodity-form is not,
presently, use-value, and even if it is not actually present, it affects in
advance the use-value of the wooden table. (SM160,161)
Against Marx's effort to know the precise moment that "the ghost comes on
stage," Derrida maintains that it is always already on stage, and that Marx's
effort to mark such a moment is itself an act of exorcism. Just as the ghostly
return of Sandy as something other than a body calls into question the strict
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
152
distinction between use-value and exchange value in terms of the supposed
alienation that inheres in the latter, the materiality of the table is never only
and simply "wood," that is, if Marx means by this material ingredient
something uncontaminated by the temporality of its subsequent
idealizations. Like Sandy, the table is a specter prior to becoming a specter as
such.
Kindred
Possession
Sandy's return marks less a preservation of "the body" as a vessel of
containment than a remaindering that exceeds the imprisoning effects of the
body. The return of this uncontainable, spectral body deconstructs the
Socratic notion of the body as container, a "prison" of the soul. This is not to
suggest, however, that its spectrality can be likened to the emancipated soul,
released from its ponderous and contaminated body.4 0 For such a conflation
of specter/soul would simply reinscribe the trope of containment that
Sandy's haunting displaces. In the Phaedo, Socrates, who is imprisoned and
awaiting execution, fittingly invokes the figure of the prison to describe how
the body contains the soul until death. Not by accident, we might imagine,
does Foucault resuscitate this trope in his famous work on the modem
prison, Discipline and Punish.4 1 Inverting Socrates' formulation, Foucault
writes: "The soul is an effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul
is the prison of the body" (34). Understood as a figure for institutionality, for
the regulation and normalization of the body, the "soul" contains the body,
just as in the Phaedo the prison effectively contains, regulates, and punishes
Socrates' body by death. While Socrates' understanding of the body/soul
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
153
relation makes the body into a figure of containment, Foucault's "inversion"
of this relation is meant to uncover precisely what Socrates denies in his
formulation of the body as prison: namely, that "the body" in general, and
Socrates' body in particular, are not so much containers as normative
idealizations, themselves contained, disciplined and punished. It would seem,
however, that Foucaulf s inversion does little in the way of displacing the
logic of containment that inheres in the Platonic formulation. For this
extemalization of the soul as normalization and distiplinarity leaves the
trope of containment, of inside and outside, relatively intact.4 2
The dismemberment of Sandy, on the other hand, occasions a return
that fails to assimilate his various parts into any coherent, containable whole.
This dismemberment recalls the preface to the Phenomenology where Hegel
writes: "The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps
itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and
maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it
finds itself" (19, my italics). We have remarked how Spirit always finds itself
within the reflexivity of Hegel's dialectic. This return of Spirit to itself
involves a confrontation with negativity whereby Spirit's "tarrying with the
negative" is but the precondition of its conversion into being. Miller's
translation of the German Zerrissenheit as "dismemberment," moreover,
suggests an odd corporealization of Spirit. For how exactly can a spirit
become dismembered? Zerrissenheit can also be translated as "tearing" or
"shredding," yet this shift away from the corporeality that
"dismemberment" implies still leaves us with a certain materialization of
Spirit. But if Spirit returns to itself by virtue of its dismemberment, Sandy's
dismemberment affords no return to a body. Whereas negativity remains a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
154
resource for Spirif s return, Sandy's return leaves us only with the remains.
These are the remains that Tenie wants to ontologize, to make present, if
only so she can explain to Sandy that she did not leave him "ter be chop'
down en sawed up" (51).
While Sandy's body cannot be "reconstructed" into a containable
whole, it manages to subvert those ideologies of containment that
characterized antebellum slavery. His initial request of Tenie that she
transform him into something immobile like a "tree, er a stump, er a rock, er
sump'n w'at could stay on the plantation fer a w'ile" is profoundly ironic
given the mechanisms of control that worked to keep slaves in their place:
spatially, hierarchically and temporally (47). Historically, slaves were
prohibited from travelling without a pass, a regulation that emancipation
saw thrown away almost instantly when blacks fled the plantations.
Although whites often interpreted black mobility in the postbellum era as
aimless wandering, Hartman notes that, for a population that had never
seen freedom, "locomotion was definitive of personal liberty" (151). The
question of containment versus mobility would reach all the way to the
Supreme Court by 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the debate over
"separate but equal" would involve an effort to impede the migration of a
man of one-eighth black blood to the other side of the color line, a
prohibition of movement that marked, albeit in a different register, the
central constitutional question of providing separate accommodations on
locomotives for whites and blacks. As I will argue in Chapter Three, the one-
eighth rule worked to contain blackness, no matter how indiscernible, by
anchoring itself in the conventional figure of the body-as-prison. The
containment of the slave, however, is also legible temporally in the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
155
production of the slave as a "genealogical isolate/' as Patterson puts it,
severed both from his ancestors and his descendants (5). In this sense, Sandy
as slave, "lives" only in the present. But his "presence," as it were, is one that
bears no relation to the past or to the future. Sandy's "life" is a dead
presence. In this sense, the call to make the socially dead present misses how
the socially dead are nothing but present, immobilized in time. Sandy's
spectral return, on the other hand, allows us "to speak of what persists
beyond the end, beyond death, of what was never alive enough to die,
never present enough to become absent."4 3 Contesting the spatiotemporal
containment of slavery, Sandy persists in the materiality of the plantation in
such a way that his immobilization— both temporal and spatial—is refused.
Recall that he is first transformed into the kitchen, then the schoolhouse, and
finally almost becomes a kitchen again if it was not for Annie who,
persuaded by Julius' story, allows Julius to hold church meetings in the
schoolhouse. Sandy's exchangeability is thus double-edged: it confirms his
status as commodity at the same time that it allegorizes an uncontainability
that allows him to exceed his immobilization. Not by accident, perhaps, does
the name of the church ironically sound the possibility of slave mobility:
"Sandy Run Colored Baptist Church."
Sandy's spectral resistance thus allegorizes what Hartman refers to as
the "inadvertent, contingent, and submerged forms of contestation" that
characterized slave resistance in the antebellum era (62). That Sandy haunts
the wood with which the plantation kitchen is constructed suggests the more
than likely possibility that slave labor was used to chop down the tree, take it
to the sawmill, and build the kitchen. The kitchen, as the center for
domesticity, is rendered completely useless by Sandy whose audible
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
156
moaning scares everyone away, including the slaves.4 4 But if Sandy's
contestation allegorizes the "nonautonomy of the field of action" that is
available to the slave, it does so at the price of being excluded from the
"proper locus" of the political (61). This exclusion has the consequence,
Hartman maintains, of recognizing only those practices of resistance that
measure up against conventional notions of autonomy and agency. If,
however, "the everyday practices of the enslaved occur in the default of the
political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the self-
possessed individual," then the barring of such contingent contestation
effectively limits the recognition of slave resistance only to "heroic action
and oppositional consciousness" (62) ,45 As I remarked earlier, however,
Hartman contests the assimilation of resistance to the paradigm of the
autonomous self only to reinscribe it when she asks us to imagine the
possibility of a slave body that is unimplicated in the body of the master—in
short, a fundamentally non-prosthetic body that is fully separate from that
of the master. In this sense, Hartman's insistence on difference emerges as
something like the corollary to Butler's logic of identity. If Butler
inadvertently reduces the difference between bodies to the one, Hartman
refuses this reduction only to reproduce a binary relation between master
and slave.
Hartman's reinscription of the master/ slave binary is made legible in
her critique of white empathy. She maintains that empathy "is double-
edged, for in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is
occluded by the other's obliteration" (19). Hartman rightly argues that the
substitution of oneself for the other involves a dialectics of "mutual
recognition" that consumes and ultimately destroys the other. Discussing
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
157
John Rankin's fantasy of Ms own enslavement, she writes: "Rankin begins to
feel for Mmself rather than for those whom his exercise in imagination
presumably is designed to reach" (19). But what finally determines the
difference between feeling for oneself and feeling for the other? How can
empathy proceed without some sort of incorporation that calls into question
the difference between my body and the other's body? While Hartman
suggests that it is Rankin's function as "proxy" that obliterates the other for
whom he is trying to feel pain, how are we to imagine a relation between
bodies in wMch "the body" of the other (to invoke the very fiction of
identity that we want to displace), is not already different to itself both by its
non-contemporaneity with itself and by its coming into relation with the
other/body? Hartman remarks that
Empathic identification is complicated further by the fact that it cannot
be extricated from the economy of chattel slavery with which it is at
odds, for tMs projection of one's feeling upon or into the object of
property and the phantasmatic slipping into captivity, while it is
distinct from the pleasures of self-augmentation yielded by the
ownership of the captive body and the expectations fostered therein,
is nonetheless entangled with this economy and identification
facilitated by a kindred possession or occupation of the captive body,
albeit on a different register. (21, my italics)
Both empathy and slavery involve a "phantasmatic slipping" of one body
into another. It is precisely this "kindred possession" that Hartman argues
might ultimately be superceded, either as it appears in emphathic
identification or in the economy of slavery itself. Hartman appears to
understand this kindred possession as obtaining only within the restricted
economy of slavery that obliterates the other, against the possibility that this
spectral inhabiting of one body in another is generalizable.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
158
What is perhaps most striking about Hartman's argument is how the
obliteration of slave sentience is assimilated both to the
"hyperembodiedness" of the slave and to the "spectral character of
suffering.. . the "ghostly presence of pain" (20). Caught between wanting
to materialize black pain on the one hand, and refusing the "thingliness" of
the slave on the other, Hartman's effort to articulate black sentience finds
itself in much the same predicament as that of Bigger Thomas or the invisible
man, both of whom understand that "body" and "spook" are the only
modes of being available to them. A consideration of bodies as always
already spectral, however, would allow us to circumvent the argument that
understands the ghostliness of the commodity as synonymous with
estrangement and alienation, and thus enable us to envision alternative ways
that the slave might be reanimated. Does the reanimation of the socially
dead require the materialization of the body? Might "haunting back"
necessitate less the materialization of the body than a transformation from
"spook"—that racist trope of pure disembodiment—to "specter," understood
as neither spirit nor body, but as a surplus that comes up against the
Hegelian sublation of master (body/spirit) versus slave (body/spook)?
One cannot think social death apart from the spectrality that estranges
one's body from itself without reproducing liberal notions of autonomy,
self-possession, and ultimately self-presence that preserve one's body
through the obliteration of the other/body. The chiasmatic relation between
bodies is not only the condition of slavery. For my body is always in some
sense inhabited by the body of the other, and conversely. This inhabiting of
one body in another, however, does not mean that the other is fully or
finally incorporable. The other/body remains as an wnincorporable,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
159
unassimilateable ghost that interminably beckons me near if only to affirm a
singularity that exceeds my grasp and comprehension.
11 thank Eric Anders who read and responded to an earlier draft of this
chapter. A shorter version was first presented at the "Mass Symposium" at
the University of Southern California in April of 1999, with Sam Weber as
respondent, and then later at the "Materiality of Fantasy" panel at the
Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, December 1999.1
thank Professor Weber in particular for encouraging me to think beyond the
conventional conception of the body as container.
2 Emily Field Van Tassel, "'Only the Law Would Rule Between US':
Antimiscegenation, the Moral Economy of Dependency, and the Debate
Over Rights After the Civil War," 70 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 873, 875.
3 Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang,
1993), 111.
4 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982).
5 Hortense Spillers, "Mama’ s Baby, Papa's Maybe," in Diacritics, Summer
1987, 65-81,74, her italics.
6 David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1984), 177.
7 Descartes, Oeuvres Philosophiques, Tome II (Paris: Editions Garnier Frferes,
1967), 406. "Et comment est-ce que )e pourrais nier que ces mains et ce corps-
ci soient a moi? si ce n'est peut-£tre que je me compare a ces insenses, de qui
le cerveau est tellement trouble et offusque par les noires vapeurs de bile,
qu'ils assurent constamment qu'ils sont desrois, lorsqu'ils sont tres pauvres;
qu'iis sont vetus d'or et de pourpre, lorsqu'ils sont tout nus; ou s'imaginent
6tre des cruches, ou avoir un corps de verre."
8 Judith Butler, " ’ How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are
Mine,"’ in Qui Parle, vol. 11 no. 1, (Fall/ Winter 1997), 8. Cited in the text as
HC.
9 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963), 305.
1 0 See C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes
to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 56.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
160
1 1 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 53.
1 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Editions Metallic, 1992).
1 3 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f1844 in The Marx-Engels
Reader, Robert Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 77. Cited in the text as
EM.
1 4 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I in The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker, ed.
(New York: Norton, 1978), 305. Cited in the text C.
1 5 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 119.
1 6 See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
1 7 For Nietzsche, the "subject" emerges through its subjection to morality
and conscience: "This instinct for freedom forcibly made latent... is what
the bad conscience is in its beginnings." See On the Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 87.
1 8 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135.
1 9 Hartman 120. Peter Kolchin notes that white southerners routinely
appealed to an understanding of liberty by which they saw the threat of
abolition as an infringement of their right to own slaves, and thus, a
violation of their own liberty. Liberty, in the minds of many southerners,
was closely aligned with the notion of custom, tradition and the right to
pursue one's own interest. This view of slavery thus saw no contradiction in
defending slavery while proponing liberty. See American Slavery, 85-92.
2 0 Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993).
2 1 Robert Bone, Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 83.
2 2 Houston Baker defines conjure as a "transatlantic religion of diasporic and
Afro-American masses in the New World. Descended from vodun, an African
religion in which the priestess holds supreme power, conjure's name in Haiti
and the Caribbean is voodoo." See his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 43.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
161
2 3 Perhaps the most well-known proprietary claim made by former slaves
involved the South Carolina Sea Islands, where fleeing white inhabitants left
behind 10,000 slaves who remained on the plantations and raised food for
their own subsistence. Later Sherman ordered that the Islands and a portion
of the Carolina coast be set aside for former slaves. He promised forty acres
and the assistance of mules, all of which were eventually revoked when the
lands were returned to pardoned southerners. See Foner, "Rehearsals For
Reconstruction" in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.
2 4 Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 30; Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 9. Cited as SM. Richard Broadhead observes
that plantation fiction and the literature of local color "took on prominence
in the postbellum years because it performed a larger social work, the work of
mourning ways of life being eradicated at this time" (3, my italics). While
plantation fiction such as Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus and Thomas
Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia evince a more nostalgic than critical view of
slavery, Chesnutt's Conjure Woman Tales employ an ironic tone that casts
light on the violence and alienation endemic to the institution. See
Broadhead's "Introduction" to the Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales;
Lucinda H. Mackethan, "Plantation Fiction, 1865-1900 in Louis D. Rubin et al
eds. The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1985); Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in
the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State
University Press, 1989); Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan
and Other Stories (Ridgewood N J: Gregg Press, 1968); Joel Chandler Harris,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: Ltd, Editions Club, 1957).
2 5 Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden
Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 103.
2 6 Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1979. "Cest k
moi, pas vrai, puisque c’ est mon bras."
2 7 See my more extensive reading of Cheng in Chapter Three.
2 8 Judith Butler, The Psyhic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 35. Cited in the text as PLP.
2 9 Although conjure sometimes achieves powerful effects in Chesnutt's
stories (as in "The Marked Tree" where conjure brings about the destruction
of an entire plantation family), Eric Sundquist remarks that conjure
historically "posed no direct threat to the plantation regime and seldom
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
162
changed the balance of power in the slaves' favor." See Ms To Wake the
Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 368.
3 0 Jacques Derrida, llEcriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Semi, 1967),
377.
3 1 Herman Melville, Billy Bndd, Sailor and Other Stories (New York, Bantam,
1984), 206.
3 2 The general consensus, however, is that the racial sense is much more
recent, most likely mid-twentieth century. See Wicked Words: A Treasury of
Curses, insults, Put-Domns, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-
Saxon Times to the Present (New York: Crown, 1989).
3 3 Dickson Bruce remarks that "Chesnutt was never committed to a
distinctive black identity. His alienation from black North Carolinians was
striking. He certainly felt his own superiority to most black people around
him. As a teenager, in fact, he actually thought of passing over the color line
to live as white Chesnutt wanted, above all, to be part of the American
elite—an elite that happened to be white rather than black." See his "The
Color Line and the Meaning of Race" in Black American Writing from the Nadir
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 172. See also
Chesnutt's essay, "What is a WMte Man" (1889), reprinted in Werner Sollors,
ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and
Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and his novel The Marrow of
Tradition in Henry Louis Gates, J r . ed. Three classic African-American novels
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
3 4 Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997), 132.
3 5 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 97.
3 6 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3-4.
3 7 It is precisely this danger of re(pro)ducing the thingliness of the slave that
haunted Booker T. Washington's so-called "accommodationist" politics.
Insisting on the "dignity" of manual labor, Washington's crude materialism
has typically been read as constituting a simple acquiescence to the
ideologies of slavery that exploited the black body as labor. While Nicholas
Bromell argues that "the distinction between mental and manual labor,
resting upon an assumed dichotomy of mind and matter, was the paradigm
that structured virtually all antebellum thinking about work," he appears to
exclude Washington from the ubiquity of this mind/body split, and instead
gives us the conventional reading of Washington's politics: 'Washington
maintains that, in making his way forward, the typical African American
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
163
should not aspire to perform mental labor, or to become learned...." See By
the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10, 208. The politics involved here,
however, are more complicated than this reading would allow, given that
Washington does not simply eschew other forms of labor for blacks,
including mental and intellectual work. Writing of one of his mentors,
Washington remarks that "M r. Adams, in a large degree, derived his
unusual power of mind from the training given his hands in the process of
mastering well three trades during the days of slavery." Regardless of how
sincere Washington was in his notion of mind/body integration, publicly he
seemed content with acceding to white racist ideologies that wanted the
continued exploitation of black labor. While Washington remarked in his
famous Atlanta Exposition Address that "there is as much dignity in tilling a
field as in writing a poem," the yoking of blacks to manual labor reemerges,
I would suggest, in his trope of the hands that follows, and for which
Washington is most often remembered: "In all things that are purely social
we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress." Not by acddent do the hands of labor return
in this statement of what has been conventionally read as an affirmation of
the Jim Crow ideology of "separate but equal," Washington's metaphor
imagines an equality from within the work of progress, a labor that can be
accomplished, he maintains, despite the social separation of whites and
blacks. See Up From Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 70,129.
Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk responds to Washington's materialism by
offering an alternative, "spiritual" account of postslavery black
consciousness. While Cynthia Schrager argues that Du Bois "figure [sj
blackness in terms of the spiritual and whiteness in terms of the material,"
thereby "locating African-American political agency in a spiritual or psychic
racial difference," it might also be said that the confrontation that he stages
between two "warring ideals" of whiteness and blackness "in one dark
body," understands the materiality of the body as that which remains
beyond these polarized idealizations, a body "whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder." In this sense, what du Bois offers us
might be understood as neither a spiritual nor material account of black
agency, but rather, a spectral one. See The Souls of Black Folk (New York:
Penguin, 1996), 5; Cynthia Schrager, "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science
and Mysticism in W.E.B. Du Bois" in American Quarterly, vol. 48 no. 4
(December 1996), 554.
3 8 Much could be said with regard to Marx's assertion that the use-value is
"not a thing of air" in terms of its assumption that air is immaterial. The
history of Western materialism, as Daniel Tiffany notes, bears witness to a
persistent negotiation with the basic tenets of atomism, which proceed from
an equation of materiality with invisibility, beginning with that which is
perceivable only to the intellect: the atom. Thus Marx's claim that "not an
atom of matter enters into [the] composition" of the exchange value, and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
164
therefore "it seems impossible to grasp/' likewise equates matter with the
visible and the tangible (C 313). That Marx was in dialogue with the tenets of
atomism is confirmed by his doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus. Yet
it is dear from his equation of the invisible with the immaterial in Capital that
Marx's materialism departs from its atomist inheritances in significant ways.
See Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of
California: Berkeley, 2000).
3 9 Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1890), 37.
4 0 The denial of slave sentience was routinely made by insisting that the slave
did not have a soul. In this sense, Tom's steadfast belief in Unde Tom's Cabin
that he will be saved in the afterlife would seem an exemplary contestation
of the notion of the soul-less slave: "His bible seemed to him all of this life
that remained, as well as the promise of a future one." See Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Unde Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New York: Penguin, 1986),
230. As Elizabeth Ammons remarks, "Stowe's program in Unde Tom's Cabin
is basically spiritual. She seeks to convert those in power .. . away from the
patriarchal institution, slavery, which she associates with the devil, toward a
new sotial ideal, one associated with the mother-Christ and manifest in the
little girl Eva, the black man Tom, and the strong Quaker mother Rachel
Holliday." See her "Stowe's Dream of the Mother-Savior: Unde Tom's Cabin
and American Women Writers Before the 1920s" in Eric Sundquist ed. New
Essays on Unde Tom's Cabin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
170. This accession to Christianity, however, does little to challenge the
notion of the body-as-container that produces the slave body as all or no
body. If the denial of the slave's soul makes the slave into nothing but body,
the belief in an afterworld salvation utterly denies the slave's corporeality.
Such disdain for the corporeal led Nietzsche to characterize Christians as
"despisers of the body." He writes: "body am I entirely, and nothing else;
and soul is only a word for something about the body," Nietzsche's
dismissal of the Christian soul, however, does not seek to reduce the body to
a thing-in-itself. For it is this very positivist conceit that Nietzsche takes to be
the flip-side of the Christian negation of the body. If Christianity can only
negate the body, then science can only seem to affirm it as an ultimate
empirical ground. See "On the Afterworldy" and "On the Despisers of the
Body" from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Penguin, 1966), 34.
4 1 Plato, Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995).
4 2 We might imagine that Foucault's failure to think beyond the trope of
containment accounts in part for why Butler, in her explicitly Foucauldian
inflected theories of corporeality, similarly remains within this model of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
165
containment. If, in Chapter One, I give little "air time" to the Foucauldian
legacy that manifests itself in Butler's work, I do so only to bring out her less
pronounced, yet for that reason all the more significant, Hegelian
inheritance.
4 3 Warren Montag, "Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida's Specters of Marx"
in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx
(New York: Verso, 1999), 71.
4 4 The significance of Sandy's haunting of the plantation kitchen also reflects
the erasure of the distinction between domestic and market economies that
Gillian Brown argues is central to the institution of slavery: "Slavery
disregards [the] opposition between the family at home and the exterior
workplace. The distinction between work and family is eradicated in the
slave, for whom there is no separation between economic and private
status" (505). Brown locates this "contagion of the market" in none other
than Dinah's kitchen in Uncle Tom's Cabin which "look[s] as if it [has] been
arranged by a hurricane blowing through it" (503). Sandy's haunting
likewise brings the "confusions of the marketplace into the center of family
shelter, into the kitchen" (506). Yet one might counter that the division
Brown marks between domestic and market economies is not as rigid as one
might think, that is, that kinship is itself invested in certain proprietary claims
that contaminate it prior to its exposure to the market. See her "Getting in
the Kitchen With Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin," in American
Quarterly, vol. 36 no. 4 (Fall 1984), 503-523. Not by accident, perhaps, does
Toni Morrison's Beloved describe the "spiteful" 124 Bluestone road by
detailing the ravages that the baby ghost wages in the family kitchen: tiny
handprints appear in a cake; chickpeas and soda crackers are strewn about;
the dining table rushes toward Paxil D, etc.
4 5 The vast majority of slave resistance practices in the United States involved
individual or small group acts, rather than full-scale subversion. Only a
handful of such rebellions took place in America, perhaps the most well-
known of which is Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. Less spectacular were the
day-to-day resistances of steeling food, spitting in food, lying, work
stoppage, etc. For more on large-scale rebellion, see Kenneth Greenberg ed.
The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (New York: Bedford
Books, 1996). For more on small-scale resistance see Hartman, "Redressing
the Pained Body" in Scenes of Subjection; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 161-
168.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
3
166
The H au n ted House of
Kinship: Miscegenation, Same-
Sex Marriage and Faulkner’ s
Absalom, Absalom!
Haunting is always the haunting of
a house. And it is not just that some
houses are haunted. A house is only
a house inasmuch as it is haunted.
— Mark Wigley, The
Architecture of
Deconstruction
Any house is a far too complicated,
clumsy, fussy, mechanical
counterfeit of the human body....
—Frank Lloyd Wright,
"The Cardboard
House," 1931
E
MILY DICKINSON'S "One need not be a chamber to be haunted"
begins by posing the phenomenon of haunting as the excess of any
structure of containment. While Dickinson's language does not deny the
possibility that haunting might be interiorized, its interiorization is deemed
inessential and perhaps even secondary to the haunting itself. Chambers,
houses and other such enclosures mark the conventional spaces in which the
haunting that is peculiar to the Gothic tends to get contained. In the
Dickinsonian dynamic of haunting, on the contrary, haunting is imagined as
"surpassing Material Place— - . " 1 This uncontainable haunting recalls
Chesnutt's Conjure Woman Tales in which Sandy's unreconstructed
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
167
materiality achieves its spectral potential, despite, or rather because of, its
dispersion and generalizability.
Yet in the lines that follow, Dickinson moves away from this assertion
of haunting's un con ta inability toward another set of enclosures—the
corridors of the brain—which suggests that her opening gesture performs
something perhaps less radical than it might first appear. Given that these
corridors are understood to exceed "Material Place— ," they appear to figure
the brain as something like an interior psyche or mind (Geist) rather than a
material organ. The movement beyond material place thus retains the trope
of containment despite having denied the brain its materiality. How are we
to understand these immaterial corridors of the psyche? What insures their
continued coherence once their materiality has been denied? Indeed, what
non-material walls hold such a psychic structure in place? If such psychic
inferiority surpasses material place, it does so only by retaining a sense of
(en)closure that affirms the materiality that it displaces. What is meant by a
place without materiality, or for that matter, a materiality without place?
What happens to our sense of place once the materiality of place has been
put into question?
While Mark Wigley reminds us that the term "'haunting' is
etymologieally bound to that of 'house,'" this linguistic yoking of haunting to
containment may demonstrate that all houses are haunted, but it does not
follow that all "haunting is always the haunting of a house," indeed, that
haunting is always housed.2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the
derivation of the verb form "haunt" is of uncertain origin: "It is not dear
whether the earliest sense in French and English was to practice habitually
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
168
(an action etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place)." This uncertainty of origin
points to the difficulty in affirming a proper historical place for haunting, and
foregrounds a tension between performance and place in which we might
read a performative dimension into haunting, that is, a relation between a
habitual action (iterability) and inhabiting.3 To claim that haunting is
irreducible to house is to understand haunting as anterior rather than
interior to those structures that are conventionally thought to contain it. The
haunting is the originary possibility of the house. The haunting comes first.
Such questions of materiality, place, and containment are central to
any consideration of American slavery and its aftermath in Reconstruction. It
is the figure of the house, after all, that Lincoln invoked in his famous 1858
acceptance speech on the occasion of his Republican senatorial nomination.
Insisting that "this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and
half free," Lincoln borrowed a phrase from Matthew 12: " 'A house divided
against itself cannot stand/"4 Although Lincoln intended this metaphor to
stand for the impossibility of sustaining a nation divided along the question
of slavery, this division of North and South, as Eric Sundquist observes,
"concealed a further division between white and black, one that was
paradoxically evident in their literal, physical union and one that, far from
being dissolved by a reunion of the waning sections and an abolition of
slavery, could only be made more prominently explosive."5 Insofar as
abolition portended a crisis around the question of racial amalgamation, any
return to unity would only lead to further division, if no longer between
North and South, then between black and white. Lincoln's metaphor
assumes both that the nation as house might be returned to an imagined
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
169
unity, and that the nation is not always divided in itself, that the nation as a
house, or as a body, to follow Frank Lloyd Wright, somehow precedes and
contains a more generalizable haunting that is its very condition. Moreover,
the adjectival transformation of the verb "divided" performed by Lincoln's
famous speech employs a syntactical inversion that positions the house prior
to the adjective that modifies or divides it, and thus rhetorically endows a
certain primacy to that structure. As Sundquist notes, Lincoln's metaphor
conjures up not only the possibility of the nation's dissolution, but also, and
more covertly, his anxiety that the spread of slavery made possible by the
Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision would in turn lead to the
spread of miscegenation.6
Notwithstanding this suppressed dread of miscegenation, Lincoln and
other Republicans were persistently charged by the Democrats during the
election year of 1864 with championing interracial amalgamation. The
frequent rhetorical quip chiding Lincoln for his "miscegenation proclamation"
attests to how closely southern democrats aligned black freedom with the
supposed threat of racial amalgamation.7 In Reconstruction America
moreover, the problem of containment was registered hierarchically in the
continued exploitation of black labor in the form of forced labor contracts
(buttressed by the repeated decrying of "black laziness");" spatially in the
emergence of the Jim Crow laws that worked to control black movement;
and corporeally in the fascination and violence that greeted the movement
over the color line that miscegenation made possible. If, as I argued in
Chapter Two, the conventional figure of the body-as-container denies the
inhabiting of one "body" in another, the threat of miscegenation would seem
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
170
to lie ia its confirmation of a chiasmatic relation between white and black
bodies prior to any racial admixture. If all bodies are related in a chiasmatic
way, then all bodies are in some sense miscegenated bodies. Indeed, it
remains unclear whether we can still retain the trope of containment that the
signifier "body" always seems to imply once its integrity has been called into
question. The white body, like the body of the nation, is always divided in
itself by precisely that which it excludes.
The conception of the body as container is precisely what Mark
Twain's Puddn'head Wilson both challenges and reasserts in its allegorical
invention of a thirty-one-parts-white child, Valet de Chambre, aptly called
"Chambers" for short. Chambers' mother Roxy stealthily exchanges him for
the slave master's child, Thomas, in order that her child might escape the
bonds of slavery. This substitution thus goes some degree toward
interrogating the notion of the body as a self-contained whole. To the extent
that Chambers can pass for white, the notion that his body contains an
irreducible blackness is contested. Moreover, Twain's juxtaposition of the
Chambers / Thomas pair with the sometimes conglomerate Italian twins, Luigi
and Angelo, further questions the corporeal integrity of the former pair. For
what is perhaps most striking about Twain’ s treatment of the twins in
Puddn'head is his "forgetting" to separate them. Retaining the Italian couple
from Those Extraordinary Twins, the shorter novella that gave birth
("Cesarean-like, he tells us) to Puddn 'head, Twain cannot seem to decide if the
twins in the latter text are conjoined (as they are in the original story) or not.
Although the twins are introduced in Puddn'head as separate, Angelo
describes him and his brother as their parents "only child" (90).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
171
Twain exploits this problem of separability to great comic effect in
Those Extraordinary Twins. The narrator tells us that Angelo sometimes
"wished that he and his brother might become segregated from each other
and be separate individuals, like other men" (253). Always the ironist, Twain
cleverly refers to the politics of "separate but equal" by linking segregation to
the problem of bodily integrity. The threat to white racial purity that
miscegenation augured was never far behind the assertion of separate but
equal.8 Moreover, Angelo’ s desire—to be "separate" from but "equal" to
Luigi—further grafts the conjoined twins onto the Chambers/ Thomas pair.
It expresses a desire to possess an uncontaminated body, a body that is
unhaunted by the body of the other. When Luigi reveals to Aunt Betsy and
Patsy that he is in fact six months older than his brother even though they
were bom at the same time, he proclaims: "W e are no more twins than you
are" (260). We might read Luigi's language as he likely intends it, that is, that
neither he and Angelo nor Betsy and Patsy are twins. But there is also the
suggestion here that Luigi's revelation is all in jest, and that "we are no more
twins than you are" means that not only are Luigi and Angelo conjoined
twins, but that we are all conglomerate, miscegenated bodies, spectral beings
that haunt one another from within and without.
The implication of such a reading is that the- haunting of one body by
another is not confined to miscegenated bodies, properly speaking. One
need not be "Chambers" to be haunted. That Dickinson traces a move from
the chamber to the haunted self, before finally arriving at "The Body"—a
corporeality that is figured as warding off a "superior specter"
within—further underscores the conventional conflation of body and house.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
172
Chambers’ name in particular sounds an ironic note insofar as the "fiction of
law" affirms that the 1 /32 part of him that is black count for the whole (64).
This synecdochic logic by which Chambers’ spectral blackness is transposed
into a racial signification that is nowhere discernible understands his body as
the vessel or receptacle of an invisible blackness that in turn belies the visible
whiteness of his body. When Twain allegorizes such a disavowal by noting
that, in reference to Roxy, "the one sixteenth of her which was black out
voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro," he ironically endows a
certain agency of suffrage to this invisible blackness, a right that is
nonetheless denied to Roxy in the political sphere. By underscoring how this
spectral blackness is given complete power over her being, Twain affirms
the persistence of what Hartman refers to as a "metaphysics of blood that
transformed race into a sanguineous substance" (186). For blackness to "out
vote” whiteness requires a synecdochic substitution of blackness for
whiteness notwithstanding the invisibility of the former.9
That Chambers remains contained by his blackness despite Roxy's
substitution of him for Thomas is confirmed when Roxy reveals to the false
Thomas that he is in fact her own son and therefore black. Setting the scene
of Roxy's revelation in the haunted house behind Judge Driscoll's home,
Twain invokes the trope of containment along the lines of Wright's
description of the house as a "counterfeit of the human body." Referring to
Chamber’ s refusal to fight Luigi, Roxy remarks: "It's de nigger in you, dat's
what it is. Thirty-one parts 'o you is white, en only one part nigger, and dat
po’ little one part is yo' soul" (157). Roxy’ s designation of Chambers' one part
nigger as his soul positions the dilemma figured by his miscegenated body
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
173
squarely within the Platonic and Christian traditions where the body is
understood to be a "prison" of the soul. Yet the synecdochic logic by which
the part comes to stand for the whole has an almost Foucauldian resonance
insofar as Chambers' "nigger" soul emerges as the prison of Chambers’
body. Just as Foucault’ s inversion of the body/soul dichotomy stops short of
displacing the trope of containment that conditions it the formulation of
Chambers'"nigger" soul figures that soul as being not so much contained by
his body, but rather, that which imprisons his body within the walls of an
invisible blackness. Such immaterial soul-like walls recall those that
Dickinson imagines as holding in place an inferiority which nonetheless
exceeds the materiality of place. As we asked of Dickinson's retention of
inferiority, we might also ask of this conception of blackness as not only
soul-like, but more strangely, as entombing Chambers within its translucent
walls. How can Chambers' blackness be construed as constituting both his
innermost part and that which materializes and congeals the borders of his
body? If Chambers' soul-like blackness is figured as being both inside and
outside his body, what finally holds this body together as a bounded
being?1 0
Echoing the Platonic resonance of debates around both miscegenation
and segregation, Morton Keller remarked that the United States Supreme
Court decision in 1896 which gave the go ahead to "separate but equal"
confined blacks to the "Plessy prison."1 1 Like Twain's fictional Roxy and
Chambers, Homer Plessy’ s "mixture of colored blood was not discernible in
him," as he was "in the proportion of seven eighths Caucasian and one
eighth African blood" (537).1 2 That the opinion delivered by Justice Brown
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
174
consistently refers to the train upon which Plessy was traveling as a "vessel"
rhetorically underscores the relevance of the problem of containment to the
question of segregation. This landmark case centering on the question of
separate but equal accommodations involved what, since the completion of
the transcontinental railroad in 1869, had become a dominant mode of
transportation that greatly advanced the mobility of all Americans. The
effort to restrain the movement of black Americans by distinguishing
between white and black spaces thus ought to be read alongside the promise
of unimpeded mobility that locomotion implied. Quoting Blackstone in his
dissent from the majority opinion, Justice Harlan affirmed that "personal
liberty .. . consists in the power of locomotion. . . without imprisonment or
restraint" (557). Insofar as the segregation of whites and blacks always
involved an effort to prevent blacks from inhabiting "white" spaces, the
doctrine of "separate but equal" might be better characterized as designating
blacks "contained," immobilized, and therefore not equal.
Most striking about the anxiety aroused by the proximity of white
and black bodies is how it admits of a certain chiasmatic relation between
these differently raced bodies, an intersection of ostensibly separate bodies
that is nonetheless denied by the proscription against miscegenation. While
Hartman, for instance, is on board with the conventional view that Plessy
evinced "fears of engulfment and contamination" that further demonstrate
how the "integrity of bodily boundaries and racial self-certainty was at the
heart of this anxiety," such fears of interracial proximity imagine a
phantasmatic inhabiting of black bodies in white bodies that is in
considerable tension with the supposedly " rea l" contamination that
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
175
miscegenation is thought to portend (206). If the white imagination can
fantasize about an erasure of bodily boundaries in which the white body is
penetrated by a spectral blackness, then the anticipated danger that
miscegenation would seem to pose is rendered moot. For "encounters
between scandalously proximate bodies"—whether on a train, a steam boat
or on the street—are imagined as always already acts of miscegenation (206).
According to the racist logic by which interracial proximity threatens to
contaminate white bodies, the miscegenation that the segregation of whites
and blacks is designed to prevent will have always already taken place.
The problem of miscegenation, then, lies less in the threat of
contamination than in its disavowal. This is not to affirm that black bodies
pose some real, material threat to white racial purity, only that the pollution
that interracial mixing is thought to portend denies a chiasmatic relation
between all bodies. Just as the slave master does not deny his own body, but
rather, the fiction of bodily possession that conditions the possibility of his
disavowal, the proscription on miscegenation "forgets" that my body is never
properly my own, and is therefore never in an uncontaminated relation to
the body of the other.
Insofar as the racist imagination understands the white body as fully
proper to itself, it does so by construing whiteness as an inalienable
property. This inalienability, as Cheryl Harris notes, would at first seem to
preclude whiteness from the domain of property given the traditional liberal
view of property that affirms its transferability. In a paradoxical sense, what
marks the determination of property as property is the possibility of its
becoming im-proper, detached from its owner. Yet Harris goes on to show
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
176
that alienability is not the exclusive determinant of what counts as properly,
and that when it comes to the property value in whiteness, "its inalienability
may be more indicative of its perceived value, rather than its disqualification
as property."1 3 The historical construction of whiteness as property protects
an investment in whiteness in terms of reputation and status. Thus in Plessy
v. Fergusson, Albion Tourg6e, one of Plessy's attorney's, argued that the
Louisiana law deprived him of his property as a white man:
How much would it be worth to a young man entering upon the
practice of law, to be regarded as a white man rather than a colored
one? .. . Is it possible to conclude that the reputation of being white is
not property? Indeed is it not the most valuable sort of property,
being the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity?
(cited in Harris 9)
While the court denied Tourg6e's claim, they nonetheless admitted
that—even if the law protected a property investment in whiteness—Plessy,
as a black male, had no claim to such property:
It is claimed by the plaintiff in error that, in any mixed community,
the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the
white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action, or of
inheritance, is property. Conceding this to be so, for the purposes of
this case, we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in
any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man and
assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages
against the company for being deprived of his so called property.
Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he
has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to
the reputation of being a white man. (549)
Although the majority opinion flatly rejects the notion that whiteness
constitutes property in any legal sense, the language that closes this excerpt
from the decision oddly resuscitates the very claim that it has denied,
asserting that Plessy " is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a
white man," Given that the court had already rejected Plessy's due process
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
177
claim because Ms race "did not properly arise on the record/' and therefore
was not relevant to the question of the constitutionality of separate
accommodations, their consideration of the damage done to Plessy's
property in the form of reputation depended on the "issue of race
classification that the Court had previously declined to address" (Plessy 549,
Harris 9). The court's tautology seems to go something like this: whiteness is
not property, but even if it were, Plessy (whose race is not at issue here)
would have no claim to such property because he is black!
The law thus works to preempt the estrangement of whiteness such
that the latter achieves its status as property despite, or perhaps because of,
its inalienability. Whiteness always returns to itself. Although the law figures
it on one level as inalienable, Blackness returns to itself as a proper identity
only in a contaminated form. Yet the anxiety of contamination imagines this
proper blackness as fully improper, as an uncontainable threat to white
bodies that in turn belies the inalienability of whiteness. If whiteness achieves
its property status because of its inalienability, then the property value of
whiteness—in fantasizing its penetration by a threatening
blackness—allegorizes its own dissolution. The crucial point here is not that
whiteness is figured in terms of the proper while blackness is imagined as
improper. For the anxiety of racial mixing inadvertently gives the lie to the
inalienability of whiteness, and more generally, to the fantasy of possessing
an indivisible body.
What we are calling the disavowal of contamination thus returns us to
the problem of finitude that we considered earlier in relation to the denial of
absence, and ultimately death, one that seems to surface whenever reference
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
178
is made to the body or my body. To claim that this body is mine is to deny its
relation to the other/body, to insist on the presence of my body -prior to its
coming into relation with other bodies. This is not to say, however, that this
relationship to other bodies marks the coming into being of this body as
fully present, for the relation to the other engenders a loss of the body as my
body, an absence that marks my body as always already mourning its own
death. The appearance of my body to itself is conditioned from the start by
the possibility of its disappearance. This absence of the body that is "m y
death" is always already signified to me by the difference that opens up
between self and other. What the white imagination both recognizes and
refuses in its anxiety around racial purity is precisely this possibility of the
body's not being mine. Yet the racialization of this impropriety denies this
loss of corporeal integrity by figuring such contamination only in relation to
the threat of a different raced body. The racialization of contamination thus
seeks to affirm the white body as a living presence by making the black
body stand in for the threat of death that haunts any life.
In this sense, the fear of interracial mixing emerges as a displacement
of a more profound set of anxieties that circle around the non-presence of
the "white" body. Here we are talking not only about the possible alienation
of an "inalienable" whiteness but also of the death that the desire for racial
purity seeks to deny. If, as we considered in Chapter One, the patriarchal
model of kinship requires the return of the father's seed to himself in order
to save him from death and preserve his immortality, racial amalgamation
threatens to derail the reflexivity of the father’ s self-relation. Such "spiritual"
kinship—while performing a temporary detour through the materiality of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
179
the mother's body—must finally suppress the materiality of the
mother / child relation through its transubstantiation into Spirit. Historically,
the problem of racial mixing engendered by sexual relations between white
slave masters and black female slaves was "solved" by codifying the
mother's status in any mixed-race offspring.3 4 Sex between black men and
white women, on the other hand, posed a considerable threat to racial
purity, and thus to the preservation of the father/ spirit's immortal presence.
While Martha Hodes notes that "white men turned a convenient ideological
somersault to justify their own access to black women while furiously
denouncing sex between black men and white women on the grounds of
racial purity," such a contradiction was absolutely necessary if the father's
immortal self-presence was to be preserved (199). In the Reconstruction
south, white women were often thought to be the sole carriers of racial
identity, an ideology that permitted continued sexual relations between
white men and black women while forbidding those between black men and
white women. As the receptacles of racial purity, the wombs of white
women had to be protected from black insemination. Yet the figuration of
these white female bodies as containers of pure whiteness masks the
ideology that converts their materiality into the transfiguration of the white
father/spirit. Pondering the insurrectionary possibilities of a new "guerrilla
warfare" in which white males might smuggle vials of black sperm into
'banks of unborn golden people," Patricia Williams asks wryly: "W hat
happens if it is no longer white male seed that has the prerogative of
dropping noiselessly and invisibly into black wombs? . . . Instead it will be
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
180
disembodied black seed that will swell white bellies; the symbolically sacred
vessel of the white womb."1 5
Insofar as the "spirit" of kinship is always haunted by the possibility of
its specialization, contamination inheres in the father's self-relation from the
start: it is inscribed in his relation to his own death, the death whose
amortization the insistence on racial purity intends yet fails to perform. That
the father's pursuit of immortality will always end in failure requires little
consideration, unless such worldly transcendence is to be accomplished
along the lines of Woody Allen's old joke—that is, by not dying. If, to repeat
an earlier citation, "the first spiritualization also, and already, produces some
specter," such a specter emerges as a contamination of spirit, as the
remainder that resists assimilation and totalization.1 6 It involves a certain
materialization of spirit, one that disturbs the evacuation of materiality that
the father's self-relation performs.
The Fall of the
House of Sutpen1 7
That the divided nation is always also a haunted nation is suggested
by Toni Morrison in her Playing in the Dark: "For a people who made much of
their ’ newness’ —their potential, freedom, and innocence—it is striking how
dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding
literature truly is” (35). Notwithstanding Lincoln, the nation is founded on its
divisibility rather than, its indivisibility, its production and exclusion of a
blackness that divides and contaminates the nation.1 8 Although the negative
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
181
valence of the term "contamination" animates anti-miscegenation sentiment,
I continue to use the word here in part to retrieve it from its pejorative
connotations.1 9 Moreover, I want to insist that miscegenation as
contamination, and therefore, as differance, is both the condition of any life,
and the disavowed specter that haunts the apparent self-presence which the
proscription on racial mixing seeks to preserve. To be against miscegenation
is not only to be against death, but to find that one's refusal to be near death,
indeed, to be against it in this other sense of the term, must begin by
foreclosing difference. Not to be near death is in some sense not to be at ail.
This disavowal of hauntology is what conditions Thomas Sutpen's
pursuit of his "design" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Like Lincoln, Sutpen
essays to build a house only to have it "come down like it was built out of
smoke, making no sound, creating no rush of displaced air and not even
leaving debris" (215). By the "house of Sutpen," we mean not only the
material structure that he tears out of the Louisiana swamp, but also the
house as lineage or race. The linguistic chain that links house, haunt, family
and race means that there is no unhaunted kinship, no undivided house of
Sutpen. The Sutpen race cannot finally exclude the racial otherness that
divides it against itself.
Indeed, after Quentin and Shreve appear to have finished their
discursive reconstruction of the old south, it is the specter of miscegenation
that remains, that exceeds the walls of their narrative frame:
So it took Charles Bon and his mother to get rid of old Tom, and
Charles Bon and the octoroon to get rid of Judith, and Charles Bon
and Clytie to get rid of Henry; and Charles Bon's mother and Charles
Bon's grandmother got rid of Charles Bon. So it takes two niggers to
get rid of one Sutpen, dont it? .. . Which is all right, it's fine; it clears
the whole ledger, you can tear all the pages out and bum them,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
182
except for one thing. And do you know what that is? ... You've got
one nigger left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you can't catch him
and you dont even always see him and you never will be able to use
him. But you've got him there still. You still hear him at night
sometimes. Dont you?2 0
Juxtaposed with the patronym "Sutpen," the epithet "nigger" foregrounds the
ruination of the slave master's grand "design." All that remains of the Sutpen
lineage is the father's mulatto great grandson, an absent presence of mixed
white and black blood that nevertheless demands to be heard: "They could
hear him; he didn't seem to ever get any further away but they couldn't get
any nearer and maybe in time they could not even locate the direction of the
howling anymore" (301). Everywhere present yet nowhere visible, Jim Bond
defies any fix on his direction, place or location. His proximity is
chiasmatically related to the obscure distance from which his unintelligible
howling hovers over the ruins of the former plantation.
While Bond's remaindering thwarts the patriarchal design of
immortality, it also demands that we reckon with his revenance. For nothing
less than this difference between immortality and revenance is implied by
the distinction between spirit and specter—that is, between Thomas Sutpen
and Jim Bond. Although Sutpen repudiates his mulatto wife and child
because they cannot be "adjunctive to the forwarding" of his "design," such a
design ultimately fails to contain these specters within its restricted economy
(211). While the divine performative tears "Sutpen’ s Hundred, the Be
Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light... out of the soundless
Nothing," it cannot finally achieve immortal transcendence (4).
The inspiration for Sutpen's design, as we later discover, originates in
what might be characterized as the novel's "primal scene": the poor, young
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
183
Thomas Sutpen, is sent to the "big house" with a message from his father
who works on the plantation, only to find himself standing before a black
servant who informs him that he may only enter through the back door.
Humiliated by what must seem to him to constitute a perversion of the
natural order of racial hierarchy, Sutpen leaves his family and sets out to
have his own "land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with" (192).
Sutpen's encounter with the "monkey nigger" at the door engenders a
certain self-dissolution, a plunging into unreality that he immediately
projects onto the black servant. He considers what it might be like to strike
at this black face, but concludes that
they (the niggers) were not it, not what you wanted to hit;... when
you hit them you would just be hitting a child's toy balloon with a
face painted on it, a face slick and distended and about to burst into
laughing and so you did not dare strike it because it would merely
burst and you would rather let it walk on out of your sight than to
have stood there in the loud laughing.... (186)
This complicated image of the balloon face, like Jim Bond’ s howling, moves
in several directions at once, and thus defies any effort at interpretive
containment. Indeed, it is the very image of something about to burst from
its structure of containment. It recalls the shattering laughter that, according
to Bataille, exceeds dialectical oppositions. That is, the explosive laughter
suggests a certain deconstruction of the master/ slave dialectic. Yet this
image also figures a denial of black sentience that means to remain fully
within the violence of a restricted economy. The incongruity of laughter with
pain that the balloon face figures rehearses the familiar spectacle of the coffle
where the pain of slavery was so often suppressed through forced
theatricalization and song. As George Featherstonhaugh put it, the "'poor
negro is naturally a cheerful, laughing animal."2 1
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
184
But if the laughing face rehearses the dismissal of black sentience, it
also bears the traces of the very pain and violence that it disavows, Thai the
balloon face resembles what a black face might look like with a rope around
its neck, hanging from a tree, is confirmed when the passage goes on to
yoke this image to lynching, to the murder of "no actual nigger, living
creature, living flesh to feel pain and writhe and cry out" (187). This refusal to
recognize black sentience is made difficult, however, by the figuration of this
"loud and terrible laughing" as escaping the bonds of containment. Indeed,
Thomas must refrain from bursting the balloon, lest the threatening laughter
escape through the walls of its "paper-thin distension" (189,187). This
distended materiality, swelling outward to the point of its dissolution,
returns us to the paradoxical image of Chambers' soul-like blackness which
is imagined as securing the borders of his body notwithstanding its
immateriality. Read next to the image of the balloon face, it is blackness that
would appear to have the last laugh, to explode beyond the limits of its
premature entombment in something like a body. Perhaps it is this same
laughter that converges with Jim Bond's howling, a howling laughter of
sorts whose ubiquity leads Shreve to declare:
in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere.
Of course it wont be in our time and of course as they spread toward
the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and birds do, so
they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim
Bond; and so in a few thousand years I who regard you will also have
sprung from the loins of African kings. (302)
An odd temporal disjunction: I who regard you now will have been of mixed
blood. The proximity of the future anterior to the present form "I who regard
you (now)" plunges this future past into Shreve's present. His present is
already his future past, which means that the racial amalgamation that he
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
185
imagines as taking place in some future past will have already divided his
present/presence. Although Shreve insists that the Jim Bonds of the world
will not conquer the West in "our time," something of this panwestem
miscegenation already seems to inhabit Shreve’ s present. That it is and "will
still be Jim Bond" whose race will have haunted this bleached-out whiteness
figures this whiteness as having already been infected by blackness.
The denouement of Absalom in a bleached-out yet still miscegenated
whiteness both rehearses and displaces what Toni Morrison identifies as a
familiar strategy of narrative closure: a resolution into an "impenetrable
whiteness," exemplified for Morrison by the ending of Poe's The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym.2 2 Such figures of whiteness, according to Morrison,
"surface in American literature whenever an Africanist presence is engaged."
They "function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is
companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the
hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing" (33). While
Poe's "shrouded human" whose skin is of "the perfect whiteness of snow"
imagines that whiteness as pure and indivisible, the whiteness that closes
Absalom can no longer lay claim to such unfathomability (32). For the snow-
like whiteness that concludes Faulkner's text remains inseparable from, and
therefore cut across by, the shadowy blackness that occasions its appearance
as pristine and unadulterated.
If the property of whiteness is shown in Absalom to be fully penetrable
and alienable, it does so by calling into question the bodily boundaries that
separate my body from the body of the other. Faulkner's text is pervaded by
a sense of ghostly inhabiting of one body in another. This inhabiting is most
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
186
striking in the love triangle that develops between Henry, Judith and Bon.
The triangle evinces a tripartite transgression of the prohibitions on
miscegenation, incest, and same-sex desire that in turn deconstructs the
integrity of their bodies. These three modes of differance converge in the
threat to the father's immortality that they represent. If the reflexivity of the
father's self-relation requires the suppression of difference, the convergence
of these taboos on racial amalgamation, endogamy and homosexuality
curtails the paternal project of self-reflection and immortal transcendence.
The difference that the father must suppress —in keeping with the model of
the divine family—is the material. For the threat which miscegenation,
incest, and same-sex desire pose is nothing less than a materialization of
spirit. If the father achieves immortality by reproducing his negated body in
the body of the child, that negated body is finally what returns to the father
if only in its transcendent, spiritual form. As we observed in relation to
Butler's "dialectical corporealism," spirit and body are nothing more than
opposite poles in the dialectical apparatus, which means that the father's
transubstantiation into spirit requires the very body that it negates. Not only
does such a dialectic perform a phantasmatic retention of the father's living
body above and beyond his death, but it also has the consequence of
violently negating the very biological kin upon which the structure of the
normative family is based. Insofar as it disavows difference, and therefore
death, normative reproduction reduces itself to a certain narcissistic project
of self-relation and self-recognition.
This disavowal of death as sexual reproduction raises the question of
whether there might be alternative versions of reproduction that do not
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
187
reduce to this equation. Might there be non-normative modes of
reproduction, and even non-reproductive forms of kinship, that do not
require such self-reflection? Does sexual reproduction require this denial of
death? Given that Absalom provides us with an instance of paternity that is
profoundly and unusually narcissistic, it might be argued that the
assimilation of the norm to Sutpen's patriarchal violence reduces all kinship
to a single formulation. Despite its hyperbolic form, such an examination of
kinship might shed light on how other less insidious structures of kinship still
remain implicated in this disavowal of death. Even if we define kinship
broadly as a relation to the other, any relation of self and other that would
affirm one's self-presence through the recognition and refusal of that other
operates within the same terms as the paternal economy of presence.
Displaced from biology, kinship still retains the threat of reducing the other
to the same. To supplant the conventional assumption of "self-presence" with
what Derrida calls "originary mourning," on the other hand, would open up
a relation to the other that no longer requires that other as the "proof" and
"guarantee" of one's presence.2 3 Kinship would be "good," to return to the
equation that Frankenstein's monster provided us in Chapter One, not
because being alone is "bad," but because kinship announces an ethical
relation to the other that affirms the other’ s fundamental alterity, an
otherness of the other that exceeds any economy of presence or
containment.
While the attendant emergence of miscegenation, incest and same-sex
desire in Absalom threatens to derail the return of the father to himself by
adulterating his spiritual transcendence, it also belies the notion of the body
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
188
as self-contained, and indeed, calls into question the very appearance of the
body as a body. This despite the figuration of Judith as the container of
Henry and Bon's hom(m)osexual desire:
It was not Judith who was the object of Bon's love or of Henry's
solicitude. She was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which
each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his
illusion of the other but what each conceived the other to believe him
to be—the man and the youth, seducer and seduced. (95)
While this familiar image of woman-as-receptacle would seem to fall
squarely within a homosocial tradition in which the bonds between men are
preserved by making the container/woman into an alibi for an unavowable
same-sex desire, the function of Judith as a vessel is perhaps less secure than
it would at first appear.2 4 Earlier the text describes Judith and Henry as
constituting a "single personality with two bodies both of which had been
seduced almost simultaneously by a man whom at the same time Judith had
never even seen" (73). Although this passage suggests that Bon seduced the
conglomerate pair of Judith and Henry, soon after the text asserts with equal
conviction that " it must have been Henry who seduced Judith, not Bon ... as
though by means of that telepathy with which as children they seemed at
times to anticipate one another's actions as two birds leave a limb at the
same instant" (79). Stopping short of ascribing any agency of seduction to
Judith, the text does make it difficult to maintain the trope of containment
that it announces. If both Bon and Henry can be figured as Judith's seducers,
and if the latter's seduction is understood to take place through a form of
unmediated telepathy, not only can Judith not be so easily contained within
the homosodal matrix, but the boundary that separates the bodies of Henry,
Bon, and Judith becomes crossed by a certain kindred possession. The
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
189
figuration of Judith as a vessel is undone from the start by a sense of mutual
inhabiting, of an erasure of those corporeal boundaries that would hold her
in place as the receptacle for Henry and Bon's desires.
Indeed, although Judith is not "present," as it were, at the scene of
Henry's seduction by Bon, Judith is seduced by the latter nonetheless. Her
seduction extends the telepathic relation that obtains between Henry and
Judith to Bon. The three are one yet always more than one. They
"metamorphose" into one another such that the relation of each body to
itself is always already haunted by its appropriation in and through the
other. But because there can be no ultimate corporeal synthesis of their
"three" bodies into "one," they remain in excess of one another. We thus
cannot finally decide for whom each individual’ s desire is intended, for the
very integrity of their desires is shown to be divided in itself, "untroubled by
flesh" (77). While we might read Henry's desire as extending across the body
of his sister to its " rea l" aim in Bon, it is equally true to say that Bon is merely
the "vessel" through which an unavowed incestuous desire might find
expression. As the text explains, only by transforming into Bon can Henry
shatter his sister’ s virginity:
Perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that
the sister’ s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all,
taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man
whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into the love,
the husband; by whom he would de despoiled, choose for despoiler, if
he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the
bride. (77)
Henry's desire emerges as an amalgamation of incestuous, homosexual, and
interracial desires. Given this mix of social prohibitions and their
trangressions, we might understand "Henry's desire" as a kind of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
190
miscegenated desire, a desire, or rather, a set of desires that cannot properly
be said to belong to Henry. The impropriety of these desires not only makes
it impossible to assign their ownership to any one body, but it also prompts
us to ask after the relative integrity of both the proscriptions and the
trangressions that govern them. If Henry loves Bon, as the text so often
reminds us, how is that love to be characterized? Is it incestuous?
homosexual? interracial? The multiple and conflicting desires that haunt the
pages of Absalom are without a body, they are spectral desires whose
impropriety marks bodies as always already absent to themselves,
mourning their own loss in and through their appropriation by the other.
Yet what the text characterizes in terms of a telepathic relation
between Henry and Judith is explained by locating its origins in their social
death. 'Marooned at birth on a desert island [Sutpen's Hundred]," Henry and
Judith develop a form of telepathy "not like the conventional delusion of that
between twins," but one derived from alienation, from "the solitude, the
shadow of that father with whom not only the town but their mother's
family as well had merely assumed armistice rather than accepting and
assimilating" (79). Here the text appears to suggest that their kindred
possession is a consequence of their social death, that they are in "kinship
with the dead" only by virtue of Sutpen's paternal violence which deprives
them of normative kinship within the family. But if affirming the otherness
of the other requires the abdication of one's self-presence, and if the kindred
possession that obtains between Henry, Judith, and Bon goes some degree
toward elaborating how "m y death" is inscribed in an originary relation of
mourning to "my body"—a kinship with my own death as it were—then the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
191
spectral kinship that pervades Faulkner’ s text is not in any sense extra
ordinary, hut rather, the ordinary, mundane story of all kinship.
While the kinship that Absalom narrates appears to constitute
something of an anomaly or an aberration, perhaps that is because its
tripartite thematization of miscegenation, incest, and same-sex desire only
hyperbolizes a structure of kinship as originary mourning that haunts any
relation between self and other, as it does between self and self. This allegory
of kinship as mourning, however, is in considerable tension with Bon’ s quest
for paternal recognition that seeks to affirm the very self-presence that the
father's repudiation has negated: "Maybe . . . he [Bon] would walk into the
house and see the man who made him and then he would know; there
would be that flash, that instant of indisputable recognition between them
and he would know for sure and forever" (255). Sutpen's denial of his mixed-
race son—while resonating with the demands of normative kinship that
require the sublation of one's kin as the guarantee of paternal
immortality—is all the more necessary given the contaminating threat that
Bon poses to his father's immortal transcendence. The material residue that
miscegenation leaves on the father's spirit only intensifies Sutpen's paternal
violence. Yet if there is any comedy to be found in Sutpen's "design," we
might look to its anxious and repeated effort to ward off the specter of
miscegenation that has always already arrived. Disguised in the cloak of
racial contamination, Sutpen's finitude haunts his quest for immortality from
the start. For Bon to demand paternal recognition is to show Sutpen's dream
of worldly transcendence for what it is: merely a dream.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
192
Yet Bon's desire for recognition is still more complicated given its
resonance with the Hegelian dialectic of "mutual recognition/' what Kojeve
described in his now famous formulation as the desire for the other's desire.
Bon desires his father's desire above all else. Indeed, Bon's transgressive
desires appear to coagulate in this desire for recognition. But if Bon's quest
for self-presence seems to require this paternal recognition, it also reaches
beyond such an economy of presence by uncovering the disavowal of death
that subtends Sutpen's quest for an inheritance devoid of racial differance. As
Bon remarks to Henry, "it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you
can't bear" (285). Bon then goes on to refuse his fraternal relation to Henry,
asserting: "No I'm not [your brother]. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep
with your sister. Unless you stop me" (286). This denial of fraternity positions
Bon as an external threat to the Sutpen family notwithstanding his blood tie.
Denying his incestuous desire for Judith, Bon lends a certain priority to the
racial exogamy that threatens to dismantle Sutpen's design. For Sutpen to
refuse his daughter to Bon on the grounds of incest would be to admit to the
miscegenation. To avow the miscegenation would be to admit defeat in the
face of death, to acknowledge that the only inheritance which Sutpen can
leave is spectral rather than spiritual.
In this sense, to characterize Sutpen's design as an impossible dream is
not to suggest that nothing remains of him beyond his death, only that the
legacy that he leaves behind is something both more and less than a
"paternal line," with all the restrictions and exclusions of difference that such
linearity implies. Sutpen gets his heir, but that monstrous progeny is the
product of an unwanted paternity, one that opens up the economy of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
193
paternal' presence to a plurality of spectral inheritances' unanticipated by the
confines of his design. Insofar as .something of Sutpen remains beyond the
defeat of his quest for immortality, the text is not quite accurate in its
assessment that the failure of his design consequently "effacefs] his name and
lineage from the earth" (6). For it is less the destruction of the Sutpen name
and lineage than its spectralization that we witness in Absalom. Falling from
spiritual transcendence to a sort of spectral revenance, Sutpen engenders
through his failure a series of ghosts that demand to be reckoned with. As
Derrida reminds us in Specters of Marx, there is always more than one
specter, more than one possible inheritance.
One of these many Sutpen ghosts emerges at the beginning of the
text in Rosa Coldfield's "summons, out of another world almost" to Quentin.
Described as haunting Rosa's voice "where a more fortunate one would have
had a house," the ghost of the very man for whom the containment of
others was a lifetime project ironically lacks any material place that would
house his own haunting (4). It is this uncontainability that makes his
revenance available to a host of inhabitings, not the least of which are the
ghosts that come to inhabit Quentin: "His very body was an empty hall
echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he
was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking
ghosts" (7). Although here Faulkner's language figures Quentin's body as
fully containing these ghosts, the innumerable plurality of these specters
would seem almost impossible to contain, to overflow the borders of his
body. Indeed, the one Quentin is described as "two separate Quentins now
talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage" (4).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
194
The image of Quentin’ s body as housing a commonwealth of ghosts is
further complicated, by the narrator's assertion that Quentin "was. still too
young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless . . . [was] one for all
that, since he was bom and bred in the deep South..." (4). Quentin is both a
container of ghosts-and a ghost that cannot be contained. In this-sense,
Quentin's condition names the ha un tological s tate of .all ghosts who have yet
to become ghosts. Which is to say, the condition of all so-called "mortals."
From Analogy to Spectrality
If Quentin represents more than one of the many specters generated
by Sutpen's- fallen spirit, this plurality opens itself up to still- more- "garrakms-
outraged baffled ghosts" (4). The Quentin-Shreve dialectic that frames the
latter half of Faulkner’ s text uncovers other possible inheritances, specters
that transmogrify into forms unanticipated by their historical predecessors.
While their discursive exchange might seem io be haunted only by the
(more than one) specter of miscegenation, it begins to change shape by
virtue of their appropriation of this history. The threat of miscegenation
transforms into another imagined contamination—namely, the
contaminating threat of same-sex desire. In "reconstructing" their history of
the Sutpen family, Quentin and Shreve shift the narrative away from the
homosocial, "erotic triangle" of Henry, Bon and Judith toward the more
clearly homoerotic relationship that obtains between Henry and Bon. This
shift is conditioned by the -homoerotic nature of Quentin and Shreve's
relationship. Projecting themselves onto the Henry-Bon pair, Quentin and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
195
Shreve become "not two ... but four, the two who breathed not individuals
now yet something both more and less than, twins" (236). Later in the text,
this inhabiting is "compounded still further, since ... both of them [are]
Henry Sutpen and both of them [are] Bon, compounded each of both yet
either neither" (280), Chiasmatic in their relation to one another—always
inhabiting the other yet always exceeding the other—the four are never
either fully the same or fully different.
To claim that miscegenation reproduces itself in the specter of same-
sex desire is not to suggest that this transformation follows any progressive
"dialectic of spirit." Whereas Hegel's Phenomenology unfolds according to a
logic whereby each new stage is conditioned by what precedes it, Faulkner's
text eschews any sublation of miscegenation into a new, higher level of
meaning, now materialized in the specter of same-sex desire. Indeed, what
we observe in Absalom is a homoerotic kinship between Quentin and Shreve
that is always already articulating the terms by which miscegenation is made
legible. The Quentin-Shreve section of what we might be tempted to call
Faulkner's "Phenomenology of Specter" is less the product of what precedes
it than the precondition of this ostensible past. That miscegenation is already
contaminated by the specter of homosexuality is made clear, as we have
already noted, in the triangle that obtains between Henry, Judith, and Bon.
Homosexuality emerges as both bastard offspring and genitor o f a paternal
will that essays to transmit its seed in an inaberrant form. As both parent
and child to miscegenation, same-sex desire can neither be granted priority
over, nor can it be understood as the deformed progeny of, the racial
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
196
endogamy that would appear, on the surface at least, to be the novel's chief
preoccupation.
Faulkner's text gives us a pair of young, Harvard students who
imagine from within their homoerotic exchange in 1909 how the
reproduction of a mixed-race son nearly eighty years before led to the
demise of the Sutpen line. Just as this spectral, out-of-joint time allows
Quentin and Shreve to reconstruct the rise and fall of Sutpen vis-&-vis their
own fantasies and desires, it also allows us to plunge into the future anterior
of Shreve's always-already miscegenated America, and ask how the
interimplication of miscegenation and homosexuality emerges in late-
twentieth century debates around family and kinship. For something not
altogether unlike this co(in)habiting of same-sex desire and miscegenation
activates more recent political and legal debates around the question of gay
marriage. One cannot go very far into current activist literature without
encountering an analogy something like the following: "Just as the ban on
interracial marriage was determined to be unconstitutional, so too should
gays and lesbians be allowed to marry partners of the same sex." One might
doubt the relevance of this somewhat easy equation between two very
different historical prohibitions and their material consequences if it were not
for the currency that this analogy enjoys in the legal sphere, as evidenced by
both case law and legal theory. In critical legal scholarship, the historical
relationship between the bans on interracial marriage and gay marriage is
frequently glossed as "the miscegenation analogy." As David Coolidge notes,
recent years have seen such a proliferation of scholarly legal articles making
the analogy that its legitimacy is now taken as self-evident.2 5 In his dissent
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
197
from the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, justice Blackmim wrote that
"the parallel between Loving [v. Virginia, the 1967 case that ended the ban on
interracial marriage] and this case is almost uncanny/'2 6 Joining Blackmim in
his dissent, Justice Stevens also remarked on the parallel between interracial
marriage and sodomy: "Neither history nor tradition could save a law
prohibiting miscegenation from constitutional attack" (216). He then remarks
in a footnote citing Loving: "Miscegenation was once treated as a crime
similar to sodomy" (216). More recently, the analogy was introduced in Baehr
v. Lewin, the Hawaii same-sex marriage suit that ultimately failed in its effort
to achieve legal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages, as well as Baker v.
Vermont, in which the Supreme Court of Vermont required the state
legislator to grant equal benefits to same-sex partners.2 7
While not refuting the relationship between Bowers and Loving, I
would like to interrogate how such kinship between interracial marriage and
same-sex marriage might be conceived otherwise than through the
vocabulary of analogy.2 8 Justice Blackmun's appropriate use of the term
"uncanny" to describe this difficult relation underscores the problem at hand.
The uncanny, as Freud reminds us, names what is both familiar and
unfamiliar, both the same and different. The uncanny involves a return to
itself, or to the self, that remains haunted by the difference or impropriety
which it works to suppress.2 9 The "miscegenation analogy" risks making
interracial marriage in some sense about same-sex marriage. It returns the
problematic of same-sex marriage to itself at the expense of supplanting
difference. At its worst, the miscegenation analogy fashions gays and
lesbians as the "proper" heirs of a dying or already dead ghost of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
198
miscegenation. According to the politics of analogy, the racially oppressed
and the sexually oppressed become members of one unhappy family for
whom only one line of inheritance is possible.
Not only is miscegenation not a dead issue—one which, it might be
thought, the Supreme Court finally put to rest in 1967— but its specters
continue to reproduce themselves in aberrant forms, only one of which is
the ghost that haunts the question of same-sex marriage. So while it is this
particular ghost whose wanderings I elect to trace here, there are certainly
other ghosts to come to terms with.
Quentin and Shreve'’ s homoerotic dialogue about miscegenation thus
suggests how the relationship between miscegenation and gay kinship
might be understood other than through the politics of analogy. Projecting
themselves into the problematic of miscegenation, Quentin and Shreve
imagine a nexus between same-sex desire and miscegenation that prefigures
current debates. This is not to displace one analogy and replace it with
another—making the political concerns of present day gays and lesbians into
those of Quentin and Shreve. Yet if suggesting that we might consider the
proximity between these seemingly unrelated narratives appears to trace an
improper historical trajectory, that is precisely the point. To be faithful to
these inheritances requires that we undertake what Derrida calls an
"unfaithful faithfulness," one that eschews reducing our historical
responsibility to the proper, to what always returns to itself by way of
excluding all that might contaminate it.3 0 Although the specter of
miscegenation qua miscegenation is certainly alive and well in its "proper"
form, to insist on containing it within an appropriate historical inheritance
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
199
would be to require the return of miscegenation to itself, to deny its
catachrestic transformation into ghosts that—while bearing the residue of
their historical predecessors—take on new and unanticipated forms. Indeed,
would it not evoke the most comic irony to suggest that we might prohibit
in advance the contamination of miscegenation, to preempt, that is, the
contamination of contamination?
The submerged eroticism between Quentin and Shreve surfaces
throughout their discursive exchange, and is described by the narrator as
"some happy marriage of speaking and hearing" (253). Their dialogue,
moreover, is interrupted at multiple points by a narrative voice preoccupied
with Shreve's nakedness. Quentin "glanc[ed]. . . for a moment at Shreve
leaning forward into the lamp, his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-
smooth, cherubic, almost hairless" (147). Here the narrator operates as a sort
of proxy for Quentin's gaze. This preoccupation with Shreve's naked torso
returns later in the text in a passage that would seem to confirm the
homoerotic character of their relationship: "So it is zero outside, Quentin
thought; soon he [Shreve] will raise the window and do deep-breathing in it,
clench-fisted and naked to the waist, in the warm and rosy orifice above the
iron quad" (176). Later this "rosy orifice" becomes a tomb, a transposition
that figures this rectum as indeed a grave: "The room was ... tomblike: a
quality stale and static and moribund beyond any mere vivid and living cold.
Yet they remained in it, though not thirty feet away was bed and warmth"
(275).3 1 Eventually they do get in bed, together no less. Lying next to Shreve,
Quentin ” feel[s]. . . the warming blood driving through his veins, his arms
and legs":
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
200
And now, although he was warm and though while he had sat in the
cold room he merely shook faintly and steadily, now he began to jerk
all over, violently and uncontrollably until he could even hear the bed,
until even Shreve felt it and turned, raising himself.. . onto his elbow
to look at Quentin. (288)
When Shre ve asks Quentin if he is cold, the latter replies that he is not, but
that he cannot help trembling nonetheless, as if shaking in some sort of
involuntary orgasm. Not by accident, perhaps, does blood figure in this
erotic scene, given the novel's persistent meditation on blood, "the immortal
brief recent intransient blood" (237). Although the transmission of blood is
understood throughout the text to guarantee one's immortality, here the
blood that courses through Quentin's body leaves him cold and lifeless, a
corpse already entombed in its sepulcher. The blood that flows through
Quentin is imagined as non-reproductive, incapable of sustaining life.
Quentin’ s blood can never be immortal because he is figured as already
dead, producing the symptoms of a body freezing to death despite the
burning warmth that floods through him.
Yet if the "rosy orifice" where Quentin and Shreve's desires find a
home lacks the immortal, intransient blood with which to reproduce
themselves, their discourse does give birth to the figure of Jim Bond, that
howling specter of Sutpen’ s design. His remaindering is the product of their
discourse, a dialectic in ruins that cannot finally account for every
expenditure, that cannot finally "clear the whole ledger" (302). The
miscegenated offspring of Thomas Sutpen coalesces with the result of
Quentin and Shreve's discursive intercourse, producing a specter of their
desire that is less the proof of their immortal transcendence than the
possibility of a model of reproduction that eschews the logic of presence
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
201
through self-recognition. It is a non-reproduetive reproduction that
recognizes from the start its failure to repeat itself without remainder.
This reproduction that fails to reproduce not only leaves us with the
specter of Jim Bond as its result, but with Shreve imagining that he has
"sprung from the loins of African kings" (302). As we noted earlier, Shreve's
language poses this miscegenation in a future past that already infuses his
present, which is to say that Shreve is both parent and child to the ’ ’ marriage
of speaking and hearing" that conditions their spectral offspring. Their aural
copulation through that other "rosy orifice" engenders Shreve as the specter
of his own act of reproduction. Shreve is always already one of the many Jim
Bonds that "are going to conquer the western hemisphere."
In this sense, it is not quite appropriate to invoke the term
"copulation" to describe this reproduction that does reproduce given the
logic of presence that inheres in the vocabulary of the copula, of that which
links a subject to its predicate, as in Hegel's formulation that "the child is the
relationship" between husband and wife. Yet something like the Hegelian
Aufliebung surfaces when Shreve announces to Quentin: "'And now .. . we're
going to talk about love’ " (253). The narrator goes on to assert that—prior to
this turn toward love— -" a ll that had gone on before [was] just so much that
had to be overpassed.... That was why it did not matter to either which one
did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and
accomplished the overpasssing, but some happy marriage of speaking and
hearing" (253, my italics). Here their intercourse is figured as enacting the
negation, preservation and supercession of what precedes it. "Discarding the
false and conserving what seems ... true," Henry and Quentin are said to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
202
produce their legacy by sublating all that comes before (253). This
teleological narrative is in tension with the language that follows, however,
which affirms their "creajtion] of this shade whom they discussed (rather,
existed in)" (253). Inhabiting this "shade" that they create, Quentin and Shreve
exist in what Derrida calls a "spectral moment, a moment that no longer
belongs to time" (SM x x /17). The specter which emerges from the remains of
their "spiritual" overpassing to love is already "present," as it were, in the
very "past" that the text suggests might be superceded. As the condition of
the possibility of this overpassing, the specter that they produce deconstructs
the teleology that overpassing implies.
Quentin and Shreve's discourse, then, constitutes less a
"reconstruction" of slavery and its aftermath than its deconstruction. Yet the
terms by which we understand this deconstruction must necessarily eschew
any too easy opposition between the modalities of Reconstruction and
deconstruction. That Reconstruction is less an historical period in our nation's
history—with reliable temporal boundaries—than an ongoing, interminable
process is suggested, as I noted in Chapter Two, by Eric Foner's
understanding of Reconstruction as unfinished, indeed, as affirming the
inevitable failure of successful mourning. Yet to recognize the illimitability of
Reconstruction-as-mouming is not the same as saying that the reanimation
of the socially dead is a doomed project, that racial equality is finally
impossible. For something like this disavowal forms the subtext of
contemporary claims that spuriously announce the end of racial bias and
inequality, that triumphantly and prematurely repeat the achievement of a
"level playing field." There is no need for affirmative action, the refrain goes,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
203
because the ghosts of slavery have long since been put to rest.3 2 This notion
that racism is a dead issue covers over a more insidious omission that its
ghost need not be confronted since it is both already dead and yet not dead
enough. As if racism might end simply by repeatedly pronouncing it dead.
How might this not-dead-yet ghost finally be heard above the din of its
vociferous obsequies?
In this sense, the charge that affirmative action constitutes "reverse
discrimination" cannot be read apart from this pronouncement of racism's
death. The notion of reverse discrimination disavows mourning by
recognizing the historical phenomenon of racism on the one hand, while
refusing to confront its continued violence on the other. As Cheryl Harris
notes, the anti-affirmative action movement signals a continued investment
in the property value of whiteness in that
the parameters of appropriate remedies are not dictated by the scope
of the injury to the subjugated, but by the extent of the infringement
on settled expectations of whites. These limits to remediation are
grounded in the perception that the existing order based on white
privilege is not only just 'there,' but also is a property interest worthy
of protection. (12)
Against the notion that the end of racism is both impossible and already
achieved, to understand Reconstruction as interminable is to claim that its
work does not end with Brawn v. Education, Loving v. Virginia, the civil rights
movement or affirmative action. Yet it also recognizes the possibility of
affirming other inheritances that diverge from the "proper" historical
trajectory.
One of these inheritances, as I have been arguing, has emerged in the
haunting by Reconstruction-era anxieties around miscegenation in more
recent debates concerning the question of gay marriage. The politics of this
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
204
haunting are difficult to say the least. While the dissents of Justices Blackmun
and Stevens from Bowers lend a certain legitimacy to the argument that we
might make the claim for gay marriage by taking the Loving decision as legal
precedent, it would be a mistake to make gays and lesbians into the proper
heirs of Loving, to "overpass" Loving, as it were, in order to secure a gay
political agenda. At its worst, the miscegenation analogy forgets that
interracial sex—despite its legalization—remains a source of great anxiety
and contestation. In an address at the Boston University Law School in 1997,
Randall Kennedy noted that recent polls "suggest that as much as twenty
percent of the white population continues to believe that interracial marriage
should be illegal."3 3 This antipathy toward interracial sex, moreover, says
nothing of the punitive consequences that resulted from the violation of
miscegenation laws prior to their abolition in 1967. These consequences were
certainly different in kind from those that gays and lesbians have
experienced and continue to experience as a result of their exclusion from the
institution of marriage. Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, like many
interracial couples before them, risked imprisonment for attempting to
evade the law of Virginia by marrying one another in Washington D.C. and
returning to live in their home state. The recent non-recognition laws that
have emerged with respect to gay marriage, unlike the miscegenation laws,
do not criminalize gays and lesbians who marry in Vermont (the only state
that has legalized same-sex marriage at the time of this writing) and move
back to their home state. Such marriages are simply held to be null and
void.3 4
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
205
Yet while interracial couples were criminalized for violating
miscegenation laws, states that prohibited interracial marriage did not
universally refuse to recognize the validity of such marriages performed in a
state where they were legal. If, for instance, one member of an interracial
union died and left property in a state where interracial marriage was illegal,
or left an inheritance to children who resided in another such state, the
marriage was routinely upheld. Interracial marriages were also often
recognized when a married couple moved to a state that prohibited such
marriages—if, that is, they demonstrated a genuine intent to domicile there
and could not be shown to be attempting to evade the law. The same policy
of recognition was applied as well in a few cases where a couple married in a
state prior to its adoption of a statutory prohibition on miscegenation.
Arguing for the recognition of gay marriages performed in one state by
another where it is illegal, Andrew Koppelman remarks that "the blanket
rule of non-recognition. . . is nearly unheard of in the United States."3 5
Whether or not the non-recognition laws lack legal precedent, the different
consequences that resulted from the prohibition on interracial marriage
should not be denied.
Yet to eschew the politics of analogy is not to disavow any historical
relation between miscegenation and same-sex marriage. Something like this
disavowal emerges in David Orgon Coolidge’ s "Playing the Loving Card:
'Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Analogy." After listing the numerous
differences between Loving v. Virginia and Baehr v. Lewin, Coolidge declares
the miscegenation analogy to be a political rather than legal argument.3 6
While Coolidge is right that there is "no straightforward relationship
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
206
between” the two, not only is Ms too neat separation of the political from the
legal difficult to entertain, but his rejection of the analogy leads to a denial of
any Msforical relationship between miscegenation and same-sex marriage. If
they are not the same, this logic appears to go, then they must be
fundamentally different, so different in fact that we ought not to see any
relationship between them. Coolidge's only solution is to reverse the terms
of the analogy in order to support the argument against gay marriage.
Whereas the Virginia court in Loving was "prepared to deconstruct and
redefine marriage in order to achieve racist goals," the Supreme Court of
Hawaii, Coolidge wryly muses, is "prepared to deconstruct and redefine
marriage in order to advance its vision of social transformation" (9).
Although Coolidge's construction of this "counter analogy" is meant to
parody the politics of analogy and point to its inevitable failure, his strategy
in turn fails to go beyond the very political rhetoric that he denounces:
"There is more than one Loving analogy, if there is any analogy at all" (9).
While this language recalls Derrida's gesture toward the "more than one" in
Specters of Marx, if does not go very far toward elaborating the sort of
plurality that Derrida likely imagines. In French, "plus d'un" (more than
one /no more one) calls for a plurality of inheritances whereby there would
no longer be only one historical trajectory to trace. This is something other
than asking for more than one analogy. Indeed, the affirmation of such a
plurality requires a vocabulary altogether different from that of analogy,
which can comprehend sameness only by risking the obfuscation of
difference.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
207
One might counter that an analogy, after all, is a comparison of urtlike
things, An analogy is not the same as an equivalence. Yet the politics of
analogy—however attuned to the dangers of reducing difference to
sameness—nevertheless protect us from the perhaps more risky prospect of
having to confront the politics of mourning. As long as we remain at the
level of comparing historical injuries, we need not make the move from
listing our historical grievances to examining our historical grief. In The
Melancholy of Race, Anne Cheng deftly argues that "we as a society are at ease
with the discourse of grievance but terribly ill at ease in the face of grief."3 7
For Cheng, racial mourning too often gets assimilated to the legal exigency
of proving damage, where the only harm that registers is that which is
material and calculable. Pointing to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954) as a notable exception, Cheng stresses the importance of "allowing
racial grief to have its say even if it cannot definitively speak the language of
material grievance" (4).'Citing evidence from the famous "doll tests"—in
which black children who were given the choice of playing with black or
white dolls generally chose the latter—Justice Warren, in Ms written opinion
on Brown, did not limit the scope of the majority's argument to historical
debates that circled' around' the F ourteenth Amendment but instead turned
to intangible factors—namely, the "feeling of inferiority" that segregation
causes, and that "may affect [the] hearts and minds [of black children] in a
way unlikely ever to be undone."3 8 If the Brown opinion offers a rare
instance in which'the law recognized the unfinished business of mourning, it
also suggests that the consolidation of mourning around material grievance
has the consequence of containing its effects within circumscribed temporal
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
208
boundaries. When senator Stan Koki of Hawaii insists that the Baehr case is
"not an issue of civil rights” because "blacks have suffered economic
hardship" whereas gays and lesbians have not, he reminds us that the
recognition of a material grievance as it pertains to one minority group can
too easily justify disallowing the grief of other groups from "having its say,"
as it were (cited in Coolidge 4). The historical exclusion of gays and lesbians
from the institution of marriage can be discounted, this argument goes, both
because the effects of this exclusion fail to transpose grief into a legally
recognized grievance, and because whatever mourning gays and lesbians
might perform, such work takes place in a completely different historical
register from racial grief.
It is not altogether clear, however, that the problems of
miscegenation and same-sex marriage constitute two distinct spheres of
historical grief, "separate but equal" in the work of mourning that they
perform. Taking its cue from Derrida's notion that mourning is interminable,
a politics of mourning would ask not only how the reparation of historical
injuries does not necessarily put an end to historical grief, but how it may be
finally impossible to separate the mourning that Cheng argues is intrinsic to
race from the mourning that haunts the politics of gender and sexuality as
well. If the specter of miscegenation has come to inhabit the debate around
gay and lesbian kinship, might it also be true that the ghosts of same-sex
desire always already shape how we understand the politics of
miscegenation, even and especially in its Reconstruction contexts?
I have attempted to show to some degree how we might read the
prohibition on miscegenation against the proscription on homosexuality as
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
209
they surface together in Quentin and Shreve's homoerotic dialogue. Yet the
convergence of miscegenation and homosexuality takes place in relation to
sex between a white man and a mulatto woman. As we have already
observed, not only was sex between white men and black women not
considered to be a "problem" in terms of the preservation of white purity, it
was a rather common occurrence, both during slavery and after. It was sex
between black men and white women, after all, that most threatened white
men, especially after emancipation. Absalom cannot then be taken as the final
word on miscegenation. As Barbara Ladd notes, Faulkner repeatedly
reminds the reader that the story is "invented," and is as much the product of
its numerous narrators' fantasies as of historical fact.3 9 Indeed, the different
sociopolitical effects that miscegenation engendered between white men and
black women and between black men and white women—differences that
must be measured against the ever-evolving landscape of race relations
from the early colonial days through Reconstruction—caution us against
understanding miscegenation as one. Indeed, "miscegenation" already says
more than one. There can never be generation without more than one,
without, that is, differance. The prohibition on miscegenation thus vainly
attempts to exclude this difference which is the condition of all generation.
Walter Benn Michaels argues something similar in Our America when
he states that the "technology of reproduction is also the technology of
contamination."4 0 Which is to say that heterosexuality is inherently a "form
of miscegenation" (ibid.). Michaels traces the emergence of incest and
homosexuality (particularly in nativist, modernist texts) as twin means to
prevent the mixing of blood between different families. If "what is outside
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
2 1 0
the family is also outside the race/' heterosexual reproduction is always a
precarious affair when it comes to the nativist anxiety toward difference (8).
The imperative of exogamous, heterosexual reproduction threatens the
imperative of racial endogamy. Yet Michaels formulation—no matter how
accurate a diagnosis of how the conflation of family/race works in the
nativist texts that he examines—is not precisely the same as the claim that I
advance here: that differance is the condition of all generation. For Michaels
argument assumes two self-present bodies of different blood who ,
contaminate one another through sexual reproduction. This assumption
implies that contamination requires some racial other, and that " I" become
contaminated only on the condition of my exposure to this other.
Reproduction as differance, however, means that my self-relation is always
already contaminated. That contact with the other is not a requirement for
this contamination to have taken place means that asexual reproduction and
even cloning would be miscegenous. In short, if miscegenation is a
pseudonym for differance, then my self-relation is different from itself prior
to any relation to a racial other.
The term "miscegenation," then, would correspond to any differential
relation—from my self-relation to interracial reproduction, from
heterosexual generation to homosexual relations. That we can only speak of
specters of miscegenation, then, means both that miscegenation is always
different from itself and that its future inheritances are always implied in its
past and present manifestations. In terms of homosexuality, its specters
always haunt the politics of miscegenation insofar as the latter is invested in
the reproduction of heterosexuality. Consider that the very vocabulary of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
211
"reproduction" promises a repetition of the self that affirms one’ s continued
presence beyond one's death. The fiction of reproduction lies in its effort to
repeat the self without leaving any remainder, without, that is, producing
some specter. The reproduction of reproduction requires that normative
heterosexuality name itself as its own heir, that it produce itself as.its own
offspring. This reflexivity by ivhich normative heterosexuality always
returns to itself suggests that heterosexual reproduction immortalizes itself
as compensation for its failure to reproduce the self without remainder. If
one’ s presence cannot be secured beyond one’ s death, reproduction might
preserve itself as the immortal spirit of its own impossibility.
Same-sex desire, then, emerges as the fallen specter of this immortal
spirit, a ghost that is made to bear the material residue of heterosexuality’ s
own failure. The claim that there is no relationship between miscegenation
and same-sex desire disavows this failure, as does the frequent rhetoric that
"homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit." That heterosexuals
also fail to reproduce is affirmed by the compensatory anxiety of the
reproduction of reproduction. When Coolidge argues in "Playing the Loving
Card" that the miscegenation laws "were prepared to deconstruct and
redefine marriage in order to achieve racist goals," it is unclear how we are
to understand miscegenation law as constituting a sort of anomaly or
aberration of heterosexual kinship (237). If the reproduction of reproduction
names a disavowal of death intrinsic to normative heterosexuality, then the
call for racial integrity is less an aberration of heterosexual reproduction than
a racialization of the very disavowal of differance by which heterosexuality
proceeds. That the threat of miscegenation was conceived almost from the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
2 1 2
beginning of the word's invention alongside other non-normative sexual
relations is confirmed by an editorial that appeared in the New York World on
March 24,1864. According to the World, advocating miscegenation would
lead to "incest, or any other abomination which the progressists have not
yet dubbed with a euphemistic name."4 1 In Scott v. Georgia (1869), the State
Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Charlotte Scott, an " ’ unmarried
woman of color,'" for having sexual intercourse with Leopold Daniels, an
"'unmarried white man.’ " 4 2 Insofar as the opinion cited the production of
miscegenated offspring as "sickly and effeminate" and compared the
necessity of prohibiting sex between the races with proscribing sex "between
persons of the Levitical degrees," the court's language offers what might be
the first legal-historical invocation of the "miscegenation analogy" (324). It
suggests, albeit preliminarily, that the analogy is not merely a tool of recent
political activism, but rather, articulates the very conditions under which
miscegenation and homosexuality threaten to undo the project of
heterosexual reproduction.
Of Hemophobia and
Homophilia
Given that miscegenation is no longer legally prohibited, how does
the insistence that interracial marriage and gay marriage occupy separate
political spheres become less about separating black grievances from gay
and lesbian ones than making miscegenation in some sense about the
preservation of heterosexuality? Does not the rejection of any historical
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
213
relationship between miscegenation and gay marriage both conjure and
exorcise the specter of miscegenation not so much to preserve the territory
of racial grief from political appropriation, but rather, to defend the
institution of heterosexual marriage? Although it is important to recognize
the anxiety that interracial sex and marriage continue to produce in post-
Loving America, it seems equally crucial to note that the most virulent
opposition to the miscegenation analogy comes from the right of the
political spectrum in the name of "traditional" marriage. In the meetings of
the House Judiciary Committee on the Defense of Marriage Act, Republican
Representative from South Carolina, Bob Inglis, exploded in response to the
analogy, declaring: " It offends me tremendously to have homosexuals
compare themselves to the historic struggle for civil rights among black
people.. . . Black people were economically disenfranchised and cut off from
this society, whereas homosexuals . . . have a higher standard of living than
heterosexuals/'4 3 Yet insofar as grief always remains "after grievance has
had its say," as Cheng so provocatively suggests, its continuation beyond the
pronouncement of its end, beyond its enclosure in something like material
grievance, makes the politics of mourning available for "improper" and
unanticipated inheritances. Miscegenation can become something other than
itself only because it is never fully and finally about itself. We cannot then
say that miscegenation is only about racial purity, or that it is only about
paternal presence. For if miscegenation names the mixing of blood between
women and men of different races, is there not also something like
homosexual miscegenation? And do we not glimpse something of this
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
214
possibility in Quentin and Shreve's reproduction of Bon as in some sense
their mixed-race son?
This seemingly odd juxtaposition of the terms "homosexual
miscegenation"—far from announcing an absurdly catachrestic association
between two fundamentally different historical problematics—takes its cue
from the historicity of the terms themselves, both of which were invented in
the latter half of the nineteenth century: miscegenation in 1864,
homosexuality in 1892 ("heterosexuality" was to come later in 1900). Much
blood has been spilled over how to address homosexuality's recent entry
into Western discourse, particularly around the question of whether its
linguistic belatedness means that homosexuality per se did not exist prior to
the end of the 19th century.4 4 Given the considerable "air time" devoted to
this debate during the waxing years of queer studies, I do not wish to
rehearse its terms here. By alerting us to the relative novelty of the term
"miscegenation," however, I mean to suggest only that the discursive life that
it has enjoyed well beyond its circulation as a form of anti-Lincoln mud-
slinging urges us to consider its emergence within a larger historical context,
one in which the coeval invention of terms like "heterosexuality,"
homosexuality" and "miscegenation" says much about their interimplication
in modern conceptions of corporeality. If contemporary debates around
same-sex marriage mark the convergence of homosexuality with "one
hundred years of miscegenation," that is not to suggest that interracial sex is
only a recent phenomenon. Yet insofar as the terms appear at an historical
moment which saw a proliferation of discourses concerned with
categorization, normalization, pathologization, and above all containment,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
215
they emerge between the twin poles of what Foucault called "societies of
blood” and "societies of sex." If societies organized around a sovereign power
operate through a "symbolics of blood" in which blood as a signifier both
affirms lineages (to have or to be of the same blood) and designates that
which one must be willing to risk in the name of defending the sovereign,
the collapse of the aristocracies and the rise of modern democracy means not
only that political power can no longer be secured through blood, but also
that "wars are no longer fought in the name of a sovereign that must be
defended; they are fought in the name of the existence of all/'4 5 The
transition from blood to sex thus takes the living body as an object of
normalization: "The disciplines of the body and the regulations of population
constitute the two poles around which the organization of power over life is
deployed" (183).4 6 For Foucault, life is no longer an "inaccessible foundation
that only emerges from time to time in the accident of death and its fatality"
(187).4 7 The analytics of sex is exercised over the life of the body in modem
Western societies for whom the triumph over famine and disease means that
death no longer seems so imminent: "Sex becomes a central target for a
power that is organized around the maintenance of life rather than the
threat of death" (193).4 8
Insofar as a society of blood is organized around a symbolics both of
having the same blood and shedding blood, it would seem to acknowledge a
certain permeability and vulnerability of the living body. The body would be
marked by the possibility of a loss of blood, the transfer of my blood in the
other that the symbolics of blood affiliation announces or the spilling of my
blood for the sovereign. Insofar as I have the "same" blood as the other, my
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
216
blood is always in some sense the blood of the other. In a society of blood,
the body could not be understood as self-contained, uncontaminated by the
other, and therefore uncontaminated by death. That the analytics of sex
takes the living body as the site of its policing and regulation suggests that
the transition from blood to sex marks the emergence of a peculiarly
modem conception of the body, of an ordered, self-contained, healthy body,
a body that is present to itself. The emergence of the body is thus tied to
what Phillipe Arifes has identified as an interdiction and disappearance of
death that is symptomatic of modernity.4 9 Or to paraphrase Woody Allen,
we in the modem West no longer see death as an inevitability, but rather as
an option. In this sense, the emergence of the terms miscegenation and
homosexuality is marked not only by the development of mechanisms of
sexuality that needed a vocabulary to regulate and order bodies, but also by
a certain disavowal of finitude, a refusal of death that requires a hermetically
sealed body, a body that no longer bleeds.
To locate miscegenation and homosexuality at the threshold of this
historical transformation from blood to sex, however, is not to align
miscegenation with blood and homosexuality with sex. As Foucault remarks:
"The preoccupation of blood and the law has haunted the management of
sexuality for close to two centuries" (196). Blood and sex do not conquer one
another "without overlapping, interactions or echoes" (196).5 0 Indeed,
anxieties around racial purity evince a desire for an impregnable body even
as the insistence on homogeneous blood radically undermines that hermetic
conception. The proscription against miscegenation admits, albeit
inadvertently, of a certain non-hermetic conception of the body, and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
217
therefore recalls a time when the affirmation and continuation of sovereign
power through blood paradoxically meant a symbolic loss of blood as my
blood. If "sex gives access both to the life of the body and the life of the
species," the coining of the term miscegenation (literally "mixed species") at a
historical moment when increased antipathy toward interracial sex and
escalating violence were just on the horizon, suggests that miscegenation is
not so much about blood as it is about sex.5 1 Which is to say that
miscegenation is about policing the body, a regulation and management of
bodily life to which the invention of the homosexual body is certainly not
immune.5 2
The association of male homosexuality with contamination has a
contemporary resonance in the wake of the AIDS crisis.5 3 Moreover, the
emergence of AIDS has dealt a devastating blow to the modem Western
conceit that plagues, and by extension death, are things of the past. Yet
something akin to this more contemporary set of meanings already
orchestrates the scene of Quentin and Shreve’ s discourse on love, as if the
indissolubility of miscegenation from their homoerotic discourse
contaminates their dialogue by its very proximity. In his "Strange Blood:
Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," Michael
Davidson identifies an inheritance of late nineteenth-century anxieties
around blood and racial purity in contemporary AIDS rhetoric, discourses in
which hemophiliacs and homosexuals have found themselves engaged in an
unlikely and highly charged kinship:
Blood disorders raise concerns about the porousness of boundaries,
the vulnerability of the bodily envelope, the infection of bodily
fluids—concerns that parallel phobias about sexual deviance and racial
mixing. Hemophobia, in other words, represents the merging of two
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
2 1 8
discourses—one of blood, the other of sexuality—in which anxieties
about bodily boundaries in one are articulated through anxieties
about gender binaries in the other. (44)
Drawing from Foucault's distinction between "societies of blood" and
"societies of sex," Davidson remarks that the latter are "based on maintaining
the health of the larger social body.... The policing of the body, the
categorizing of its functions, ardors and excesses, becomes the central
concern of health and medicine" (45). In this sense, bleeders are threatening
precisely because their bodies fail to conform to the modem conception of
the body as container. The screening of homosexuals from blood donation in
the advent of the AIDS crisis, like the division of black blood from white
blood in the nineteenth century, figures both homosexual and miscegenated
bodies as in some sense "bleeders." Indeed, their coeval emergence as
signifiers of uncontainability paradoxically figures these bodies as bleeding
into one another, allowing the miscegenated body in some sense to stand in
for the homosexual body.
To Bon's conclusion that "it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which
you [Henry] can't bear," we might ask if it is not also precisely an unnamed
same-sex desire that the novel cannot support. How might the text employ
miscegenation, in part, as a means to name what it cannot name? This is not
to suggest that miscegenation merely screens homosexuality—in both
senses of concealing and revealing it—only to note that the novel's apparent
silence on the latter is inversely related to its obsessive speaking of the
former. If miscegenation gives voice to Quentin and Shreve's "marriage of
speaking and hearing," it does so by remaining in excess of homosexuality as
its "proper" referent.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
219
Quentin and Shreve's homosexual miscegenation is conditioned by a
discourse on love whose dialectical "overpassing" fails. Although we have
seen this dialectic before in Christianity, Hegel, and Freud, it is Plato's
conception of love, particularly in the Symposium, that most closely
resembles the homoerotic quality of Shreve and Quentin's dialogue.
Whereas in Plato's dialogue, each "character" gives a eulogy on love only to
have Socrates refute them in the interest of affirming some synthesis of all
opposing views—an "overpassing to love" in its final and true
form—Quentin and Shreve fail to give us any final word on the subject.
Despite its pretensions to synthesis, as well as its embedded narrative
structure (both of which directly recall Plato's dialogue), their dialogue
undoes its own dialectical structure.
In addition to Socrates’ speech, the Symposium also contains the
famous speech of Aristophanes, who makes the novel claim that all humans
are remnants of an originally whole being that Zeus cut in half as
punishment for challenging the gods. According to Aristophanes, love
names the pursuit of wholeness in our lost other half. While humans cut off
from an androgynous being are attracted to the opposite sex, humans
separated from a single gendered being long to be reunited with the same
sex. When Socrates goes on to take up the question of love, he preserves
Aristophanes dialectical logic while reformulating it. Love, for Socrates (as
for Hegel), is the desire for something that one does not possess.
Notwithstanding Aristophanes claim of an originary wholeness, Socrates
reports Diotima's argument that the object of love is not only goodness, but
the "permanent possession of goodness for oneself."5 4 Insofar as the object
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
220
of love is the possession of permanent goodness, the aim of love, Diotima
concludes, is immortality. Such immortality can only be achieved, Socrates
goes on to suggest, through reproduction, "because reproduction is as close
as a mortal can get to being immortal and not dying" (49).
The "goodness" that Faulkner's text makes into an object of love
appears under the proper name Bon, "Charles Good," as Quentin reminds us
(213). Yet this "Bon” that Quentin and Shreve generate constitutes both
something more and less than the reproduction of the permanent possession
of goodness for themselves. The immortality of this good is specialized by
virtue of Bon's unmediateable difference. As the remainder that resists
containment within the frame of Quentin and Shreve's dialectic, this "bon"
or good might also be heard in terms of its Americanized pronunication,
"bone," that is, as what remains after all flesh and blood has decayed. Or one
might imagine, alternatively, that this "bone" would contain the marrow, or
what the OED defines as "the inmost or essential part," the "goodness."
Bon's name bears the weight of these paradoxical meanings insofar as he is
figured as both the container of some irreducible essence and the remainder
that resists containment. For Charles Bon finally marks the inevitable failure
of any absorption of difference into identity.5 5
Quentin and Shreve's reproduction of this "shade " recalls Diotima's
distinction between physical and mental pregnancy:
When men are physically pregnant... they're more likely to be
attracted to women; their love manifests in trying to gain
immortality, renown, and what they take to be happiness by
producing children. Those who are mentally pregnant, however...,
people whose minds are far more pregnant than their bodies; they’ re
filled with the offspring you might expect a mind to bear and
produce. What offspring? Virtue, and especially wisdom. (52, italics in
original).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
221
Here playing off the meaning of the word philosophy (the love of wisdom),
Diotima goes on to claim that heterosexual love is in some sense inferior to
the love between men whose creations are truly immortal:
This kind of relationship involves a far stronger bond and far more
constant affection than is experienced by people who are united by
ordinary children, because the offspring of this relationship are
particularly attractive and are closer to immortality than ordinary
children. We’ d all prefer to have children of this sort rather than the
human kind .. . since the children themselves are immortal. (52)
Although we might be tempted to follow Diotima's logic here and conclude
that Quentin and Shreve's creation of Bon is superior to heterosexual
reproduction because his presence in and as discourse, as speech (logos),
preserves their immortality, the transformation of Charles Bon into his
spectral grandson, Jim Bond, reminds us that reproduction between two
men is no more a guarantee of immortality than heterosexual reproduction.
What Jim Bond's ghostliness offers—and what the Americanization of his
name performs—is a Bond between Quentin and Shreve that is " far
stronger" not because his immortality preserves their continued presence,
but rather, because the Bon that he promises to be is forever deferred by
their Bond, left to remain as the ghostly reminder of their failed
reproduction.5 6 Their bond begets a Bon who begets a Bond. Leaving us
only with Bond and his unintelligible, unlocatable howling, Faulkner's text
reminds us that the bondsmen of slavery continue to haunt the bonds of
kinship. Jim Bond's name thus allegorizes the chiasmatic relation between
kinship and slavery—that is, the extent to which both kinship and slavery
are implicated in a dialectical logic whose pretensions to synthesis are always
haunted by the otherness they exclude.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
222
Toward a Politics of M ourning
If the Interminability of mourning beyond proper temporal or
political boundaries means that the specters of miscegenation and
homosexuality always haunt one another from within, what are the
implications of a politics that would affirm mourning, a politics that begins
by not disavowing the death that haunts any life? Deconstruction, perhaps
more than any other mode of contemporary thought, has had much to say
about the yoking of the political to the ontological, of a politics that can only
counter the so-called de-ontologization of the abject, or the socially dead, by
insisting that they too should not be denied participation in the domain of
the ontological, in the sphere of what is. As Faulkner reminds us, however,
what is is never present because in the end "all you have left is a block of
stone with scratches on it..., something that... is because it never can
become was because it cant ever die or perish" (101, his italics). For Faulkner,
the only thing that is present is what can never become absent. In a
paradoxical sense, while we can never be present because we are mortal, the
epitaph that marks our death is immortal.
When Cheng suggests that the reparation of historical grievance does
not resolve historical grief, she begins to uncover just how invested politics is
in ontology. "American racial politics,” she remarks, "demands an alternative
formulation whereby the desired goal may not be to 'work through1 or 'get
over' something but rather to negotiate between mourning and melancholia
in a more complicated, even continuous way" (94). Turning to an analysis of
Ellison's Invisible Man, Cheng suggests that a "politics of melancholia" would
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
223
offer " a theorization of identity that recuperates that loss not as presence but
as invisibility" (127.128). Insofar as she interrogates the Freudian paradigm
of "successful mourning/' Cheng theorizes the political possibilities of
melancholic consciousness, one that would address what it means to "get
over" race. Although she suggests that the vocabulary of mourning and
melancholia is inadequate to address the politics of racial grief, it is significant
that she remains within this very language, and indeed, locates the agency of
minority discourse in a melancholic politics. But what does it mean to
recuperate loss as invisibility, to recuperate loss as loss and not as presence
when the language of recuperation implies something like a return to a
healthy state of being? How does one recuperate loss without making that
absence present? How can Cheng theorize identity in relation to loss
without participating in the very refusal of mourning that she describes?
While Cheng appears to offer a melancholic politics in order to
counter the notion that loss and absence can be successfully mourned, what
■ she does not address is how melancholia itself registers a certain refusal of
absence and loss. As she puts it herself: "The melancholic must deny loss as
loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession" (9). Insofar as Cheng wants
to elaborate melancholia as an alternative politics, it is difficult to understand
how the disavowal of absence attendant to melancholia gets us beyond the
paradigm of successful mourning. To understand mourning as having a
proper point of termination is in some sense to refuse recognition of the
very absence that one claims to have "gotten over." This disavowal of the
other's absence, then, is first and foremost a refusal of my own absence, of
my own death. To the extent that self-presence requires the recognition of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
224
the other, the denial of the other's absence-— the denial of my absence in the
other-— enables the melancholic to preserve the fiction of his/her own self
presence. Yet this refusal of one's finitude is also that which conditions the
substitution of this lost love for another. While successful mourning might
register the recognition of this other's absence, it does not recognize my
absence in this other or any other Other.
Much of Cheng's difficulty in attempting to imagine a politics other
than one centered on grievance can be traced to Freud's own failure to
address how the loss of the other puts one's self-presence into question.
Freud writes that "in mourning it is the world which has become poor and
empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself" (246). We might be tempted to
locate in this emptiness of the ego a relation to the self that does not begin
by disavowing absence if it were not for Freud's identification of melancholy
as a refusal to recognize loss. In this sense, Cheng's project of recovering
melancholia in the name of an alternative politics cannot finally distinguish
itself from the very disavowal of mourning that the politics of grievance
performs. This failure is largely due to Freud's, and by extension Cheng's,
refusal to recognize that both melancholia and successful mourning proceed
by way of disavowing death. If the melancholic denies his absence in the
other on the occasion of that other's death, the subject who is said to mourn
the loss of the other successfully—and substitutes that absent other for a
new love object—continues to refuse the hauntological condition that the
anxious preservation of the self in the other only affirms. In this sense, the
difference that Freud marks between mourning and melancholia is itself a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
225
melancholic gesture that participates in the very refusal of finitude that it
describes.
Insofar as it names a disavowal of finitude, melancholia might be
understood as a pseudonym for what Derrida has often called "the
metaphysics of presence." That Cheng recognizes the collapse of melancholia
onto mourning in Freud's text is made clear by her efforts to think beyond
the paradigm of successful mourning. Because the Freudian distinction
between mourning and melancholia is determined in part by the latter’ s
interminability, Cheng's move toward melancholia would at first seem like
an attractive alternative to the terminability of Freudian mourning. No
longer would politics require the resolution of historical grief into the
premature and self-satisfied closure that the reparation of grievance
triumphantly announces. But if successful mourning is always already
melancholia, then the move toward melancholia is really no move at all. Is
not contemporary political discourse all too invested in melancholic
consciousness? While it is important to address how melancholia shapes
social identity—how the self comes into being through the staged
incorporation and exclusion of otherness—it is also crucial to ask how the
refusal of loss and absence that is melancholic identity always already
terminates the process of mourning if only because, for the melancholic,
mourning is over before it begins.
Advocating a melancholic politics, Cheng assumes that a politics of
interminable mourning would be identical to melancholia. But what if we
understood interminable mourning, what Derrida has termed, "semi-
mourning" {demi-deuil), as naming a process of mourning irreducible to the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
226
melancholic refusal of finitude?5 7 That Cheng is in good company with her
assimilation of interminable mourning to melancholia is confirmed if one
considers other recent efforts to rethink politics between the twin poles of
mourning and melancholia. Judith Butler's "Melancholy Gender/ Refused
Identification," and in particular, her dialogue with analyst Adam Phillips
about the implications of her theory of gender melancholia both for
clinicians and theorists, approach the subject of unsuccessful mourning with
some skepticism, and anxiously characterize the preoccupation with that
failure as an idealization of psychic illness. Remarking how "mourning has
provided the foundation for development in most versions of
psychoanalysis," Phillips suggests that it is has "acquired the status of a quasi
religious concept" (153). Echoing Phillips, Butler affirms that the "idealization
of mourning" endangers psychoanalysis with "becoming afflicted with the
very suffering it seeks to know." She continues: "The resolution of grief
becomes unthinkable in a situation in which our various losses become the
condition for psychoanalysis as a practice of interminable mourning" (162).
Butler then goes on to ask if the "work of permanent mourning" is not in
some sense "the result of the force of repudiation itself, aggression in the
service of a self-berating bind typical of melancholia?" (163). So-called
"permanent mourning" is read here as indissoluble from melancholia, which
implies that, for Butler (and apparently for Freud), the mourning of one's
self-presence can only be figured as performing a certain violence to the self.
Yet even at the opening of "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud
displays a certain uneasiness with the distinction that he is attempting to
mark: "Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
227
attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition
and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a
certain lapse of time" (244). And then a few lines further: "It is really only
because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem
to us pathological.” This "overcoming," indeed, this Aufhebung of mourning,
is something that "we know so well how to explain," if only because it does
not finally seem to require any explanation. We assume that (normal)
mourning will end, says Freud. Yet to admit this assumption is to suggest
that the normative end of mourning can be assumed only by saving it from
further investigation.
In this regard, we might consider Freud's claim that the melancholic
"knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him" (245). Might this
"what" that I lose in the other be nothing less than the loss of my presence in
the other? Is not this loss of self-presence hinted at by Freud's ominous
language that intones: "the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” of the
melancholic (249)? Although Butler recognizes this phrase as an echo of the
biblical "shadow of death," she does not pursue the question of how the
refusal of this ghostly object relieves the melancholic from recognizing
his/her finitude. If the ego of the melancholic becomes poor and
impoverished because it has become the very loss that it has refused, what
would happen if the melancholic were to recognize this loss? The Freudian
answer would appear to be that such an avowal would mark the transition
from melancholia to mourning, the latter understood as involving a finite
process. But what does it mean to sound the death knell of mourning in such
jubilant tones? Is there not something profoundly ironic about announcing
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
228
the death of mourning, the death of the very process by which one comes to
terms with death? The death of death? Strain to listen and we can almost
hear the triumphant words of John Donne ringing in our ears: "And death
shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”
Our Miscege-nation
To hazard a confrontation with the unfinished work of
Reconstruction—in any of its many manifestations and
inheritances—requires something other than a politics of melancholia that
signals less an "unfinished process of grieving," as Butler defines it, than a
mourning that begins by not beginning (132). The demand for gay marriage
in particular begs the question of what happens to the grief that would be
left over after gays and lesbians achieve legal recognition of their
relationships, that is, after their grievance has had its say. This demand for
recognition asks to be read from within the terms of a Hegelian dialectics of
"mutual recognition," one that articulates not only a desire to have one's
kinship relations recognized, but by extension, a desire to affirm a certain
kinship with the state, to be included within the larger American family,
indeed, to be the acknowledged sons and daughters of a no-longer-divided
house/nation. This anxiety of unity, as I noted earlier, recalls those divisions
that so preoccupied Reconstruction-era politics: from the division between
north and south, to that of black and white, to the question of states rights
versus federalism on which many of the political and legal debates around
slavery and Reconstruction rested. In the words of Comfort Servosse, the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
229
carpet-bagging protagonist in AlbionTourg^e's A Fool's Errand: A Novel of
the South During Reconstruction, the Civil War
annihilated the State. Every element of a State of the American Union
remained, except this statal relation to the Union; and this is just the
very element which is necessary to statal existence as breath is to life.
It is what distinguishes a State of the Union from all other organized
communities of earth called 'States.' You may have all but this, and
there is no State in the sense we use it, but only a skeleton, a lifeless
body. It is this element which reconstruction restored.5 8
Although here the Union is figured like a body whose existence depends on
a healthy relationship to its various states, " as breath is to life,” a few lines
below, this bodily union is likened to "marriage,— a contract indissoluble by
either or both of the parties, a relation which no antagonism can ever impair
or destroy" (237). At the close of the novel, however, Servosse is less than
secure in his notion of the indissolubility of the Union/State relation. In
response to his old friend's suggestion that "the dogma of ’ State Rights’ was
settled by the war," Servosse notes that the struggle of Reconstruction has
"just begun" (377,379). Servosse goes on to transform his metaphor once
again. The Union that earlier is likened to a body, and then to marriage, is
now described as a "deep and quiet whirlpool, which lies below the fall, full
of driftwood and shadows, and angry mutterings, and unseen currents, and
hidden forces, whose farther course no one can foretell, only that it must go
on" (379).
This figure of the interminable river of Reconstruction is echoed in the
epigram from Peter Randolph with which Eric Foner closes his text on
Reconstruction: ’ "The River has its bend, and the longest road must
terminate"’ (612). While Randolph’ s metaphor suggests the possibility of final
closure, Foner ends his text, paradoxically, by noting the impossibility of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
230
coming to a proper end: "Nearly a century elapsed before the nation again
attempted to come to terms with the implications of emancipation and the
political and sodal agenda of Reconstruction. In many ways, it has yet to do
so" (612). Indeed, the quotation from Randolph aligns two metaphors for
Reconstruction that are not exactly commensurate. If even the longest road
must terminate, that says nothing of the bend in the river that gives way to
new and uncharted waters.
Among these unseen currents, hidden beneath the stream of
Reconstruction’ s "official" course, runs the submerged possibility of gay and
lesbian kinship. It flows through the veins of the always already divided
white body, whose originary ghostliness gives the lie to the threat of racial
amalgamation. Yet the transfusion of miscegenation into the contaminating
threat that gay and lesbian marriage is imagined as posing for heterosexual
marriage names but one means by which Reconstruction permeates
contemporary politics. This divided body of the state figures in the debate
around The Defense of Marriage Act (1996) insofar as the indivisible union of
the state is once again put into question. The Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA) allows individual states to circumvent the "full faith and credit"
clause of the U.S. Constitution by refusing recognition of gay marriages that
might be performed in another state. The text of the act reads as follows:
No state, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe,
shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial
proceeding of any other state, territory, possession, or tribe
respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is
treated as a marriage under the laws of such State, territory,
possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such
relationship.5 9
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
231
The act goes oh to define marriage for the first time in the history of the
United States as "a legal union between one man and one woman as
husband and wife." Although the first section of the act unequivocally
affirms the right of individual states to dedde if they will recognize gay
marriages performed in another state, the second section would appear to
disallow the states from affirming such marriages insofar as it restricts the
definition of the term "marriage" to a union between one man and a woman.
To define marriage on the federal level is to abrogate the right of the states
to define it according to their laws. Yet this conflict between states rights and
federalism is intrinsic to the full-faith-and-credit clause itself. The second part
of the clause reads: "And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the
manner in which such Acts, Records, and proceedings shall be proved, and
the effect thereof." If congress may exercise its power over how states
recognize the actions of other states, then the act of defining marriage on the
federal level as a union between a man and woman may not necessarily be
in violation of full faith and credit.
Even if DOMA is in accord with full faith and credit—which is by no
means a settled conclusion in constitutional law—that says nothing of its
potential violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In her oral testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Cass Sunstein, Professor of
jurisprudence from the University of Chicago, argued that DOMA violates
the spirit of the full faith and credit clause which has historically been
invoked in the interest of extending states rights. Taking the Supreme
Court's very recent decision of Romer v. Evans as precedent, Sunstein goes on
to suggest that the nullification that DOMA performs in terms of states rights
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
232
risks violating the equal protection clause. If Colorado's Amendment Two
worked to impose a broad disability on a single group, DOMA, according to
Sunstein, is no different.6 0 Although the constitutional implications of DOMA
remain unresolved, what does seem clear is that DOMA inherits from
legislative and judicial history a conflict between states rights and federalism
that became particularly acute in the outbreak of the Civil War and
continued well after emancipation. As Pamela Brandwein notes, the
Democrats’ tendency to favor state rights reflected not only a desire to
protect the institution of slavery from abolition, but also a particular
conception of democracy that dates back to the Founding period, one that
eschewed the tyranny of central governments (i.e., monarchies) in favor of
the liberty of popular majorities. Republicans, as Brandwein summarizes,
"expanded this idea" to consider "not only the liberty of popular majorities
against governments, but also the liberty of individuals against popular
majorities. States could be as much of a threat to liberty as could the central
government."6 1 This latter conception of liberty, of course, was borne out of
the experience of slavery through which it became abundantly clear that the
doctrine of popular majority could so easily slide into majority tyranny.6 2
That state power was often tantamount to majority tyranny is
confirmed if we consider the weight that the so-called "nonincorporation
doctrine" held for some early interpreters of the equal protection clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment. This interpretation of the amendment—voiced
most famously in the majority opinion from the Slaughter-House Cases
(1872)—claimed that it did not provide any federal remedy for individuals
when the state failed to secure equal protection for them.6 3 In his strained
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
233
interpretation of the Amendment, Justice Miller argued that the language
clearly distinguished between federal and state citizenship. From the
statement that "all persons bom or naturalized in the United States. . . are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," Miller
draws the bizarre conclusion that a man "must reside within the State to
make him a citizen of it, but it is only necessary that he should be bom or
naturalized in the United States to be a citizen of the Union" (my italics). The
Fourteenth Amendment, of course, makes no such distinction between state
and federal citizenship. Since the "United States" named in the language of
the amendment is inclusive of the states in which citizens must reside in
order to be citizens, it makes no sense to claim that the phrase "all persons
bom or naturalized" refers only to federal citizenship and not to state
citizenship.6 4 The purpose of Miller’ s argument was to deny the
incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment.
According to this view, the latter did not require states to protect individuals
from the infringement of their rights by other individuals. This meant that
Klan members who violated the rights of blacks, for instance, as well as
states that refused to prosecute Klan members, were understood not to be in
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the notion that the
Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to individuals would appear
untenable to us today—and indeed the amendment has been enlisted to
address a broad range of equal protection violations well beyond race
classifications—DOMA's virtual nullification of full faith and credit as it
applies to gay marriage once again raises the specter of majority tyranny.
Yet given that the language of DOMA both affirms the right of the states to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
234
decide the gay marriage question for themselves, and preempts the states
from exercising this power by defining marriage as a union between a man
and a woman, it remains unclear whether the responsibility for this majority
tyranny lies finally in the hands of the state or the federal government.
Although DOMA's effort to affirm heterosexual marriage against the
specter of same-sex marriage is patently unethical, what finally are the
ethical implications of the gay and lesbian demand for the institution of
marriage? Remarking on Illinois Republican Henry Hyde's claim on the
floor of the House of Representatives that gay marriage would demean
heterosexual marriage, Michael Warner notes how Hyde's enraged
moralism obscures the unethical subtext of his argument: "He [Hyde]
doesn't just want his marriage to be holy; he wants it to be holy at the
expense of someone's else’ s."6 5 Although this affirmation of certain
relationships against the negation of others may appear to be a gesture only
of straight marriage, Warner goes on to argue that all marriage—insofar as
it proceeds by way of sanctifying some relationships while shaming
others— is inherently unethical. The implication here is that the motives of
gays and lesbians who want to marry may not be so far removed from
those of Henry Hyde et al. who can secure the value of their relationships
only by negating others. Indeed, this raises the question of what kind of
responsibility married gays and lesbians should assume (if indeed gay
marriage became legal) toward their queer brothers and sisters who choose
not to marry. How will married gays and lesbians relate to unmarried gays
and lesbians? Will the institution of gay marriage divide us into "good" gays
and "bad" gays, as Warner contends?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
235
To the extent that the demand for gay marriage rests on the desire for
recognition, the state becomes something like the phantom "other” in which
gays and lesbians might imagine themselves as finally present, no longer
socially dead. Yet if social death denotes the grievance for which gays and
lesbians seek redress, speciality names the illimitable mourning that no
dialectical recognition can put to rest. As noted earlier, heterosexuality
secures its self-presence via a presumptive de-ontologization of gay and
lesbian lives. Yet while our culture makes the socially dead stand in for the
death that haunts any life, the ontology of gays and lesbians would be made
no more secure by the reparation of their social death. Insofar as the social
death of gays and lesbians is predicated on a strict distinction between being
and non-being, presence and absence, how does the desire to participate in a
sphere of kinship predicated on one's social death preserve the very
ontological conceit that conditions the production of the socially dead? This is
not to suggest that all gays and lesbians who want to marry understand
marriage as synonymous with reproduction, and therefore, with the dream
of immortal presence. Yet even those forms of gay kinship that eschew
reproduction cannot finally avoid implication in the fantasy of self-presence
insofar as the continued existence of their kinship is thought to require the
recognition of the state as Other. Indeed, the emergence of paranoid
legislation such as DOMA, as well as its various offspring at the state level,
underscores how the debate over gay marriage has been reduced to an odd
Hegelian struggle to the death that poses the future of heterosexual
marriage as contingent on the negation of its homosexual other even before
this other comes into being.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
236
For heterosexuality to continue to reproduce itself as the same, it
cannot tolerate any mode of kinship that might predicate itself on something
other than biological reproduction. Gay and lesbian kinship comes to bear
the burden of heterosexuality’ s own failure to reproduce itself without
remainder. Homosexual marriage is a threat to heterosexual marriage if
only because the recognition of so-called "non-reproductive" forms of
kinship as kinship might entail the further recognition that heterosexual
reproduction begins by disavowing its own failure to reproduce. That
heterosexual reproduction can only reproduce itself means that the
transitivity by which it claims to produce "others" (i.e., children) is
nonetheless a reflexive movement. Insofar as it excludes difference,
reproduction does not finally reproduce.
Heterosexuality thus claims for itself an immortality that— by making
itself forever present—inhabits something closer to a dead presence. If the
spectral, as Warren Montag reminds us, achieves its power precisely by
"being neither present nor absent, neither living nor dead"—in the sense that
its "very non-contemporaneity determines the possibility of its
persistence"—heterosexuality's insistence on its immortal presence
paradoxically denies its future as anything other than itself.6 6
Heterosexuality is less a transcendent spirit than "a body whose spirit has
suffered that death beyond death, the death that survives life after death"
(78).
Although this study has defined kinship in the broadest terms
possible as a relation to the other in order to foreground the ethical
implications of self-presence, we cannot ignore the peculiar power that the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
237
reproductive model of kinship continues to hold, particularly in gay and
lesbian contexts. While Shreve and Quentin's dialectic offers one instance of
this fantasy's persistence, Bill Condon’ s recent film Gods and Monsters
thematizes the problem of paternal presence in a gay male context. Based on
Christopher Bram's novel, Father of Frankenstein, the film tells the semi-
biographical story of James Whale (Ian McKellen), the gay director of
Hollywood's Frankenstein films, and his relationship with his young
gardener, Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser). The story follows the final days of
Whale's life prior to the director’ s suicide. Whale and Clay engage in a
dialogue of homosexual love, death, and war not unlike Quentin and
Shreve's, one that reveals both of them to be mourning a lost same-sex love
object. Complicating the homoerotic quality of their exchange is the effort
on the part of Whale to make Clay into the director's kin on the occasion of
Whale's death. This preservation of Whale in Clay as his son raises the
question of how gay kinship, and in particular, gay paternity, does or does
not follow in the tradition of paternal presence. If Whale makes Clay into his
monstrous progeny, does he do so with a view toward preserving his
immortality beyond his death? Or is what remains of Whale—like Sutpen
before him—something less spiritual than spectral? It is to these question of
gay paternity that I turn in Chapter Four.
1 Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York:
Back Bay Books, 1961), 333.
2 Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 163.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
238
3 For Derrida, the non-presence of the " I am (mortal)" conditions iterability.
See my discussion of Derrida and Poe in Chapter one. See also Derrida's La
voix et le phenomena (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). For an
essay that explores the implications of spectrality for the performative, see
Werner Hamacher, "Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-
Language and Derrida's Specters of Marx," in Michael Sprinker ed., Ghostly
Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (New York:
Verso, 1999).
4 Abraham Lincoln, "House Divided" Address (Springfield: Illinois State
Historical Society, 1958), 3.
5 Eric Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983), 105.
6 Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857). The Dred Scott case addressed
whether the temporary residence of a slave in free territory (in this case
Illinois) necessarily freed him of the bondage of slavery. The Supreme Court
determined that Dred Scott was not a citizen of the United States according
to the meaning put forth in the constitution, and therefore his residence in a
free state did not confer on him free status. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)
was proposed by Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on
Territories. Following the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," Douglas
proposed that the slavery question in the new territories ought to be left to
the settlers to decide. Section 19 of the act reads: "... when admitted as a
State or States, the said territory, or any portion of the same, shall be
received into the Union with or without slavery, as their Constitution may
prescribe at the time of their admission...." See The Avalon Project at Yale
Lazo School, [dted July 6 2002]. Available from
www.yale.edu / lawweb / avalon/kanneb.htm; INTERNET.
7 The term "miscegenation,” literally meaning "mixed species," was
introduced during the election year of 1864 in an anonymous pamphlet
circulated in an effort to discredit Lincoln and abolitionist Republicans for
advocating interracial amalgamation. The pamphlet marked the beginnings
of a peculiarly late-nineteenth-century antipathy toward interracial sex and
marriage. The writers of the pamphlet portrayed themselves as abolitionists
(though they were in fact proslavery democrats) who held the belief that
racial amalgamation was crucial to human progress. They solicited responses
from abolitionists who favored miscegenation and received many letters
from prominent actors in the movement. The hoax was exposed soon after
Lincoln was reelected. See Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the
Election Year of 1864" (1949), reprinted in Werner Sollors ed., Interracialism:
Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford:
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
239
Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Werner Sailors, Neither Black Nor
White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and
Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 183-191; Martha Hodes, White Women/Black Men: Illicit Sex in the
Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Hodes
underscores, the complicated history of interracial sex belies the late
twentieth century assumption that it was always viewed as abhorrent. The
practice of lynching black men for the supposed rape of white women was
rare before the Civil War, reaching its peak between 1882 and 1900. For a
review of Hodes that questions how rigid the distinction actually was
between antebellum and postbellum attitudes toward miscegenation, see
Ariela Gross, rev. of Martha Hodes, White WomenlBlack Men: Illicit Sex in the
Nineteenth-Century South, in 18 Law & Hist. Rev. 686 (Fall 2000).
8 Radical Reconstructionists that advocated black suffrage were also often
referred to as "miscegenationists." See Foner, Reconstruction, 216-227.
9 For more on the synecdoche of racism, see Lee Edelman, "The Part For the
(W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the Phantasmatics of ’ Race,’ " in
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1994).
1 0 Although Wright's conception of architecture as a counterfeit or copy of
the body understands the body as in some sense prior to the house, what
would it mean to reconfigure the house as the condition of the body's
coming to be as self-contained and impenetrable? The house as the
possibility of the body's constructedness and containability? This is to
suggest something other than a return to the discourse of constructivism,
which too often "deconstructs" the body only to reconstruct it over and over
again. See my discussion of Judith Butler's "constructivism of negativity" in
Chapter One.
1 1 Cited in Charles Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
1 2 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
1 3 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property" in 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993), 6.
1 4 As Peter Bardaglio notes, this "American legal innovation" that codified the
mother's slave status in mulatto children broke from English common law,
which determined that the child’ s status followed that of the father (114). See
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
240
his '"Shameful Matches': The Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in
the South before 1900,” in Martha Hodes ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press,
1999).
1 5 Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 188.
1 6 Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx.
1 7 An earlier version of this section was given at the symposium on
"Difference and Psychoanalysis' ’ at the University of Southern California in
March 2001, with Barbara Johnson as respondent.
1 8 1 write these words in the wake of the 2000 presidential election where the
5/4 division of the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore has many
Americans worrying out loud that the split court only confirms the political
divisions that the election results bore out, differences that threaten to "tear
at the fabric of our nation" (to invoke the alarmist rhetoric so common in
media responses to the election).
1 9 In philological terms, "contamination" names the condition of all language:
"The blending of forms, words, or phrases of similar meaning or use so as to
produce a form, word, or phrase of a new type" (OED).
2 0 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 302.
2 1 Cited in Hartman, 33.
2 2 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(New York: Vintage, 1992), 33.
2 3 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993).
2 4 See Eve Sedgwick’ s "seminal" work on erotic triangles, Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
2 5 According to Coolidge's research, seventy-five law review articles in
major legal journals were published between 1990 and 1995 alone. See his
"Playing the Loving Card: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Analogy," in
12 BYU J . Pub. L. 201 (1998).
2 6 Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), 211.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
241
2 7 Baker v. Vermont, 744 A.2d 864 (1999).
2 8 We should note that analogy constitutes one of the most familiar forms of
legal argumentation and is the backbone of much civil rights advocacy. The
analogies that gay civil rights activists frequently make between sexual
orientation and race take their cue from a long history of feminist advocacy
that has argued that discrimination on the basis of gender "is like" race
discrimination. The politics of analogical reasoning, however, are far more
complicated than its opponents tend to admit. Given the legal system's
reliance on precedent and a reluctance to grant suspect status to
classifications other than race (the failure of the ERA is perhaps exemplary
here), civil rights advocates find it difficult to eschew analogical arguments
altogether. For more on the role of analogies in civil rights law, see Serena
Mayeri, "'A Common Fate of Discrimination': Race-Gender Analogies in
Legal and Historical Perspective," 110 Yale L . J . 1045, April 2001; Trina Grillo
and Stephanie Wildman, "Obscuring the Importance of Race: The Implication
of Making Comparisons Between Racism and Sexism (or Other-isms)," 1991
Duke L. J . 397; Janet Hailey, "Gay Rights and Identity Imitation: Issues in the
Ethics of Representation," In David Kairys ed., The Politics of Law: A
Progressive Critique (New York: Basic Books, 1998); Devon Carbado, "Black
Rights, Gay Rights, Civil Rights," 47 UCLA Law Review 1467 (2000). On the
role of legal analogies more generally, see Cass Sunstein, "Commentary: On
Analogical Reasoning," 106 Harv. L. Rev. 741.
2 9 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny'," in The Standard Edition (London: Hogarth
Press, 1975).
3 0 Jacques Derrida, "M arx and Sons" in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999).
311 allude, of course, to Leo Bernard's often-cited essay, " Is the Rectum a
Grave," in Douglas Crimp ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism
(Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988).
3 2 See Derrick Bell's "T he Unspoken Limit on Affirmative Action" in And W e
Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books,
1987). In Ms parable of the "Divine Gift," Bell notes how the legal reparation
of racial injustices and inequalities is often impeded by the belief—either
explicit or implicit—that affirmative action has both already achieved its
goals and that this acMevement marks the end of racial injustice. In a similar
vein, Peggy Pascoe notes that what she calls the "modernist racial ideology"
is predicated on the "deliberate non-recognition of race" (467). We might
further link this ideology of "color blindness" to the disavowal of mourning
that we have been tracing. See her "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
242
Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America" in Martha Hodes ed.,
Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York:
New York University Press, 1999).
3 3 Randall Kennedy, "How are We Doing With Loving: Race, Law, And
Intermarriage," in 77 B.U.L. Rev. 815 (1997), 2.
3 4 Over two thirds of the states have adopted laws that refuse to recognize
gay marriages performed in other states. The laws are designed to
circumvent the "full faith and credit" clause of the U.S. constitution. Article IV
section I reads: "Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public
acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the
Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts,
records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof." USCS
Const. Art. IV, § 1 (2002). The text of the California Defense of Marriage Act,
for instance, reads: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or
recognized in the state of California." Cal Fam Code § 308.5 (2001).
3 5 Andrew Koppelman, "Same-Sex Marriage and Public Policy: The
Miscegenation Precedents" in 16 Quinnipiac L . Rev. 105 (1996), 5. See also
James Trosino, "American Wedding: Same-Sex Marriage and the
Miscegenation Analogy" in 73 B.U.L. Rev. 93 (1993).
3 6 Among the differences in the two cases, Coolidge notes that the Hawaii
marriage law "is positive not prohibitory," that is, that it does not impose any
penalties on same-sex couples who attempt to marry. As Coolidge puts it
rather dismissively: " In Hawaii, no one was charged with a felony; the State
simply sent them a polite letter and returned their marriage applications" (5).
He goes on to note that, in contrast to Baehr, no one planned Loving,
suggesting that the plaintiffs' strategic publicization of the state's rejection of
their applications was opportunistic. Yet Coolidge conveniently "forgets" that
Plessy was also orchestrated from the beginning as well, and by none other
than Albion Tourg6e, who later became one of Homer Plessy's attorneys.
3 7 Anne Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden
Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175.
3 8 Brown v. Board ofEducation, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), 494.
3 9 Ladd further reminds us that the matrilineal codification that operated in
the Upper South was foreign to the Deep South where—prior to the
Louisiana Purchase in 1803— -the status of mixed-raced children followed the
father. The acquisition of Louisiana by the U.S resulted in a conflict between
the old French assimilationist politics, in which creoles of color maintained a
certain amount of economic and political power, and American
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
243
segregationist ideologies that placed creoles in the powerless (and often
persecuted) category of "free men/women of color.” For Ladd, Absalom
returns us to "the issue of assimilation versus segregation of the creole as it
was defined and discussed in the political discourse of American nationalism
between 1803 and the beginning of the Civil W ar" (536). See her "T he
Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom,
AbsalomT in American Literature, vol. 66 no. 3 (Sept. 1994), 525-551.
4 0 Walter Berm Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 48.
4 1 Cited in Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election Year of
1864."
4 2 Scott v. Georgia, 39 Ga. 321 (1869), 321.
4 3 Cited in Andrew Sullivan ed., Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (New York:
Vintage, 1997), 219.
4 4 Animating this debate is, of course, David Halperin’ s now famous claim:
"Before 1892 there was no homosexuality, only sexual inversion." See his
One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 15. Yet Halperin's claim is already anticipated by
Foucault’ s tracing of the emergence of the homosexual as a "species" in the
History of Sexuality, Vol. I. For a counterargument to Halperin and Foucault,
see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in
Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
4 6 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite 1 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976),
180. "Les guerres ne se font plus au nom du sovereign qu’ il faut defendre;
elles se font au nom de 1'existence de tous...."
4 6 "L es disciplines du corps et les regulations de la population constituent les
deux poles autour desquels s'est deployee Forganization du pouvoir sur la
vie."
4 7 ’’... soubassement inaccessible qui n'emerge que de temps en temps, dans
le hasard de la mort et sa fatality,..
48"... le sexe devient une cible centrale pour un pouvoir qui s'organise
autour de la gestion de la vie plutdt que de la menace de la mort."
4 9 Phillipe Aries, Essais sur Vhistoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age a nos
jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
244
50"... la preoccupation du sang et de la loi a hant6 depuis pres de deux
siecles la gestion de la sexuality"; ”... sans chevauchements, interactions, ou
6chos."
5 1 "Le sexe est aco§s a la fois & la vie du corps et h la vie de l'espece.”
5 2 Given that late-19th-century America marks a peculiarly heightened
period of racial strife, it is easy to forget how sexuality- plays -more than a
mere supporting role in the racial politics of the era. As Lisa Duggan has
shown in her study of the Alice Mitchell/Freda Ward murder, the
affirmation of legitimate sexuality went along with the sanctioning of
legitimate violence. That so much public outcry could attend Alice Mitchell's
1892 murder of her female lover in Memphis while the lynching of three
black men three months later in the same city was treated as almost routine,
shows to some degree how questions of race are always in conversation
with sexuality. The racialization of the "lesbian love murder story," Duggan
maintains, invokes the twin figures of the lesbian and the black male as
dangerous threats to white domesticity. See Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers:
Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000),
5 3 The "rosy orifice" from which Bon emerges as Quentin and Shreve's
contaminated son anticipates the more recent phantasmatic construction of
the anus as the site and origin of AIDS, a figure that is imagined as producing
death rather than life, and as Leo Bersani suggests, speaks to a pervasive and
deeply imbedded cultural anxiety over the "intolerable image of a grown
man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a
woman" (212). Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave," in Douglas Crimp ed.,
AIDS: Cultural Analysis!Cultural Activism. See also, Ellis Hanson, "Undead" in
Diana Fuss ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York:
Routledge, 1991). In an essay reminiscent of Bersani, Michael Davidson notes
that the cultural characterization of hemophiliacs as "mama's boys"—a label
conditioned by the nature of the disorder itself whereby boys receive a
recessive gene from their mothers—is reinforced by their dependency on
the blood of others, which places them in a "passive or ’ receptor’ position
with respect to the health delivery systems." See his "Strange Blood:
Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation" in Timothy
Powell ed., Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a
Multicultural Context (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1999), 51.
5 4 Plato, Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 48.
5 5 Pursuing this linguistic chain a bit further, the OED notes the somewhat
antiquated verbal form of marrow which means "to marry." Marrow (as a
noun) can in this way refer to one's companion or mate. And finally, the 15th
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
245
century term "marrowship" was used to denote an "association or
companionship." Returning to the context of Reconstruction, not by accident
does Charles Chesnutt name his book that foregrounds the problem of
miscegenation, The Marrow of Tradition.
5 6 Although not drawing from a Platonic perspective, the "new natural law"
attacks on gay civil rights and marriage invoke an understanding of "the
good" in and as reproduction. Following rather from Augustine’ s
understanding of marital communion as an instrumental good in the service
of procreation, John Finnis, one of the leading exponents of this theory,
argues that "the union of the reproductive organs of husband and wife really
unites them biologically.... The spouses are indeed one reality." The sexual
acts of homosexuals, on the other hand, "cannot make them a
biological...unit. So their sexual acts cannot do what they hope and imagine."
Yet it is clear from Finnis' own language that this union that two men or two
women are said to imagine is simply a projection of what Finnis fantasizes
heterosexual reproduction as accomplishing, revealing more-what he
fantasizes homosexuals to be fantasizing about than how they might view
the purpose of their sexual acts. While we might be tempted to dismiss
Finnis' argument as illogical, the publicization of his argument in recent legal
debates, particularly in the testimony that he (as well as other leading
classicists and philosophers including Martha Nussbaum, who critiqued his
position) gave in Romer v. Evans, requires that we take notice of the
frequency with which this claim is made. The Colorado case sought to
overturn the so-called Amendment Two, a referendum passed in 1992 that
effectively made it illegal to adopt any statute that would protect the rights
of gays and lesbians. As the state had based much of its claim on its interest
in protecting the family, both sides offered philosophical expert witnesses to
debate the relevance of the state's claims. The result of which was an almost
absurd scene of classicists sparring over readings and translations of Plato,
and accusing one another of perjury. Amendment Two was eventually
overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996. See John Finnis, "Law,
Morality, and 'Sexual Orientation,’ " in 69 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1049 (1994), 5.
The article is the published version of his affidavit from the Colorado case.
See also Martha Nussbaum, "Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The
Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modem Sexual Controversies," in 80
Va. L . Rev. 1515 (1994); Andrew Koppelman, " Is Marriage Inherently
Heterosexual?" in 42 Am. J . Juris. 51 (1997).
5 7 Jacques Derrida, " J a , ou le faux-bond," Diagmphe, no. 11 (Avril 1977).
5 8 Albion Tourgee, A Fool’ s Errand: A Novel of the South During Reconstruction
(Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1991), 237, his italics.
5 9 28 USCS § 1738C (2002).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
246
6 0 See Sullivan, 209-212.
6 1 Pamela Brandwein, Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and
the Production of Historical Truth (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 89.
6 2 James Madison anticipated the specter of majority tyranny in The Federalist
Papers. In Federalist no, 10, Madison voiced his concern that "measures are too
often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the
minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing
majority." See also Federalist no. 51, where he maintains that government is
needed only as a means to pursue the possibility of justice, the latter of
which signals "the end of government," both in the sense of its goal and its
termination. See The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, [accessed July 6 2002].
Available from www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed.htm;
INTERNET.
6 3 Slaughter-House Cases, 83 (16 Wall.) 36 (1872).
6 4 David Richards likewise notes that Miller's interpretation "makes little
interpretive sense even on its own textualist terms." See his Conscience and
Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of The Reconstruction Amendments
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 214; See also Derrick Bell, Race,
Racism and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973).
6 5 Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of
Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 82.
6 6 Warren Montag, "Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida's Specters of Marx,"
in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx
(New York: Verso, 1999), 71.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
4
247
Phantoms, Fathers, Friends
No man had a father...; all boy
flesh that walked and breathed
stemming from that one ambiguous
eluded dark fatherhood....
—Faulkner, Absalom,
Absalom!
.. . this strange kind of
domineering Phantom, called the
Fatherhood.. . .
—Locke, First Treatise of
Government
Somewhere a Father Figure shakes
his rod/ At sons who have not sired
a child?/Through our own spirit we
can both proclaim/And shuffle off
the blame/For how we live----
—James Merrill, The Book of
Ephraim
C
iting the well-known line from Hamlet in which the Prince of Denmark
laments the seeming interminability of his grief—"Oh that this too, too
solid flesh would melt"—James Whale, in Bill Condon’ s Gods and Monsters,
announces the film's preoccupation with the problem of mourning.
Although the citation from Hamlet appears midway through the film, it
echoes the film's earlier scene with Whale and the young Mr. Kay, in which
the horror director's most ardent fan and would-be pool boy cannot resist
sharing with Mr. Whale his favorite line from the director's Frankenstein
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
248
pictures: "Love dead ... hate living." That this citation comes from The Bride
of Frankenstein links the problem of mourning to the film's other most
urgent concern—that is, kinship. In a line that echoes the broken syntax of
'love dead .. . hate living," Frankenstein himself reminds us in the final
moments of the film: "Alone baaad... friend goood." Beckoned by the sweet
sounds of a violin, the lonely monster has discovered a blind hermit living in
a secluded cabin. As they are both alone and without kin, the two decide that
they will be friends.
Gods and Monsters would thus appear to offer friendship as the
answer to the principal characters’ lack of biological kin, and by extension, to
their melancholia. Insofar as being alone carries the threat of not being at all,
friendship emerges as an ostensible guarantee of self-presence. If friendship
can be just as invested in presence as the biological model of kinship,
however, then what distinguishes friendship from family? Such a question is
particularly pertinent for any discussion that aims to articulate a "kinship
beyond family." For even if we situate it under the rubric of non-biological
kinship, friendship still can be reappropriated by the dialectical model. This
dialectic emerges in Montaigne's famous treatise on friendship, De Yamitie,
where he characterizes his relationship with a dead friend as one in which
their souls intertwined and became one. While Montaigne asserts the
superiority of friendship over family because the former "has no business or
commerce than with itself," his dependence on a dialectical model suggests
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
249
that, in ethical terms, friendship is not necessarily immune to the reduction
of the other to the same.1
Gods and Monsters raises the question of how friendship, like
biological forms of kinship, can be structured through a melancholic relation
to the other, a relation, that is, in which "my" absence is denied by the
apparent presence of the other. Whale's melancholia would seem to be
confirmed by the difficulty he evinces in mourning the loss of a fellow
soldier and lover who died in combat during the first World War. This
melancholia is further made legible in the aging director's effort to make
Clay Boone (Brendan Frazer) into his son on the occasion of Whale's death.
Yet Clay also displays a certain melancholia, as if unable to grieve a loss or
attachment of some kind. We know little of Clay's actual past: only that he is
an ex-Marine who, having enlisted during the Korean war, was discharged
due to a burnt appendix, and thus never saw combat. Clay's shame and
embarrassment about his discharge from the service is redoubled by his
discovery that Whale, a gay man, fought in and survived World War I —as if
to suggest that Whale is a "better man" than he.
To get at the source of Clay's melancholia we might begin with his
submission to Whale's gaze. After Mr. Whale extols the virtues of Clay's
"marvelous head," his "architectural skull," the yard man somewhat
reluctantly agrees to sit for the film-maker-cum-painter. Although Mr.
Whale wryly assures him that he has no interest in his body, the director's
earlier game of "strip poker" with the young Mr. Kay suggests that he is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
250
interested in more than just Clay's head. During the course of their second
sitting, the conversation turns to what Clay describes as "locker room
talk"—that is, to Mr. Whale's somewhat gratuitous description of the days
when he enjoyed hedonist pool parties with young naked boys. Enraged
and disgusted by Mr. Whale's open talk of homosexuality. Clay angrily
refuses to sit any longer for the director. And yet, Clay returns to sit once
again before the gay gaze because he ” like[s] [Mr. Whale’ s] stories." Insofar
as the stories that Clay takes pleasure in hearing reveal how gay "love in the
trenches," loss, and melancholia are manifest in the director’ s horror films,
we might inquire about this preoccupation with loss, especially with a loss
that, for Mr. Whale, is explicitly homosexual in character. Indeed, the
identification that obtains between Clay and Whale obscures the distinction
between the director's and Clay's individual stories. To what extent does
Whale's story become Clay's? How does such a conflation allow for Whale’ s
loss to become Clay’ s? And why would Clay want to assume or take on
another's loss, especially when the loss in question is the loss of another
male, the gendered love-object that Clay, as a heterosexual male, has
supposedly foreclosed?
The convergence of Whale and Clay's psychic histories thus returns us
to the chiasmatic structure of mourning in which there is intersection and
overlap yet no final synthesis. Their spectral relation to each other as other is
inseparable from those losses and unmoumed attachments that they conjure
forth from the depths of their psychic pasts. They come to stand in for each
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
251
other's lost love objects if only because their kinship reactivates past scenes
of loss and mourning. Their spectral kinship is made difficult, moreover,
because it is at once homoerotic and paternal/filial. Indeed, the father/son
relation that obtains between Whale and Clay does not exclude eroticization,
but rather, is the condition of its possibility.
While the content of Clay's loss remains implicit and unspoken, the
threat that Whale represents to Clay's masculinity suggests that Clay is
attached to the specter of a disavowed and ungrievable same-sex love. This
heterosexual attachment to the possibility of same-sex love is what Judith
Butler has called "heterosexual melancholia." Butler argues that the
prohibition on homosexuality begins with the bar against desiring one’ s
same-sex parent. This proscription thus puts into play a certain melancholic
attachment with that gender which has been foreclosed as a possible love
object. For Butler, gender identity is formed in part through a repudiation of
that gender which one does not desire. The construction of gender norms,
then, is conditioned by an opposition of sexual-object choice to gender. This
melancholia emerges in the hyperbolic performance of gender in which "the
straight man becomes . . . the man he ’ never’ loved and ’ never’ grieved; the
straight woman becomes the woman she ’ never’ loved and ’ never’ grieved"
(147, her italics). Put in terms of the Oedipal scenario, the son must become
the father whom he cannot love; the daughter must become the mother
whom she cannot love. Maintaining that sexual object-choice is too often
purchased at the price of a hyperbolization of gender into the categories of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
252
"male" and "female," Butler provides an analysis of gender that takes into
account the interimplication of sexuality and gender. If male heterosexuality
would appear to affirm itself through a hyperbolic performance of
masculinity, that is because normative heterosexuality tends to panic when
gender performance too closely mimes sexual object-choice. If a
heterosexual male acts like a woman, how can he still desire her? Or as Butler
puts it: "He wants the woman he would never be. He wouldn't be caught
dead being her" (137). So in order to install the difference between him and
her, the heterosexual male must exaggerate the performance of his
masculinity.2
The homoerotic character of Whale and Clay's relationship recalls
Quentin and Shreve's dialogue in Absalom in which the paternal and filial
positions become interchangeable. Quentin ponders: "Maybe we are both
Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished.. . . Or maybe Father and
I are both Shreve, maybe it took father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me
both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all ofus."3 . To the extent
that Whale comes to inhabit the position of father vis-^-vis Clay, their
father/son relation is implicated in the problem of paternal presence. That
Whale’ s effort to make Clay into his son is invested in the Christian tradition
of the infinite father/spirit is suggested by the final image that we are given
of Whale's lifeless body floating upward to the surface of the pool, baptized
by the water that takes his life yet figuratively confirms his immortality.
Although Hannah and Clay agree that they must return Whale's body to the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
253
pool in order to avoid having to explain Clay's presence at the house (i.e., no
one would believe the aging maid strong enough to pull Whale's body from
the pool), Clay's absence conversely affirms the immortal presence of
Whale, and is figured visually by the image of Whale floating upward, arms
stretched out in a gesture that recalls the image of the crucifixion, and by
extension, the promise of everlasting life. As Hannah sardonically puts it;
"You'll keep better in the pool Mr. Jimmy." Keeping with the Christian
sublation of father/son, Whale incarnates himself in Clay, who remains as
the proof of Whale's eternal presence. Like the cementing of the mother's
dead body in McEwan's The Cement Garden, or the freezing of Javel's
amputated arm in a barrel of fish in Maupassant's En Mer, Whale's body is
figured as being both negated and preserved beyond its transformation into
spirit.
If normative, patriarchal kinship affirms paternal presence through
the negation of the son, we might ask how the preservation of Whale does
or does not negate Clay. Clearly the paternal/filial relation in Gods and
Monsters is far removed from the patriarchal violence that Thomas Sutpen
wages against his kin in Absalom. Indeed it is Clay as would-be son who is
figured as always on the verge of enacting violence against Whale. Clay’ s
potential for violence, moreover, partakes of two cultural traditions of male
on male violence: the Oedipal violence that the son commits against the
father and the homophobic violence that the professed heterosexual male,
on occasion, perpetrates against the homosexual male. That Clay finally
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
254
resists both of these violent possibilities suggests that he and Whale's kinship
finally exceeds the dialectic of negation/preservation. Because their relation
to one another eschews the dialectical model for a more chiasmatic structure
of mourning, neither Whale nor Clay can be said to preserve himself in the
other.
What follows is an effort to examine the relationship between Oedipal
and homophobic violence through a reconsideration of the Freudian model
of "successful mourning." I argue that homophobic violence is bom of the
failure to install a firm heterosexuality in the son. Although the Oedipal
situation assumes that the heterosexuality of the son is not in question, the
murder of the father produces rather than confirms his heterosexuality. The
installation of the son's heterosexuality requires the murder of the father, the
son's "first" male love object. Homophobic violence thus reactivates the
patricidal scene that first proscribes homosexual love, as if in murdering a
gay man, the homophobic male murders his father all over again, and
thereby reconfirms to himself his heterosexual disposition. The second
section of this chapter traces Butler's notion of "heterosexual melancholia" as
it emerges in recent American case law concerned with the question of gay
and lesbian marriage. I also explore how, within gay activism and political
discourse, the turn away from AIDS toward marriage as a unifying political
struggle might itself be symptomatic of a certain "homosexual melancholia."
The final section asks how the idealization of marriage that gay politics often
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
255
evinces gives short shrift to friendship, even as the politics of the latter
always risk being reappropriated by the idealized terrain of marriage.
Moulding Clay
In Gods and Monsters, Clay and Whale's reactivation of past losses
bears witness to a revision of the Freudian model of mourning that Melanie
Klein calls "the depressive position." For Klein, when one loses a love-object,
one mourns not only this object, but also those primary love objects that this
most recent loss once again puts into play. The infantile depressive position
is understood as involving a conflict between an external and internal loss of
the mother. While the mother is still present externally, according to Klein,
the loss of her breast which has come to represent a good and protective
object threatens the child with the possibility of her internal loss. The child
must compensate for the specter of this internal loss of the mother by
incorporating her into the ego. Although the infant has yet to secure the
mother internally prior to his separation from the mother's breast, the adult
who loses a love-object is able to mourn that object fully by virtue of these
early lessons of loss, teachings through which the child learns to construct an
inner world of incorporated losses: "The rebuilding of this inner world
characterizes the successful work of mourning."4
Much could be said, of course, regarding Klein's adherence to the
notion of successful mourning and its attendant presumptions of self-
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
256
presence. Yet what Klein does offer us is a temporally more expansive
understanding of the work of mourning in which present losses unleash the
specter of past losses. If, however, the incorporation of this lost object
reinstates all of my past internal objects, what finally distinguishes this loss
from these other losses? Moreover, how are we to understand the early
lessons of internalization as setting the stage not only for the incorporation
of later losses, but for the incorporation of these losses as fully mourned? In
short, if later losses conjure forth past losses, what does this say about the
relative "success" of the work of mourning? That internalization is never
fully accomplished would appear to be the broader implication of Klein's
theory that both affirms and denies the Faulknerian thesis: "Maybe nothing
ever happens once and is finished." Indeed, the repeated staging and
redeployment of incorporation belies the notion that it might ever be
finished, and therefore betrays its inevitable failure.
Klein, then, would appear to gesture toward the possibility of
interminable mourning against her subscription to the Freudian principle of
successful mourning. In their theory of the "transgenerational phantom,"
Abraham and Torok also suggest something of the uncontainability of
mourning within finite temporal boundaries. Their conception of the
phantom seeks to account for how the unfinished business of
others—namely, our parents and other historical predecessors—comes to
haunt our unconscious. It should be noted, however, that Abraham and
Torok begin their discussion of the phantom by attempting to distinguish it
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
257
from the work of mourning: "Because the phantom is not tied to the loss of
an object, it cannot be understood as the result of unsuccessful mourning.
Such would be the case, rather, of the melancholic or of all those who carry a
tomb inside themselves."5 For Abraham and Torok, the secrets and
unconscious fantasies of our parents are exemplary of what they call the
phantom. Given that we inherit these fantasies from our parents, indeed,
from those who are pre-deceased in relation to us, it is difficult to imagine
how the phantom would not be tethered to the loss of an object. If what
comes back are the tombs not just of any others, but of those others whom
we have lost, then the phantom would be implicated in the problem of
mourning from the beginning. Although Abraham and Torok set the
groundwork for a theory of transgenerational mourning, they persistently
align introjection with healthy modes of mourning, while yoking
incorporation to psychic illness and pathology. For Abraham and Torok,
introjection corresponds to a "true mourning" that is opposed to the
"phantasms of incorporation" (274). Incorporation marks the failure of
introjection. Despite their acquiescence to the Freudian notion of successful
mourning, their theory of the transgenerational phantom might be
employed to interrogate the entombment of mourning not only within
circumscribed temporal boundaries, but within ostensibly separate bodies,
egos, and psychic histories.
If Clay internalizes the loss of Whale's lover, then perhaps such an
incorporation signals Clay's paradoxical desire to live through a loss that he
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
258
himself has not actually experienced. Although the film would have us
believe that Whale wants to make Clay into his monster, it would be equally
true to say that Whale represents Clay's monster. Such interchangeability, of
course, echoes the historical confusion that has surrounded both Mary
Shelley's novel and its various adaptations—that is, the confusion of Dr.
Frankenstein with his monster. The interchangeability of Whale and Clay
speaks to a certain co(in)habiting of their psychic histories. If the
transgenerational phantom, moreover, would name an inhabiting of the
father's unconscious in the son, the interchangeability of the positions of
father and son in Gods and Monsters raises the question: whose phantom is
haunting whom?
In his "speculative reading of Faulkner," John Irwin argues that the
antagonism between father and son is born out of the nature of time itself.
That is, the priority of the father in time is all that finally secures his authority
over the son. To become a father, as Clay finally does at the end of the film,
is to enact a certain revenge against time: " It is the paradox that sons turn
into fathers by trying to forget. . . that they were once sons."6 This revenge
against time can be successful only if the son is able to free himself from the
grip of time, only if he is able to become immortal. What the Christian
dialectic of father and son offers, Irwin reminds us, is not a material
genealogy in which the father's immortality is secured through the
reproduction of new physical life, but rather, a spiritual genealogy whereby
the promise of an afterlife is made good as long as one accepts the sacrifice
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
259
of Jesus: "The priests who renew that sacrifice in the Mass are, like Jesus,
celibate, partly as a sign that they have to do not with the generation of new
physical life, a physical life that must always be in bondage to death, but with
the generation of a new spiritual life—they are ghostly fathers" (131).
While the theory of the transgenerational phantom might be enlisted
to open up the finite temporal limits ascribed to the process of mourning by
the Freudian tradition, the chiasmatic kinship that obtains between Whale
and Clay gives us a glimpse of how they each come to carry the tomb of the
other within. Given that the phantoms which they transmit back and forth
through their discourse are most often those that consolidate the son's
revenge against the father with the ghosts of unavowable same-sex loves,
these phantom fathers and gay ghosts would appear to inhabit one another.
Consider that the prohibition of the father as an object of desire
heterosexualizes the desire of the son. The father thus remains as the sign of
both the prohibition and its possible transgression. The father who says no
comes to represent the spectral possibility of what he forecloses. This
inseparablility of the phantom father from the gay ghost means that the
ghostly father is always also in some sense a "gay father." If this
homosexualization of the paternal/filial relation startles us, that is only
because the Oedipal scenario, as Judith Butler reminds us, assumes that the
heterosexualization of desire has always already been achieved: "The
prohibition on incest presupposes the prohibition on homosexuality."7 The
Oedipal scene presumes that the son rages against the father because the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
260
father’ s priority in time—the fact that the mother loved him first—bars the
mother as an object of desire. What would it mean, however, if the son's
murder of the father works not so much to secure the mother as an object of
love, but rather, to kill off the male-gendered love object that normative
heterosexuality proscribes?
The risk of posing the question in the above terms is that it might be
read as merely reversing the heteronormative logic of the Oedipal scene.
The point is not that the son really wants the father, or that he is truly
homosexual, but that the son's jealousy toward the father is conditioned by a
proscription on a same-sex love that is presumed to be all but dead and
buried. That its ghost lives on, however, is confirmed by the son's patricide.
The implication here is that—while the prohibition on homosexuality is
anterior to the incest taboo—its anteriority does not ensure its effectiveness.
If the prohibition on incest presumes that the son is heterosexual, the
murder of the father suggests that the son's heterosexuality is never finally
secure, that is, that it must be continuously and repeatedly dramatized. In a
sense, the heterosexualization of the son requires the father's solicitation of
his own murder.
We see something of this paternal solicitation in Gods and Monsters
when Whale begs Clay to murder him, to strangle him with his bare hands.
That Whale demands Clay's act of patricide, notwithstanding the absence of
a maternal object over which to wage any paternal/ filial war, reactivates the
primal scene of the father/ son Liebestod. Clay almost murders Whale not with
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
261
the aim of securing any maternal love object for himself, but upon Whale's
(paternal) request that has for its effect the proscription of the father as an
object of the son’ s desire. The murder of the father thus not only serves to
heterosexualize the desire of the son, but by extension, seals the pact that
secures the immortality of the father in the reproduction of himself in the
son, a son whose heterosexual desire would presumably preserve the
institution of heterosexuality through the production of future heterosexual
sons. In this sense, it is less a case of the father reproducing heterosexuality
than of the institution of heterosexuality reproducing itself via the repetition
of the father's heterosexuality in the son.
Whale's patricidal solicitation is traumatic for Clay precisely because it
reactivates the double movement of the paternal demand: it proscribes the
father as an object of desire for the son even as this prohibition retains this
desire as an unlived possibility. The eroticization of Whale's demand
positions Clay squarely between the twin poles of the prohibition and the
desire, between the " n o " of the father embodied in the patricidal demand and
the "yes" that this act of murderous love cannot but allegorize. If the
phantom father is always in some sense a gay father—that is, the ghostly
reminder of the very desire that he forecloses—then this scene, which
hovers between filial vengeance and filial desire, only dramatizes a conflict
between desire and prohibition intrinsic to the normative paternal/filial
relation as such.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
262
Given that the father preserves his immortal presence in the son,
reproduction emerges as a melancholic gesture inseparable from the
prohibition that bars the father as an object of the son's desire. The
proscription against the son's desire for the father affirms the latter's
immortality through the reproduction of the .heterosexual .son. What Butler
calls the "melancholia of gender" is thus always bound up with the problem
of paternal presence, and by extension, a certain disavowal of finitude. When
Butler writes that the male heterosexual melancholic "wants the woman he
would never be," and therefore "wouldn't be caught dead being her," she
hints at the ontological evacuation that "being" the wrong gender is
imagined as precipitating. Tor the melancholic, death is the price that one
pays for being of the same gender as the object that one desires: "His
wanting will be haunted by a dread of being what he wants, so that his
wanting will also always be a kind of dread" (137). But if he becomes what he
wants, he cannot, strictly speaking, be what he desires because the
effacement of "wanting" and "being" puts his being into question. It is not so
m uch that he would not be caught, dead being her, as he could be her only at
the price of being dead. He could be her only at the risk of not being at all.
Within the hyperbolic terms of heterosexual melancholia, then,
wanting a man means being a woman. The condition of womanly (not)being
thus confirms his dread that—if he were to become what he wants, that is, a
woman—he would lose .his claim, to a .masculine ontology.. Yet the .finitude
that he imagines to be the price of being a woman betrays a certain
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
263
disavowal of the hauntological condition of "being a man," The urgency with
which he is told to " be a man," no matter, or perhaps because of, how many
times it is repeated, covers over the impossibility of ever being such a man in
a manner uncontaminated by the feminine, and by extension,
uncontaminatfid by the finitude that the feminine Is thought to represent
We need perhaps look no further than the words inscribed on Clay's
right bicep—"Death before dishonor"—to glean how, for the heterosexual
melancholic, death is preferable to the dishonor of being a woman. Clay's
hyperbolic display of gender as compensation for sexual-object choice is
evident from the opening moments of the film when, wearing a white tank
top that shows off his pumped up arms and torso, he gives a. quick, jab to a,
punching bag hanging from the outside of his ocean-side trailer. Later in the
film when he and Mr. Whale are having lunch and Clay tells him that he
knows that he is gay, their awkward dialogue is punctuated by Clay
aggressively tearing away at his food: all we might imagine as signaling an
anxious assertion of masculinity. For Clay's agreement to sit for the director
placesM m inafenum zed position, that is, a becoming feminiiie that might
suggest a collapse of sexual object-choice onto gender, thus threatening the
heterosexual trajectory of his desire. Indeed, in the scene that immediately
follows Whale's so-called "locker room talk," and thus, Clay's refusal to be
the object of the gay gaze any longer, Clay picks up a woman at a local bar
and has sex with her, as if to prove his heterosexuality both to the spectator
and. to himself. But Clay soon returns to Mr,. Whale, and asks to sit for Mm.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
264
again because he likes listening to his stories. Clay thus reinserts himself into
Mr. Whale's history of melancholia and same-sex love.
The interweaving of Clay's and Whale's individual psychic histories
engenders a paradoxical incorporation whereby the loss that, for Whale,
m ust remain unspoken within the terms of normative heterosexuality is
given life in and through Clay's solicitation of Whale's stories. But if Clay
breathes life into Whale's social death by giving the latter an occasion to
avow and grieve his loss, Clay's heterosexual melancholia can only emerge
from within Whale's story of homosexual love. In this sense, Clay might be
said to become Whale, to take on or assume his place within an avowed gay
male relationship.. Soliciting Whale's stories of lost homosexual attachment,
Clay acts out a scene of ungrieved loss that can be avowed only by
becoming the story of another. Indeed, this story of homosexual loss must
always be the history of another, even though the very solicitation of the
story—Clay's desire to hear the story—reveals this other's history as having
been all along his own.
That Clay's solicitation of Mr. Whale's .stories suggests a certain
conflation of their individual psychic histories is further made dear in one of
Mr. Whale’ s dreams in which Clay plays the role of the would-be mad
stientist and Mr. Whale that of the monster. Clay pops open Mr. Whale's
head, inserts a new brain, and then sutures him back together. Although the
dream might be interpreted in terms of Mr. Whale’ s wish for a new brain,
one devoid of the "electrical storm" that currently disrupts, his. mental
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
265
processes, the dream also inverts the terms by which Mr. Whale seeks to
construct Clay as his monster. While strictly speaking the dream is Whale's,
and thus represents his wishes, fantasies, etc., the dream also allegorizes how
Clay constructs Mr. Whale as his monster, indeed, as the embodiment of a
same-sex love that must remain unlived.
To understand Clay and Whale as displaying two different versions of
a melancholic attachment to a lost same-sex love object might at first appear
to obfuscate Whale's loss within a normative heterosexual framework that,
as Butler puts it, "can mourn the loss of homosexual attachment only with
great difficulty" (133). Mr. Whale's loss, after all, is not a function of
melancholic heterosexuality, but rather, w hat the latter m ust exclude and,
deny in order to constitute itself. If Mr. Whale's loss cannot be avowed
within the terms of normative heterosexuality, that is because the latter
regularly denies the meaning of homosexual loss. As Butler formulates the
problem: " Is it [homosexual loss] regarded as a 'true' love, a 'true' loss, a love
and loss worthy and capable of being grieved, and thus worthy and capable
of being lived.?" (139). indeed, if heterosexuality is articulated through the
workings of melancholia, then any avowal of a lived homosexual loss would
conjure forth the specter of this other, unlived homosexual loss. If there is a
conundrum that Butler's theorization of heterosexual melancholia poses,
then, it is the risk of reproducing—if only at the level of theoretical
description—the insidious logic by which homosexual loss gets supplanted
by the ungrieved loss that founds melanchoitc heterosexuality. The gay male
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
266
who is deprived of mourning the loss of a lover comes to bear the
melancholic residue of the heterosexual melancholic's refusal to mourn the
possibility of a same-sex love object. Indeed, heterosexual melancholia
transforms this spectral possibility into a loss that is taken to be in some
sense more real, .more urgent than the lived loss that a gay male might
experience.
Butler appears to be acutely aware of this problem when she remarks
in the form of a disclaimer that "phenomenologicaily there are many ways of
experiencing gender and sexuality that do not reduce to this equation, that
do not presume that gender is stabilized through the installation of a firm
heterosexuality" (136). Indeed, we misread Butler’ s argum ent If we
understand her to be prescribing a mutual exclusivity between gender
performance and identification. That one can perform as a conventional
"m an " and still desire a man, for instance, is not only within the realm of
possibilities for Butler, but a troubling of the oppositional axes of gender and
sexuality that her work by and large advocates. And yet, how do we
articulate gay and lesbian grief and loss, mourning and melancholia, when
they are so easily absorbed into the constitutive loss that homosexuality is -
for normative heterosexuality? Although Butler alludes to the problem of
homosexual loss, she does not pursue either the question of how such a loss
might be heard above the din of melancholic heterosexuality or what the
articulation of such a loss might mean for the construction of queer kinship
relations.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
267
To ask how gay mourning might articulate itself beyond the
melancholic structure of heterosexuality that absorbs gay loss is not to insist
on the presence of gay kinship against its specialization. For as I argued in
Chapter Three, to claim a place for queer kinship in the very domain of the
ontological that conditions the social death of gays and lesbians is to leave
the ontological conceit of heteronormativity fully in place. This is not to say
that melancholia is legible only in the demand for gay marriage, however.
For no form of kinship—no matter how divorced from biology,
reproduction, or normalizing institutions such as marriage—is necessarily
free from the melancholia of presence. To exhume gay mourning from the
crypt of heterosexual melancholia, then, is not to affirm a self-presence only
denied by the mechanisms of heteronormativity. It is, rather, to affirm
mourning as the condition of any kinship, to affirm mourning as affirmation
and possibility.
What, then, does Whale's loss reveal to us in terms of the construction
of Clay .as his monstrous progeny? While Whale and Clay's paternal/filial
relation draws from the normative model of paternal presence, Whale’ s
position as the non-prohibitive gay father troubles that tradition in significant
ways. For if Whale is father to Clay, and if the conventional father proscribes
the possibility of same-sex love, his active desire for Clay, as well as his
solicitation of Clay's in return, collides with the paternal no, and indeed,
raises the possibility of its transformation into a yes.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
268
Clay's status as a kind of construction is articulated by Ms name, an
appellation that recalls the epigraph to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from
Milton’ s Paradise Lost: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould
me Man, did I solicit thee / from darkness to promote me?"8 If "C lay" names
the raw material with wfech Mr. Whale might construct his monster, then
the dismemberment that he performs on Clay's body— a dismemberment
that the camera, as surrogate for Whale's gaze, is often enlisted to
perform—further links Clay to the monster that Mary Shelley's Dr.
Frankenstein assembles from the remains of dead bodies. From the earliest
moments of the film, Clay is (de)constracted as a body-in-pieoes. Indeed, our
first view of Clay is given to us in pieces: an extreme close-up of Ms
shoulders and back as he pulls his wMte tank top over his head, followed by
another of his face as he shaves. These early shots anticipate what Mr. Whale
will later articulate in his announcement that he wants to paint the
gardener’ s head. The camera mimes Whale's preoccupation with Clay's head
throughout the film by using tight shots of Clay that often cut off the top of
his high forehead, a feature willfully exaggerated, we might imagine, by the
producers' decision to give actor Brendan Fraser a short, spiky haircut. And
if we have any question as to how the camera wants us to read Whale's
preoccupation with Clay's head, it is answered when Boris Karloff shows up
at a fancy Hollywood party along with Whale’ s other "monsters." Gazing
past Boris's head, which is tightly framed on the right of the field of vision,
Whale observes Clay standing some distance beyond the others. The shot
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
269
momentarily allows for Clay's head to occupy the left portion of the visual
field, thus juxtaposing his head with that of Frankenstein's monster.
The construction of Clay as Whale's monster culminates on a gothic
rainy night when Clay, sporting a bath towel and a loose fitting sweater,
suddenly removes the sweater and drops the towel, willfully submitting to
Whale's gaze. "You said you wanted to paint me like a statue,” Clay remarks.
Although Whale originally said that he had no interest in Clay's body, Clay’ s
disrobing transforms his dismembered body into a totality, a coherent
whole. " I t was a dreary night in November that I beheld the accomplishment
of my toils," to recall Dr. Frankenstein's famous lines from Mary Shelley's
novel (56). To make his monster complete, Whale asks Clay to wear an old
World War I gas mask, thus fully inserting Clay into his story of melancholia
and loss. But just as the parts of Dr. Frankenstein's monster fail to add up to
a whole, Clay, who at first agrees to wear the mask, becomes scared and
disoriented and demands that Whale remove the mask from his face. Rather
than remove the mask, however, Whale comes up behind Clay, massages
his shoulders, his chest, and then reaches for his crotch. Enraged by Whale’ s
actions, Clay punches him and throws him on the floor. Whale then implores
Clay to kill him, to strangle him with his bare hands. While at first Clay
appears more than ready to murder the man who has threatened his
sexuality in such a way, Clay suddenly resists Whale's request, throws him
to the floor, and announces: " I am not your monster."
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
270
Whale’ s request for mercy killing asks to be read within the terms of a
heterosexist culture that refuses the reality of gay kinship structures, and
therefore of the loss and grief that accompanies the death of one's lover.
Whale cannot mourn his loss precisely because melancholic heterosexuality
considers such a loss unreal .and unlived. This refusal to recognize kinship
relations effectively renders Whale "socially dead/’ to recall Orlando
Patterson's formulation. Ironically, then, melancholic heterosexuality
transposes Whale’ s lived loss into something unlived and unreal, while
Clay's unlived loss transmogrifies itself into the monster that Whale has
become for him. Yet insofar as Clay embodies melancholic heterosexuality,
he is also Whale's monster, the monstrous appearance of a normative
kinship structure that articulates itself by producing a field of unlivable,
unspeakable love. Whale's demand for mercy killing solicits Clay to
perform, to act out, the murderous conclusion of heterosexual melancholia.
It is the suicidal demand for a certain "hate crime," a crime of passion, as it
were, that would want to put to death this man that he "never" loved and
"never" grieved. Resisting Whale's suicidal request, however. Clay finally
carves out a heterosexual identity that is not necessarily dependent on the
hyperbolization of gender, a performance that—in its extreme version—acts
out in aggressivity and violence. Clay's repeated denial to Hannah, Mr.
Jimmy's maid, his insistence that he "didn’ t do this," articulates Clay outside
the murderous conclusions of melancholic heterosexuality even as it fails to
resolve the other question as to who is finally accountable .for James'Whale's
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
271
suicide. Requesting his own murder, then. Whale asks for the only possible
end to his social death that he understands to be available to him.9
The film ultimately resolves its anxiety around gender, sexuality and
kinship by offering up, ludicrously perhaps, Clay's heterosexual marriage as
an ostensible "triumph" over the unsettling questions that Clay’ s relationship
with Mr. Whale may have engendered. If earlier in the film Clay’ s former
girlfriend tells him that he " is not marriage material," and Hannah
admonishes him that " a man who is not married is nothing," the film's
conclusion reinserts Clay into a normative kinship structure complete with a
wife and a young son. Clay and his son are seen to be watching the scene
from- Frankenstein in whjch. the monster finally finds a . M end in the blind
hermit. After the film concludes, Clay pulls out from his pocket the sketch of
the monster's head that Mr. Whale gave to him. The inscription reads: "For
Clayton—Friend?” Although Whale's question would appear to ask "are you
my friend?", it might also be read as interrogating the very nature of
friendship (i.e., "what is a friend?"). While we might have hoped that what
constitutes .friendship would have remained a source of .investigation, the
film leaves this question relatively unexplored. If, as I suggested at the
outset, the film invokes friendship as a redemptive solution for melancholic
attachment, it overlooks the extent to which friendship can be implicated in
the workings of melancholia itself. Clay gets to act out his scene of same-sex
attachment and loss if only to work toward its inevitable resolution in
heterosexual marriage. What remains of Ms attachment to homosexuality?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
272
The final image of Clay walking alone in the rain, imitating the awkward,
monstrous gait of Frankenstein suggests that the monster of an unlived
homosexual attachment haunts his corporeal frame, indeed, that his gestures
and bodily performance enact a melancholia over and against the
heterosexual marriage that the film conjures forth as the resolution: to Clay's
ambivalence.
Yet perhaps Clay's monstrous gait signals less a refusal of
homosexual attachment than an incorporation of this monstrous possibility
that can never finally be complete. Clay's monstrous gait may remind us
that he is his father's son, yet it is not altogether clear that Whale preserves
himself in Clay according to the heteropatema! model. If the production of
gay children by straight parents is an embarrassment to normative
heterosexuality, that is because it betrays the failure of that institution to
reproduce itself as the same. What Gods and Monsters gives us, however, is a
fantasy of gay male reproduction that fails to reproduce homosexuality as
the same precisely because it has no institution behind it to affirm its
continued presence. Although this lack of. institutional presence is often,
bemoaned in contemporary gay and lesbian politics, this absence is what
opens up possibilities for queer kinship that do not require their
reproduction as the same. An institution names precisely that which strives
to remain the same throughout all of its possible repetitions. Yet this fantasy
of repetition without difference is always haunted by those differences that it
excludes.. .In contemporary politics, for instance, opponents of gay marriage
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
2 7 3
tend to assume that the ubiquity and apparent transhistoricality of
heterosexual marriage affirm its naturalness and continued endurance,
notwithstanding the possibility that the presumptive immortality of this
institution is belied by its institutionalization. Given that it must be forcibly
repeated in order to survive, heterosexual marriage betrays its own
hauntogical condition: hence the circularity of the static, transhistorical
definition of marriage that would have us believe that it somehow precedes
its institutionalization, that there is some natural set of relations between the
sexes understood as marriage that the state merely recognizes. To insist,
however, that gay marriage ought not be legalized on the basis that
marriage is inherently and transhistorically heterosexual—present in all of its
presumptive past, present, and future presents—is to ignore how
heterosexual marriage requires and enforces its own reproduction in order
to appear eternally present.
How far Gods and Monsters goes toward imagining possibilities for
kinship that eschew the institutional repetition of the same is difficult to
decide. Tor while the film offers us heterosexual, closure, it unfolds this
resolution according to a trajectory that troubles its own claim to
normativity. In the scene where Clay is seen watching Frankenstein with his
son, Clay's wife is initially absent. In fact, we first see the enchanted face of
Clay's son watching the scene where Frankenstein meets the blind hermit
before the camera pulls back and reveals Clay, now the proud father, sitting
behind Ms son. Only after Gay shows his son the drawing of Frankenstein
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
274
that Mr. Whale gave to Mm does the camera pull back a second time to
reveal Clay's wife working in the adjacent kitchen, thus resolving the
question as to how this child was made. This narrative reversal in which we
as spectators first see the son, then the father, and finally the wife, inverts the
"natural order of things," as it were, by giving us the son prior to the
heterosexual union that must have generated him. Indeed, we never see a
marriage ceremony or anything of that sort. Against the heterosexualization
of Clay that we might imagine to be the raison d'etre of tW s scene, the
heterosexual bond is made visually secondary to that between father and
son. The scene in this way recalls the absence of the mother in Mary Shelley's
version of the birth of .Frankenstein's monster: Or. Frankenstein "gives birth"
to his monster without the need of a woman. The initial absence of the wife
and mother in this scene suggests that the film is really about fathers and
sons. In this respect, we might recall that the title of Christopher Bram's
novel on which the screenplay was based is Father of Frankenstein. Bram’ s
original title suggests both that Whale's Frankenstein films are his
children— that is, that they function as his surrogate kin— and that the
construction of Clay as his monster signals an effort to produce Ms own
progeny above and beyond his social death.
If one considers that the film gives the paternal bond between Clay
and Ms son priority over the relation between Clay and Ms wife (the only
function the wife seems to have in tMs scene is to remind Clay to take out
the garbage before it rains!), Clay's paternity emerges from within a familiar
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
275
patrilineage where wives and mothers are absent or at least not central to
the kinship structure. It is as if Whale and Clay have produced this son, much
like Quentin and Shreve beget Bon in Absalom. Is this merely the same old
homosocial kinship structure in which the bonds between men are secured
through the absence of women, or does Gods and Monsters■ offer a vision of
gay male kinship and paternity that—while articulated without women—is
not for that reason predicated on their absence? Can Whale and Clay's
friendship be comprehended by what Derrida describes in The Politics of
Friendship as the fratemalization of friendship? While it is true that Clay's
wife is present only insofar as she is absent, her presence/absence is also the
film's alibi, a way for the film to avoid having to imagine a gay male JdnsMp
that is not immediately absorbed into the homosocial model of friendship.
This is not to say that this rather opaque view of gay male kinship in Gods
and Monsters is not itself constrained by certain norms. What would it mean
if Clay were seen to have a daughter? What if he had a daughter and no wife
to be seen in the kitchen, or a daughter and a male partner? What if Clay's
son was mothered by a lesbian best Mend? Such are the possibilities that the
film does not pursue.
What the film does explore, however, is the extent to which making
pictures becomes for Whale—as a socially dead gay male—a vehicle to
reanimate himself vis-a-vis his monstrous kin. Such reanimation-as-kinship is
made clear in the film's highly moving behind-the-scenes recreation of the
animation of Frankenstein's bride. Although Hannah, who is -watching The
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
276
Bride ofErankenstein along with Whale on television, declares the bride to be
"horrible," Whale quietly murmurs to himself: "She's beautiful." Whale's
description of "his bride," coupled with his beaming, even amorous visage,
captures the extent to which his identification with her effectively reanimates
him by extension. We can see the bride's sharp twitches as the electrical
current shocks her into life almost as if bringing Whale back to life by proxy.
This reanimation via Frankenstein's bride functions not so much as a
heterosexualization of Whale's desire, but rather, as an affirmation of film-
making as a surrogate kinship structure. Only through making films, it
seems, could Whale achieve some degree of life in his social death.
T he D eath of AIDS and
the Birth of Marriage
Although Whale 'aims but ultimately fails to mold Clay into Ms
monster, what kind of sexuality might be available to the latter after he has
rejected the murderous conclusion of heterosexual melancholia? Because we
see so little of Clay and his wife on film, the question of how he might
perform.' his gender in relation to the ostensible heterosexual aim of Ms
desire is left suspended. If before Clay molded his gender into a hyperbolic
display of masculinity, then perhaps his gender might now be left to
moulder, to decompose in the grave of heterosexual melancholia. In Mary
Shelley's epigraph from Paradise Lost—"Did I request thee, Maker, from my
day / To mould me man"—the archaic spelling of "mould" speaks to the
paradoxical (de)constraction of the gendered category of "M an ." If Clay's
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
277
gender moulders in, the grave., then whatiorm(s) might the ghost of this
gender take? Might this be a gender that deconstructs the "solid flesh” of
gender melancholia that, in the language of Hamlet, refuses to "melt, thaw,
and resolve itself into a. dew"? Although Butler maintains that
heterosexuality can "mourn the loss of homosexual attachment only with
great difficulty," can such difficulty ever be surmounted? Or would a
heterosexuality that mourns its loss of homosexual attachment no longer be
heterosexuality? f£ the mourning of one's own gender was not a
requirement of normative heterosexuality, then might the "paradise" of
heterosexuality be forever lost to a new structure of kinship, one that
eschews the hyperbolization of heterosexual difference?
That heterosexual, melancholia is a pervasive force in our culture is
confirmed by its manifestations in diverse contexts: from mass rallies held by
the homophobic, right-wing religious organization called "The Promise
Keepers" (who pack stadiums full of crying straight men), to the protests of
Rev, Fred Phelps and -cc^apany— -who sound their violent judgment of
homosexuality at many a memorial for gay men who have died of AIDS (as
if heterosexual melancholia can only sustain itself by parasitically feeding off
gay rites of mourning)—to the melancholia that haunts American statutory
and case law. Indeed, the melancholic model was both challenged and
reasserted in the recent same-sex marriage cases in Hawaii and Vermont.1 0
In the Hawaii case, the state Supreme Court ruled that, because of the strict
language of the state's constitution which bars discrimination on the basis of
sex, the denial of a marriage license to a gay couple is discriminatory because
it requires that the partners entering into the contract be of the opposite sex.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
278
There, is a certainhxilli.an.t simplicity to the court’ s reasoning, a.logic
that—perhaps without the court being fully aware of its broader
implications—clearly links homophobia to the normative opposition of
gender and desire, and by extension, to the melancholia of gender. On, the
face of it, the argument is quite radical in its refusal to sustain the codification
of the gender/desire opposition. The court's action suggests that
discrimination based on sexual orientation is something like a "straw man"
(or woman) for sex-based discrimination. The decision thus inadvertently
gestures toward a certain understanding of the interimplication of gender
and sexual-object choice. With this argument, Hawaii appeared poised to
become the first state to legalize gay marriage. That is, until November of
1998 when the voters circumvented, the court's decision by passing, a
constitutional amendment that defined marriage as a union between a man
and a woman.1 1
The case began in December of 1990, when three same-sex couples
were denied marriage licenses from Hawaii's Department of Health on the
basis that the Hawaii statute (Haw. Rev. Stat. 572-1) requires that the two
parties be of opposite-sex. The three couples then sued the state in Baehr v.
Lewin (1993), arguing that the statute violated their right to privacy, their
right to equal protection, and their right to due process of law. Although the
lawsuit was dismissed by the Circuit Court on the grounds that the couples
had failed to "state a claim of relief” (i.e., regardless of whether the violation
was true or false, the law did not have to provide them a right of recovery),
the couples brought the case before the Hawaii Supreme Court on appeal.
While the Supreme Court rejected the right to privacy argument, a close
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
279
reading of Hawaii's Equal. Protection Clause, provided enough., doubt, to
cause the case to be remanded to the Circuit Court. That is, the Supreme
Court found that Hawaii's equal protection clause was in fact "more
elaborate" than that in the U.S. Constitution (562).1 2 As the court explained:
" B y its plain language, the Hawaii Constitution prohibits state-sanctioned
discrimination against any person in the exercise of his or her civil rights on
the basis of sex/'1 3 Because the Hawaii Constitution provides stronger
provisions against .sex-based discrimination than does .the U.5, Constitution,
the court decided that the Hawaii marriage law was unconstitutional. In
remanding the case to the lower court, the Hawaii Supreme Court held that
the law must be reviewed under "strict scrutiny"—that is, that the court had
to demonstrate a-compelling state interest in. not allowing same-sex. couples
to marry. With the burden of proof on the state, and limiting that proof
primarily to claims that households headed by same-sex couples impeded
the healthy development of children, the state, the circuit court ruled on
remand, cannot deny a couple a.marriage license simply because the parties
are of the same gender.
Although the Supreme Court's holding in Baehr that gender is a
"suspect" classification would at first appear to subvert the desire/gender
opposition, this same court’ s rejection of a fundamental privacy right for
same-sex marriage undermines the radical implications of that subversion.
Following from precedent set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Baehr
majority opinion stated:
We do not believe that a right to same-sex marriage m so rooted In
the traditions and collective conscience of our people that failure to
recognize it would violate the fundamental principles of liberty and
justice that lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions. Nor
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
280
do we believe that a right to same-sex marriage is implicit in. the
concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would
exist if it were sacrificed (556).
Yet as Steven Homer deftly observes, the court found that there is no
fundamental right to same-sex marriage only on the basis of the federal
privacy doctrine that takes marriage as inextricable from procreation.1 4
Given that the assimilation of marriage to the exigencies of reproduction
requires that marriage be defined as a contract between opposite genders,
the rejection of the privacy argument reinscribes the desire/gender
opposition that the determinatiQii of gender as a suspect classification would
contest. In short, the Baehr court reaffirms discrimination based on gender
notwithstanding its constitutional invalidation. The court even goes so far as
to suggest that " it is immaterial whether the plaintiffs .. . are homosexuals," a
formulation that suggests a disentangling of gender from sexuality which
the court is unprepared to sustain (558).
Yet if the melancholic refusal of mourning returns to the Baehr court
despite all of its efforts to the contrary, despite its "discovery" that the
heterQs:e:x,uallzati.on.of marriage is secured by barring my desire for my own,.
unmourned gender, what are we to make of the phenomenon of homosexual
melancholia? For it is precisely this other melancholia that surfaces in the
desire for gay marriage, a demand whose emergence in the wake of
numerous calls for a "post-AIDS” gay culture—pronouncements that
triumphantly declare the end of AIDS—might well leave us asking if the turn
toward marriage can be read apart from the turn away from AIDS. Indeed, I
would argue that melancholia persists in and as the demand for the
legalization of gay marriage..
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
281
To claim .that the quest for gay marriage is implicated in melancholia
might appear to leave us as at an impasse. If both the exclusion from
marriage and the demand to be included in it are melancholic, then what
political.- options are available to gays and lesbians? The desire to be. included,
in the domain of marriage, however, has the effect of producing a series of
exclusions: the abjection of those gays and lesbians who do not subscribe to
the ideology of legalized marriage, and therefore the exclusion of kinship
otherwise than marriage and family; as well as them arpnaljzation of AIDS
and those living with it.
In terms of this latter exclusion, we need perhaps look no further than
one of Andrew Sullivan’ s many passionate pleas for gay marriage to glean
some sense of how the presumptive "end" of. a. .serious and. sustained
engagement with the AIDS crisis conditions the beginning of the call for gay
marriage. Responding to the charge that the stigmatization and increased
criminalization of gay sex, especially in public, marks the emergence of a
"Sex. Panic" in American ■adturai politics, Sullivan, writes:
It is a victim panic, a terror that with the abatement of AIDS we might
have to face the future and that the future may contain certain
opportunities that gay men and women have never previously
envisaged, let alone grasped. It is a panic that the easy identity of
victimhood might be slipping from our grasp and that maturity may
be calling us to more difficult and challenging terrain. ■
It is not hard to see what that terrain is. It is marriage.1 5
Setting aside for the moment how anyone, let alone an HIV-positive gay
man,, could suggest that, the "terrain" of. marriage is "mare difficult and
challenging" than an epidemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of
lives over more than a twenty-year period, we cannot but note the sober
urgency with which Sullivan solicits us to accede to the "maturity" of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
282
marriage. Although Sullivan would have us believe that the move from
AIDS to marriage is made possible by the so-called "abatement of AIDS"—by
which he means the emergence of new drug therapies for HIV-positive
people that have been, widely successful in extending, their life
expectancy—this progressive narrative from "death" (AIDS) to " life"
(marriage) obscures how these seemingly separate terrains might overlap.
That Sullivan can characterize marriage as more difficult and challenging for
gays and .lesbians than the AIDS crisis betrays a certain transposition. of the
anxiety of AIDS into the context of marriage, as if the difficulty associated
with marriage works to displace Sullivan's own sense of panic and terror in
the face of a medical crisis that is not yet over. Marriage can appear to be
"difficult’ ’ and:, "challenging" toSulivan.pnly because he has supplanted the
truly difficult terrain of AIDS with the safety of marriage, and at the risk of
trivializing the persistence of the epidemic.
Although Sullivan advocates marriage because he believes that the
end of AIDS calls for more sustained and "mature" .kinship -relations among
gay men in particular, it is unclear if the kinship that he wants to affirm is as
concerned with the living as he would have us believe. As Steven Homer
observes: "Those friends who have died of AIDS are irretrievably gone.
Gone, and marriage won’ t bring them back" (6). Read against Homer’ s
remark, Sullivan's urgent call to those gay men left behind, to those who not
only "escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who
contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths and still survived,"
emerges less as a summons to the living than a summons io the dead,
indeed, a conjuration of sorts that means to make present all of those lives
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
283
that have been lost. Sullivan thus returns us to the dilemma that Creon faces
in Antigone, and with which we began in Chapter One, when he denies
mourning only to find himself in kinship with the dead. This attachment to
those who are already dead thus .reveals a . melancholic refusal, of Sullivan's
own ghostliness. While he observes that his diagnosis is ” no different in kind
than the diagnosis every mortal being lives with," this recognition of a
common hauntological condition is in tension with his repeated affirmation
of ..self-presence, often at the expense of those "others" with whom he .shares
the same diagnosis. In a critique of Sullivan, Phillip Brian Harper notes how
Sullivan begins by recognizing how the majority of those infected with
H T V —that is, non-whites both here and in other countries—will not have
access to the drugs, only to disavow the significance of their continued
suffering and deaths, writing: "But it is also true—and in a way that most
people in the middle of this plague privately recognize—that something
profound has occurred in these last few months."1 6 A diagnosis of HIV
infection "no longer signifies death. It merely signifies illness" (ibid.). Given
Sullivan's unlimited capacities for denial, we might suppose that, for him,
death no longer signifies death. Indeed, with the death of illness, the death of
death cannot be far behind. Yet it is not only his own death that Sullivan
disavows, but the importance of. the deaths of those that he acknowledges
will not benefit from the latest medical advances in AIDS treatment. If
Sullivan can announce that "most people in the middle of this
plague ... recognize.. . that something profound has occurred," and write
this on the .heels of Ms recognition that "most people" means and will
continue to mean non-whites deprived of the best medical care, then AIDS
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
284
does still signify imminent death for "most [non-white] people," despite
Sullivan's attempt to supplant this "minority" referent with a presumptive
American, white majority. Although whites do not count as the majority of
AIDS cases w orld wide,, they somehow make their way .into the "middle of
the plague" as a minority whose wealth and political advantage allows
Sullivan to dismiss the deaths of non-whites so easily. This disavowal of the
deaths of those who are already deemed socially dead leads Harper to link
Sullivan's logic of "I know ...... but. . to the ..Freudian concept of fetishism,
and by extension, to the fetishization of normative whiteness. This
fetishization of whiteness is first and foremost a fetishization of white
presence, which means that Sullivan's disavowal of minority .AIDS deaths .is,
at its core, a refusal of his own finitude. If normative kinship involves a
fetishization of the other, a conjuration of the other as an absent / presence
that in turn affirms one's own presence, Sullivan's affirmation of a certain
kinship with those minorities with. whom, he shares the same, diagnosis
evokes the specter of their suffering and dying only as a way of securing his
presence through a fetishized construction of whiteness as property. He
affirms the property value of whiteness whose origins Cheryl Harris traces
back to the plaintiffs argument in Plessy v. Fergussmt.1 7 Sullivan protects his
investment in whiteness by resigrdfying his diagnosis in terms of illness
while leaving poor people of color to bear the burden of his own disavowed
death. This is not to claim for AIDS a static signification immune to the
impr.ovem.ents offered by new drug th.erapi.es in. the. West. Nor is it to
suggest that Sullivan’ s own access to these drugs does not indeed shift what
it means for him to be H T V positive. Yet to recognize the changing terrain of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
285
AIDS says nothing of how so many are excluded from the benefits that
Sullivan enjoys, and how his insouciance toward their exclusion relieves him
of having to recognize the death that haunts his and any life. After all,
having access to good .medical care, or being D3V negative does not make
one immune to death.1 8
Sullivan is certainly not alone in his triumphant sounding of the death
knell of AIDS. Since the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver
which, saw the official'- anpotmcement of the success of the new protease
inhibitors, pronouncements that declare the end of AIDS have been
ubiquitous, as if by shear discursive repetition Americans hope to conjure it
away for good. In his ironically titled essay, "Not-About-AIDS," David
Soman traces the emergence and .intersection of various. AIDS discourses
that either talk about AIDS without talking about it, or explicitly (and
contradictorily) begin their engagement with AIDS by denying that they are
speaking about AIDS.1 9 Asking us to consider how "the 'end of AIDS' itself
{might] be understood as an AIDS discourse that tells us much about our
current relationship to AIDS," Romhn contests the division between " A ID S "
and "post-AIDS" discourse; that is, he resists the separation of the work of
mourning that is AIDS from the work of mourning that the announcement
of its death betrays (.2 ). As a corollary, we might also ask how AIDS itself
becomes a cathected site of mourning in the wake of its presumptive death.
The emergence of the gay marriage issue on the heels of a dying AIDS crisis
suggests that marriage promises a certain ontologization of those we have
lost. Moreover, It reflects an acute anxiety that— if- the rumor of the death of
AIDS turns out not to be an exaggeration—then gay men could find
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
286
themselves bereft of a life-and-death crisis around which to organize their
kinship relations. This mourning for AIDS that attends its perceived end
might register one explanation for why the prospect of living longer and
healthier lives due to emergent treatment advances is ..reported by many
persons with HIV to be a difficult and sometimes terrifying possibility.
In his preface to Love Undetectable, Sullivan notes that he began to
write a book on friendship while in the process of expanding his New York
Times, essay only to discover- that "the two subjects were, after all,
inseparable” (ix). His long excursus on the question of friendship that closes
the book, " If Love Were All," is a eulogy in part for a close friend who died of
AIDS. Sullivan situates his meditation on friendship among some of the most
well-known treatises on the .subject, including those of .Aristotle, Montaigne,
and Augustine. What emerges is an often moving portrait of friendship and
Sullivan's pain in coming to terms with its loss. So high does Sullivan elevate
friendship above other forms of kinship that we are left wondering how this
view sits with his championing of marriage elsewhere:
For, of all our relationships, friendship is the most common and the
most natural. In its universality, it even trumps family. Many of us fail
to marry, and many more have no children; others never know their
mother and father, and plenty have no siblings. But any human being
who has ever lived has had a friend (176).
Sullivan goes on to argue that "the great modem enemy of friendship has
turned out to be. love...., the. love to which every life m ust apparently leach
the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our
popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a
primary and ultimate good in every Western child" (198). Given Sullivan's
preoccupation with gay marriage, it is strange that .he criticizes this m odern
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
287
cult of love. And indeed,- toward the end of the chapter, Sullivan abandons
any further inquiry into the politics of friendship when he claims that "the
most important cultural aim of the modern homosexual
movement.... should be to bring the homosexual child back into the fold of
his or her family ..." (232).
Yet if we are at a loss to reconcile Sullivan's elevation of friendship
with his obsession with marriage, we might perhaps turn to the end of the
chapter where Sullivan recounts the burial of his friend, Patrick. Andrew, his
friends, and Pat's family have taken a boat out into the Gulf to scatter
Patrick's ashes into the sea. They cast the ashes into the wind, like "powdered
sugar," and then suddenly one of Pat's brothers takes his shirt off and yells
"Tut going in’ " (252). After hesitating a. moment, the others follow suit, and
jump into the Gulf to bathe themselves in the waters now sprinkled with the
remains of Patrick. Sullivan unites:
I remember the- shock, of. warmth as my body fell into the sea, and the
strange mist that surrounded me as I opened my eyes in the water,
and the pure, sweet breeze that greeted me as I reached the surface,
and looked around me again, and breathed, suddenly, for air (252).
Sullivan's baptism in the waters that hold the remains of his Mend, recalls the
final image of James Whale's lifeless body floating in the pool. Similar to
Sullivan's dive into the ocean, Clay jumps into the pool, not so much to join
Whale as to save him. Yet perhaps saving a friend from death is not so far
removed from joining a friend in death. Perhaps diving into death is what
friendship is all about. Coming up for air, Sullivan returns from the watery
grave of friendship to live on, not perhaps as before, but forever immersed
in the remains that return to him, and to all of us, in the question: friend?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
SpectropMlia
288
How .might we pursue this interrogative beyond the question "are
you my friend, or will you be my friend?"? For what finally is a friend, and
who is a friend? What is this relation to others that we call friendship, and
that we distinguish from family or blood ties? Derrida's answer to this last
question-in The Politics of Friendship is that, there is finally nothing that
rigorously separates friendship from family and kinship. Friendship, as it has
been conceived from the Platonic tradition forward, is synonymous with
fraternity and therefore with what Derrida calls the "double exclusion of the
feminine," by which the possibility of friendship between women and
friendship between men and women is almost nowhere on the horizon. The
"philosophical paradigm" thus corresponds to the "essential and essentially
sublime figure of virile homosexuality."2 0 We must be careful,
however— more mindful perhaps than. Derrida would appear to be
here—about yoking friendship to some transhistorical notion of
homosexuality. For the homosexual character of friendship across history is
not necessarily or essentially congruent with what we understand in the
modem West as sexual.relations between men.. .Perhaps what Lucelrigaray
has called hommosexualite— which could include both homosexual and
homosocial relations between les hommes (hence the double "m") but would
not necessarily reduce one set of relations to the other—might be better
suited to describe the philosophical paradigm of friendship.2 1 For the
assimilation of friendship to homosexuality leads Sullivan to the rather
absurd conclusion that heterosexual men have not cultivated male-to-male
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
289
friendships, to which we can only respond: well, of course they have.
Friendship is certainly not the staked-out terrain of gay men. And fraternity
bears no essential relationship to sexual relations between men (to the great
chagrin, perhaps, of gay frat boys everywhere!). Calling our attention to the
fratemalization or hommosexualization of friendship, however, Derrida's
analysis should caution us against the temptation to idealize friendship as
somehow escaping all of the trappings of biology, blood ties, and filiation.
Although Sullivan argues that "friendship trumps family," the
fratemalization of friendship means that it will have been family all along.
The risk of understanding friendship as somehow surpassing family is
that friendship becomes just as idealized as the domain of normative kinship
that it claims to have left behind. To the extent, that friendship preserves the
terms of kinship that it ostensibly negates, friendship might be better
understood as the sublation of family. We can observe something of this
transposition of the idiom of kinship into the domain of friendship when we
say "he is like a brother to me," or "my friends are like family," or when we
talk about "blood brothers."2 2 That friendship remains tethered to family
even where it seems most radically to break from it is suggested, as I noted
earlier, by Montaigne in his De Varrdtie. Montaigne cites Aristippus who,
"when, one pressed hurt for the affection, that he must have toward his,
children for having come out of him, he began to spit, saying that we just as
surely engendered lice and worms" (313).2 3 Montaigne then goes on to cite
Plutarch, who remarked on his relation to his brother that he did not make
much of their "having come out of the same hole" (ibid.).2 4 Montaigne
would have us believe that friendship—unlike marriage, which often has
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
290
other aims than affection and love—"has no business or commerce than
with itself" (315). Yet friendship, as Montaigne conceives it, looks
suspiciously like the dialectical model of kinship that seeks to affirm one's
self-presence through the relation, to the other;
For all that we ordinarily call friends and friendships are only
acquaintances and intimacies tied by some occasion or convenience,
by the means of which our souls intertwine. In the friendship of which
I speak they were combined and intertwined one in the other, in a
union so universal that they erased and could no longer find the seam
that joined them. If I was pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that it
could only be expressed by responding: "Because it was him; because
it was me" (318)?5
Montaigne thus returns us to the fantasy of dialectical union, and therefore
to the dream of self-presence. While he has no truck with leveling the edifice
of biological kinship, Montaigne nonetheless retains an idealized model of
friendship that says much about how kinship comes to inhabit the domain of
friendship. Yet the explanation that Montaigne gives for his love—"Because
it was him; because it was me"—suggests a tension within the passage
between a dialectic that erases the seam that joins him and his friend, and a
relation., of difference that resist identity. The difference between "me" and.
"him" remains. Those friendships that Montaigne dismisses as mere
"acquaintances" and "intimacies" where souls intertwine yet fail to become
one would also describe the necessarily failed union with his dead friend.
Asking what friendship would look like divorced from the trappings
of fraternity, kinship, blood relations, and the family, Derrida suggests that a
friendship otherwise than kinship is always to come, a venir:
As if there have never been but specters, on two sides of this
opposition, on two sides of the present, in the past and in. the future..
All phenomena of friendship, all the things and all the beings that one
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
291
must love belong to spectrally. "One must love" means: specters, one
must love specters, one must respect the specter (320).2 6
To love is to love a specter. Or as Simon Critchley puts it: "One is only a
friend of that which is going to die."2 7 This observation leads Critchley to
contrast what he calls the necrophilia of the traditional conception of
friendship—which maintains a strict distinction between the living and the
dead—with what Derrida refers to variably as spectrality and sur-vivance:
"One might say that sur-vivance is the first opening onto alterity insofar as
alterity opens in the relation to mortality... . The precondition of friendship
is the acknowledgement of mortality" (259). Mourning is the originary
possibility of friendship. As Derrida remarks: "It is thanks to death that
friendship can be declared" (335).2 8 Whether one declares one's friendship on
the occasion of the other's death, which is the case with Montaigne, Sullivan,
and many famous treatises on friendship, or if one declares it to one's living
friends, "it comes down to the same thing, it avows death thanks to that
which finally arrives, never missing the chance to declare itself" (335).
Thanks to death. Grace a la mort, writes Derrida. By the grace of death,
we have friendship. That the expression "thanks to ..." bears both a
positive and negative valence affirms an ambivalent relationship to death,
that is, given that death is responsible both for the end of friendships and for
their possibility. We should thank death, even welcome it. And this invitation
that we extend toward death begins with an invitation to the other, to the
other as specter. To speak to the other as specter. For the love of specters.
Spectrophilia.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
292
"Oh my friends, there is no friend!" Derrida places this Aristotelian
apostrophe under close surveillance as he traces its permutations in Kant,
Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Blanchot:
Someone turns in effect toward his friends, "O h my friends . , . but
the apostrophe turns on itself, its carries in it a predicative
proposition, it envelopes an indicative proposition. Claiming to state a
fact, it also announces a general truth in the form of a judgment:
"there is no friend'.. . . How to affirm without contradiction that to
have friends one does not have any friend? (261).2 9
This "performative contradiction" that hovers between the plural and the
singular "resembles at once both a recall and a call" (262).3 0 It calls on the
presence of one's friends in the present. It assumes their presence prior to
the call. Yet it also calls to them, calls or conjures them up; "it makes a sign
toward the future," to a friendship beyond fraternity, a friendship yet to
come (ibid.).3 1 And if there is no [one] friend, perhaps that is because a non-
fraternal friendship requires the rupture of the couple/copula, the couple as
the residue of fraternity, kinship, family, and reproduction: of "two souls
united in one body." As Derrida asks, "how could one soul inhabit more
than one body without haunting them?" (216).3 2 So that there can be more
than one friend, "a friend never has a proper place.. . . The body of the
friend, his own body, would always be able to be the body of the other. It
would stay there as a guest, a visitor, a traveler, a passing occupant.
Friendship would be the Unheimlich" (202).3 3
So perhaps it is good, bon that there is no friend. The bon of kinship
always pluralized by the spectral call to one's friends: 0 mes amis.. . . But
what about when they call on us? Perhaps all they really want is for us to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
293
listen to them. For they were never ours. What else can we do, but listen to
them being ghosts?
Oh my friends who were not my friends....
1 Michel de Montaigne. Essais Livre I (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Tditions,
1998), 315. "... il riy a affaire ni commerce que d'elle-mdme."
2 Like Cheng, Butler interrogates Freud's distinction between mourning and
melancholia only to conclude that the two registers are in some sense
coextensive, that "there is no final breaking of the attachment" (134). As I
noted in my discussion of Cheng, however, to point toward the impossibility
of a full and final end to the process of mourning is still not to address how
melancholic identity begins by refusing absence. If (semi)mourning and
melancholia are to be distinguished from one another, their difference is to
be found not in how they end, but rather, in how they begin. Because
mourning always names an interminable process, the characterization of
melancholia as "unfinished" fails to grasp what is most at stake in
distinguishing it from semi-mourning: namely, the disavowal of my finitude
in and through the refusal of the other's loss. The belief in the continued
presence of the other notwithstanding his/her absence is conditioned first
and foremost by the presumption of my own self-presence.
3 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 210.
4 Melanie Klein, "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States," in
The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1 ,1921-1945 (New York: The Free Press,
1975), 363. See also " A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-
Depressive States," in this volume.
5 Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, L'Ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Editions
Aubier Montaigne, 1978), 427. " S i le fantdme n'est pas lid a la perte d'un
objjet, il ne saurait dtre le fait d’ un deuil manqud. Tel serait plutot le cas du
mdlancolique ou de toutes les personnes qui portent une tombe en elles."
6 John Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading
of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 104.
7 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 135.
8 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modem Prometheus (New York: Signet
Classic, 1983).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
294
9 Indeed, the transposition of Whale’ s "social death" into actual death signals
an inversion of Patterson's formulation in which the slave becomes socially
dead after having escaped material death. Such a reversal is all too familiar in
dominant AIDS discourses in which the already socially dead gay male who
dies of AIDS arrives at the ineluctable conclusion of a lifestyle that was all
along deemed to be (as some members of the religious right smugly
pronounce) a "death style."
1 0 While the majority opinion in Baker v. Vermont did not broach the question
of sex discrimination, Justice Johnson's dissent, in part, from the majority
argues that the rejection of marriage licenses to same-sex couples is " a
straightforward case of sex discrimination." See Baker v. Vermont 170 Vt. 194;
744 A.2d 864 (1999), 252. He also chastised the majority for shirking their
duty to remedy this discrimination immediately by leaving it to the
legislature to decide how gays and lesbians shall receive the same benefits as
heterosexuals, either by including the former in existing marriage laws or
inventing a parallel domestic partnership system. After much deliberation,
the state legislature opted for the latter, and on April 26,2000, the Governor
of Vermont signed into law a bill that legalized so-called "civil-unions" for
same-sex couples. The civil unions afford gay couples almost all of the same
benefits that married heterosexual couples receive.
1 1 Pursuant to the passage of this constitutional amendment by Hawaiian
voters, The Supreme Court of Hawaii overturned the circuit court's decision
on remand that the denial of same-sex marriage violated the state
constitution. See Baehr v. Mikke, 92 Haw. 634 (1999).
1 2 Article I, section 5 of the Hawaii Constitution states that " ’ no person shall
.. .be denied the equal protection of the laws, nor be denied the enjoyment
of the person’ s civil rights or discriminated against in the exercise thereof
because of race, religion, sex or ancestry." HRS Const. Art. I, § 5 (2001).
5 3 Baehr v. Lewin, 74 Haw. 530 (1993), 562. Note that the defendant named in
the case changed to "M ikke" when Lawrence Mikke took over for John
Lewin as Director of the Department of Health.
1 4 Steven Homer, "Against Marriage," in 29 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties
Law Review (Spring 1993).
1 5 Andrew Sullivan, "The Marriage Moment," The Advocate 0anuary 20,
1998), 61-63. Cited in Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics,
and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135.
1 6 Andrew Sullivan, ’ When Plagues End,” in The New York Times (November
10,1996). [accessed July 16 2002]. Available from: www.ny times .com;
INTERNET. Phillip Brian Harper, "Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
295
Relations of Public Exchange: Notes On Directions For Queer Critique/' in
Social Text 52*53 (1997).
1 7 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property" in 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993).
1 8 In the subsequent publication of his book, Love Undetectable, Sullivan
included a revision of his New York Times article that is as problematic as
the original. Of particular note are the changes made to the passage that I
critique here. Clearly responding to the vehement criticisms of gay activists
who were disturbed by his seeming dismissal of those who constitute the
majority of HIV infections world wide, Sullivan asserts: " I do not apologize
for the following sentence. It is true—truer now than it was when it was first
spoken, and truer now than even six months ago—that something profound
has occurred these last two years." If Sullivan is as firm in his opinion as he
claims, then we might ask why he proceeds to make three key revisions to
his original essay. He removes the phrase "most people in the middle of this
plague/' and adds the following qualifications:" ... a diagnosis of HIV
infection in the West; and "F or those who can get medical care...." If he
need not apologize for the original essay, then why does he add these
qualifications here? Given his revisions, of course, there is no need to
apologize for what he writes here. That he cannot let those changes speak for
themselves, however, belies his rejection of the apologetic mode. In short,
the alterations perform the apology that he denies. See his Love Undetectable:
Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival (New York: Vintage, 1998), 7-8.
1 9 David Roman, "Not-About-AIDS,” in GLQ 6:1 (2000).
2 0 Jacques Derrida, Politiques de I'amitie (Paris: Editions G a M M e, 1994), 310.
"... double exclusion du feminine " " ... paradigm philosophique ...;
"figure essentieile et essentiellement sublime de Phomosexualitl virile."
2 1 See Luce Mgaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985).
2 2 As the OED notes, the word "marrow"—whose "goodness" we noted in
Chapter Three with regard to the figure of "Bon," and which has the
somewhat antiquated verbal form "to marrow," or "to marry"—was also
used in the fifteenth century to denote something called "marrowship,"
which meant "association or companionship," and thus displayed a usage
similar to that of the word friendship. Friendship, as it has been conceived
largely through the idiom of kinship, would appear always to have been
something like marrowship. The "spirit” of friendship thus preserves the
material base of kinship that it would supercede.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
296
2 3 ",.. quand on le pressait de 1 'affection qu'il devait a ses enfants pour etre
sortis de lui, il se met a craeher, disant que cela en etait aussi bien sorti • que
nous engendrions bien poux et des vers."
24" .. . pour etre sorti de m tee trou."
2 5 Au demeurant, ce que nous appelons ordinairement amis et amities, ce ne
sont qu'accointance et familiarites nou£es par quelque occasion ou
commodite, par le moyen de laquelle nos Hmes s'entretiennent. En 1 'ami tie
de quoi je parle, elles se melent et confondent l'une en 1 'autre, d'un melange
si universal qu'elles effacent et ne retrouvent plus la couture qui les a jointes.
Si on me presses de dire pourquoi je 1'aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut
exprimer qu'en repondant: parce que c'etait lui • parce que c'etait moi."
2 6 "Comme s’ il n ’ y avait jamais que de spectres, des deux cotes de toute
opposition, des deux cdtes du present, dans le passe et dans 1'avenir. Tons les
phdnomfenes de I'amitie, toutes les choses et tous les etres qu'il faut aimer
reinvent de la spectralite. 'H faut aimer' veut dire: les spectres, il faut aimer les
spectres, il faut respecter le spectre."
2 7 Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (New York: Verso, 1999), 270.
2 8 "C'est grace k la mort que I'amitie peut se declarer."
2 9 "Quelqu'un se tourne en effet vers ses amis, 'Q mes ..amies .. . • / mais
1 'apostrophe tourne sur elle-meme, elle porte en elle une proposition
predicative, elle enveloppe une declaration indicative, Pretendant constater
un fait, elle 6nonce aussi une verite generale dans le forme du jugement: 'il
n'y a nul a m / .... Comment affirmer sans contradiction qu'a avoir des
amis on n'a aucun ami?"
3 0 "... ressemble tout a la fois un rappel et a un appel."
3 1 "... elle fait signe vers le futur."
3 2 " . . . comment une seule ame pourrait habiter plus d'un corps sans les
hanter?"
3 3 " ... un ami n'a jamais de lieu propre.. . . Le corps de 1'ami, son corps
propre pourrait toujours etre le corps de 1 'autre. II y logerait comme un
invite, un visiteur, un voyageur, un occupant de passage. Unheimlich serait
I'amitiC"
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
297
5
Beloved's Claim
Slavery is cannibalism, not that of
eating, but of selling human flesh
and blood; one cuts the man up for
food, and the other sells him for
money.
—John Jolliffe before
Commissioner Pendery,
Garner Fugitive Slave Case,
1856.
The moral question is thus not, nor
has it ever been: should one eat or
not eat... but since once must eat
in any case . . . how for goodness
sake should one eat well?
—Jacques Derrida, "Eating
W ell"
W
HAT DOES it mean to claim one's children as property? When
Sethe declares, "Beloved, she my daughter. She mine," what is the
difference between her claim and the slave master's? That is, how can we
understand the relation between a maternal claim and a property claim
other than in terms of simple opposition and contestation? And what of
Beloved's claim, the claim of a ghost who reaches across time and space,
trespassing the borders that separate the living and the dead? In the closing
pages of the novel, Morrison writes: "Although she has claim, she is not
claimed."1 The grammar that allows one to have claim figures the claim as
itself claimed. One not only claims one's due—whether what is due
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
298
constitutes a slave master's abstract right to property or, in the case of
Beloved, a demand to be addressed—but one claims one's claim. Prior to
what I daim, the claim itself must be mine. The mineness of the claim ensures
that the claim always returns to me, as if to compensate in advance for the
possibility of not having one's demand answered, indeed, for not getting
what one claims. The mineness of the claim, then, describes the
compensatory fantasy by which dispossession ceases to be dispossession,
where absence and loss are always recuperated.
Dispossession, of course, is not only entangled with loss and
mourning, but with the activities of exclusion and abjection as well. Indeed,
Beloved's demand for recognition finds itself in tension with the will of a
community that seeks to exordse her, to "disremember" her. The women
quit their claim on Beloved: they dismiss, release or otherwise absolve
themselves of it. For Morrison, disremembering names a process of
incorporation by which the "chewing laughter swallowjs] [the other] all
away" (ibid.). To disremember is thus to dismember, indeed, to cut the other
up into incorporable, digestible pieces. Yet if we take the spectral other in
only to disclaim or dispossess ourselves of it, what does it mean to say that a
ghost has claim, that it daims us with an urgency prior to any claim that we
might make on it? What is this strange sense of possession that emerges
anterior to our claim, as if we do not so much possess our kin—as the
vocabulary that permits one to say my daughter or my mother, etc.,
suggests—as we are possessed by them?
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
299
Certainly the conventional language of kinship does not suppose that
one possesses one's children in the same way that a slave master owns his
slaves. Kinship is not identical to slavery. Yet, as I argued in Chapter Two,
the conventional opposition of slavery and kinship idealizes the latter by
insulating it from property relations. Hence, Hortense Spillers' effort to
displace the patriarchal focus of Patterson's notion of social death retains an
idealized conception of kinship despite her turn toward the maternal.2 For
the violence of appropriation is not only a question of corporeal
enslavement, but of any relation to the other. As Emmanuel Levinas would
have it, violence emerges in any dialectical relation to the other in which the
other is nardssistically reduced to the same. Kinship, as I have been arguing
throughout this dissertation, is not immune to violence, appropriation, and
narcissism.
Beloved's spectral claim, however, lacks the ontological weight of an
ostensibly self-present " I ," and therefore would appear to eschew the
reduction of the other to the same that, for Levinas, is conditioned by
ontology. Yet it is Beloved who, echoing Sethe, declares: " I am Beloved and
she [Sethe] is mine" (210). What is perhaps most striking about Beloved's
language is that it transforms the object of love—the beloved—into a subject
that might claim to possess others: "I" am Sethe or Denver’ s beloved, but
also, I am Beloved. The reflexivity of her claim thus works to secure a certain
self-presence that is in considerable tension with Beloved's hauntological
condition. To recall Derrida, if " I am " always says " I am mortal," then it also
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
300
always says something like "I am (dearly) beloved," "I am" speaks, or rather
writes, its own epitaph. "M y" death, is the condition of saying " I am ."
Despite its apparent possessiveness, Beloved's claim does exhibit
elements of a Levinasian ethics. Indeed, those whom she haunts are
possessed by her prior to any acceptance of responsibility or obligation. Her
claim is therefore consistent with Levinas' notion that ethics does not
commence with a conscious decision, but with a responsibility anterior to my
liberty, a "passivity more passive than all passivity."3 Perhaps it is no
accident, then, that the novel begins with an address—124—which is both a
street address, and therefore the address of the ghost, and a call to address
ourselves to the ghost. 124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The ghost comes
first. From the beginning we are held hostage to its demands, to its jealous
desire to be loved. Commenting on the opening of her novel, Morrison
remarked: " I wanted the sudden feeling of being snatched up and thrown
into that house, precisely the way they [slaves] were."4 We are thus urged to
understand our reading in terms of being somehow enslaved to the
other/ghost, and in a manner that recalls the ethical philosophy of Levinas.
Against the entire Western philosophical tradition and its thought of being,
Levinas locates ethics, and therefore the other, prior to ontology. For
Levinas, " I " am always called to the other, to whom I am held hostage by an
"unlimited responsibility," a responsibility that extends to the point of
substituting myself for the other.
Levinas’ claim, as it were, is undoubtedly rather hyperbolic in its
affirmation of exteriority, of an "absolute other" that cannot be reduced to an
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
301
object of my comprehension. For Levinas, the other always come first, as if
the violence of ontology can only be countered through a language that
marks a decisive rupture with that tradition: "Ontology as first philosophy is
a philosophy of power/'5 Yet, if only a radical reversal of the primacy of
being can affirm a non-egological relation to the other, such a claim tends to
imagine the other as absolutely outside the same, notwithstanding the
possibility that appropriation is both inevitable yet finally impossible.
It is precisely this originary violence that Derrida takes to be the
condition of ethics. Despite Levinas' daim that the ethical relation to the
other is a relation without relation, that is, a relation in which the other is
absolutely other, and not other than me, Derrida reminds us that "I" am also
always the other of the other. "O ther" must mean other than me. And given
that I am also the other’ s other, the relation to that other will always be
conditioned by a certain violence that cannot but relate that other to me. " If I
attained it [the other] immediately and originarily . . . the other would cease
to be other."6 For the other to be absolutely other, I would have to grasp it in
a manner that completely effaces its alterity. In order that the other remain
other, then, I must still relate that other to me, which means that the relation
to the other will always be haunted by the threat of trespass and violence.
This "transcendental origin, as irredutible violence of the relation to the
other, is at the same time non-violence since it opens the relation to the
other" (188)7 In short, violence is necessary for ethics.
The notion that ethics is haunted by an originary violence might at
first seem to contradict Derrida's emphasis in other contexts on the double
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
302
affirmation, the yes, yes that makes both deconstruction and the relation to
the other possible. In the Introduction to this dissertation, I read this double
yes in relation to Ouija, the talking board whose name sounds the repetition
of the yes that begins a stance, and that therefore opens any discourse
between and among ghosts. As I noted before, however, Derrida cautions
that the "essential repetition" of the yes "lets itself be haunted by an intrinsic
threat" (89).8 The originary yes, yes thus emerges together with this
originary violence.
Grasping the difference between Derrida and Levinas is thus
complicated due to the proximity of the Derridean double yes to the
Levinasian notion of ethics.9 The anteriority of the Derridean yes would
appear to bear a striking similarity to Levinas' notion that ethics is anterior
to ontology. As Derrida himself has suggested, his reading of Levinas is "not
of the order of disagreement or distance."1 0 That Derrida does not oppose
his thought to Levinas, however, might tempt us to establish a certain
homology between the two thinkers. Resisting the conclusion that Derrida
and Levinas are the same, however, Simon Critchley argues that "certain
thematic and strategic similarities between Derrida's and Levinas' thinking ..
. allow both deconstruction to be understood as an ethical demand and ethics
to be approached deconstructively" (ibid. 12).
Although the proximity of Derrida and Levinas troubles any effort to
establish the border that separates them, this lack of absolute separation
would name the necessary non-border or chiasmus that opens up the
relation between Levinas and Derrida, and that therefore affirms the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
303
singularity of their respective work. The latter's interest in "Violence and
Metaphysics," moreover, is not to submit Levinasian ethics to critique, but to
show those textual moments where Levinas' tendency to oppose ethics to
ontology inadvertently effaces the other. Hence, despite Levinas' claim that
ontology is solipsistic, his ethics of the other cannot help but be imagined in
relation to the same. It is not that Derrida offers a vision of alterity that
meets the Levinasian demand for an absolute other; rather, Derrida shows
not only that such a demand can never be answered, but that the effort to
realize it runs counter to ethics.
I want to suggest that something akin to this chiasmatic non-border is
played out in Beloved, insofar as it moves between a logic of solipsism and
possession on the hand, and an ethics of singularity on the other. Like the
Levinasian notion of the solipsistic ego that closes itself off to anything
outside itself, 124 marks a site of violence: of Sethe’ s act of infanticide and of
an angry baby ghost, but also of the originary violence that haunts any
ethical relation to the other. Beloved begins by opening the doors of 124
Bluestone Road. We cross its threshold and perhaps like Paul D want to ask:
"What kind of evil you got in here?" (8). To address ourselves to this spectral
other, however, requires that we accept something like Sethe's invitation to
Paul D: " It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through" (8). As we soon
discover, to step through is to enter a house that feels as claustrophobic as it
does angry. Only at the end of the novel does it finally open itself up to
exteriority, to the world beyond the borders of the yard that School Teacher
trespassed and that Denver has not crossed in years.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
304
124 thus marks a site where "pure ethics" and "pure violence"
converge. Remarking on the contradiction inherent in such conventional
notions as "pure violence" and "pure ethics," Derrida notes that "pure non
violence, non-relation of the same to the other (in the sense that Levinas
understands it) is pure violence. Only a face can stop violence but at first
because only a face can provoke it" (218).n The so-called pure ethical relation
to the other, the relation without relation in which the other emerges as pure
exteriority, is pure violence. I am always cannibalizing the other, taking the
other in, if only to find that the other finally resists any effort to incorporate
it fully. Far from constituting an "ethical miscarriage," as Penelope Deutscher
describes the view from the position (not hers) of pure-ethics, the
incorporation of the other is both necessary yet not finally possible:
something of the other remains beyond our grasp, which means that the
incorporation of the other which conditions kinship always fails.1 2 Yet this
failure to incorporate the other, this failure to mourn fully, is also the sign of
a certain respect for the alterity of the other.
One of the fundamental questions that Beloved raises is whether there
can ever be a pure ethical relation to the other, that is, whether Sethe's
maternal claim on Beloved might not in some way repeat the master's
(paternal) violence that it seeks to prevent. While normative paternity would
seem to proceed by way of a negativity that preserves the father through
the cancellation of the child (who is always a son), the normative vision of
maternity tends to elevate the mother/child relation to an idealized field of
ethical action. Given this idealization of motherhood, infanticide is most
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
305
often read either as an unintelligible aberration from normative kinship, or
as an act of pure love, in which case it is thought to be completely intelligible.
In his Modern Medea, Steven Weisenburger observes that the infanticide
committed by Margaret Garner, the historical figure on whom Morrison
loosely based her character of Sethe, was "used in support of the most
poisonist racist theory, or it was a tableau of the most divine mother love."1 3
That infanticide could quickly be assimilated into the ripened image of slave
animality is confirmed by Paul D's reaction to Sethe's revelation: "You got
two feet, Sethe, not four" (165). Yet infanticide also could and was
appropriated by the abolitionist movement to show the tragic ends to which
slavery always led. As the headline from the Cincinnati Gazette of January 29,
1856 summarized it: "A Slave mother murders her child rather than see it
returned to slavery" (Cited in Weisenburger 87). Or as an anonymous poem
put it in response to the events in Cincinnati: "The very love she bears her
child/Has nerved her arm to deal the fatal blow" (Ibid., 246). Mary
Livermore’ s poem, "The Slave Tragedy at Cincinnati," also affirms this
sentiment: "Well I know no stronger yearning than a mother's love can
be— ... Ay, my hand could ope the casket, and thy precious soul set
free:/Better for thee death and Heaven than a life of slavery!"1 4 These
reactions represent more or less an interpretative consensus with regard to
Margaret Gamer's act, and slave infanticide more generally, insofar as they
read infanticide as an act of pure, motherly love.
The critical reception of Beloved, moreover, has done little to challenge
the normative conception of motherly love. Writing within a psychoanalytic
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
306
frame, Jean Wyatt argues that Beloved imagines a "maternal symbolic" that
contests the paternal substitution of "the word" for the lost maternal body.
While she alludes to Sethe's lack of separation from her children as an
"oppressive plenitude," and further links the novel’ s vocabulary of
possession to the language of the slave master, Wyatt does not explore how
a maternal symbolic might still carry the threat of its own violence (237):
"The hope at the end of the novel," Wyatt concludes, " is that Sethe, having
recognized herself as subject, will narrate the mother-daughter story and
invent a language that can encompass the desperation of the slave mother
who killed her daughter" (249).1 5 Maternal violence emerges as an anomaly
driven only by "desperation" within an otherwise non-violent mother-
daughter dyad. If there is any violence to be found in the maternal symbolic,
this argument seems to suggest, it would have to be an effect of what
Spillers characterizes as the invasion of property relations into the domain of
kinship.
Slavoj Zizek comes closer than most to challenging the normative
suppression of maternal violence in his reading of Beloved. He characterizes
Sethe's act as a "monstrous deed" that nevertheless exemplifies the "properly
modem ethical act," in which "one bears witness to one’ s fidelity to the Thing
by sacrificing.. .the Thing itself."1 6 Zizek then claims that Sethe's act "takes
place in the intersection of ethics and politics," and therefore suspends the
familiar, gendered division between (feminine) ethics and (masculine) politics
(155, his italics). In appearance at least, Zizek's injection of the political into
the ethical shows the latter to be contaminated by the struggles of power
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
307
and violence to which it claims to be immune. Yet when it comes to applying
this formulation to Sethe, Zizek sounds more or less a familiar chord. Sethe
"kills her children out of her very fidelity to them" (154, his italics).1 7
Consistent with Wyatt's reading, Zizek does not so much recognize a
impure ethical relation to the other as he exorcises maternal love of any
specter of violence—despite the fact that love or fidelity is understood to
propel a mother's murder of her daughter. Sethe may indeed strike at
herself with her act of infanticide, as Zizek maintains, but she also makes a
claim on her child that returns that child to her. The murder as claim thus
returns Beloved to Sethe in advance of this daughter’ s spectral return. A
ghost before she is a ghost, Beloved is always already returning, crawling
already? toward Sethe, and yet never finally arriving there.
The reflexivity of Sethe's act—which is both a striking at oneself, a
negation of self, as well as a preservation of self—requires an interrogation
of conventional notions of love and fidelity, especially as they pertain to
motherhood. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observes, "all cultures have valued
motherhood, but nineteenth-century bourgeois culture raised it to
unprecedented heights of sentimentality."1 8 Along with this sentimentality
came the obligation to exclude violence from the normative view of
motherhood, or in the case of Margaret Garner, to absorb the violence of
her act into preconceived images of motherly love. Weisenburger argues
that contemporary responses to Margaret Gamer’ s child-murder most often
missed her "absolute singularity" and
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
308
persisted in seeing Margaret as a figure they already knew.... Far
more imaginary than she ever was real... the infanticidal slave
mother had by January 1856 become a potent icon signifying
everything unnatural and unholy about the "peculiar institution." It
was almost as if the icon had always awaited and demanded a
Margaret Gamer. (247)
The assimilation of Margaret to the already saturated image of the "good
mother" subsumed slave infanticide under the cult of motherhood, against
the possibility that violence is not so much an aberration of maternity as the
condition of its emergence. Weisenburger later notes that the more recent
"discovery" of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and its higher
prevalence among slave populations (largely due to poor diet and hygiene)
casts doubt on the long-held belief that infanticide was widely practiced by
slave mothers.1 9 This revelation lends credence to the notion that the
"imaginary" infanticidal slave mother fed the abolitionist cause in order to
reinforce the bourgeois image of motherhood.
With Beloved, Toni Morrison undoubtedly contributes to this
imaginary construction of the infanticidal slave mother. As is well known,
Morrison was inspired to write her novel after having come across an 1856
newspaper article detailing the basic facts of the murder. Morrison claims she
did not do any more research into Margaret's life beyond reading the article
because she "wanted to invent her life."2 0 Although Morrison gives only
passing attention to the historical details surrounding the case, she clearly
grasps the larger political and legal implications involved—namely, the
conflict between the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and the abolitionist effort to
have Margaret tried for murder.2 1 Since we know that Sethe does jail time
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
309
for the murder, we can assume that the abolitionists won out over the
supporters of the Fugitive Slave Law in Morrison's version. As
Weisenburger shows, however, Margaret Garner’ s fate was far less happy.
Despite the fact that the case marked the longest fugitive slave trial in
American history—an astonishing four weeks—Margaret was finally
remanded to slavery.2 2
That Beloved seeks to imagine what might have happened had
Margaret not been returned to slavery is striking, for it suggests that
Morrison conjures up with Beloved a certain abolitionist spirit of divine
motherly love.2 3 Sethe herself tries to convince Beloved that "what she had
done was right because it came from true love" (251). She seeks to make her
actions intelligible to Beloved and to the larger community that has made
her into a pariah, indeed, into a sign of abjection and unintelligibility. To
consider her act of infanticide as either wholly unintelligible or fully
intelligible, however, does little to trouble the normative equation of
maternity with ethical non-violence. While the conception of infanticide as an
unintelligible aberration leaves the sphere of normative, white maternity
untouched by negativity, so too does its assimilation to ethical love insofar as
it quickly cancels out any trace of violence. For racist ideologues, slave
infanticide is further proof of an animality inherent in black motherhood,
even as this view exempts white motherhood of violence. For abolitionists,
slave infanticide emerges both as proof of slavery’ s evils and of a mother's
love for her children in the face of an institution that disregards slave
kinship. If racist ideologues fail to comprehend slave infanticide because
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
310
normative (white) maternity precludes the possibility of violence,
abolitionists can claim to understand it fully only by disavowing the violence
that is both the condition and limit of ethical action.
How do we begin to consider Sethe's act in such a way that it remains
neither unintelligible nor fully intelligible? If to read is to make intelligible,
and thus in some sense to own or possess what one reads (as in the
colloquial expression, "what did you get from reading... ?), then reading will
always reveal its own violence. We must begin, then, by avowing this
violence as the condition of our reading. Beloved is no more ours than she is
Sethe's. Yet, from the celebration of Beloved as a novel that bears witness to
aspects of slave life "too horrible and too dangerous to recall," and that
therefore allows readers to reclaim and come into possession of facts
omitted from "official" histories, to Oprah Winfrey's purchase of the film
rights to the novel, to the more recent claim made by an Ohio writer, Joanne
Caputo, who believes that she is the child who Margaret Gamer murdered
in 1856, now reincarnated—the reception of Morrison's novel and of
Gamer's child-murder is the history of this proprietorial violence.2 4 This is
not to say that one does violence to a text in the same way that one exercises
violence over another person. Yet the asymmetry between interpretative
violence and violence committed against another does not mean that there is
no relation between these two registers. If there is a violence of reading, it
lies in the reduction of the text, this other other, to the self: hence, Winfrey's
rather narcissistic insistence that she not only own the rights to the film
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
311
adaptation of Beloved, but star in it as well, that she might say, with Sethe,
"Beloved, she my daughter. She mine."2 5
A non-possessive relation to the other, however, is what Sethe is
given to learn when Beloved, her "best thing," evaporates and becomes "just
weather" (275). While 124 Bluestone Road is quite literally haunted by the
language of possession, "nonsensical" speech from which Stamp Paid can
make out only the word "mine," it also thematizes a certain dispossession as
the condition of kinship; I am always kin with someone who is going to die,
and who is therefore never "mine" (172). Firtitude defines kinship as alterity.
Our kin are always in some sense Beloved from the start, marked by a loss
and dispossession that is also the possibility of our kinship.
Bearing the Other
The idealization of maternity that can be observed in both nineteenth-
century responses to Margaret Gamer's child murder and in the more recent
critical reception of Morrison's Beloved also makes its way into the ethical
philosophy of Levinas. In Otherwise Than Being, maternity becomes the
paradigm for the ethical bearing of the other in the same:
Maternity signifies responsibility for others—to the point of
substitution for others and suffering, both from the effect of
persecution and from the persecuting to which the persecutor sinks.
Gestation— bearing par excellence—even bears responsibility for the
persecuting of the persecutor. (121)2 6
Levinas' introduction of maternity in Otherwise Than Being marks a shift
away from the idealization of paternity in Totality and Infinity, where the
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
312
father's love for the son—despite our cultural indoctrination into the cult of
Oedipal violence—is held to be the exemplary ethical relation. Whether or
not we read the emergence of maternity as a corrective to Levinas' earlier
disregard of women and valorization of the father-son relation, the model of
maternity as "vulnerability, responsibility, proximity, contact. . is not
without its problems (OB 122).2 7 Much of the feminist criticism of Levinas has
labored over the question of whether he has empirical women in mind when
he cites maternity as synonymous with "the sensible experience as obsession
by the other person" (OB 123).2 8 Yet what is largely absent from feminist
critiques of Levinas is an interrogation of how the privileging of the
maternal—whether understood to refer to "empirical women” or to some
larger principle of femininity as welcome, as bearing of the other in the
same—involves an idealization of ethicality, and by extension, of maternity.
After all, Levinas’ notion of maternity conjures up the biological, material
experience of bearing children as if it were not already a trope.2 9 By not
addressing the tropic status of maternity, Levinas participates in its
idealization. Just as the earlier treatment of paternity sought to imagine an
idealized ethics of father/son love, stripped of all Oedipal violence, the
principle of maternity relies on an ideal of pure motherly love that ultimately
denies the violence that opens up any relation to otherness.3 0
In this sense, Sethe's act of murder hyperbolizes a violent act of
claiming that always haunts the vocabulary in which we speak of my
daughter or my mother, etc.. Consider Sethe's explanation for the murder: " If
I hadn’ t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
313
bear to happen to her. When I explain it she'll understand, because she
already understands everything already" (200). Sethe kills Beloved so that no
one else might kill her. Although seemingly contradictory, Sethe's actions
make sense as a form of resistance against the slave master's claim. To kill
her own daughter is to claim that daughter as her own over and above the
master's claim.
Killing thus becomes equated with claiming. But if to kill is to claim as
one's own, then the reverse is also true: the claim of possession is always
violent. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese puts it, Sethe cuts her daughter’ s throat
"to ensure that she could be a daughter—that Sethe could be a mother" (UT
108). The terms of kinship are thus bom of violence, which means that the
violence of Sethe's claim is not opposed to the explanation that she gives
Paul D: that she had to put her children "where they'd be safe" (164).
Although Paul D is shocked by Sethe's talk "about safety with a handsaw,"
this seeming conflict between love and violence is made all the more
incongruous by the normative equation of motherhood and ethical purity
(164). Yet Sethe's handsaw is not so much an expression of pure motherly
love as it is a reminder of the non-pure ethical relation that is motherhood.
As Paul D ruminates: "M ore important than what Sethe had done was what
she claimed" (165). Whut Sethe claims signifies not only her daughter, but
also what she claims for her act of infanticide: namely, that it is an act of pure
love. To Sethe's notion of pure love, Paul D counters that her love is "too
thick" (164). Echoing the familiar trope that "blood is thicker than water,"
Paul D's characterization of Sethe's too-thick love figures that love as
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
314
excessive, and implicitly connects this excessiveness to violence. Read next to
the conventional configuration of blood and kinship whereby the "thickness"
of blood relations marks them as superior to non-blood relations, Paul D's
notion of a love that is too thick challenges the elevation of the blood
relation to a higher ethical plane.
Thick love is understood as a blood relation that has become
excessively possessive, and is further linked to violence by the language that
describes the "baby blood that soaked her [Sethe's] fingers like oil" (5). Sethe
sheds the thick, oily blood of her daughter in order to save her from a life of
slavery. Yet the metonymic chain that links blood, thickness, and violence
shows Sethe's love to be implicated in violence from the start.
Notwithstanding the formulation that 'blood is thicker than water," Paul D's
notion of thick love relates the blood relation to the violence that the former
trope denies. Although Paul D will go on to link Sethe's claim to animality,
and therefore seem to reinforce the racist doctrine of slave animality, this
seemingly aberrant animality also names the disavowed violence that haunts
any relation between self and other. The black slave thus comes to embody
the animality that normative whiteness must deny: "The screaming baboon
lived under their own skin; the red gums were their own” (199). When Sethe
responds to Paul D that "thin love ain’ t love at all," she reaffirms the equation
of thick love with the blood relation, at the same time that she suggests that
love—by virtue of its thickness—not only carries the threat of violence, but
is conditioned by it (164). It is thanks to violence, to the always impure
relation to the other, that we have love.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
315
Beloved thus returns us to the familiar Hegelian problematic, that is,
the reflexive turn through which the "I" who claims the other as its own, as
its other, comes to be haunted by that other that it finally fails to possess. If
Sethe wants to secure for her daughter a safe place in heaven, that spiritual
salvation ultimately fails. While Beloved fails to become spirit, her failure
"succeeds" by giving the lie to what Weisenburger characterizes as the
"bourgeois ideology that required martyred slaves to evaporate in some
abstract spiritual kingdom" (258). Beloved emerges as a certain specter of
spirit. She is "flesh," as Baby Suggs puts it, "flesh that weeps, laughs" (88).
Reversing Christian doctrine, Baby "told them that the only grace they could
have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they
would not have it” (88). When Beloved takes flesh, her incarnation contests
the evaporation of slaves that "takes" their flesh, indeed, that steals it away
from them. Beloved takes back her flesh, but in a manner irreducible to
embodiment or corporealization. Although Morrison's novel may feed off
Christian, abolitionist ideology, the return of Beloved as an angry, fleshy
ghost departs considerably from this tradition that "evaporates" slaves into
some spirit world. After all, the fleshly presence of the ghost is precisely
what inspires its exorcism:
As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place—shaking
stuff, crying, smashing and such—Ella respected it. But if it took flesh
and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She
didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this
was an invasion. (257)
What is most threatening about Beloved is her refusal to be contained within
her "ghostly place." She not only takes flesh, but she invades the ostensibly
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
316
self-contained, insular world of Sethe, Ella, and the other women. Beloved
does not respect boundaries, whether spatial or temporal. And if Sethe
imagines Beloved to be " a body returned to her," that fantasy of corporeal
return—in which spirit and body are always interchangeable terms—is
contested by her spectral uncontainability (198).
Despite Beloved's manifestation as a specter of spirit, the fantasy of
spiritual transcendence persists in the novel, emerging in an alternative,
unarticulated explanation that Sethe gives for her actions. While the
explanations that Sethe gives Beloved and Paul D aim at making her actions
intelligible, this other version resists intelligibility. It appears in the novel just
prior to the explanation that she gives Paul D, and is figured as being
anterior to the very possibility of explanation:
Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the
subject, would remain one. That she could never dose in, pin it down
for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off—she could
never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a drawn-out record
of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells.
Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them
coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little
hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headdoth
into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was
No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. (163)
This passage is remarkable for how it refuses to explain, to justify, to make
intelligible. Sethe simply sees a hat, and hears wings. She does not so much
fly as she is flown, propelled by the phantasmatic hummingbirds that lift her
up and carry her to perform her deed. Her agency—if we can even say that
it finally belongs to her—is figured as independent of eonsdous thought: "If
she thought anything, it was No." Although this No would appear to reject
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
317
schoolteacher's claim on her children, Morrison's language suggests that her
No is conditioned by a possible rather than actual thought. That Sethe might
have thought nothing suggests that the agency of her(?) actions does not
belong to consciousness, that it resides finally in the imagined hummingbirds
that stick their beaks into her headcloth. Insofar as her agency emerges from
outside, it cannot then be attributed to some kind of internal, and therefore
maternal, instinct. To claim that Sethe's actions exceed consciousness,
moreover, is to refuse the assimilation of the body to the mind (Geist), which
means that the scene of infanticide is already haunted by the specter prior to
its appearance, prior to its taking flesh. Sethe's "No" would describe a
spectral agency that belongs neither to the mind nor the body.
The novel thus circles around a primal scene of infanticide that it can
never finally explain in rational terms. The impossibility of closing in on this
scene, however, does not stop Sethe from trying to explain it. Only by
grasping it "right off" and immediately, the narrator suggests, can "anybody
who had to ask" come to understand it. Yet, as Derrida reminds us, such an
immediate and originary understanding of the other finally betrays that
other. Although Paul D is Sethe's immediate interlocutor here, as readers we
become Sethe's interlocutors by proxy. We read Beloved, in part, so that we
too might come to grasp the ethical dimensions of her act: not only why she
does it, but whether her actions are justified. Yet Sethe ceases to be other at
the very moment that we claim to "get it." Here the language that posits the
comprehension of otherness as "getting" or "having" affirms understanding
and moral judgement as an activity of coming into possession of the other.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
318
For the other to remain irreducibly other and not simply other than me,
however, we must "get it” by allowing for the possibility that we do not
finally get it at all.
Notwithstanding our efforts to comprehend and understand them,
Sethe's actions finally escape us, they take flight, just like the hummingbirds’
wings that propel her to commit her deed. These musical birds recall the
motifs of song and flight in Morrison’ s Song of Solomon, where flight
(whether Mr. Smith's suicide or Milkman Dead's final leap from the cliff)
promises transcendence to a spiritual world free from slavery. The
hummingbirds in Beloved perhaps anticipate the hoped-for transcendence
that Sethe imagines for the daughter she is soon to murder.
To the extent that the transcendent image of the hummingbirds
secures the safety of Sethe's daughter in a phanstasmatic afterlife, it recalls
the familiar Hegelian logic of the Aufhebung (cancellation, preservation, and
supercession). The image of the hummingbirds, and the cancellation of
Beloved's death that they figure, anticipate Beloved's ghostly return, which is
itself implicated in a certain fantasy of preservation. As Sethe has it: "She
come back to me, my daughter, and she is mine" (204). That Sethe imagines
Beloved's return within a dialectical, and therefore egological, movement is
suggested not only by the vocabulary of possession that infuses the novel,
but also by the narrator's corporeal language. Returning home to see smoke
rising from the chimney, Sethe ponders: "The ribbon of smoke was from a
fire that warmed a body returned to her—just like it never went away,
never needed a headstone" (198). Here Beloved is figured as a bodily
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
319
presence that need not be mourned because it was never lost. Given that
Sethe exchanges sex for the "seven letters" engraved on her daughter’ s
headstone, the absence and subsequent return of Beloved's body would
appear to be implicated in the corporeal loss that Sethe experiences when she
"sells her body" to the engraver. Of course, the conventional figure through
which prostitution is imagined as involving the sale of one's body likens
prostitution to slavery, even though, in both cases, the trope masks how one
still "has" one's body. Or put another way, slavery and prostitution never
involve the actual sale of bodies, but rather, the sale of acts or labor. That
slavery is often characterized as a literal "theft of the body," in Spillers
words, attests to how critics remain unattuned to how this figure shapes our
understanding of slavery. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the
mineness of the body is never in question (such an assertion would indeed
contradict much of what I have been arguing in these chapters). Rather, I
want to underscore that the body is never fully appropriated or stolen
precisely because it is never fully mine to begin with.
The notion that one loses one's body at the hands of slavery,
prostitution, and other forms of "appropriation" is bound to the liberal
tradition of possessive individualism. If the body can be imagined as having
been stolen, then resistance to slavery requires only that one come back into
possession of one's body. As Beloved's narrator puts it: "Freeing yourself was
one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another" (95). I want to
suggest that something of this liberal tradition haunts the metonymic
relation that the novel traces between Sethe's "sale" of her body, the burial
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
320
of Beloved's body, and its subsequent return. Although the text does not
explicitly invoke the vocabulary of corporeal theft—that is, it does not refer
to slavery or prostitution in terms of the sale or theft of bodies, the
interimplication of Sethe and Beloved's bodies tacitly imagines a certain
dialectical loss and return of Sethe's (or is it Beloved's?) body.
Consider that the ghost takes its name metonymically from the seven
letters that Sethe has engraved on her daughter's headstone. Given that this
memorialization is conditioned by Sethe's act of prostitution—the "sale" of
her body—and that Beloved's body is imagined not only as having returned
to her, but as having never left, never having needed a headstone, suggests
a certain revision of Sethe's scene of prostitution. If we follow Sethe's fantasy
to its logical conclusion, the act of prostitution that secured her daughter's
epitaph would never have taken place: Sethe never would have sold her
body. Sethe's body returns to her, "just like it never went away." The body
of Beloved that Sethe imagines as returning to her is thus also her own, the
body that she "sold" to mourn her daughter's. Sethe mourns the loss of her
body in Beloved, which is then fantasized as never having been lost, and
therefore not in need of mourning. While Sethe’ s corporeal loss is narrated
through a scene of sexual violence, the mourning of her body as hers also
describes the condition of Sethe's relation to others more generally. From
the sexual violence that slavery wreaks on her body, to the sacrifice of her
body for the lives of her children, to the violent, possessive relation that she
affirms with her kin, Sethe’ s body is always and irredudbly marked as a site
of mourning. And though we might be tempted to comprehend this
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
321
mourning only as an effect of her social death, that is, that given a different
set of social circumstances, Sethe's corporeality would not be in question, the
violence of social death is what is made possible—though not inevitable—by
the ethical violence that opens any relation to others.
Is Beloved therefore a body? a spirit? or is she something like a
specter, in the sense that we have been tracing: a corps revenant that never
returns to itself as a living presence? If Sethe imagines that Beloved is a body
returned to her, a body that was never lost, and therefore never mourned,
then Beloved's return remains implicated in the dialectic of
negation/ preservation. Sethe can therefore imagine that Beloved not only is
her daughter, but is her daughter. The copula signals the one-to-one
correspondence of the ghost to the daughter, against the possibility that
Beloved is not only Sethe’ s daughter or Denver’ s sister, but, as Denver puts
it simply: ’ ’ —more" (266). To read Beloved only as the daughter or the sister
is to miss how she fails to embody these terms. That she fails to contain the
mourning she emblematizes is made clear in the final pages of the novel:
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn
up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smoothes and
contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then
there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is
alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of
one's feet going seem to come from a far-off place. (274)
The mourning that can be contained, rocked, and wrapped up inside one's
skin is contrasted to a mourning that roams, that cannot be rocked or held
down, that spreads beyond the borders of the self-contained body. This
illimitable mourning corresponds to a plurality of Beloveds, the "sixty Million
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
322
and more" to whom Morrison dedicates her novel. Morrison's image of a
"loneliness that can be rocked" at first recalls the rocking of a child in the
arms of its mother. It then moves to the rocking of a ship, and conjures up
Beloved's earlier interior monologue where she "channels" the ghost of a
slave woman who died during Middle Passage, and whose body was thrown
into the sea. The ship that quite literally contains the bodies of slaves leaves
traces of a violence that spreads beyond the boundaries of space and time. In
this way Beloved's return marks a speciality that cannot be contained by
the body that Sethe memorializes. The emergence of the ghost from the
name that Sethe has engraved on her epitaph affirms that Beloved bears a
proximity to Sethe's dead daughter that cannot be denied. Yet "Beloved" also
signifies a generalizability that exceeds the (one) body of the daughter.
Channeling
Beloved
That there will have always been more than one Beloved is further
suggested by the recent on-line publication of Joanne Caputo's Diversity of
Love, which chronicles the history of Margaret Gamer and her child murder.
Caputo claims to have established a new genre that she calls "historical
spiritual non-fiction,” which, in addition to more traditional historical
research, "includes information Caputo received directly from the deceased
Gamer and eight (8) other spirits with whom she has been communicating
since 1997."3 1 What is more, Caputo claims that she is the child that Gamer
murdered in 1856, now reincarnated. If such a claim seems rather dubious,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
323
however, perhaps that is because the arrival of the specter always brings
with it a certain tendency to pathologize. It is not altogether clear, however,
that Caputo’ s claim is finally distinguishable from the many other claims that
have been made on this story of child murder. The headline of Caputo’ s
press release—"Writer Claims Murdered Slave Child P a st" -— could describe
any one who has written about Margaret Gamer or her various
reincarnations, and has therefore made certain claims about her or even on
her: from Morrison, to Weisenburger, to the present study.3 2 While Caputo
is perhaps unique in the literality of her claim, it only signals a fantasy of
possession pushed to its absolute limit. Caputo is Beloved and she is hers.
But if cannibalism is both the condition and limit of our relation to the
baby ghost, Caputo chews her up and swallows her all away. Echoing Sethe
and Beloved’ s mutual incorporation, the ghost of Margaret Gamer, speaking
through a medium, tells Caputo about her cooking: "I was a very good cook!
Many of my pies were taken. It's why you like to cook now. Go have little cookies.. . .
Sit there and take teeny tiny bites, as if it was the only cookie you'd ever have. Just
let it melt in your mouth ... and feel me, feel being me. Take teeny, tiny bites” (her
italics). Like Beloved, Caputo is "looking for the join," the place where the
face of the other is hers (213).
The predominance of the face in Beloved resonates with Levinas'
privileging of the face as the marker of exteriority par excellence: "The
relation with the Other—absolutely other—which shares no border with the
Same—is not exposed to the allergy that afflicts the Same in a totality and on
which the Hegelian dialectic rests" (H178).3 3 The other is thus not a "scandal
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
324
that sets reason into a dialectical movement, but the first reasonable teaching
the condition of all teaching (enseignement)" (ibid.).3 4 Against the Hegelian
dialectic of "mutual recognition," the Levinasian notion of the face is
understood to escape the economy of war, the life-and-death struggle
through which Hegelian self-consciousness emerges,
For Levinas, then, the relation to the other begins with peace. There
can be no ethics derived from violence: "The peace of empires that emerges
from war is based on war" (TI x).3 5 As Derrida notes, however, Levinas is
"very dose to Hegel, much doser than he would want himself and here at
the moment when he is opposed to him apparently in the most radical
manner" (147). Levinas wants to claim for the face an exteriority immune to
the allergy of otherness. Yet how can this absolute other be said to "share no
border with the Same" without finally effacing the otherness of the Same,
who is always also the other of the other? How are we to understand this
notion of the border (frontiere) as it operates in Levinas' text? On the one
hand, to claim that the Other and the Same share no border could mean that,
like distance countries or continents, they simply do not come into contact.
On the other hand, the notion that they share no border might mean that
they simply do not have a border, which is in fact closer to the French: "...
qui n'a pas frontiere avec le Meme." While the former reading suggests that
the border or frontier operates as a marker of division, the latter
interpretation would signify that there is no reliable border that separates
the Other and the Same, that the Other is not absolutely other.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
325
To pose the other as absolute, then, risks drawing a line in the sand
between Same and Other whereby peace comes to resemble the economy of
war that it claims to have abandoned. That is to say, Levinas' affirmation of
an absolute other risks reproducing the very violence that it seeks to avoid.
As Levinas himself remarks: "The refusal of totality by war does not refuse
the relation, since in war the adversaries pursue one another" ( T T 198).3 6 For
Levinas, the ethical relation to the other constitutes a rejection of
totality—that is, a refusal of the reduction of the other to the same. Whereas
ethics constitutes a relation without relation, war refuses totality but does not
refuse the relation. If both war and peace involve a refusal of totality, and if,
pace Levinas, neither war nor peace refuse the relation, then there will have
been no peace that is not implicated in the economy of war. The refusal of
totality that Levinas tends to elevate to the highest plane of ethical action, to
the level of pure ethics, is always open to trespass, to violence.
Such questions of separation, division, and trespass are central to
Beloved's treatment of the face. The three interior monologues at the center
of the text are particularly haunted by faces, from Sethe's face that Beloved
claims as her own, to the slave faces of Middle Passage whom she "channels":
" I am not separate from her [Sethe] there is no place where I stop her face
is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be
looking at it too..." (210). Beloved's stream of consciousness soon substitutes
Sethe's face for a "dead man on my [Beloved's] face," the face of one of
hundreds of slaves thrown on top of one another by storms that rock the
ship. When he dies, the man is taken away from Beloved, who then "miss[es]
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
326
his pretty white points" (211). Beloved cannot find the "man whose teeth I
loved," but soon she sees "the woman... with the face I want the face that
is mine" (ibid.). Beloved imagines biting the iron collar around the slave
woman's neck with the "teeth of the dead man who died on my face," but
soon the woman is cast into the sea along with many other slaves (ibid.).
Beloved's "unspeakable thoughts" render a virtual sea of faces, all of
whom Beloved wants to join, to claim and possess (199). The opening
sentence—" I AM BELOVED and she is mine."—marks the only use of
punctuation in the entire monologue. Although the period denotes a
conventional mark of finality, closure, and separation, its appearance here is
ironic given that it punctuates a sentence that denies separation. The
sentence cited above—I am not separate from her there is no place where I
stop—also makes ironic use of punctuation, or a lack thereof, given that the
omission of a period after I am not separate from her both eschews the
separation and closure that a period conventionally denotes and adds a space
that typographically separates the two clauses. There is no place where I stop
does not stop with a period, and thus typographically performs the refusal
of separation that it describes. Yet the sentence also spaces itself from her
face is my own, opening onto an unlocatable border where Beloved’ s face
stops and Sethe's begins. And this space between Beloved and Sethe names
the necessary separation, the border between Same and Other, that the
ethical relation requires. There is no place where I stop can mean that Beloved
is merged with Sethe, but it also suggests that there simply is no place where
she stops, that where she stops is not precisely a place, in the sense of a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
327
determinable location. Where Beloved ends and Sethe begins does not
belong to place.
The (almost white) Face
of the Other
While Joanne Caputo claims Mary Gamer's face as her own ("even
though I am white"), it is less Caputo's whiteness than the claim of
reincarnation that is most suspect here. For indeed the "historical" Beloved
was described in the Cincinnati Gazette as "almost white," a "little girl of rare
beauty."3 7 The Gazette also surmised that her mother Margaret was a
"mulatto, showing from one-fourth to one-third white blood," and that her
only other living daughter, Cilley, was "much lighter in colour than" her
mother, "light enough to show a red tinge in its cheeks" (ibid.) The specter of
miscegenation haunted Margaret Gamer’ s fugitive slave trial from the
beginning, but only at the close of the proceedings was it fully articulated by
the abolitionist and feminist, Lucy Stone. After the court had adjourned to
await the judge's verdict, Stone addressed the audience as to the evils of
slavery and the "depths of a mother's love," before finally acknowledging
what everyone present already knew too well but refused to admit (ibid.):
The faded faces of the negro children tell too plainly to what
degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her little
daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt
the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming
woe, who shall say she had no right to do so? That desire has its root
in the deepest and holiest feelings of our nature—implanted in black
and white alike by our common father.3 8
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
328
While the audience was undoubtedly scandalized by this public admission of
miscegenation, as well as the explicit connection made between mixed-race
children and the open secret of sexual relations between slave masters and
their female slaves, the double entendre of "our common father" certainly
brings the point home. Stone's language ostensibly means to explain the
origins of maternal love in a God who instills in both black and white the
desire to protect one's children. Although more than likely lost on the
assembled crowd, the subtext of Stone's language reveals (perhaps
unintentionally) the slave master as this "common father" who plants his
seed in "black and white alike." The pun thus aligns the slave master with the
Christian father/ spirit, and implicitly sexualizes these "deepest and holiest
feelings of our nature." Assuming the whiteness of God, the conflation of
father/master figures this God as a miscegenator by analogy: a spirit whose
offspring are specialized through the mixing of his seed with black blood.
Of course, it was never proven that Mary Gamer was fathered by
Margaret’ s master, Archibald Gaines. Not surprisingly, however, does
Caputo claim that the spirit of Gaines came to her and all but confessed his
paternity to her. And perhaps it is fitting that Caputo would fantasize him as
appearing to her in spirit form—as if fashioning herself as a real-life Rosa
Coldfield, haunted by the ghost of Thomas Sutpen "where a more fortunate
one would have had a house."3 9 Gaines will have always already been a
spirit, or rather, the ghost of a spirit who inseminates black wombs only to
deny the presence of his seed. For as we saw in Chapter Three, to avow the
miscegenation would be to admit the specialization of spirit that always
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
329
threatens the conceit of paternal self-presence. Long before Morrison
transformed Mary Gamer into Beloved, indeed, from the moment of her
birth, the "almost white" little girl will have been a specter haunting the
uneasy kinship between master and slave.
Nowhere in Morrison's Beloved is it suggested that Sethe's daughter
was fathered by Schoolteacher. Yet Morrison's text is certainly not silent on
the issue of miscegenation. We know that Baby Sugg's "eight children had six
fathers" (23). Nan tells Sethe after the death of her mother that Nan and
Sethe's mother, who knew each other from the sea, "were taken up many
times by the crew. 'She threw them all away but you.... You she gave the
name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not
put her arms around. Never. Never'" (62). Ella gives birth to " a hairy white
thing, fathered by 'the lowest yet,"' and, refusing to nurse it, lets it die of
starvation (259). But Sethe "had the amazing luck of six whole years of
marriage to that 'somebody' son who had fathered every one of her
children" (23). What is most striking about the treatment of miscegenation
by the text is that it actively excludes both Sethe and Beloved from what it
otherwise presents as a rather wide spread practice. That Sethe was the only
child bom to her mother who was not fathered by a white man, and that she
would in turn have had the "amazing luck" of giving birth to four children
who were all fathered by the same black man, suggests that the text's
exclusion of miscegenation from Sethe's blood line is more or less an active
effacement.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
330
Halle's parentage, however, does remain somewhat unclear. We
know that he is the last of Baby Sugg's eight children, and that at least some
of her children were fathered by white men. Finding herself pregnant by
"the man who promised not to and did," Baby "could not love [the child] and
the rest she would not" (23). Yet absent any textual proof that either Sethe or
Halle carried any white blood, Beloved's race would not appear to be in
question. Given Morrison's public statements that she limited her research
on Margaret Gamer to the barest details of her child murder, it is not clear
that Morrison was even aware of Mary Gamer's "almost white" skin. The
text's reference to Sethe's "amazing luck," however, acknowledges the
ubiquity of miscegenation only to exempt Sethe and her offspring from it.
Considering the numerous other atrocities that Sethe suffers at the hands of
slave masters, her exemption from bearing mixed-race children seems
almost too good to be true. How different it would have been had Sethe
destroyed Schoolteacher's property at the same time that she murdered his
progeny? And would such a possibility trouble the almost unanimous
interpretation of Sethe's actions as bom of pure, unequivocal, motherly
love? If Beloved finds itself haunted by the tradition of spiritual, motherly
love, the novel amasses its energy in Sethe's "amazing luck," her anomalous
escape from bearing the slave master's children.
Rarely has the critical reception of Beloved made mention of this
exclusion of miscegenation. One notable exception is Barbara Christian's
"Beloved, She's Ours," where she observes how Morrison "eliminates" the
"rationale" that Sethe may have been "striking out at the master/rapist" in
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
331
order to resist "perpetuating the system of slavery through breeding" (41,
42). Christian goes on to note the ubiquity of miscegenation in the novel, but
does not pursue the implications of its omission from Sethe's bloodline, that
is, how its exclusion perpetuates the idealization of motherly love. Given that
this idealization of maternity tends to ignore how "love," as Christian herself
remarks, "can seek to own," it is striking that she does not connect the
omission of miscegenation to Sethe's "thick love."4 0
As Weisenburger argues, rarely did abolitionist literature depart from
portraying infanticide "as scenes in ’ the romance of America"’ that articulated
" a set of absolute equivalencies: Death = Liberty = Divine" (256).
Weisenburger offers Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at
Pilgrim's Point" as a notable exception. Here a slave mother murders her
child because he is "far too white .. too white for me.,. .4 1 " I covered him up
with a kerchief there;/I covered his face in close and tight:/And he moaned
and struggled, as well might be,/For the white child wanted his
liberty—/Ha, ha! he wanted the master right" (251). Far from performing
the abstraction of slaves into some imagined "spiritual kingdom," Browning
mocks the "angels white" who "freed the white child's spirit so" (252). Indeed,
the poem emphasizes the corporeality of the dead child: " I carried the body
to and fro . . . I carried the little body on" (Ibid.). Finally the slave mother
buries the child in the "black earth," leaving "nothing white," a "dark child in
the dark!" (253). She quite literally blackens the face of her white child with
dirt, "and thus we two were reconciled," for " a child and mother do wrong to
look at one another, when one is black and one is fair" (253,251).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
3 3 2
Yet Beloved departs from the death-liberty-divine
equation—inadvertently perhaps—precisely through its exclusion of
miscegenation as a possibility that would complicate Sethe's act of
infanticide. That the specter of whiteness remains to haunt the text is
suggested by Beloved's first appearance not in but as " a white dress/'
kneeling next to a praying Sethe, "its sleeve around her... waist," as if the
whiteness that the text excludes from Beloved's skin color returns in the
color of her dress (29). Given the conventional, Gothic representation of
ghosts as white apparitions, Beloved's appearance as a white dress would
seem rather unremarkable. Yet Beloved is a text in which color is so laden
with meaning that the emergence of a black ghost in a white dress calls for
unusual scrutiny. Speaking specifically of Beloved, Morrison remarks that she
"stripped" the text "of color" so that the reader might "feel" its "hunger" and
"delight."4 2 Yet this treatment of color is not merely stylistic; it is profoundly
political. When Baby Suggs "ponderfs} color," the significance of her
meditation extends well beyond the lavender of her quilts (4). That Morrison
is acutely aware of the ways in which color comes to signify racially is made
clear by her reading of Poe's Pym, in which she identifies the novel’ s closure
in "impenetrable whiteness" as symptomatic of how whiteness operates " as
both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this
whiteness."4 3 In Beloved, however, blackness is no longer the mere shadow
of whiteness. Indeed, when Beloved finally materializes to Sethe, Denver,
and Paul D, she no longer wears a white but a black dress. This substitution
of whiteness for blackness aligns the latter with Beloved's incarnation. By
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
333
shedding whiteness, blackness steps out from the shadows and becomes
flesh.
Race is figured here as clothing, as an outer shell or covering that fails
to contain the body. This is not to suggest, however, that race enjoys an
unlimited transferability, that one might take it on or off like clothes. Yet
race, like clothes, is characterized by a certain failure to contain the body
fully. This uncontainability is affirmed by the text's repeated reference to
"men without skin," or white men. Whiteness names the condition of being
"without skin," both in the sense of being unmarked by one's race, and
lacking the material shell that houses a body. This uncontainability would
seem to contest what Cheryl Harris identifies as the property investment in
whiteness that seeks to preempt its inalienability.4 4 As I showed in Chapter
Three, however, the anxiety of contamination belies the inalienability of
whiteness insofar as it fantasizes that blackness might penetrate the borders
of the white body. As Stamp Raid's thoughts illustrate:
White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark
skin was a jungle But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with
them to this other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted
in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread,
until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one.
Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even
they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.
The screaming baboon lived under their own skin; the red gums
were their own. (199)
Beyond Stamp Paid's account of how whites project their own savagery onto
blacks, the passage is also a veiled reference to miscegenation, "to the jungle
whitefolks planted in them." The jungle that alters whites, moreover, does
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
334
not come from the racial other, but from within. Whiteness is always already
uncontainable and alienable.
Yet this uncontainability is also what allows whiteness to be
unmarked, which means that its uncontainability is the condition of the racist
construction of blackness as both interior essence and exterior surface.
Whiteness is always everywhere and nowhere. Calling our attention to its
uncontainability, however, the text marks the unmarkedness of whiteness.
From within the terms of normative whiteness, blacks can be said to have
skin because they are inescapably marked by it. To the extent that "the
body" emerges only on account of its domestication, the condition of being
without skin, of being uncontainable, is in principle, the condition of all
bodies. The logic of racism, of course, permits the fantasy that this
uncontainability is reserved only for whiteness. The texf s marking of
whiteness as something uncontainable troubles the conflict between exterior
and interior essence by which normative racial determination is made. If, as
Ariela Gross notes, race was determined in the nineteenth-century south by
a shifting discourse of essence that moved between a "rhetoric of
transparency," on the one hand, and a "rhetoric of veiled and hidden
essences," on the other, this oscillation was conditioned by an understanding
of blackness as either marked on one's skin or else contained, veiled or
hidden beneath it.4 5 To have skin is to have a body that is marked and
contained by that skin. Despite the tendency within contemporary American
cultural studies to equate the emergence of the body with a certain
reanimation of the socially dead, Beloved suggests that whiteness profits from
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
335
an uncontainability of which blackness is deprived. If to be with skin is to be
imprisoned by one's blackness, then to be without skin is to enjoy a spectral
uncontainability that contests the equation of corporeality with "social life."
Despite having a rather short life in the text, the glowing whiteness of
Beloved's dress appears on the cover art of the 1987 edition of the novel,
giving the reader a stunning visual impression of the ghost's whiteness that
quite literally obscures her blackness. The cover art depicts a white, "rich
lady's dress," wrapped tight around the body of a young black woman,
whose faded face just barely peaks out the top of the dress' high neck (35).
The only blackness exposed is the woman’ s translucent face, half obscured
by the shadow cast by a white, broad-brimmed hat resting on her head. This
image of Beloved's faded, black face recalls "the faded faces of the negro
children" in which Stone urged her audience to read the specter of
miscegenation that the slave master denied. Yet here Beloved's face is
perhaps not so much faded as jading, dematerializing before our eyes.
Beloved is marked by an exterior whiteness that seems to veil some hidden,
black essence within. Begging us to uncover this essence before it evaporates
into thin air, the faded/fading face allegorizes the problem of reading race
on a miseegenated body. The image of Beloved fading beneath her white
dress emblematizes the normative vision of the miseegenated body, of a
body whose elusive race is imagined as always lurking just below the
surface. The uncontainability that normative whiteness enjoys is therefore
unavailable to the "white," miseegenated body. As I argued in my reading of
Twain's Puddn'head Wilson in Chapter Three, the "soul" that is blackness is
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
336
synecdochically transformed into the body. Yet if the cover art covers over a
blackness that is normatively figured in terms of containment, Beloved's
specialization throughout the novel sheds the constraints of this whiteness
for an uncontainable blackness. Figured neither as an interior essence—like
Chambers' "nigger soul" in Twain's Puddn'head Wilson—nor as an exterior
surface, blackness refuses to stay in its ghostly place.
To trace race in Beloved is thus to encounter something like the inverse
of what Morrison identifies in Absalom, Absalom!, where Faulkner "spends the
entire book tracing race, and you can't find it. No one can see it, even the
character who is black can't see it" (AF 101). If, as readers of Faulkner, we are
"forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and
nothing," Morrison's exclusion of white blood from Beloved's lineage sends
us on a search to identify its presence, to trace those textual moments where
it appears only to disappear (ibid.). Excluding the specter of miscegenation
from the scene of Sethe's infanticide, the text does so in the spirit of pure,
motherly love. In an odd reversal, whiteness itself becomes a contaminating
threat to the purity of this love.
If miscegenation is what the novel must foreclose in order to purify
Sethe's act of infanticide, this is not to suggest that this purification amounts
to what some might be tempted to call "reverse racism." The novel certainly
does not invoke whiteness as a threat to the future of the black race, as in
some odd corollary to Shreve's fantasy in Abaslom, Absalom! of having
"sprung from the loins of African Kings." Although it turns out that some
black people may have indeed sprung from the loins of some white,
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
337
American presidents, and whereas Morrison's "red gums" (like Faulkner's
"African loins") suggest that whiteness is haunted by an originary
miscegenation, it is not so much the threat of miscegenation per se as its
erasure from the scene of infanticide that is at issue here. To admit
miscegenation into the frame of slave infanticide would be to allow for a
much more ambivalent master/slave dialectic, a relation in which the
distinction between one's kin and one's property becomes all the more
difficult to determine. In addition to betraying the master's position as both
owner and biological father, the specter of miscegenation troubles the
actions of a mother who—in a single stroke— saves a child from a life of
slavery, claims that child as her own, and destroys its "too white" face. Yet if
Margaret Gamer "saved" her daughter wielding the same handsaw with
which she destroyed the master's progeny, her excessive violence, her too-
thick love, allegorizes the irreducible violence that haunts any and every
kinship relation. If, as Hegel tells us, we all kill our parents, our parents also
always kill us.
Dis(re)membering
History
Blood emerges in Beloved not only as a trope for kinship and family,
but as the literal, material substance that Sethe sheds when she draws the
knife across her daughter's throat. That this blood is then incorporated by
Denver redoubles the metaphorics of the blood relation. The breast that
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
338
nourishes Denver is literally covered in the blood of her sister. If one sheds
blood in order to share it, then consanguinity is always haunted by violence.
Indeed, consanguinity, or having the same blood, is conditioned by the
shedding and incorporation of blood. In her interior monologue, Denver
states: "BELOVED is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my
mother’ s milk" (205). What is most striking about Denver's language is how
the incorporation of Beloved's blood is said to affirm the bond between
sisters. Would Beloved be Denver’ s sister if it were not for this
incorporation? If Beloved is Denver's sister because Denver swallowed this
sister's blood, then Beloved is a sister only to the extent that she is
incorporated as one. Consanguinity is not enough. The dead sister must be
taken in and made hers. The literal incorporation of blood affirms a
metaphorics of blood precisely by drawing on the latter's figurative power.
Thus, this literalization can only and always refer back to its metaphoridty. If
incorporating the other was all that was required to claim someone as one's
kin, then would we not all be kin, regardless of biology? This is precisely the
point to be gleaned from Denver's claim. The blood relation must be
established apart from biology. The blood relation is a blood relation only to
the extent that it is registered metaphorically. The literalization of the blood
relation occasioned by the yoking of blood to biology obscures the
metaphorics of blood. Blood is never biology. An unincorporated sister—a
merely biological sister—is therefore no sister at all.
The incorporation of Beloved as sister or daughter or as an historical
or literary property will always be haunted by a certain violence, a desire to
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
3 3 9
make her ours. As Weisenburger underscores, Margaret Garner was always
a "symbolic property" toward which opponents and proponents of slavery
were drawn to contest her meaning (134). This dissertation began by asking
how we might imagine an ethics of kinship that eschews the reduction of the
other to the same perhaps only to discover that there is no kinship that is not
conditioned by violence. Yet this seeming failure to affirm a pure, non
violent relation to the other also names a certain success. Spectral kinship
"succeeds” where it fails to affirm a non-violent relation to the other, and
where it fails to incorporate the other that it must necessarily cannibalize.
The success of spectral kinship will have been measured by these twin
failures: the failure of pure ethics and the failure of pure violence.
In the gap opened up by these two failures lies what Levinas calls the
"sensible experience as obsession by the other person" (OB 123, my italics).4 6
In French (as in English), one can be obsessed either by or with (par ou avec)
something or someone. Yet Levinas' choice of the former preposition
emphasizes an inhabiting of the other in the same that eschews the
vocabulary by which one is said to be obsessed with the other. Here the
obsession (in French one might also say hantise or "haunting") comes from
the other, and is anterior to my will or agency: "The paradox of this
responsibility consists in the fact that I am obligated without this obligation
having begun in me, as if an order had slid itself into my consciousness by
stealth..." (OB 28).4 7 This sense of being obsessed by the other, together with
the idiomatic notion of hantise as obsession, suggests a certain non-
possessive possession by the other. Although Levinas does not adopt a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
340
spectral vocabulary, we might rewrite the "sensible experience" of the other
in the same precisely in terms of this non-possession by the other. As
Derrida remarks with regard to Levinas: "Host or guest, Gastgeber or Gast,
the host would not only be a hostage. It would at least have . . . the figure of
the spirit or phantom (Geist, ghost)" (192).4 8 For Derrida, "the master of the
house .. . is already a received host, the guest, in his own home" (81).4 9 Ethics
begins with this notion that " I " am always a guest in my own home, a ghost
in my own body. The non-possessive possession by the other is conditioned
by a corporeal dispossession, the loss of this "clumsy, fussy, mechanical
counterfeit" of a house, to paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright.
We enter the unhomely home of 124 Bluestone road as guests whose
invitation betrays the failure of the house to contain its ghost. 124 is already
its own guest. Emerging from an unhomeliness that "no rocking can
hold... down," the claim that 124 makes on us suggests that the other's
claim always comes from beyond the grave, that its anteriority in relation to
any claim that we might make on it is also its future anteriority—not only the
ghosts of the past, the "disremembered and unaccounted for," but the
ghosts of the future (274). 124 will have been....
In a 1988 interview with Marsha Darling, Morrison addressed the
question of historical responsibility with regard to Beloved:
The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the
living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present
does not exist. It's bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for
people no one’ s ever assumed responsibility for. They are those that
died en route. Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about
them.5 0
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
341
Although Morrison characterizes responsibility in conventional terms as
something that we actively assume, for Levinas, responsibility assumes us; it
emerges from a "passivity more passive than all passivity" (OB 85).
Understood in these terms, the gap between the living and the dead is
bridged by a responsibility that seizes hold of us, that possesses us prior to
our assumption of it. Beloved, we are hers.
The question of historical responsibility in Beloved finds itself divided
between the will to "rememory" the dead on the one hand, and to
"disremember" them on the other. As Morrison notes, "there is a necessity
for remembering the horror, but of course there's a necessity for
remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in
which the memory is not destructive" (247). In Beloved, however, digestion
emerges as itself a mode of destruction, a way of dismembering the other. In
one of the few passages where the narrator gives us a glimpse into the
thoughts of the ghost, Beloved, upon losing a back tooth, thinks:
This is it. Next would be her arm, her hand, her toe. Pieces of her
would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of
those mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would
fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached
to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not
remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day
and find herself in pieces. She had two dreams: exploding, and being
swallowed. (133)
The reference to "keeping her head on her neck" recalls the brutal murder of
Beloved, when the depth of the knife wound forces Sethe to support her
daughter's head so that it does not fall off. The disrememberment that the
community of black women enact through their final exorcism of Beloved
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
342
mimes Sethe's dismemberment of her daughter, as if in exorcising her they
dismember her all over again. On this reading, Sethe's dismemberment of
Beloved is already implicated in the activity of disremembering. The murder
of Beloved as claim anticipates the women's incorporation of her at the close
of the novel. That is, remembering history "in a manner in which it can be
digested"—in the sense of not allowing our confrontation with rememories
to destroy us—allows that historical responsibility is conditioned by the very
violence that it seeks to address, or perhaps, redress. We rememory an act of
dismemberment only to disremember it. To rememory is to dis(re)member.
If, as Derrida argues, to eat or not to eat is not the ethical question, but
rather, how to eat well, then we might ask: is the exorcism of Beloved an
example of eating well? Judging from Morrison's language in the closing
pages of the novel, this community of black women eats rather too well.
There is nothing left of Beloved, no waste, no excrement: " B y and by all trace
is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too
and what is down there. The rest is weather" (275). Perhaps it is not a
question of eating well, of historical digestion, but rather, of indigestion, of
allowing some trace to remain unincorporable and unmoumable. Beloved,
however, remains both too buried within and too far outside their
rememories:
They never knew where or why she crouched, or whose was the
underwater face she needed like that. Where the memory of the smile
under her chin might have been and was not, a latch latched and a
lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal. What made her
think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on? (275)
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
343
Is Beloved trying to get in or get out? Does she remain trapped by rusted
locks in something like Paul D’ s tobacco tin, entombed under the sea with
the rest of the "underwater face[s]" of Middle Passage, or has her exorcism
cast her out, leaving her to scratch at the doors, begging to be readmitted to
their rememories? (ibid.)
As Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas remark in their introduction
to a collection of Derrida's essays on mourning: " In mourning, we must
recognize that the friend is now both only 'in us’ and already beyond us, in us
but totally other 5 1 Although we most often think of mourning in terms of
the loss of an other who, by virtue of death, is now totally other and removed,
Brault and Naas observe that the loss of the other carries with it the paradox
that the dead other is now closer to us than ever before, existing only in us.
Might this overproximity explain part of the dread that attends mourning the
other who no longer exists outside us, and who therefore lodges inside us like
a guest who has overstayed its welcome? As Derrida puts it in Specters of
Marx, "one welcomes them [ghosts] only in order to chase them. One is only
occupied with ghosts by being occupied with exorcising them, kicking them
out the door."5 2 And this welcome is precisely what Sethe's community
rescinds at the end of the novel. So, in the end they forgot her too Remembering
seemed unwise disavowed Beloved becomes weather not the breath of
the disreremembered and unaccounted for but wind in the eaves or spring ice
thawing too quickly just weather Beloved melts thaws resolves
herself into a dew it was not a story to pass on the text sounds its own
death knell do not repeat it or transmit it to others forget it it was not a
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
'XAA
U 'T lV jE
story to pass on it transmits itself repeats its message of the nonrepeatable
it says do not pass on it rememory it transmit it to others this is not a
story to pass on the story is passed from the past to the present it does not
pass on or die nothing ever happens once and is finished oui it lives
on beyond the was and the is ja it will have been a story to pass on
forget repeat dissrememoryes Yes
—‘ Befovecfs
1 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 274*
2 Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in Diacritics (Summer
1987), 65-81.
3 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’etre ou au-delu de Vessence, Le Livre de
Poche edition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 31. Cited in the text as
OB. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the French are mine.
4 Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American
Presence in American Literature," in Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989), 32.
5 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalite et infini: essai sur I'exteriorite (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 16. "L'ontologie comme philosophie premifere est
une philosophie de la puissance." Cited in the text as TI.
6 Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 182.
"... si je l'atteignais imm£diatement et originairement... l'autre cesserait
d'etre l'autre."
7" .. . cette origine transcendentale, comme violence irr6ductible du rapport
h l'autre est en m§me temps non-violence puisqu'elle ouvre le rapport a
l’ autre."
8 Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilee,
1987).
"... r6p6tition essentielle se laisse hanter par la menace intrinseque...."
9 Derrida's reading of Levinas is also difficult to situate because Derrida has
engaged Levinasian thought at various points throughout his and Levinas'
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
345
careers (See, for instance, Derrida's reading of Levinas on the question of
sexual difference in "En ce moment m§me dans cet ouvrage me void," in
Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987). Because the work of neither
philosopher can be seen as static, to speak of a "Derridean reading" of
Levinas is somewhat reductive. If Levinas' later work—particularly
Otherwise than Being—emerges as a "corrective" to an earlier tendency to
oppose ethics and ontology absolutely, the later Derrida has shown a more
explidt commitment to the ethical problematics that Levinas has always
foregrounded. Derrida's "critique" of Levinas that I employ here, "Violence
and Metaphysics" (1967), moreover, is not really a critique at all, insofar as
critique implies taking a certain distance from the object of interrogation.
1 0 Alterites: Jacques Derrida et Pierre-Jean Labarriere: avec des etudes de Francis
Guibal et Stanislas Breton (Paris: Osiris, 1986), 74. Cited in Simon Critchley, The
Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (West Lafayette: 1992), 9.
1 1 ”... la non-violence pure, non-rapport du m§me a l’ autre (au sens oh
l’ entend Levinas) est violence pure. Seul un visage peut arreter la violence
mais d’ abbord parce que seul il peut la provoquer.”
1 2 See Penelope Deutscher, "Mourning the Other: Cultural Cannibalism, and
the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)” in differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3 (1998), 159-184,165.
1 3 Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-
Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 279.
1 4 Mary A. Livermore, "The Slave Tragedy at Cindnnati," from The National
Anti-Slavery Standard, vol. XVI no. 39 (February 16,1856).
1 5 Jean Wyatt, "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni
Morrison's Beloved" in Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere eds.,
Understanding Toni Morisson's Beloved and Sula (Troy New York: Whitston
Publishing Company, 2000). See also Caroline Rody, "Toni Morrison's
Beloved: History, 'Rememory,' and a 'Clamor for a Kiss,"' in this same
volume. Rody contends that the "historical project of the novel is in a
profound sense a mother-quest, an African-American feminist 'herstory' that
posits a kind of 'mother of history' ..." (97).
1 6 Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth
Fighting For (New York: Verso, 2000), 156; 154, his italics.
1 7 Zizek also refuses to give up the conventional assodation of the feminine
with the ethical even as he insists that his notion of suspension gets us
beyond this formulation: "... when we claim that the ethical act 'as such’ has
the structure of feminine subjectivity, and furthermore, that the subject 'as
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
346
such' is ultimately feminine, this does not involve the standard cliche about
how men are involved in political power struggles, while women are
inherently apolitical-ethical" (155). Yet one wonders why the suspension
between ethics and politics must remain gendered as "feminine."
1 8 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and
Memories in Beloved," in Harold Bloom ed., Modern Critical Interpretations:
Beloved (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999), 101. Cited in the text
asUT.
1 9 See Weisenburger, 259; See also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the
Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 19S8), 323-333.
2 0 "Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women," The New York Times,
(August 26,1987). [accessed July 19 2002], Available from:
www.nytimes.com / books / 98/01 /11/hom e/ 14013.html; INTERNET.
Morrison came across the 1856 article while editing The Black Book. See " A
Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Children," in The American Baptist
(February 12,1856), reprinted in Middleton Harris, The Black Book (Random
House: New York, 1974).
2 1 Section 6 of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 reads: "And be it further
enacted, That when a person held to service or labor in any State or
Territory of the United States, has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into
another State or Territory of the United States, the person or persons to
whom such service or labor may be due . . . may pursue and reclaim such
fugitive person." Section 7 continues: "And be it further enacted, That any
person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such
claimant... from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor... or shall
rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the
custody of such claimant, .. . or shall aid, abet, or assist such person so
owing service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from
such claimant, ... or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent
the discovery and arrest of such person, .. . shall, for either of said offences,
be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment
not exceeding six months." From The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School.
[accessed July 18 2002]. Available from:
www.yale.edu / lawweb / avalon/ fugitive.htm; INTERNET.
2 2 Much of Margaret’ s case hinged on whether a prior visit with her master
across the border into Cincinnati necessarily released her from bondage.
Because she did not come into the state as a fugitive upon this first visit, the
master could not make a claim under the Fugitive Slave Law. The law
usually required, however, that the slave claim his or her freedom while on
free soil, something which Margaret had failed to do. See Julius Yanuck, "T he
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
347
Gamer Fugitive Slave Case," in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol.
40, no. 1 0une 1953), 47-66; William G. Hawkings, Lunsford Lane (New York:
Negro Universities Press, 1969), 119-136.
2 3 It should also be noted that Morrison's significant revision of Margaret
Gamer's story imagines a triumph over the Fugitive Slave Law that cautions
against the almost unanimous characterization of Beloved as a novel of
historical recovery rather than of historical invention. As Weisenburger
reports, John Jollife, who argued the Garner case on behalf of the
defendants, won only one case out of the eleven that he argued during the
1850's, a fact that further marks Sethe's story as anomalous (100). For a
reading that departs from the trend toward historical recovery see Teresa
Heffeman, "Beloved and the Problem of Mourning," in Studies in the Novel
vol. 30 no.4 (Winter 1998), 58-73.
2 4 Barbara Christian, "Beloved, She's Ours," in Narrative, vol. 5 no. 1 0anuary
1997), 40.
2 5 Winfrey has stated her identification with Sethe in countless interviews.
" I ’ ve always thought I could play Sethe, from [the time I read] the first page.
I don't know how to explain it: instinct. From the moment I read [the book],
I always knew that I was Sethe, and that Danny Glover was Paul D ." See
"Odd Couples," Philadelphia City Paper, October 15-22,1998 [cited June 25
20002]. Available from
www.citypaper.net/articles/101598/critmas.odd.shtml; INTERNET.
2 6 "Dans la maternity signifie la responsibility pour les autres—allant jusqu’ a
la substitution aux autres et jusqu’ k souffrir et de l'effet de la persecution et
du pers6cuter m€me oh s'abime le persycuteur. La matemite—le porter par
excellence—porte encore la responsibility pour le persycuter du persycuteur."
27"... vulnerability, responsability, proximity, contact...."
2 8 "L'expyrience sensible en tant qu’ obsession par autrui " Remarking on
Levinas’ treatment of the feminine elsewhere in his work, Donna Brody
argues that, if "one reads the feminine as a figure, indifferent to sex... it
loses the specificity of an irreducible alterity belonging to the feminine sex."
Given that Levinas is male, however, it would seem doubtful that he would
want to grant women a monopoly on ethicality, and therefore exclude his
own gender from the domain of ethics. Donna Brody, "Levinas's Maternal
Method from 'Time and the Other' Through Otherwise Than Being: No
Woman's Land?" in Tina Chanter ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel
Levinas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 59. As
Stella Sandford puts it: "Nothing of the biological must remain in the
maternal if it is not to suggest that the female is somehow more capable of
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
348
the excellence of responsibility than is the male." Stella Sandford, "Masculine
Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato" in this same volume, 190.
2 9 As Sandford notes, "the trope of maternity . . . is an obvious one for
Levinas, because of the already established cultural signification of the
maternal as paradigmatic of care (nourishment) and responsibility" (183, her
italics). Yet when Sandford goes on to remark on the literal "sharing of
substinence, even substance" that would appear to enlist motherhood in
Levinas' ethics of the Other in the Same, she returns us to a conception of
maternity that is less a "cultural signification" than a biological given (ibid.).
To wonder whether Levinas' notion of maternity does or does not
correspond to the so-called "empirical experience" of child bearing is already
to assume that there is something like an empirical experience of
motherhood that somehow precedes the trope of maternity. Insofar as it
labors over the question of tropic versus empirical maternity, feminist
criticism tacitly posits an empirical "essence" of the maternal. Whether
theorized by Levinas, or invoked in everyday language, maternity always
corresponds to a trope, an idea or a principle, and never simply to a
biological experience. The idealization of maternity, moreover, must further
deny the appearance of any violence that would belie the normative
conception of pure motherly love.
3 0 At stake more generally in feminist debates around Levinas' work is the
status of the feminine, which Levinas very early on made synonymous with
the "absolutely contrary contrary," the "absolutely other." See Emmanuel
Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 85. While Levinas meant to
posit the feminine as escaping the logic of the same, he has often been read
as circulating a familiar, androcentric equation of women and otherness. The
debate around the status of maternity must therefore be read within the
larger context of the role of the feminine in Levinas’ work.
The feminist engagement with Levinas begins with Beauvoir's harsh
critique of his Time and the Other. According to Beauvoir's reading of Levinas,
woman " is determined and differentiated in relation to man and not he in
relation to her; she is the incidental, the inessential. He is the Subject, the
Absolute: she is the Other." [Elle se determine et se diff6rencie par rapport h .
l'homme et non celui-d par rapport a elle; elle est 1'inessentiel en face de
l'essentiel. H est le Sujet, il est l'Absolu: elle est l'Autre"]. In a footnote,
Beauvoir goes on to claim that Levinas "deliberately adopts a male point of
view without signaling the reciprocity of subject and object." [... il adopte
deliber<§ment un point de vue d'homme sans signaler la reciprocity du sujet
et de l'objet"]. See Le deuxieme sexe I (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 15. As Tina
Chanter notes, however, Beauvoir "fails to engage with Levinas' overall
philosophical project, which is to elevate the notion of alterity above the
notion of totality" (2). Indeed, Levinas challenges the entire notion of
reciprocal relations on which Beauvoir's criticism rests. See also Chanter’ s
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
349
Time, Death and the Feminine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Irigaray's reading of Levinas is likewise very critical, yet largely more subtle
than Beauvoir's. For Irigaray, "the other sex as an alterity irreducible to
myself eludes Levinas," pace his claims to the contrary. See "Questions to
Emmanuel Levinas On the Divinity of Love," trans. Margaret Witford, in
Robert Bemasconi and Simon Critchley eds., Re-Reading Levinas
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) 110. See also her "The
Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity,
'Phenomenology of Eros,"' trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, in Feminist
Interpretations of Levinas.
3 1 Joanne Caputo, The Diversity of Love, [accessed June 25 2002]. Available at
www.yellowsprings.com / margaretgamer; INTERNET.
3 2 Joanne Caputo, "Writer Claims Murdered Slave Child Past,” Press Release
(January 24,2002).
3 3 " L e rapport avec l'Autre—absolument autre—qui n'a pas frontiere avec le
M§me, ne s'expose pas k l'allergie qui afflige le M&tne dans une totality et sur
laquelle la dialectique hegelienne repose."
34"... pour la raison un scandale qui la met en mouvement dialectique, mais
le premier enseignement raisonnable la condition de tout enseignement."
Here the French enseignement bears a moral or ethical weight that its
translation as lesson, teaching or education risks effacing.
3 5 " L a paix des empire sortis de la guerre repose sur la guerre."
3 6 " L e refus de la totality par la guerre ne refuse pas la relation, puisque dans
la guerre les adversaires se cherchent."
3 7 Reprinted in The National Anti-Slavery Standard, vol. XVI no. 40 (February
23,1856).
3 8 Levi Coffin, Reminiscences (New York: Amo Press, 1968), 565.
3 9 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986), 4.
4 0 In an essay that reads Beloved against historical accounts of Margaret
Gamer, Angelita Reyes argues that Gamer's escape from Kentucky
challenged the traditional characterization of the "tragic mulata" as weak
and fragile. Despite her careful attention to the politics of miscegenation,
however, Reyes does not pursue how Morrison— by excluding the
possibility of miscegenation—misses the opportunity to counter the image
of the tragic mulata through her invention and development of Sethe's
character. See Angelita Reyes, "Rereading a Nineteenth-Century Fugitive
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
350
Slave Incident: From Toni Morrison's Beloved to Margaret Gamer's Dearly
Beloved," in Annals of Scholarship, vol. 7 (1990), 464-86.
4 1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems (New York: James Miller, 1866), 250,
her ellipses.
4 2 Toni Morrison, ’ The Art of Fiction C X X X IV ," Interview by Elissa
Schappell, in The Paris Review 128 (1993), 115, 83-125. Cited in the text as AF.
4 3 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(New York: Vintage, 1992), 33.
4 4 Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property" in 106 Haw. L. Rev. 1707 (1993).
4 5 Ariela Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the
Nineteenth-Century South," 108 Yale L.J. 109 (1998), 123.
46 "L'experience sensible en tant qu'obsession par autrui. ..."
4 7 "Le paradoxe de cette responsibility consiste en ce que je suis obligd sans
que cette obligation ait commencd en moi—comme si, en ma conscience un
ordre s'etait glissd en voleur...."
4 8 Jacques Derrida, Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilee, 1997). " Host ou
guest, Gastgeber ou Gast, l'hdte ne serait pas seulement un otage. II aurait au
moins . . . la figure de 1 'esprit ou du fantdme (Geist, ghost).
4 9 "Le maitre de maison... est d £ j& un hdte regu, le guest, dans sa propre
maison."
5 0 Danille Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations With Toni Morrison (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 247.
5 1 Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas eds., The Work of Mourning: Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11.
5 2 Jacques Derrida. Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993) 223; Specters of Marx: The State of
the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans., Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 141.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
351
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria. L'Ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Editions
Aubier Montaigne, 1978).
Ammons, Elizabeth. "Stowe's Dream of the Mother-Savior: Uncle Tom's Cabin
and American Women Writers Before the 1920s" in Eric Sundquist ed., New
Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Arifes, Phillippe. Essais sur I'histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age a nos
jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
Alterites: Jacques Derrida et Pierre-Jean Labarriere: avec des etudes de Francis
Guibal et Stanislas Breton (Paris: Osiris, 1986), 74. Cited in Simon Critchley,
The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (West Lafayette: 1992), 9.
Austin, J.L.. How to Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Baehr v. Lewin, 74 Haw. 530 (1993).
Baehr v. Mikke, 92 Haw. 634 (1999).
Baker v. Vermont, 744 A.2d 864 (1999).
Baker, Houston. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987).
Ladd, Barbara. "The Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color
Line in Absalom, Absaloml" in American Literature, vol. 66 no. 3 (Sept. 1994).
Bardaglio, Peter. " ’ Shameful Matches': The Regulation of Interracial Sex and
Marriage in the South before 1900," in Martha Hodes ed., Sex, Love, Race:
Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York
University Press, 1999).
Bataille, Georges. "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale
French Studies, vol. 0 no. 78 (1990).
Beauvoir, Simone de. Le deuxieme sexe I (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
Bell, Derrick. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New
York: Basic Books, 1987).
—--------. Race, Racism and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1973).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
352
Benhabib, Seyla et al. Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New
York: Routledge, 1995).
Bersani, Leo. " Is the Rectum a Grave," in Douglas Crimp ed., AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988).
Bone, Robert. Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1975).
Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in
Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
Brandwein, Pamela. Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the
Production of Historical Truth (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Brault, Pascale-Anne and Naas, Michael eds. The Work of Mourning: Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Brody, Donna. "Levinas's Maternal Method from 'Time and the Other'
Through Otherwise Than Being: No Woman's Land?" in Tina Chanter ed.,
Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2001).
Bromell, Nicholas. See By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in
Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Brown, Gillian. "Getting in the Kitchen With Dinah: Domestic Politics in
Uncle Tom's Cabin," in American Quarterly, vol. 36 no. 4 (Fall 1984).
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems (New York: James Miller, 1866).
Bruce, Dickson. "The Color Line and the Meaning of R ace" in Black American
Writing from the Nadir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York;
Columbia University Press, 2000).
— . "Contingent Foundations" in Seyla Benhabib et al, Feminist
Contentions.
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
353
• — . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
-----------. '"How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine,'" in
Qui Parle, vol. 11 no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1997).
-----------. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York:
Routledge, 1993).
-----------. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
—. The Psyhic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997).
Caputo, Joanne "Writer Claims Murdered Slave Child Past," Press Release
(January 24,2002).
-----------. The Diversity of Love, [accessed June 25 2002]. Available at
www.yellowsprings.com / margaretgamer; INTERNET.
Carbado, Devon. "Black Rights, Gay Rights, Civil Rights," 47 UCLA Law
Review 1467 (2000).
Castle,Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in
the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
Chanter, Tina. Time, Death and the Feminine (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001).
Cheng, Anne. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden
Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Chesnutt, Charles. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993).
-----------. The Marrow of Tradition in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed., Three classic
African-American novels (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
-----------. "What is a White Man" (1889), reprinted in Wemer Sollors ed.,
Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
354
Christian, Barbara. "Beloved, She's Ours," in Narrative, vol. 5 no. 1 0anuary
1997).
Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences (New York: Amo Press, 1968).
Coolidge, David. "Playing the Loving Card: Same-Sex Marriage and the
Politics of Analogy," in 12 BYU J. Pub. L 201 (1998).
Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and
Contemporary French Thought (New York: Verso, 1999).
Davidson, Michael. "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored
Boundaries of Queer Nation" in Timothy Powell ed., Beyond the Binary:
Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context (New Brunswick,
Rutgers University Press, 1999).
Dayan, Joan. Fables of Mind: An Inquiry Into Poe's Fiction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilee, 1997).
-----------. Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993).
—. UEcriture et la difference (Paris: fiditions du Seuil, 1967).
— ---------. De Vesprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987).
-----------. Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974).
-----. " J a , ou le faux-bond," Diagraphe, no. 11 (Avril 1977).
-----------. "M arx and Sons" in Michael Sprinker ed., Ghostly Demarcations: A
Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999).
-----------. L'oreille de l'autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions (Montreal:
VLB M teur, 1982).
-----------. Politiques de I'amitie (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1994).
— ----- -—. Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987).
----------. Spectres de Marx: L'Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle
internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993).
----- . Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
355
-----------. Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilee, 1987).
-----. La voix et le phenomene (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1967).
Descartes, Oeuvres Philosophiques, Tome II (Paris: Editions Gamier Freres,
1967).
Deutscher, Penelope. "Mourning the Other: Cultural Cannibalism, and the
Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)" in differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 10 no. 3 (1998).
Dickinson, Emily. Collected Poems (New York: Barnes and Noble Books,
1993).
Dickinson, Emily. Selected Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
Dubois, W.E.B.. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996),
Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Durkheim, Emile. Contributions to L'Annee Sociologique (New York: Free Press,
1980).
Edelman, Lee. "The Part For the (W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the
Phantasmatics of 'R ace,'" in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural
Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995).
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1986).
Field Van Tassel, Emily. "'Only the Law Would Rule Between US':
Antimiscegenation, the Moral Economy of Dependency, and the Debate
Over Rights After the Civil War," 70 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 873 (1995).
Finnis, John. "Law, Morality, and ’ Sexual Orientation,"’ in 69 Notre Dame L.
Rev. 1049 (1994).
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
356
Foucault Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
-----------. Histoire de la sexualite 1 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976).
—------- . The History of Sexuality, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1978).
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and
Memories in Beloved," in Harold Bloom ed., Modern Critical Interpretations:
Beloved (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999).
— --------- . Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Franke, Katherine. "Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of
African-American Marriages" in 11 Yale J.L & Human (1999).
Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition
(London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
-— — — . "The Ego and the ID ," in The Standard Edition (New York: Norton,
1960).
-----------. "The 'Uncanny'," in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
-----------. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition, trans. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).
Fugitive Slave Law (1850). The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School [accessed
July 18 2002]. Available from: www.yale.edu / lawweb / avalon/ fugitive.htm;
INTERNET.
Fuss, Diana ed.. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories (New York:
Routledge, 1991).
Fustel de Coulanges. La Cite Antique: Etude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions
de la Grece et de Rome (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie, 1917).
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997).
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
357
Greenberg, Kenneth ed.. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents
(New York: Bedford Books, 1996).
Grillo, Trina and Wildman, Stephanie. "Obscuring the Importance of Race:
The Implication of Making Comparisons Between Racism and Sexism (or
Other-isms)," Duke L J . 397 (1991).
Gross, Ariela. "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the
Nineteenth-Century South," 108 Yale L.J. 109 (1998).
Gross, Ariela. Rev. of Martha Hodes, White Women/Black Men: Illicit Sex in the
Nineteenth-Century South, in 18 Law & Hist. Rev. 686 (Fall 2000).
Hailey, Janet. "Gay Rights and Identity Imitation: Issues in the Ethics of
Representation," in David Kairys ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive
Critique (New York: Basic Books, 1998).
Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on
Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Hamacher, Werner. "Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-
Language and Derrida's Specters of M arx," in Michael Sprinker ed., Ghostly
Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (New York:
Verso, 1999).
Hanson, Ellis. "Undead" in Diana Fuss ed., Inside/Out:Le$bian Theories, Gay
Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Harper, Phillip Brian. "Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations
of Public Exchange: Notes On Directions For Queer Critique," in Social Text
52-53 (1997).
Harris, Cheryl. "Whiteness as Property" in 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993).
Harris, Joel Chandler. Unde Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York:
Ltd. Editions Club, 1957).
Harris, Middleton. The Black Book (Random House: New York, 1974).
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Hawkings, William G.. Lunsford Lane (New York: Negro Universities Press,
1969).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
358
Heffeman, Teresa. "Beloved and the Problem of Mourning," in Studies in the
Novel, vol. 30 no.4 (Winter 1998).
Hegel, G.W.F.. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977).
"The History of the Talking Board." [accessed July 15 2002], Available from
www.museumoftalkingboards.com/history.html; INTERNET.
Hodes, Martha. White Women/Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century
South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Holland, Sharon. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Homer, Steven. "Against Marriage," in 29 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties
Law Review (Spring 1993).
HRS Const. Art. I, §5 (2001).
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985).
-----------. "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas On the Divinity of Love," trans.
Margaret Witford, in Robert Bemasconi and Simon Critchley eds., Re-Reading
Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
----- . "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and
Infinity, Phenomenology of Eros,” ' trans., Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, in
Tina Chanter ed., Feminist Interpretations of Levinas (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).
-----------. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Irwin, John. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading
of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
Johnson, Thomas H. J . ed.. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York:
Back Bay Books, 1961).
Kamuf, Peggy ed.. A Derrida Reader: Between The Blinds (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991).
-----------. "Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition" in Nancy Holland
ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1997).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
359
-----------. "Deconstruction and Love," in Nicholas Royle ed., Deconstructions:
A User's Guide (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2000).
-----------. "The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction," in Martin McQuillan
ed., Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Kaplan, Sidney. "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election Year of 1864"
(1949), reprinted in Werner Sollors ed., Interracialism: Black-White
Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
Kennedy, Randall. "How are We Doing With Loving: Race, Law, And
Intermarriage," in 77 B.U.L. Rev. 815 (1997).
-----------. "Reconstruction and the Politics of Scholarship," in 98 Yale L.J. 521
(1989).
Klein, Melanie. The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. 1,1921-1945 (New York:
The Free Press, 1975).
Kojfeve, Alexandre. Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
Koppelman, Andrew. " Is Marriage Inherently Heterosexual?" in 42 Am. J .
Juris. 51 (1997).
— . "Same-Sex Marriage and Public Policy: The Miscegenation
Precedents" in 16 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 105 (1996).
Leavey, John. GLASsary (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
Krell, David Farrell. The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and
Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000).
Levinas, Emmanuel. "L'ontologie est-elle fondamentale?," in Entre Nous:
Essais sur le penser-a-V autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991).
* — . Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de Vessence, Le Livre de Poche edition
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).
— . Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
360
— -------. Totalite et infini: essai sur Vexteriorite (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1961).
L£vi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969).
Lincoln, Abraham. "House Divided" Address (Springfield: Illinois State
Historical Society, 1958).
Livermore, Mary A. "The Slave Tragedy at Cincinnati," from The National
Anti-Slavery Standard, vol. XVI no. 39 (February 16,1856).
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1963).
Lofgren, Charles. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
Mackethan, Lucinda H.. "Plantation Fiction, 1865-1900" in Louis D. Rubin et
al eds.,The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1985).
MacPherson, C.B.. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Madison, James et al. "The Federalist Papers." The Avalon Project at Yale Law
School, [accessed July 6 2002], Available from
www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ federal/fed.htm; INTERNET.
Maupassant, Guy de. Contes et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I in Robert Tucker ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, (New
York: Norton, 1978).
----------. Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1890).
-----------. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Robert Tucker ed.,
The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978).
Mayeri, Serena. "'A Common Fate of Discrimination': Race-Gender
Analogies in Legal and Historical Perspective," 110 Yale L. J. 1045 (April
2001).
McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden (New York: Vintage, 1978).
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (New York, Bantam,
1984).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
361
Michaels, Walter Berm. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Mills, Patricia. "Hegel's Antigone" in Patricia Mills ed., Feminist
Interpretations of Hegel. (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1996).
Montag, Warren. "Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida's Specters of Marx,"
in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx
(New York: Verso, 1999).
Montaigne, Michel de. Essais Livre I (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions,
1998).
Morgan, Lewis Henry. Systems of Consanguinity and the Affinity of the Human
Family (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
Morrison, Toni. "The Art of Fiction C X X X T V ," Interview by Elissa Schappell,
in The Paris Review 128 (1993).
-----------. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature," in Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989).
-----------. Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987).
-----------. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New
York: Vintage, 1992).
-----------. Song of Solomon (New York: Plume, 1987).
Nancy, Jean-Lucy. Corpus (Paris: Editions M6taili6,1992).
The National Anti-Slavery Standard, vol. XVI no. 40 (February 23,1856).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Attempt at Self-Criticism" in The Birth of Tragedy,
trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 1993).
-----------. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1967).
-----------. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Penguin, 1966).
Nussbaum, Martha. "Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The Relevance of
Ancient Greek Norms to Modem Sexual Controversies," in 80 Va. L. Rev,
1515 (1994).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
362
-----------. "The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler," in
The New Republic (February 22,1999).
"Odd Couples," in The Philadelphia City Paper (October 15-22,1998). [cited
June 25 2002]. Available from
www.dtypaper.net/ articles /101598/ critmas.odd.shtml; INTERNET.
Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other Stories
(Ridgewood N J: Gregg Press, 1968).
Pascoe, Peggy. "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in
Twentieth-Century America" in Martha Hodes ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press,
1999).
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1982).
Peterson, Christopher. "Possessed by Poe: Reading Poe in an Age of
Intellectual Guilt," in Cultural Values, vol. 5 no. 2 (April 2001).
Plato, Phaedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
— ------ . Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
-----------. Timaeus, trans. Frands Comford (New York: The Liberal Arts
Press, 1959).
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Plonitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology After Bohr and Derrida
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
-----------. In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History and the Unconscious
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993).
— . Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Gainsville:
University of Florida Press, 1993).
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: Bantam, 1982).
Prins, Baukje and Costera Meijer, Irene eds.. "How Bodies Come To Matter:
An Interview With Judith Butler," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, vol. 23 no. 2 (1998).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
363
Rapaport, Herman. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001).
Reyes, Angelita. "Rereading a Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Incident:
From Toni Morrison's Beloved to Margaret Gamer's Dearly Beloved," in
Annals of Scholarship, vol. 7 (1990), 464-86.
Richards, David. Conscience and Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of The
Reconstruction Amendments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Rody, Caroline. "Toni Morrison’ s Beloved: History, ’ Rememory,’ and a
’ Clamor for a Kiss,’ in Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere eds.,
Understanding Toni Morisson's Beloved and Sula (Troy New York: Whitston
Publishing Company, 2000).
Rom£n, David. ’ ’ Not-About-AIDS," in GLQ 6:1 (2000).
Rowe, John Carlos. Through the Custom House: Nineteenth
Century American Fictions and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1982).
Rubin, Louis D. Jr.. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society
of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Sandford, Stella. "Masculine Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato" in
Tina Chanter ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas.
Schneider, David. A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1984).
---- . American Kinship: A Cultural Account (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1968).
Schrager, Cynthia. "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science and Mysticism in
W.E.B. Du Bois" in American Quarterly, vol. 48 no. 4 (December 1996).
Scott v. Georgia, 39 Ga. 321 (1869).
Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Shell, Marc. The End of Kinship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1988).
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (New York: Signet
Classic, 1983).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
364
Slaughter-House Cases, 83 (16 Wall.) 36 (1872).
Sophocles. Antigone, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both '.Thematic Explorations of
Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Spickard, Paul. Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-
Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in Diacritics (Summer
1987), 65-81.
Stevens, Jacqueline. Reproducing the State (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly (New
York: Penguin, 1986).
Sullivan, Andrew. "The Marriage Moment," The Advocate 0anuary 20,1998),
61-63. Cited in Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the
Ethics of Queer Life, 135.
—------- ed.. Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (New York: Vintage, 1997).
-----------. "When Plagues End," in The New York Times (November 10,1996).
[accessed July 16 2002]. Available from: www.nytimes.com; INTERNET.
-----------. Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival (New York:
Vintage, 1998).
Sundquist, Eric. Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983).
-----------. To Wake the Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Sunstein, Cass. "Commentary: On Analogical Reasoning," 106 Haro. L. Rev.
741 (1993).
Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. Conversations With Toni Morrison 0ackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1994).
Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of
California: Berkeley, 2000).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
365
"Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women," The New York Times
(August 26,1987). [accessed July 19 2002], Available from:
www.nytimes.com/books / 98/ 01 /11 / home / 14013.html; INTERNET.
T ourg<§e, Albion. A Fool's Errand: A Novel of the South During Reconstruction
(Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1991).
Trautmann, Thomas. Lewis Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987).
Trosino, James. "American Wedding: Same-Sex Marriage and the
Miscegenation Analogy" in 73 B.U.L. Rev. 93 (1993).
Warminski, Andrzej. "Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life" in Stuart
Barnett ed., Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998).
Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer
Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Washington, Booker T.. Up From Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995).
Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-
Murderfrom the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly
Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present (New York: Crown,
1989).
Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1993).
Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
Wright, Richard. Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
Wyatt, Jean. "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni
Morrison's Beloved" in Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere eds.,
Understanding Toni Morisson’s Beloved and Sula (Troy New York: Whitston
Publishing Company, 2000).
Yanuck, Julius. "The Gamer Fugitive Slave Case," in The Mississippi Valley
Historical Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (June 1953).
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular
Culture (Cambridge: October Books, 1991).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
-----------. The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
For (New York: Verso, 2000).
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

"Insane passions": Psychosis and female same -sex desire in psychoanalysis and literary modernism

PDF

Darwin contra Rousseau: Evolutionary narrative and the discourse on the social bond in nineteenth-century France

PDF

Impostors, antichrists, and satanists: Textual strategies of the central and eastern European fin de siecle

PDF

Imagining China: "Niehai Hua" as a national narrative

PDF

Avant-garde criticism: The criticism of exhaustion

PDF

Prophylactic practices: Contraception and the construction of female desire from Eliza Haywood to George Eliot

PDF

City correspondence: Text and photograph in modern Paris and New York

PDF

The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906

PDF

Senses of history: colonial memories, works of art, and heterogeneous community in America's Asia-Pacific since 1945

PDF

The Balzac Book Of Ernst Robert Curtis

PDF

Through To The White: Initiation And Creation In The Poetry Of Kenneth White

PDF

A cut above: Fashion as meta -culture in early -twentieth -century Russia

PDF

Making the cut: Medical, political, and textual bodies in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France

PDF

The Relationship Between The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot And Saint-John Perse

PDF

Asymmetry of scope taking in wh -questions

PDF

Exposing Sin City: Southern California sense of place and the Los Angeles anti -myth

PDF

Between dream and reality: a study of Nathalie Sarraute and Fedor Dostoevsky

PDF

Mourning melancholia: modernist poetics and the refusal of solace

PDF

Richardson In Holland And His Influence On Wolff And Deken'S 'Sara Burgerhart.'

PDF

Getting to know the poor: Early Victorian fiction and social investigation

Asset Metadata

Creator Peterson, Christopher Michael (author)

Core Title Kindred specters: Mourning, ethics, and "social death"

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Kamuf, Peggy (committee chair), Gross, Ariela (committee member), Starr, Peter T. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-271399

Unique identifier UC11334576

Identifier 3093967.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-271399 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3093967.pdf

Dmrecord 271399

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Peterson, Christopher Michael

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA