The Mother of All Things: War, Reason, and the Gendering of Pain

War, it seems, is the male’s way of giving birth. The atomicbomb springs forth as “Oppenheimer’s baby.” Revolutions are the“labor pains” announcing new societies. Nations, in prolongedabsence of military conXict, lie “fallow,” turn “barren,” or risk falling“sterile.” Indeed, in the view of a number of social theorists, as weshall see, the war-birth trope traverses Western thinking from Platoand Aristotle to military-historical treatises, to the contemporary dis-courses of journalism and politics. In the present essay, I would like toclarify, in the wake of feminist critiques, how the patriarchal appropri-ation of birthing metaphors serves to naturalize belligerent nationalideologies. More speciWcally, I shall reexamine the institution and thepractice of war as a central feature of state fetishism. For gender andsexuality have been linked to war, historically, just as war has beenlinked to the concept of the nation—by an idealist assumption of tele-ological necessity that is based on a myth of bodily unity.1 In popular,political, and philosophical discourses, why, I ask, is the birthingbody of “woman” invoked as the antithesis of metaphysical reason?Biologically, cognitively, socially, and psychoanalytically, what is itabout this imaginary body that a masculine sublime of “rational” vio-lence disavows on the one hand, yet on the other hand appropriates,incorporates, and projects—in abstract and “self-evident” metaphorsof Truth?

As the very manner in which I frame these questions suggests,my argument presupposes a fundamental structural afWnity betweenfetishism, sublimity, and conventional forms of war discourse. The

Cultural Critique 54—Spring 2003—Copyright 2003 Regents of the University of Minnesota

THE MOTHER OF ALL THINGSWAR, REASON, AND THE GENDERING OF PAIN

Vaheed Ramazani

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Wrst section of this essay, “Making War and Making Sense,” sets forththe basic metaphorical continuities and discontinuities between con-ceptions of birthing, warring, and “reason” or “common sense.” Thesecond section, “Translation, Reference, and the Problem of the OpenBody,” links the repressions and expressions governing these sublimemetaphors to the collective act of “translation” by means of whichnations at war symbolically substantiate their moral and politicalclaims. The third section, “How Pain Got Her Gender,” elaboratessome of the psychoanalytic, neurocognitive, and biological bases forthis anxiety-driven “translation” as well as for its peculiar culturalgendering. The Wnal section, “Sexing the Body Politic,” explores ingreater detail my hypothesis of a deeply embodied connectionbetween rhetorical violence and the identity-securing violences per-formed by modern nation-states.

MAKING WAR AND MAKING SENSE

“After biological reproduction,” note the editors of Gendering WarTalk, “war is perhaps the arena where division of labor along genderlines has been the most obvious, and thus where sexual differencehas seemed the most absolute and natural” (emphasis added; Cookeand Woollacott 1993, ix). “After biological reproduction, war”: I donot betray the spirit of this phrase if I take “after” to mean not, or notonly, “second to,” “behind in place,” but its less frequently encoun-tered acceptation “in imitation of.” “War,” writes Klaus Theweleit(1993, 284), “ranks high among the male ways of giving birth.” Andindeed, for some social theorists, war must be understood as a maleappropriation of the speciWcally female capacity for bearing andproducing children. Nancy Huston, for example, in her study ofmythical and historical narratives that feature the analogy betweenchildbearing and war, speculates that men, envious and fearful ofwomen’s procreative powers, traditionally have felt compelled todevise for themselves a “similarly distinctive trait,” a form of vio-lence and suffering “as digniWed, as meritorious and as spectacular inits results as that of childbirth” (1986, 127, 131).

Now the prevalence of what Huston calls the “reciprocal meta-phorization” (131) of war and childbirth seems to me undeniable.


Sara Ruddick and Carol Cohn, among others, have shown that thewar-birth trope permeates Western thinking, from Plato and Aristotleto the “techno-strategic rationality” of contemporary “defense intel-lectuals” (Cohn 1987). But one can, I think, admit the fact of symbolicreciprocation—and even the hypothesis of a latent womb envy, oranxiety—without also concluding, as does Huston, that “men makewar because women have children” (1986, 119). It should be noted,moreover, that whether or not particular women in particular socialand cultural circumstances can, do, or want to bear children, anambivalent attitude toward birthing female bodies—an attitude asso-ciated historically with males and coded, accordingly, as a “mascu-line” trait—is a discursive position that at any given time may beoccupied by either men or women.2

I am inclined, then, to substitute for Huston’s proposition, whichmoves directly from womb to war as from cause to effect (from fun-damental cause to inevitable effect), Sara Ruddick’s considerablymore tentative formulation that “the idealization of reason in West-ern philosophy may be in part a defensive reaction to the troublingcomplexities of birthing labor” and that, moreover, “ideals of reasonsometimes have been created in explicit connection with the ideals ofwar” (emphasis added; 1993, 114–15). Such wording acknowledgesthe historical contingency of the symbolic formations and of therelays among them. It allows me to suggest that, while the causalaccount should not be oversimpliWed (reduced to a version of uni-versal intentionalism), while the extrapolation from “fear and resent-ment of birthing female bodies” (Ruddick 1989, 195) to reactive,masculinist, militarist reason must remain, in the end, beyond empir-ical certainty, still the (psycho)logical inference from womb to wardoes possess uncanny explanatory power in countless cultural repre-sentations. I shall take up presently the question of the ideologicalperformativity of the war-birth Wgure; Wrst, however, it will be neces-sary to explore in greater detail how, in Western philosophical andpopular traditions, the act of giving birth has come to be seen as “afearful counterpart” (188) of metaphysical reason.

“The gaze of the suspicious eye of common sense,” says Ruddick,“can extend itself over the entire female body, ambivalently fasci-nated and repelled by its reproductive activities. In many culturesbirthing labor, the menstruation associated with it, and at times even

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breast-feeding evoke disgust” (1989, 190). Why disgust? Because therelative disorder of these “reproductive activities” seems inherentlyunsettling in a culture whose dominant values include stability andregularity, self-control and autonomy. Take, for example, from thestandpoint of “common sense,” the physical realities associated withbreast-feeding: “The nursing couple is disturbingly sexual, while themilk of a nursing mother is usually out of even the mother’s control”(190). Menstruation, too, is at once repetitive and irregular:3 “Unlikethe other bodily excretions [urine and feces], menstrual ‘discharge’ isnot subject to voluntary regulation by the menstruating woman”(190). And unlike “other repetitive bodily activities such as breathing,the ‘regular’ cycle, over a lifetime and for many women in a monthlyway, is unpredictable” (191). Finally, and most familiarly, in the con-ventional wisdom menstruation makes women erratic, unstable.

But there is still more to fear from the biosocial circumstancessurrounding the unseemly act of giving birth. “Birth,” says Ruddick,“undermines the individuation of bodies. The growing fetus, increas-ingly visible in the woman’s swelling body, an infant emerging fromthe vagina, a suckling infant feeding off a breast . . . express in dra-matic form a fusion of self and other. Any man or woman might fearthe obliteration of self that such an experience suggests” (1989, 191).It is, however, the “brute and sometimes brutal physicality” (191) ofthis experience, of this aporetic fusion/separation of selves, that Iwant to privilege for the purposes of my discussion: “Regarded un-generously, a woman’s birthing body—bloody, swollen out of shape,exposed in its pain, its otherwise concealed parts broken open—isrepellent” (190).

Ruddick’s image condenses, for many, certain features of child-birth that invite comparison with the carnage of war: pain, struggle,radical disorder, the life-threatening breakdown of the body’s normallimits. One is reminded here of Huston’s quotation of Roger Caillois:“if ‘war is compared to childbirth with such insistence,’ it is becausewar ‘expresses without intermediary society’s lower depths, the nec-essarily horrible, visceral impulses that intelligence can neither com-prehend nor control’” (1986, 133). Caillois is certainly right, insofar asboth war and birth are violences in need of reason(s)—naturalization,social legitimation. And yet (and so), contrary to Caillois’s assertion,neither war nor birth expresses anything “without intermediary.”



Indeed, Caillois’s statement itself demonstrates as much, foreground-ing the modalities of its own mediation, of its social and linguisticoverdetermination. For although the passage purports to tell us whywar and birth are compared with “such insistence,” what it in factdoes is “explain” the war-birth metaphor by mobilizing an instanceof the very same metaphor (visceral impulses, society’s lower depths),suggesting, by this circularity, that, to a signiWcant degree, what wecall “war” and “birth” are already metaphors—indeed, metaphors foreach other. It is not altogether true, then, that “intelligence can neithercomprehend nor control” the stark realities of war and of birth, forthe abstracting, metaphorizing powers of normative reason are atwork in our very experience of these realities, in our understanding,representation, and performance of them. To say this is not to conjureaway “the referent,” but to recognize that every referent is culturallymarked, that while the physical world may exist independently ofus—may have properties that constrain our experience of it—still “it”has no meaning outside a conceptual system that is a priori Wgura-tive, rhetorical, metaphorical in the sense, given by Lakoff and John-son, of “understanding . . . one kind of thing in terms of another”(1980, 5).4

So if the concepts of war and birth are reciprocally deWning, par-tially structured by (“in terms of”) one another; if, more broadlyspeaking, the realities of war and birth are enmeshed in a discursivesystem whose meanings are relational, intertextual, and hence open-ended, there can be no deWnitively literal, no neutral, language bywhich either of the referents, war or birth, may be known, described,and, to that extent, lived. If, for example, as we saw above, Cailloisdepicts both war and birth as “necessarily horrible” while Hustonportrays them as inherently “digniWed,” this contradiction suggestsnot that one description is, in some absolute sense, truer than theother, but that in each case a different, indeed competing, facet of thewar-birth metaphor (of an entirely conventional system of equiva-lences) has been highlighted for purposes speciWc to each context. AsLakoff and Johnson insist, every metaphor leaves something out, hidessome concepts (or some part of a concept) while accentuating others(1980, 10–13). And the only challenge to received metaphors, to theperceptions and actions that they shape and sanction, comes fromother metaphors—whether invented, reconceived, or conventional

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(139–58)—as well as, I would add, from other kinds of tropes. But itis, I want to claim, precisely because knowledge is always partial,always relative to our values and assumptions, that so much is at stakein the way we describe things; it is because the truth of the referentis never simply given that referential truthfulness—accuracy, if youwill—is a goal that we must uphold as well as continually reexamine.

It might then not be entirely inaccurate to say that revolutions“are” the labor pains preceding the birth of new societies. Relative tocertain purposes, contexts, or outcomes, it might not be inaccurateto describe war as the “mother,” the “matrix” of a given culture, orto Wnd historical evidence for the philosophical adage that, in theabsence of occasional military conXict, nations lie “fallow,” turn “bar-ren,” or fall “sterile.” There is indeed a sense in which the atomicbomb was “born,” was “Oppenheimer’s baby,” as the hydrogen bombwas Teller’s.5 What is nonetheless misleading about such images (ofviolence as labor, weapons as babies, destruction as fertility, preg-nancy, and birth) is their suggestion that war is a form of creation andthat, as such, it is as natural and as socially constructive (but here weentertain yet another set of assumptions) as having sex and havingchildren. It is not, I repeat, that such ways of thinking are necessarilyfalse: war does serve to concretize (however one-sidedly) otherwiseabstract collective beliefs, to create new geographic and political real-ities; and for all we know, the impulse toward organized state vio-lence may be as “natural” (which is not to say inevitable) as desire,aggression, or the will to power. What I Wnd disturbing, though, aboutwar-birth analogies, as well as about less candidly sexual war tropes,is that they participate, almost always, in a justiWcatory rhetoric thatconceals, or at least minimizes, war’s immediate “product,” its func-tionally and deWnitionally primary goal, which, Scarry says, is to “out-injure the opponent” (1985, 63). One may wish, of course, to disputethe claim that injuring is “the main purpose and outcome of war”(63), to argue instead that the “true” goal of war (from the perspec-tive, at least, of each “side” in the conXict) is to uphold certain princi-ples, moral or political. The shortcoming of such thinking is not onlythat it makes injuring an acceptable means to a desirable end butalso—and more problematically, for an ethos of accuracy—that ittends to so emphasize the legitimacy of the end—the justness, thereasonableness, or the righteousness of “the cause”—that it risks



losing sight of bodily harm, of that means that war discourses soobviously presuppose that often it quite literally goes without saying.Now, when a discourse of the sublime6 does serve war interests, itmay or may not speak openly of physical violence. But even whenviolence is overtly represented, it—or its radical material reality—will, I believe, still be obscured—trivialized, in effect—so long as theemphasis of context and diction is on juridical, historical, or moralentitlement, on abstract, romantic, Manichaean categories of rightversus wrong, good versus evil, rational versus irrational, and so on.

It is not my contention that in war “higher” causes are somehownot at stake, or that such causes must necessarily be false or immoral.My point is that, however reasonable or moral a particular purpose,it is neither reasonable nor moral, logical nor honest, to represent thatpurpose—to oneself or to others—without also representing, in arealistic manner, the bodily damage that that purpose might entail.By “a realistic manner” I mean one that avoids conXating, as muchas possible, “means” and “ends,” “cost” and “beneWt,” so that eachterm in each one of these economic equations might carefully be“weighed” against its antagonist; but I mean, as well, in a mannerthat would attend, with lucidity and sensitivity, to the actual refer-ents of these algorithmic signs. “Realism” in this sense would lead usto question the validity of any model that trades in pain and death,that calculates, quantiWes, measures bodily experience as if it werecommensurable with theoretical abstractions (with the disciplinaryprotocols of political “science”).7

This being said, I return to my premise that war and its ravagesnever will be thought outside of some abstract, Wgural language.Gamelike models of strategy and winning, celebratory images ofwar-as-birth, and romanticized notions of dying for one’s countrymay simply be too integral to what war has become ever to be abol-ished or altered extensively. But if killing and suffering can “go with-out saying,” so too can the need to question our language; not todwell in it naively or disingenuously, but to see at every momentwhat it might in fact conceal, what, at speciWc times and in speciWcsituations, it fails to acknowledge, to refer to, or to do.

The powerful potential of linguistic vigilance as a form of civiland political intervention is apparent when we consider that waritself is in no small part a symbolic phenomenon, “a startling blend of

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the real and the Wctional” (Scarry 1985, 62), where the Wctional hasdevastatingly real implications. War, in other words, is an institution,a system whose rules are arbitrary and conventional, and whosenature and objectives have varied over time (see Rapoport 1989,425–28); it is, one could argue, an instance of the performative, aprocess of enunciation (or a series of enunciations) that accomplisheswhat it speaks of, does what it says, and whose referent is, to thatextent, identical with its signiWed. That what we call “war” is partlyan effect of the utterance (or uttering) that names and renames it8

can be seen not only in declarations of war (when they are made bythose with the authority to do so) but also in the day-to-day practiceof war as mediated by rituals of representation. As Scarry points out,“even in a relatively conWned war the events are happening on ascale far beyond visual or sensory experience and thus routinelynecessitate the invocation of models, maps, and analogues” (1985,101). War proceeds, “it goes without saying,” through stages, ex-changes, scenarios, and engagements; it is organized, invariably, onthe model of the contest—as a “reciprocal activity for nonrecipro-cal outcomes” (84)—and consists, accordingly, of formalized bound-aries (a start, a middle, and a Wnish, for example) that are made up,in turn, of actions and participants (or groupings of each)—theytoo being imagined as bounded and discrete. In principle, at least,wars are spatially and temporally bounded episodes, “arranged bydiplomats,” so the thinking goes, and “fought,” says Ruddick, “onor above ‘battleWelds’” (1993, 114, 115). And, indeed, battleWeldsand battles, weapons and targets, soldiers and civilians, enemies andallies are commonly conceived of as self-contained objects (or cate-gories of objects) closed off from each other and making up wars(or the general but equally discrete concept of war, without which,in any case, wars would not exist). But just as vital to my argumenthere is that the enabling paradigm for conceiving of war (as of otherdelineable objects and things) is a mental projection of bodily contouror, more accurately, of the body as contour, a limited surface withan inside and an outside. BrieXy stated, the experience of the bodyas circumscribed space, as integrated matter that is structurallydivided—distributed, binarily, between inside and out—generates,by the same metaphor of the “in” and the “out,” all other objects ofhuman perception.



In view of the cognitive primacy of the body as “container”(Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 58), it is perhaps not surprising that, in dis-courses of war, a version of that metaphor customarily stands in forthe countless real bodies (or embodied “containers”) that are placedat risk by the conduct of war. In military, historical, and political writ-ings, the narrative convention to which I refer represents a given army,population, or government (often without distinguishing amongthem) as a single, autonomous, uniWed adversary. The complex,chaotic, and bloody encounter of hostile forces across stretches of ter-ritory may be illustrated, for example, in strategy writing, as a balletof giants, a “rareWed choreography” (Scarry 1985, 70) of mythicalcreatures whose injuries, if any, seem entirely unreal, like those of afairytale or cartoon persona. As well, an entire people may appear toparticipate in the thoroughgoing evil imputed to its leader, a leaderwho, by virtue of being one individual, is easier to demonize thanthe many he “represents,” than the numerous social and politicalidentities that—diverse, nuanced, or motile though they be—arereduced, by metonymy, to the cliché of “the enemy.” Through theseand similar linguistic codes, abstract, simpliWed, caricatural bodiesdetermine what is “in” (the) war and what is “outside” it, what (the)war is and what it is not.

What it is not (not explicitly, at least), what lies “outside” (or hid-den “inside”) the encapsulating bounds of these fantasized bodies,are thousands of real bodies, soldier and civilian, each with its ownpersonal and cultural history, each with its own promise of vulnera-bility. “[A]s we learned in the Persian Gulf War, . . . the planning andprecision of military targeting does not admit of consideration ofthe cost in human lives of such actions as destroying power systems,or water and sewer systems, or highways and food distribution sys-tems. Psychological effects—on the soldiers Wghting the war or onthe citizens injured, or fearing for their own safety, or living throughtremendous deprivation, or helplessly watching their babies die fromdiarrhea due to the lack of clean water—all of these are not to betalked about” (Cohn 1993, 232). “Not to be talked about” in defenseanalysis are the “unwanted”—but forseeable—civilian casualties andthe accidental—but commonplace—military fratricides (see Ruddick1989, 199, 203). These messy details are, as Cohn remarks, out of boundsin political speech; but the “bounds” themselves, I am suggesting, are

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the distant projection of bodily experience, the reiWed substitute foran originary frailty: as we recall from Lacan’s “mirror stage,” theinfant’s Wrst sense of bodily integrity (the embryonic form for whatwill be the ego) arises suffused with the anxiety of loss—helpless-ness, disunity, or lack of control. Later, in adult life, I am proposingit is partly the memory of this primitive trauma that the body ofwar will seek to “contain”—to hide or deny, hold “in” or keep “out.”War’s body, in other words, is strangely disembodied, and that mightjust be why it works so well—why organized killing is a receivedpolitical tool; why licensed mass murder is ready-to-hand.

What I mean here by “the body of war,” then, is not just thatabstract, totalizing Wgure (fantastic colossus or evil head of state)whose monolithic features, physical or moral, effectively derealize thesubjects of trauma. Nor do I mean just the body of the soldier, thoughit too aspires, through training and discipline, to a rational ideal ofcomplete self-control, to a willed metamorphosis of Xesh into armoror of body into pure and inviolate soul. War’s body would be theentire grammar of war: the basic, symmetrical, adversary structure,with all of the rules and shared expectations, all of the categories,forms, and relations, through which war is made up and real warsare made.

It is easy to see, at this level of generality, how the wideningboundaries of the concept of war, despite, or because of, their sys-tematicity, fade back into the fabric of the social. Only with difWculty,it might be said, do the boundaries contain or maintain themselves.For insofar as it is socially constructed, war, as an event, extendsthe war system, while the system, or institution, extends in turnnot only the general economic substructure but the whole ideologyof “reason” that supports it—the abstract, “objective,” binary think-ing whose gendered connotations we have already seen.9 In Clause-witz’s dictum, as is well known, war is the continuation of politicsby other means (1976, 69, 87, 605–10); and it may be, too, from a his-toricizing viewpoint, that politics continue the effects of war, main-taining through (other) socioeconomic institutions the repressionsand inequities established in battle (Foucault 1979, 168; 1980, 90–91).But if the frontiers between war and politics are ambiguous (“contin-ued” by various rhetorical means), it is the disavowal of the ambigu-ity and of its constructedness that makes it an effective ideological tool.



Ambiguities, “continuations,” or “metaphors we live by” work with-in and sustain seemingly bounded conceptions—war, politics, sexu-ality, and so on—whose “silent” or conventional interrelations needto be recognized before their effects—the referential continuationsof tropes not seen as such—can be challenged by less perniciousand less mystiWed forms. Naturalized slippages, tropings, or “contin-uations” may hide inconvenient but real complications (other con-tinuations conceived by other means) whose constitutive relations ofsameness and difference may be closer, mimetically, to embodiedexperience—to the unstable metaphors at the origin of being. JudithButler describes, with respect to the mirror stage, the inaugural—andenduring—precariousness of the self, of being as becoming, spacing,or relating: “it is through an identiWcation with an imago, which isitself a relation, that the ‘outside’ of the ego is Wrst ambiguouslydemarcated, indeed, that a spatial boundary that negotiates ‘outside’and ‘inside’ is established in and as the imaginary” (1993, 74). Inother words, “the ego as object is neither interior nor exterior to thesubject, but the permanently unstable site where that spatialized dis-tinction is perpetually negotiated; it is this ambiguity that marks theego as imago, that is, as an identiWcatory relation. Hence, identiWca-tions are never simply or deWnitively made or achieved; they are insis-tently constituted, contested, and negotiated” (76).

It is, as I said earlier, the uncomfortable awareness, the feeling ofambiguity, that the body of war is “made” to contain—to subordinateto its abstract, rational contours, to its hard, unyielding, “masculine”frame. Yet for all its symbolic coherence and cohesion, the body ofwar is an unsound container, a permeable entity whose contents leakout: wars, says Ruddick, “rarely have the neat endings their plan-ners envision. Moreover, the rewards of even neat victory are oftencompromised or reversed in decades, if not in months. . . . Physicaldisabilities, psychic injuries, social disruptions, and socioecologicaldestructions of battle last long after surrender” (1993, 117). Hereagain we see how the boundaries of war—Wxed, uniform, mathemat-ically precise—are haunted by a lingering residue of matter, anuntidy efXuent of troublesome “detail.”

Etymology links materiality with woman and the feminine: mat-ter with mater and matrix, or womb (Butler 1993, 31). And in the tra-dition of classical iconography, the typing of woman as weak (or

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weaker) vessel—prone to loss of virtue or to breach of integrity—Wnds its main sanction in the open, birthing body, that unsealed re-ceptacle whose “insides” spill out (Warner 1987, 251). Like the exces-sive “details” of war, the intractable material facts of begetting—pain,incontinence, breakdown of borders—are not to be talked about inmost public forums, not to be felt, or identiWed with, outside thenorms of good, “solid” reason. “Reason,” however, does not simplysubordinate “feminine” disorder to “masculine” control. Its relationto matter, “nature,” and feeling is not simply one of moral transcen-dence, nor of concealment, exclusion, or capture. “Reason,” mas-culinity, the “science” of war are motivated and shaped by all theyexclude, by birth’s unassimilable sexual detritus and by war’s luridsurplus of cruelty and terror. To take one example from contempo-rary politics: nation-states, when personiWed by reference to theirleaders, tend to be imagined by national “security” experts as dis-tinctly male agents or “masculine actors”; and this practice givesrise automatically, says Cohn, to “male competitive identity issues”(1993, 239–40). But the maleness of the state and the manliness of warare not mere reXections of the exclusion of women from soldieringand politics, in my opinion; the exclusion (or exclusivity) is of coursequite real, but it is, as such, the effect of a turn, a turning away thatcarries within it a constitutive trace of what is denied. When men givebirth to new world orders, they ignore, or “forget,” the “feminine”details (doubt, ambiguity, “useless” emotion); but that men do “givebirth” is already a sign that war’s masculinity both excludes andincludes its overdetermined feminine other. Male war-birth, in wayswe shall see, simpliWes and distorts, through a kind of “translation,”a complex and ambivalent psychic relation.

TRANSLATION, REFERENCE, AND THE PROBLEM OFTHE OPEN BODY

The problem, I hope to show, is not just that “reasonable” discourses ofthe body may elide, misdescribe, or marginalize human suffering. Inher chapter on war, Scarry has examined in elaborate detail the vari-ous “paths” by which “the sheer material factualness” of “woundedand open” bodies can be made to “disappear” from the inXuential


rhetorics of politicians and the media, strategists and historians(1985, 14, 81).10 What, however, is of special interest to me is a partic-ular kind of omission, description, or trivialization (these categories,as we might expect, ultimately overlap [see 69–70])—a techniquewhose pretence is, precisely, that it does not dismiss the body butbrings vividly to light the repellent nature of physical violence. Cen-tral to this particular type of sublime is a perceptual process identicalin structure to that which Scarry locates in speciWc acts of violence—in torture, as I have shown in a separate essay,11 and in war, whoseinner “logic” preoccupies me here. The process, to which Scarry givesthe name “reality conferring,” or “analogical substantiation,” begins,in the case of war, in a crisis of belief, when “some central idea or ide-ology or cultural construct” has ceased to appear self-evident to acountry’s population; when, that is, each side of a dispute “calls intoquestion the legitimacy and thereby erodes the reality of the othercountry’s issues, beliefs, ideas, self-conception” (14, 128). In a disputeleading to war, Scarry avers, “a belief on each side that has ‘culturalreality’ for that side’s population . . . begins to become recognizableto its own population as an ‘invented structure’ rather than existingas it did in peacetime as . . . a naturally occurring ‘given’” (128). Tosense that one has been “unselfconsciously dwelling in the midst ofone’s own creation” is not only disconcerting or anxiety producing;it can be “terrifying,” “self-repudiating,” and Wnally “intolerable”: “itis when a country has become to its population a Wction that warsbegin” (128, 129, 131).

It is, in this context, the role of analogical thinking to restoreto the threatened beliefs of one of the warring parties an aura ofcompelling, incontestable reality. The metaphorical imagination willreconnect certain of the “derealized” cultural constructs with “theforce and power of the material world” (128); and it will do so bytransferring the truth of massive wounding—the immediacy, thecertainty, or the reality of the war’s injured bodies—to or onto one ofthe sets of issues on behalf of which the injuring was performed inthe Wrst place. Injuring, then, is not merely a means of selecting a win-ner (if it were, one would hope other and benign forms of contestcould serve the same purpose and so substitute for war [92–93]); noris injuring, or injury per se, exclusively a record, a memorialization,of the advent of struggle and attempted resolution; injuring provides,

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more fundamentally still, the “radical material base” for the winningside’s issues (132). Outrageous though it sounds—and certainly is—killing, maiming, and the inXiction of pain embody, in this sense, thevalues of the victor, investing them with the urgency, the “present-ness” of the body until, as Scarry puts it, “there is time” for the erst-while adversaries to agree on and enact what is now to be real; toreimagine, redescribe, and rebuild the world “according to the blue-print sketchily speciWed by the war’s locus of victory” (121).

But if we are to understand fully the sexual and social politics ofa warlike sublime, we shall have to look more closely at just how thisperceptual process of analogical reference is said to unfold. Recallingthe roots of reality conferring in rituals such as oaths, prophecy, andsacriWce, Scarry remarks that, like these practices, war allows “ex-treme attributes of the body to be translated into another language,to be broken away from the body and relocated elsewhere at thevery moment that the body itself is disowned, made to disappear”through mendacious redescription (124). I shall come back to this par-ticular formulation, but I want Wrst to allow Scarry to elaborate a bit:“it is as though the human mind, confronted by the open body itself ...does not have the option of failing to perceive its reality that rushesunstoppably across his [sic] eyes and into his [sic] mind, yet the mindso Xees from what it sees that it will with almost equal speed performthe countermovement of assigning that attribute to something else,especially if there is something else at hand made ready to receive therejected attribute, ready to act as its referent” (126).

Most readers of this article, I suspect, do not normally, even inwartime, witness Wrsthand the serious wounding of actual humanbodies; were we to do so we could not, in any case, entirely separateour perception of that reality from our cultural assumptions aboutwhat it might mean—about what, at a particular historical moment,“the body itself” or “the open body itself” can be understood to be or,again, to be like (which is not to say it can be whatever we want). Isnot, moreover, this countermovement of metaphor, this ontosemanticXight toward autonomy and reason (toward “another kind of lan-guage”), part of what constitutes pain in the Wrst place? If we think ofthe body as protorational form, as the barest adumbration of (cul-tural) reason, then reality conferring is akin to the experience of painitself insofar as the latter, too, is a grasping and Xeeing, a destruction



of reference—including of the body image12 as the frame of all refer-ence—and a self-preservative drive to reinstate the body, to rescue itsintegrity and that of the world. It is one thing, however, to acknowl-edge that bodies have a historical identity and that the experience ofpain (be it pain directly felt or the pain of witness and empathy) isdeWned, in part, by that identity (by the assertion of “the self” againstworld-shattering aversiveness), and another thing altogether to sug-gest that the pain experience is somehow reducible to a set of culturalcodes, to the social and political metaphors through which we appre-hend it. Yet this is precisely what reality conferring implies by the“twisting of terms” that guides its countermovement: “pain is reliedon to project power, mortality to project immortality,” and vulnera-bility to project invulnerability (126). In reality conferring, the “real-ity” or “extreme attributes” of bodily damage are not just in conXictwith an idea of relative composure or of ontological stability; instead,the very force of that conXict—the somatic extremity of the tensionitself—is abstracted (“translated”) from its basis in conXict, is felt nolonger as aversive equivocation but as certainty, resolve, moral orideological legitimacy.

This distance, this imagined autonomy with respect to bodilyexperience, is, of course, what is most problematic about “common-sense” discourses of objectivity and reason. “What gets left out” ofprofessional and popular talk about war, notes Cohn, is “the emo-tional, the concrete, the particular, the human bodies and their vul-nerability, human lives and their subjectivity” (1993, 232). “To arousea sturdy suspicion of war,” in Ruddick’s estimation, “it is necessaryto undermine the kinds of thinking that legitimate war making”(1993, 114), that cast war as a self-evident, even venerable, institution.In place of such thinking Ruddick proposes what I would like to callembodied rationality—reason still attentive to concrete particulars, tothe complexity, the ambiguity, the provisionality of experience. WhatI mean by experience here is peculiar to my argument but is also, Ibelieve, consistent with Ruddick’s: the body-mind’s awareness ofitself as dialectic13—as tension or equivocation, aversive or not—and,by extension, of its “local moral world” (Kleinman 1992, 171–73) asthe site where social norms may be transformed or resisted. This isnot to say that abstract reasoning is an intrinsically Xawed epistemo-logical method but that in the hands of strategists and policy makers

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abstraction has generally been used to reduce to dichotomous op-tions and “universal” principles dilemmas whose sources and solu-tions are contingent (see Ruddick 1989, 95, 97; 1993, 114, 115).

I referred, in the foregoing paragraph, to an imagined autonomywith respect to subjective or bodily experience. For only apparentlydoes emotive perception “get left out” of abstract thought; onlyapparently does impersonal logic sift intellect from feeling and bodyfrom mind. “The discourses of reason,” as Ruddick points out,“barely conceal the emotions that permeate them—anxiety, defen-siveness, addictive sexual assertion or fear of sexuality, distaste forand envy of female sexual and birth-giving bodies, and competitiveaggression” (1993, 114). What counts as subjective or objective, inother words, depends on which and whose emotions get left out,which in turn suggests how and why the elision occurs. What tendsto get left out, it seems to me, is the capacity for a relatively accuratereason—sensitive, self-questioning, wary of the lure of power—whereas embodied but irrational (not to say unethical) fears anddesires get “translated” into putatively rational passions: discoursesof freedom and national interest, of moral propriety and heroic self-sacriWce, whose deep afWliation with norms of “good” reason canobscure their status as passions per se. “In an ‘objective’ ‘universal’discourse,” Cohn remarks, “it is only the ‘feminine’ emotions thatare noticed and labeled as emotions and thus in need of banningfrom the analytic process. ‘Masculine’ emotions—such as feelings ofaggression, competition, macho pride and swagger, or the sense ofidentity resting on carefully defended borders—are not so easilynoticed and identiWed as emotions, and are instead invisibly foldedinto ‘self-evident,’ so-called realist paradigms and analyses” (1993,242).

The sanitization of violence, pain, and death takes, as we haveseen, numerous forms, from omission to euphemism to marginaliza-tion; but I am claiming that it is important that we add to thesetechniques the ostensible acknowledgment of the horrors of war andof the centrality of those horrors to the practice of war. What passesfor pragmatism or frank resignation (“war is hell,” “war is a dirtybusiness”)14 might then be recognized as a form of denial, a fetish-istic transcoding of ofWcially unsanctioned affect (fear, sadism, rac-ism, and so on) into “laudable” urges or “reasonable” stances such as



patriotism, courage, or Realpolitik. In a seemingly transparent or ref-erential discourse, bodily injury, I am proposing, may get left out bybeing left in; wounding and death, that is to say, may be effectivelyignored by being evoked, by being depicted—graphically, at times—as horrible yet necessary, unfortunate yet just, repulsive yet somehowsublime.15

HOW PAIN GOT HER GENDER

Keeping in mind both the structure of reality conferring and my fore-going comments on encodings of gender, I want to return to thequestion I raised earlier: to what does this sublime reason bothrespond and correspond? What horror makes “natural” the horrorsof war; what fearful unreason makes it “reasonable” to kill? For theproblem is not just the obvious one, that in the gendered dichotomiesof patriarchal culture the “feminine” concern for private affectionsand immediate needs (for “human bodies and their vulnerability,human lives and their subjectivity”) is routinely devalued withrespect to “manly” ideals such as public duty and tough, “imper-sonal” thinking. Underlying and authorizing these evaluative dis-tinctions is the assumption that one sex is more “bodily” (Ruddick1989, 194) than the other, an assumption that reduces women’s sexualspeciWcity to the presumed capacity for reproducing offspring,16 andthat equates only women (not women and men) with the sexual andgenetic requirements for procreation. If, nonetheless, we admit thegenerality that pregnancy and labor are unique to female bodies andthat birthing is, in any case, the most sensational of sexual markers,we are in a position to better understand exactly what it means for“woman” to be “bodily.” To be “bodily” is to signify the beginning oflife, and with life’s beginning its obverse, its end; so the female’spotential for “creating” human life becomes a phobic portent of ill-ness and death, a troubling reminder not just of the end but of all thatannounces it from the beginning—vulnerability and lack of control;accident, dysfunction, pain, and decay. But we need to look beyondthis associative series to what makes it seem intuitively compelling.Why, we need to ask, does this common association of women, child-birth, and bodily mortality have such uncommon affective force?

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What makes the mythical body of woman the “natural” counterpartto “rational” man, the foil and the guarantor (my “responds and cor-responds”) for the “clean” and “efWcient” violence of war?

There is, as theorists tell us, nothing inevitable about the practiceof mothering by biological mothers. But within the traditional socialarrangement that assigns caretaking mainly to women and, in partic-ular, to the child’s birth mother, it is “the” body of “the” mother thatfunctions, by convention, as the origin of pleasure, but also of pain; ofjoy, satisfaction, and love, of course, but also of fear, frustration, andhate. The voice, the touch, the gesture, the gaze: what brings thesethings into “focus,” for the child, is the quality of experience theyare felt to convey; and that experience, with respect to each object,always is split, divided in two: “the ego introjects objects ‘good’ and‘bad,’ for both of which the mother’s breast is the prototype—forgood objects when the child obtains it, for bad ones when it failshim. But it is because the baby projects its own aggression on to theseobjects that it feels them to be ‘bad’ and not only in that they frustrateits desires” (Klein 1948, 282). Thus, the original of all part-objects—the maternal breast, says Melanie Klein—is, from the start, double inkind, not just because it gratiWes or frustrates, but also because, fromthis earliest stage, the life and death instincts structure perception:“love and hatred are from the beginning projected on to [the mother],and concurrently she is internalized with both these contrasting pri-mordial emotions” (1957, 310). In this struggle between libidinal anddestructive instincts, the prevailing drive is that toward death. “Per-secutory anxiety predominates,” says Klein. Sadism is at its “zenith”;splitting at its “height.” And while splitting is in essence a processof defense, it concurrently produces what it seeks to repress: “Split-ting . . . is effective to the extent that it brings about a dispersal of anx-iety and a cutting off of emotions. But it fails in another sense becauseit results in a feeling akin to death—that is what the accompanyingdisintegration and feeling of chaos amount to” (312).

This feeling of chaos, of lack or depletion, preWgures specularself-recognition, where defensive aggression will persist as whatLacan calls “a correlative tension” of the subject’s becoming.17 Simi-larly, for Kristeva, narcissistic identiWcation is anticipated, in herterms, largely by “abjection”: “the mimesis by means of which [thesubject-in-process] becomes homologous to another in order to



become himself, is, in short, logically and chronologically secondary.Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject. Abjec-tion, with a meaning broadened to take in subjective diachrony, isa precondition of narcissism” (1982, 13). “‘I’ am not but do separate”:separation is not yet spatial for the child, but as Kristeva suggestshere, and as Klein had seen, the projection/introjection of good andbad objects prepares and facilitates spatial cognition.

So prior to the specular space of mimesis, where the inside is afunction of an outer reXection, and prior to oedipal symbolization,where “I” and “not-I” separate through “castration,” the anxiogenicsplit of repression forms the very basis of inside and out. In mirror-stage (or primary)18 narcissism, of course, integrative tendencies doemerge: the part-object gives way to the whole, while paranoid dis-sociation softens into ambivalence; but the condition of possibility forthose bounded perceptions still is a nervous and unstable law, adeeply equivocal law of the mother, marked, inevitably, by feelings“akin to death.”

And of what might such inklings of death bear the trace, if notthe traumatic fall into life? “Abjection preserves,” Kristeva contends,“what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in theimmemorial violence with which a body becomes separated fromanother body in order to be” (1982, 10). I want to pursue this idea abit further, in the light of my own particular concerns: before wecould possibly know what it was, we experienced boundary as trans-gression, inside and outside as inversion. For as the inside of themother came (or became) out, a foreknowledge of space inscribed thechild’s body; threshold and distinction were “born” in and of pain,from a violence “immemorial” yet recorded in Xesh. This trauma ofbirth announced every other, repeated itself, as archaic remembrance,with every succeeding experience of pain (of loss or ambivalence,anxiety or “death”). For Otto Rank, certainly, if not for Freud himself,the primacy of this trauma had clear implications: every anxiety feltby the child “consists of,” in Rank’s words, “the anxiety at birth,”while “the child’s every pleasure” only aims to restore the originalpleasure of life in the womb. Thus Rank will argue that castrationanxiety “is based on the primal castration at birth,” that oedipal fearattends to the genitals “just on account of their actual . . . relation”—

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“vaguely imagined (or remembered)” by the child—to procreativityand exile from the womb (1993, 20).

What masculine reason responds to, what the hard, phallic bodyof war will “contain” is a sedimented history of catastrophic losses,from the trauma of birth to the narcissistic wound to castration anxi-ety in the symbolic order—all of which are linked, in the culturalimaginary, to that archetypal mother that we fear and desire. Woman,on this view, is the emissary of pain, the source of an unwelcome“bodily” knowledge, the sex (or whose sex) betokens our frailty. Thisis not to dissociate the mother from pleasure, but to align our everypain with the loss of mother-pleasure, of nurture, continuity, andphantasies of omnipotence. It is to see the received notion of the vul-nerable woman—sensitive to pain, be it others’ or her own—as acompensatory projection of our social fear of pain, of that pain thatwas given (so it seemed) at the start by a presence we would learnover time to call “female” and whose idealized compassion wouldbelie a latent violence. It is, in other words, not a little ironic that thestereotype of the delicate, nurturing woman—passive, paciWstic, andabove all pacifying—rests on an unconscious cultural association—it too linked to labor and nursing—of women and violence, injury,and pain; women and aggression to and of the body. It does not mat-ter, then, if the child, in parturition, is at least as much the agent as thevictim of pain; nor does it matter if, generally speaking, real mothersmay be caring, protective, or benign. Maternal love itself being lessthan absolute—the imperfect answer to a total demand—it recapitu-lates, in its hurtful ambivalence, the border experience of “rejection”at birth.19

Let us return to Scarry’s observation: “to arrive at the recogni-tion that one has been unselfconsciously dwelling in the midst ofone’s own creation . . . is a terrifying and self-repudiating process”—“it is when a country has become to its population a Wction thatwars begin” (1985, 128, 131). What is “terrifying and self-repudiating”about this recognition is that it threatens not only a structure of belief,but also the structure of each body that “holds” that belief and ofwhich the belief is itself a projection. It is not, in other words, just anissue or an ideology that is recognized as made and therefore unmak-able, as invented and hence arbitrary or possibly untrue. What is atstake—or so it might feel—is a whole way of knowing anchored in the



body, beginning with the sensorimotor reXexes by means of which,as infants, we organized our world. It is not just an idea or nationalself-conception that is called into question in political disputes but,beneath such abstractions, the rudimentary cognitions (object, space,time, causation) developed in relation to the body of the mother andon which “higher” truth claims must Wnally rest.

So to say that a dispute is “terrifying and self-repudiating” is tosay that at some level it has already hurt us, already reawakened ourmemory of trauma, repeated, in effect, an archaic violence. The pointis not simply that everyday anxiety, pushed to the extreme, resonatesin the body, but that every anxiety is a physical wound, a wound tothe body as well as to the self or, better, to the body and so to the self.On this view, the altering of bodies through war is not a making lit-eral of Wgurative wounding but an intensiWcation of the already quiteliteral, a rendering visible of what had been hidden (as much, indeed,from ourselves as from others). In the analogical function of war, weremember, “the mind so Xees from what it sees that it will withalmost equal speed perform the countermovement of assigning thatattribute [of the real] to something else” (Scarry 1985, 126). Whatthe mind Xees from, I am suggesting, is the painful mutilation of thebody and/as ego, whether in arguments leading to war or in theprosecution of wars per se. But “the open body itself”—be it real orimagined, our own or an other’s—is not available to us untouched bymeaning; it is not a pure symbol of contentless pain but an uncon-scious metaphor for the mother’s sundered form, for the female mate-riality that “delivered” us to pain, that propped our entire selfhoodon and against it.20

SEXING THE BODY POLITIC: FETISHISM, IRONY, ANDTHE MALE NATION-STATE

Whether perinatal trauma, splitting, or castration, it is a boundarycrisis, a “feminine” abject, that the national imaginary sets itselfagainst. “Abjection,” says Kristeva, is “above all ambiguity”—“aborder” that does not “cut off the subject from what threatens it”; itis “[d]iscomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that,through the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of

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which signs and objects arise” (1982, 9, 10). This is the againstnessof repression and disavowal, but at the same time of apposition, sus-tenance, or support. It is the mechanism of a turn, or a turning away,that performs a “translation,” a comforting conversion, of fear intotriumph, matter into spirit, mobility and chaos into Wxity and order.The conversion, in other words, seeks to cancel out its source; itappropriates yet betrays—misrepresents—the unspeakable horrorthat sets it in motion. This is not to say that what is represented isfalse, illusory, or simply unreal. It may be these things, but it is muchmore as well; Michael Taussig, in discussing what he calls “Statefetishism,” invokes the reality of the Wction of the state—the politicalpower of the state as Idea. Philip Abram’s Wgure of the state as amask—as “the mask that prevents our seeing political practice as itis” (qtd. in Taussig 1993, 219)—represents, for Taussig, a disturbingcontradiction. “For it not only implicates the State in the cultural con-struction of reality but delineates that reality as inherently deceptive,real and unreal at one and the same time” (220). Thus, I would infer,the double logic of the Freudian fetish—knowledge and belief (here,“real” and “unreal”)—describes the way each citizen experiences thestate. We all know, at some level, that the state is but a Wction, yet wecontinue to behave as if it were not, indeed, as if that paradox weresomehow not to matter. Until, or unless, the signs of total state-hood—the bureaucratic, legal, or economic “proof” that the state, asan entity, does indeed exist—no longer ensure the authority of theconcept; until, that is, the cultural fragments, the metonyms for the“natural” national whole, no longer refer “spontaneously” to it, tothe state as a self-present, sovereign body with a mind, a will, or areason of its own. It is, to repeat, when a country has become a Wctionto its population that wars begin. As the dispute between nations“intensiWes and endures, the exposed ‘cultural Wction’ may seem indanger of eroding from something that is uncomfortably recogniz-able as ‘made’ into something potentially identiWable as ‘unreal,’‘untrue,’ ‘illegitimate,’ ‘arbitrary’” (Scarry 1985, 128).

We may therefore be inclined to situate war feelings (the feelingof being ready or eager to go to war [Scarry 1985, 131]) at one endof a spectrum of fetishistic feelings extending from our normal,everyday self-deception—the practical necessity of believing in thestate, of participating, largely as a matter of course, in the collective



substantiation of its “palpable unreality” (Taussig 1993, 218)—to thepathological fetishism represented by war. But would these “patho-logical” feelings be so readily aroused if war were not a preexistent,ready-made solution, a taken-for-granted social institution, a legiti-mate resource in the conduct of diplomacy? The problem, as I havetried to show at some length, is that the pathology in question isnothing if not normal: outbreaks of the “illness” are expected to occur,and when they do, they may in fact be redescribed as cure. War, wemight say, is a social malady that has not as yet been fully grasped assuch, however much we may pretend to loathe its human toll. Still,when applied to actual historical contexts, the metaphor of disease isof little use at all due to its misleadingly essentializing Xavor. Itwould be better, I think, to concede what Juliet Mitchell has called“the Wnal indivisibility of normality and abnormality” (1975, 5); torecognize, in our terms, that a fetishism of violence is really part andparcel of the fetish of the state. As Taussig points out, the two crucialfactors deWning the state are, Wrst, its putative embodiment of “Rea-son” and, second, its monopoly on the uses of force, on the legitimatedeployment “within a given territory” of the instruments of violence,repression, intimidation (1993, 221). This alliance of violence with thelegal nation-state is too obvious, too instinctive, too reasonable toquestion, yet self-contradictory (and uncomfortably so) when we“slow down a little” to Wgure it out.

That is why there is something frightening . . . merely in saying that thisconjunction of reason and violence exists, not only because it makes vio-lence scary, as if imbued with the greatest legitimating force there canbe, reason itself, and not only because it makes reason scary by indicat-ing how it’s snuggled deep into the armpit of terror, but also because weso desperately need to cling to reason—as instituted—as the bulwarkagainst the terrifying anomie and chaos pressing in on all sides. Therehas to be a reason, and we have to use reason. (Taussig 1993, 222)

But if it is true that there is no “outside” of reason and/as violence,to what extent, I wonder, must we dwell within denial? If it is true,as Taussig says, that we “have to use reason,” just how “desperately,”really, must we “cling” to its violence? Cannot reason, “as instituted,”change over time, progressively diminishing its reliance on violence?Taussig’s concern is not to raise such questions but to help us under-stand our commitment to violence: “what is politically important in

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my notion of State fetishism is not only that this necessary institu-tional interpenetration of reason by violence diminishes the claimsof reason, casting it into ideology, mask, and effect of power, butalso that it is precisely the coming together of reason and violence in theState that creates, in a secular and modern world, the bigness of the big S—not merely its apparent unity and the Wctions of will and mind thusinspired, but the quasi-sacred quality of that very inspiration” (Taus-sig 1993, 223; emphasis in original). What is sacred about the state,for Taussig, following Durkheim, is not just its beneWcence but itscollusion with evil, with the horror and the reverence that evil inspires.And it is telling, for me, that this “impure sacred” should be charac-terized, in Durkheim’s ethnography of religions, not only by sorceryand “the fresh human corpse,” but also (and as if in extension ofthese) by “the blood . . . from the genital organs of women” (Taussig1993, 121). Women, women’s genitals, women’s reproductivity areonce again the catalyst for reason’s counterviolence. Reason “as insti-tuted” saves us from chaos, from the “terrifying anomie” (read, fem-inine Nature) “pressing in on all sides” (as the birth canal once did?).This opposition, yet complicity, of pure and impure sacreds; thishorror, yet reverence, that each in turn inspires calls us back to a well-known Freudian example: “the Chinese custom of mutilating thefemale foot” (Freud 1977, 357) only to regard it afterward with rever-ence. Here, veneration is an alibi for cruelty; the fetish turns hostilityinto mute adoration. It is as if, says Freud, the male “wants to thankthe woman for having submitted to being castrated” (357). Of course,the violence, in this case, is hardly disguised except, for the fetishist,by social tradition. But that is precisely my point about the fetish: it isnot just the masking of pain by abstraction (omission, redescription,marginalization) nor just a subtle, dreamlike invention in which vio-lence Wnds indirect paths of expression. Fetishized violence may bequite overt; fear or its objects, relatively clear, but clarity is not herethe absence of distortion. Concealing has taken the form of revealing,of revealing and revering the sacred impure.

Something akin to this dissimulating revelation is at work, it seemsto me, in the classical evocation of “castrating” women as allegoriesof the state, of the reassuring permanence of patriarchal values. It isno accident, to take only the most obvious example, that wisdom andwar, the two masculine virtues, should both be embodied by a female



deity, by Athena who, moreover, was the city-state’s protector. Nor isit surprising that, from the French Revolution onward, the symboliccustodians of the polis remain women. Like the masculinized Victo-ries and Amazons that herald them, Liberty and Marianne afWrmpaternal law; they function, in effect, as “outed” phallic mothers,revealing, insofar as they are given as women, precisely the lack thatthey are meant to repair, precisely the pain that they serve to deny,the vulnerability that they proffer as strength. The “palpable unreal-ity” or “powerful insubstantiality” (Taussig 1993, 218, 219) that isthe fetish-state is reiterated, in other words, in the deceptive trans-parency of the state’s favored emblems, in their structural duplicityas cultural confessions. Thus, Marina Warner is able to evoke, as ifby analogy with the state’s mighty emptiness, the “invulnerableexposure” (1987, 272) of Liberty’s bared breasts, themselves emblem-atic of puriWed impurity, of carnality and instinct transvalued as Rea-son. This Amazonian type of allegorical body proclaims its chastityby shedding its clothes; announces its impregnability by “abandon-ing protective coverings,” by exposing mortal Xesh “as if it werenot so” (Warner 1987, 277). In this way, a threatening feminine sexu-ality—its efXuent, mutable, and reproductive aspects—is displacedtoward an abstract, virilized ideal, a static and sanitized image ofstrength. Similarly, in images of the state as a nursing mother, thatwhich is disavowed hides in plain sight, as a potentially perilous“bodiliness” is tamed by the message it is made to convey. For if thestate can be depicted as a nurturing matron, a Tyche who protectsand nourishes her young, that is because it is clearly understood thatthe legitimate guardians of the body of the mother are always, in thelast instance, going to be men.

Less implicitly, perhaps, but no less paradoxically, the femininemay be harnessed to a masculine agenda through subjection to a kindof iconic transvestism—through not semi-undress but full dress inarmor. “Armor is worn by so many imaginary women, projectionsof the ideal, visual and literary, . . . in order to demonstrate by deepassociation their law-abiding chastity, their virtuous consent to patri-archal monogamy as the system by which descent is traced and prop-erty transmitted” (Warner 1987, 124). Here again, the prominentmodel is Athena, whose armor is a radically polyvalent sign, yet asign, in the end, of patriarchal wisdom. Rising, as we know, from the

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head of her father, the goddess sports armor even at birth, vestimen-tary defensiveness bringing to light the defensiveness latent in themanner of her birth, in the usurpation of the womb by the father’sseat of reason. And the armor that marks her as a patriarchal fetishembeds within itself yet another fetish symbol, the apotropaic headof Medusa, whose frightening, yet consoling, powers Freud (1963,212–13) explores. But, as Freud shows, it is not just that the “cas-trated” head may at the same time be regarded as a resurrectedphallus. That very contradiction is evoked and then undone as “fem-inine” pain and mother-linked ambiguity are reinscribed, in Athena’sterrifying blazon, as a potent and menacing masculine force. Sexuallyunapproachable and unable to inherit, Athena is not just made safefor patrimony, she is made to represent its most sacred values, andshe does so all the more effectively for being a woman. In Athena, asin the seminude matron or virago, a dangerous feminine essence is“contained,” locked up in an armor that—visible this time—bespeaksthe defensiveness of phallocratic law.

My argument about these monumental Wgures for the state—and, correlatively, about the trope of male birth giving—is thatdespite their “revelation” of sexual difference (despite their exhibi-tion of male and female traits) their function in our culture is not toexpress but to resolve heterogeneity and the unease that it causes.As I read Octave Mannoni’s (1969) famous phrase for fetishism—“Iknow very well, but all the same”—it is not just that we know andat the same time do not, but that we know very well so that we donot (since the already-known merits little attention). This is not whatFreud calls a splitting of the ego, in which two independent attitudesmay simply coexist, no reciprocal inXuence obtaining between them;nor is it exactly a compromise formation if by that we mean a dialec-tic of equally charged instincts. Freud does, to be sure, employ bothof these terms to describe fetishism, or certain forms of it (see Freud1977; 1953–1974, “Some Psychical Consequences”; 1953–1974, “Split-ting of the Ego”; 1989). But if the particular conWguration that inter-ests me here is, in one broad sense, a compromise formation—ajoining together of mutually opposed feelings—it is also, more ac-curately, a dynamic process whose economic thrust is away fromcompromise toward the absolute erasure of conXict and difference.Applicable here is Marcia Ian’s reading of the phallic mother image



(the archetypal fetish) from, as I would put it, the “inside” of thesymptom: “she [the phallic mother] does not embody contradiction,although she may arouse contradictory feelings”; “she does notembody or represent ambivalence, although she may arouse ambiva-lent feelings. . . . Rather she represents the wish for the end of contra-diction and the end of ambivalence.” Ambivalence, Ian speciWes, is“the psychic analog for what you have when the law of noncontra-diction is suspended”; it is “the law of antinomial affect, that is, of‘both/and’-ness, the coexistence of opposites, but not their merger”:“Antithetical affects in the psyche may oppose and conXict with eachother but do not diminish, negate, or cancel each other. They arenot equivalent, but ambivalent” (1993, 9).21

It is perhaps worth emphasizing, before concluding, what I hopemy discussion thus far has implied: my reliance on psychoanalyticinsights notwithstanding, I do not assume that the oedipal complexis always the crucial stage in the etiology of each and every fetish-neurosis; that that stage is necessarily a datum of all cultures; that it,or its symbolic structures, are biological destiny; or that every sex andgender, let alone every individual, must somehow experience it injust the same way.22 Nor, on the other hand, do I want to underesti-mate, in the Western tradition that frames the present study, theempirical frequency and clinical signiWcance of an oedipal crisis inboth girls and boys. What I do assume is that despite developmentaldifferences between the major sexes—a longer and more narcissisticpreoedipal attachment in daughters, a more decisive (or defensive)individuation in boys, prolonged irresolution or “bisexual oscilla-tion” (Chodorow 1978, 129) in female oedipal and postoedipal ex-perience—the capacity for fetishistic disavowal is by no meansuniquely the province (or the privilege) of males. But whether wecall a case of fetishism female or male, lesbian or feminist, narcissisticor hysterical or bi- or gynesexual;23 whether it is based, followingLacan, on “being” or “having” the (missing) maternal phallus or,instead, on having the father’s sexual organ or, alternatively, on hav-ing some nonphallic object, the power of the fetish—indeed, its possi-bility—lies in its repetition and, at the same time, its transformation(suffusion with fresh meaning) of past forms of rupture, anxiety,or loss. Since Freud, Ian points out, “psychoanalytic revisions of theconcept of fetishism have treated it as a more primitive system of

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idealization and representation proper to a pregenital, preoedipalstate of conXict. Thus the castration anxiety, which fetishism seeksto relieve, is less a male fear of damage to the penis than the fear ineither sex of narcissistic injury associated with the sudden, uncon-trollable, unbearable loss of body integrity or beloved object” (1993,176–77).

By situating the birth trauma at the origin of such loss, as the“source and prototype” (Freud 1965, 436) of every painful affect, Ido not, however, simply substitute for the oedipal complex anothermaster trope of psychosexual truth. The birth trauma is a seductivenarrative of genesis, partly because of its panhuman status, partlybecause of its priority in time (in the ontobiological time of the indi-vidual); yet, even this story of beginnings is a myth, not because weshould appeal to a still more archaic truth—to that phylogeneticbedrock of prehistoric “scenes” that underlies Freud’s theory of theprimal phantasy—but because the determinants of individual behav-ior are too complex to be explained by universals, whether in theform of inherited archetypes or of timeless social structures seen aseverywhere the same.24 We should keep in mind, for example, that itis not just the birth trauma that can reverberate through the life cycleof a given individual. None of the aforementioned developmentalstages is fully resolved, permanently transcended, by the stage orposition that “normally” succeeds it (see Chodorow 1999, 46–47).And as for the temporal priority of the birth trauma, scientists areonly beginning to grasp the range of potential prenatal traumas,modiWcations of fetal brain morphology by adverse changes in theuterine environment (see Nathanielsz 1999). (I do not even considerhere the enormous complications brought to bear on notions of nataland postnatal “environment” by in vitro fertilization and surrogatemotherhood.)25

In rehabilitating Rank’s notion of a primal trauma at birth, I amnot, then, maintaining that the loss of the mother’s holding spaceis inevitably more determinative for personal identity than the lossof, say, the breast, or of the maternal phallus; rather, there is a sensein which the experience of birth is already part of each of those pri-vations (if and when they actually occur). I allow myself, in otherwords, to generalize, hypothesize, make inferences based on culturalpatterns, while keeping in mind that such patterns can change. That



being said, it is important to remember that the model (or pattern)that I have sketched out here refers to a politically dominant ideologyassociated with the middle-class nuclear family; it cannot, therefore,account directly for speciWc varieties of the “same” national fantasyacross different class or racial-ethnic lines, or within nontraditionalfamilial arrangements. Individual, personalized, clinical case studiesof the transindividual neurosis in question would have to accommo-date, inasmuch as possible, not only considerations of race and class,gender and sex, but anatomical variation, childrearing practices, andparticular features of parental personality; not only socioeconomicand geographic circumstances but their impact on uterine and natalexperience, on nutrition, or on the child’s earliest visual and cogni-tive stimuli (the list, of course, could go on and on). Obviously, myliterary and cultural analyses neither could nor would want to pre-tend to such exhaustiveness (or to the Truth that the Wction of exhaus-tiveness implies). Exactly how a national imaginary may manifestitself in certain individuals or subdominant collectivities—the preciseemotional shadings and transferential fantasies that make up privatemeanings or micropolitical identities—is something that the presentstudy can at best only hint at. This does not mean that I exclude raceand class from consideration as psychobiological categories or that,as political signiWers, they are merely incidental to the ur-metaphorsof gender and sex. What it does mean is that race and class, likenation and state, are a priori sexual in the broadest possible sense:they are rhetorics that lay down their roots in desire, biophantasmalinscriptions26 that take shape not alongside but in collaborative inter-change, metaphorical continuity, with the symbolic constructs of gen-der and sex.27

How, then, do we resist fetishistic ways of thinking? By reappro-priating the blood and guts of female generativity for the aggressivecounteroffensive of a “maternal sublime”? This does not really seemto help matters much. It solidiWes the link, in the cultural imaginary,between parturient female bodies and pain and abjection. And, in“borrowing freely from the heroic ideals of the male tradition” of epicpoetics (Yaeger 1992, 18), the maternal sublime makes only moreeffortless the conversion of the horrors and the pleasures of birthingback into the code of military conquest. It also risks, it seems to me,reopening the door to essentialist equations of women, or women’s

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social value, with reproductivity. With its insistence, moreover, on forceand violence, on pride, vaunting, and triumphant transcendence, thematernal sublime implicitly replicates the hierarchical politics it setsout to challenge (pregnant women and womb envy trumping, thistime, penis envy, men, and nonreproductive women).

The same could be said for the appropriation of stable irony asa feminist strategy for subverting fetishism. Like the female counter-sublime, that strategy turns on inversion, or reversal—the fetishisticgesture par excellence. What we need, I think, is not counterfetishismbut an antifetishistic conception of irony (nonfetishistic would be toomuch to ask for). Stable irony’s stock devices of targets and victims,reality versus illusion, superior or higher or more secure, coherentmeaning versus the rejected, naïve, or illogical meaning correspondtoo closely, in structure and in tone, to fetishism’s components ofrecognition and denial, repression and aggression: lack, absence, castration on the one hand, and on the other hand (“all the same”)narcissistic Wxation. Far better, I would argue, to adopt unstableirony, whose ongoing oscillation between incompatible perceptionsat least has the virtue of putting threatening knowledge (the disso-nant, disavowed, “irrational” meaning) on equal footing with theimpulse to certainty and power. Irony in this sense does not make“fetishists of us all” (Beizer 1994, 260); it makes us all aware of thefetishism in us; and by putting into play a multiplicity of meanings, ithelps us to imagine our fetishes as other: less Wxed, exclusive, defen-sive, irrevocable; closer to the body, whose tropisms it mimes.

At stake, then, is just how “sacred”—how entrenched or nar-rowly circumscribed—our cultural fetishes really have to be. Shallthe fetish yield an immediately transparent, “proper” meaning? Ananxious vacillation between two (otherwise) stable meanings? Or anuncontrollable spiraling between endlessly different meanings (be-tween, to put the same thing a little bit differently, two poles, twogeneral spheres of psychic meaning, whose binary structure cannotbe maintained)? The latter option moves us in the direction of fan-tasy, whose hallmark is the staging of wishful scenarios in whichsubject positions are Xuid and interchangeable (see Laplanche andPontalis 1986). For the time being, however, I want only to suggestthat Freud’s own vacillating pronouncements on the structure of thefetish would allow for all three of the above interpretations, with the



polyphonic, fantasy-like structure inscribing, if not a freely mobile,utopian outside, then the outermost limit of the concept of the fetish.

There is, of course, considerable risk in putting forth the proposi-tion that the more compromising structure will also end up beingthe less compromised politically. Whether this can ever really happenin practice depends on our reading (or taking up) uncertain irony,not against determinacy—which, like reason, we shall need and shallneed to come back to, to modify its form—but against determinism,whether biological or social. It would follow, with respect to myclaims about gender, that while pain may be necessary to being andknowing, there is no such necessity to pairing it with women. As wehave seen, retroactive linkage is supported by contingencies of natureand of nurture. That the trauma of being born cannot be grasped assuch until it returns for symbolic revision indicates that its meaningis not predetermined, that in different contexts and at different timesin the biosocial history of the subject-in-process, the signiWcance ofthat pain (of its memory traces) must be reinvented or, in Freud’sterms, “retranscribed.”28 This does not refute the intuitive basis forimagining the mother as the source of all trauma, but neither doesit doom us to sharing our culture’s misogyny—to compulsive repeti-tion of an infantile revenge.

Just as, moreover, the desublimation of pain’s belated genderingcan weaken such resentment, so the willful suspension of the body/mind distinction can assist us in decoupling verbal and physicalconXict—that is, in preventing the “logical” slide from the former tothe latter. In other words, while I, like most theorists of pain andtrauma today, believe that it is ultimately impossible to distinguishbetween psychological and physical suffering, I do not, as a conse-quence, want to imply that quarreling and warring are identicalactivities (any more, correlatively, than birthing and war), or that thereadiness with which the one so often becomes the other is natural,unavoidable, acceptable ipso facto. I do think that, by recognizingthat war and argument are in certain concrete and signiWcant waysnot only similar but effectively the same, we can better understandwhy disputes turn into wars, why the call to armed belligerence mayat times seem irresistible, and hence the grounds on which, precisely,it can be resisted.

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Notes

My title alters the famous words of Heraclitus, which are, in Charles Kahn’stranslation, “War is father of all and king of all” (1979, 67). The sentence is oftencited more colloquially as “War is the father of all things.” I thank Wayne Kleinfor calling my attention to the reference.

1. I am thinking here of a monistic conception of nature having strongafWnities with Romantic idealism. For certain German philosophers of the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as Johann Gottfried Herder andJohann Gottlieb Fichte, the pantheistic integration of nature and spirit, partand whole, sought to naturalize, preeminently, the body of the nation. “In anorganized body,” says Fichte, for example, “each part continuously maintains thewhole, and in maintaining it, maintains itself also. Similarly, the citizen withregard to the state” (qtd. in Kedourie 1993, 32). Insofar as this model representsnations as spontaneous, natural divisions, it anticipates various forms of classand racial essentialism. Yet the body is central to neo-Kantian theory not only asa commonplace organicist metaphor but as the agent and the object of historicalviolence. For if nations are unique and divinely ordained entities, war, in thethinking of the prophets of nationalism, is a means of preserving the purity of apeople—the health, the inviolability, of the body politic. Indeed, Fichte writesthat, in view of the linguistic and racial distinctiveness of nations, it is “to beexpected that each particular state should deem its own culture the true and onlycivilization, and regard that of other states as mere Barbarism, and their inhabi-tants as savages—and thus feel itself called upon to subdue them” (qtd. in ibid.,47). War, “a true and proper war—a war of subjugation”—is therefore part of ahistorical winnowing process whereby humanity “gradually ascends the scale ofculture” (qtd. in ibid., 47). For Herder, too, it was only when it had been “irrigatedwith blood” that the seed of human toil would “shoot up to an unfading Xower”(qtd. in ibid., 48). Even Kant, who ultimately disapproved of his successors’“unscientiWc” development of his own ethical subjectivism, saw war as a neces-sary, beneWcent feature of humankind’s progression toward freedom and self-fulWllment. “War,” he says, “has something sublime in it” (Kant 1951, 102). As ElieKedourie points out, the ultimate effect of these metaphysical discourses—oftheir merging of the individual will with that of the state, of their attributionto history of a redemptive telos, an inexorable urge toward the moral “life of Rea-son”—is to hide beneath an aesthetico-religious terminology “the hard issues ofpower which, by its very nature, is exercised by some over others. . . . Reason ofstate begins to partake of sovereign Reason, and necessity of state to seem anecessity for eternal salvation” (1993, 45, 40).

2. Which is not to say that “men” and “women” are the only sexes. SeeAnne Fausto-Sterling 1993 and 2000. On the necessity of historicizing our under-standing not only of gender but also of bodies and sex, see Judith Butler 1993.

3. The term, it has been suggested to me, may be too strong. Since, how-ever, I am paraphrasing Ruddick at this point, I adopt her usage, but with the



proviso that that usage in no way denies most women’s basic sense (and expecta-tion) of regularity over time. As my next two quotations of Ruddick indicate, whatshe seems to mean by irregular is “difWcult to regulate” and “not always regular.”

4. As far as I can tell, “in terms of,” here, simply means “in relation to,” asense that is broad enough to describe the turn of signiWcation in virtually anytrope. But Lakoff and Johnson’s analyses make it clear that by “in terms of” theyintend (with the exception of a brief discussion of metonymy) “in terms of simi-larities between.” On the simultaneous discursivity and materiality of the referentand the political uses of the Wgural, see also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe1985, especially 93–148.

5. For further examples of the rhetorical likening of war to procreation, seeHuston 1986, 133–34; and Cohn 1987, passim.

6. Structurally, the sublime moves from a “negative” affect (ideas of pain,death, helplessness) to a “positive” one (ideas of power or transcendence) by wayof the subject’s identiWcation with the overwhelming force of a threatening object.For analyses of both stylistic and psychoanalytic features of the sublime, seeWeiskel 1976, Hertz 1985, and Ramazani 1993 and 1996.

7. My thinking about what might be called the political economy of moral-ity and justice is assisted by Wai Chee Dimock 1996. On the discourses of gen-der and justice informing America’s response to the September 11 attacks on theWorld Trade Center, see Ramazani 2002.

8. In Butler’s (1993) Foucauldian and Derridean reading of J. L. Austin’stheory of speech acts, it is precisely the citationality of every such act—its refer-ence to, and reiteration of, a prior chain of regulatory discourses—that gives theact its authority or performative force.

9. If the institution of war is, as Rapoport says, “all activities undertakenin connection with the organization of war,” or “all activities related to the prepa-ration for war even when a state of war in the accepted sense does not exist,” thenthe category or system of war exceeds even the relatively broad Weld of activitiesto which Rapoport wants to limit his deWnition: “the design of war plans, themanufacture of war material, research directed to designing and improvingweapons, training of military personnel, even the development of strategic theo-ries” (1989, 335).

10. In view of the large place I accord to Scarry’s voice here, it may be use-ful for me to brieXy make explicit the main areas of divergence between herapproach and mine. Unlike Scarry in The Body in Pain, I do not attempt to distin-guish mental and physical pain, but rather to explore the continuity betweenthem. To that end, I develop the psychoanalytic and neurological implications ofstructures that she studies from a fundamentally phenomenological perspective.What interests me is the Wgurality of these structures, their function as, or with-in, tropes and modes such as irony, sublimity, allegory, and metaphor. I want, inother words, to clarify the relation between conscious and unconscious rhetoricson the one hand, and on the other hand their inextricably social, political, physi-ological, and material manifestations.

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11. I am referring to my book manuscript in progress.12. By “body image” I mean the conscious and unconscious sense that one

has of one’s own body as a total and autonomous form. A dynamic correlation ofsensations and perceptions over time (see RosenWeld 1992, 7–8), this image is thevery basis for the seemingly uniWed consciousness that is necessary to our every-day making of meaning. Compare Freud: “The ego is Wrst and foremost a bodilyego”; it is “ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chieXy from those spring-ing from the surface of the body” (1953–1974, The Ego and the Id, 26).

13. Fundamental to my argument here is the notion that pain can be readas an urgent Wgure for the tension that produces, even as it threatens, the persis-tent fantasy of a complete, coherent body; pain radicalizes, in other words, thenormally constitutive, but always potentially destructive, oscillation between ten-dencies totalizing and disruptive: “the body-image,” says Paul Schilder in 1935, is“never a complete structure; it is never static: there are always disrupting tenden-cies. With the changing physiological situations of life new structuralizationshave to take place, and the life situations are always changing” (qtd. in RosenWeld1992, 50). In this enactive and open-ended conWguration, I suggest, pain is bothan especially powerful “disrupting tendency” (a threat to the body image) and a“life situation” producing “new structuralizations” (new totalizing tendencies).So pain, whether attenuated and ephemeral or intense and unremitting, has aparadoxical, dialectical, or ironic structure, for it emerges both from and againstthis Wgure-in-motion.

We may well wonder whether this conception of pain would reach its limitin cases of intense pain, where consciousness of suffering turns into consciousnessas suffering, negative affect and aversive drive having engulfed all other “con-tents” of the psyche. But the experience of pain is inseparable from past experi-ence and present expectation, emotional tone and cultural valuation; it mobilizes,that is, sensory, motivational, and cognitive processes that also subserve the bodyimage (see Melzack and Wall 1983, 242). Pain emerges, then, from the very sameexistential horizon that it negates. This persistence of the body image at theextreme limit of pain captures a structure that is, as I have said, essentially ironic,for it entails the capacity for representing to oneself the nociceptive dissolution ofone’s self. Using a less phenomenological vocabulary, studies of the neural sub-strate required for “pain perception” in humans and animals make much thesame point when claiming that, in order for what we understand by pain to occur,the central nervous system of the experiencing subject must be sophisticatedenough, morphologically, to sustain time recognition (including memory andanticipation) as well as the capacity for perceiving choices and making decisions(see, e.g., Pitts 1994). (This does not mean that a noxious or potentially noxiousstimulus cannot adversely affect the developmental course of a newborn’s ner-vous system, increasing the child’s—and then the adult’s—later sensitivity topain or inclination to depression. For a discussion of the debate surroundinginfants and children, see Hardcastle 1999, 193–200.)

14. See, for example, a former GI’s attempt to come to terms with the



memory of the American massacre on July 26, 1950, of hundreds of South Koreancivilian refugees (“mostly women and children,” he notes) as they Xed the invad-ing North Korean army near the small provincial town of No Gun Ri: “Some ofthe guys in my unit have talked about this over the years. But we never reallywanted it to come out. We didn’t want the people to think we were a bunch ofwomen and baby killers. But war is hell, and in war, it’s the innocent people whosuffer the most” (Daily 1999, 59). What is at issue here is not the veracity of thestatement as such, but its adequacy as a psychopolitical explanation.

15. One striking cinematic example of this “genre” would be Steven Spiel-berg’s immensely popular Saving Private Ryan (1998). For an insightful critique ofthe Wlm, see Menand 1998.

16. As Elizabeth A. Wilson (1998, 57) puts it: “Even if we were to accept thenotion of a single, exemplary female body, is it not also the case that the sexualspeciWcity of such a body extends to the skin, the internal organs, the nervous sys-tem, bone structure, biochemistry, et cetera?”

17. Or more speciWcally, “a correlative tension of the narcissistic structure inthe coming-into-being (devenir) of the subject” (Lacan 1977, 22).

18. The state is termed “primary narcissism” in Freud’s Wrst theory of thepsychical apparatus (in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” and Totem and Taboo)and “secondary narcissism” in his second topography (in Introductory Lectures onPsychoanalysis; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; and The Ego and the Id).For a discussion of this shift in Freudian terminology, see Laplanche and Pontalis1973, 255–57, 337–38.

19. Rejection, of course, is endemic to demand, which, unlike the need“articulated in it,” can, by deWnition, never be fulWlled. “That which is given tothe Other to Wll”—an inWnite plenitude of love and attention—“is strictly thatwhich it does not have, since it too lacks being,” wholeness, satisfaction (Lacan1977, 263). It is not my intention to review here the well-glossed distinction ofneed and demand (appetite and love, dependency and attachment), nor do I wishto rehearse the debate as to whether these two instincts are indeed anaclitic(demand necessarily “leaning on” need) or might instead be autonomous frombirth. What I want to underscore is the somatic nature of demand itself. Freudhypothesizes that desire derives from (or “attaches itself to”) the bodily functionsrequired for survival. For this very reason perhaps, it seems to me that demand,as an instinct purportedly separate from need—as a class of instinct theoreticallydifferent in kind—intrudes on the deWnition of need as organic function vital tolife. Demand is not, in other words, simply an emotional need that develops sec-ondarily from a physical one, if by “secondarily” we mean in a way less con-sequential, clearly less essential, to self-preservation. Indeed, certain forms of“attachment behavior” thought to be wholly independent of need—touching,clinging, wanting to be held or spoken to—prove, in the end, to be crucial tosurvival (for some striking historical examples, see Hundert 1995, 5). NancyChodorow sums up much of the evidence as follows: “institutionalized children

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provided with the apparent physical requirements for growth but not providedwith emotional relationships . . . may grow up without ego capacities sufWcient toestablish relationships, may not develop basic motor and verbal skills, may bepsychotic, and in extreme cases, die” (1978, 60). Children, that is, whose needs aremet (who are nourished, sheltered, cleaned, kept warm) but whose demand forcontinuous, affectionate interaction is answered insufWciently or simply ignored,suffer in ways neither psychic nor somatic but instead irreducibly psychosomatic.Physiology and psyche being “indistinguishable in the newborn” (60), a lack ofconsistent, binding stimulation produces that relatively objectless state that is,we recall, constitutive of pain (see Scarry 1985, 261–62), and that slips, at its limit,into what we call death. To thus note the ambiguity of need and demand is notto dismiss all difference between them, nor is it to deny that some needs aremore “physical”—more immediately threatening to life—than are others. It is tosee that the limits of these categories, as demonstrated historically by especiallysevere circumstances, can tell us something useful about “normal” adults in “nor-mal” situations involving frustration—situations, speciWcally, where (gendered)anxieties might “normally” trigger a passion for war. I invoke extreme cases ofdeprivation to emphasize not only the physical roots and effects of the psychicbut also, more radically, the organic nature of emotional pain.

20. This assertion presupposes pain’s normative function, its constitutiverole in the making of the ego; of course, anxiety is necessary for normal develop-ment, for carving out the lines of the early body image: only, in other words,because the child feels frustration—both of its demand and of its need—does itcome to perceive the mother as other. The mother, to be an object, must be the Wrstobject of the infant’s blame. At her best the mother is, says Winnicott (1971), only“good enough”—able to relieve, forestall, but not preempt, hunger, discomfort,anxiety, distress. By “allowing” needs and wants to materialize at all, by beingsometimes absent and yet sometimes overeager, by turning her attention or herlove toward other objects, this well-intentioned mother only “persecutes” thechild. Expelled from a nurturing uterine space that supplied every need before itarose, the postnatal child now awaits satisfaction from a world it no longer feelsit controls—a world, that is, where subject and object, motion and time, emerge aseffects, perceptual concomitants, of recurrent encounters with intolerable pain.Thus, that experience that deprives us of objects—that at its extreme negates theobject world—is the very same experience that made up the world, that moti-vated any knowledge of things in the Wrst place. But it is pain’s location at iden-tity’s origin—its function, precisely, as a normal growth factor—that makes itsuch a potential threat to survival, that accounts for the urgency of the mind’sXight from it, for the energy and the violence of the counterassertion.

21. It is precisely the effort to evade psychic tension—to, in effect, turnambivalence into equivalence—that characterizes the historical concept of thefetish. If, indeed, in Freud and Marx fetishism retains the suggestion of false andirrational belief, that is because earlier discourses on the fetish had already linked



it to the taming of difference, to the soothing of anxiety through the simulation ofsameness. For the idea of the fetish arose, as William Pietz demonstrates, “in thecross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa” during the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries in response to the novel commercial situation induced by Euro-pean mercantile forays (1985, 5). “For Europeans seeking to trade commoditiesand to establish reliable social relations to facilitate this commerce, the idea of theFetisso emerged as a pragmatically totalized and totalizing explanation of thestrangeness of African societies” (1988, 116). Belonging initially to the idiom ofmiddlemen, the term “brought a wide array of African objects and practicesunder a category that, for all its misrepresentation of cultural facts, enabled theformation of more-or-less noncoercive commercial relations between members ofbewilderingly different cultures” (1987, 23). So as a catchall used condescend-ingly by the “enlightened” Europeans to (mis)describe the belief systems of aliensocieties, the term fetish itself served fetishistic ends. Revealing, as it did, a crisisof value, it promised to resolve into a makeshift homogeneity the discomWtingevidence of cultural alterity.

22. My thinking on these issues is inXuenced by Chodorow 1999.23. See Chodorow 1978; Schor 1986, 1988–89; Marcus 1989; Yaeger 1992;

Grosz 1995.24. On primal phantasies, see Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 5–34. For a

study of Jungian archetypes in relation to the birth trauma, see Grof 2000. 25. Many possible implications of the new reproductive technologies for

traditional categories of identity formation are reviewed in Bowlby 1993, 82–93. 26. Wilson hypothesizes the ontological inseparability of sexuality and cog-

nition as follows: “The facilitating movements and effects of neurocognitivebreaching are libidinal. That is, the Xow of activation across a neural network isan affective movement that could be described in terms of microintensities, ten-sions, repetitions, and satisfactions. . . . So rather than considering the vicissitudesof libidinal force (sexuality) to be secondary effects or ‘constructions’ around,after, or upon the materiality of cognition or neurology, they could more acutelybe taken to be the very stuff of cognition and neurology. . . . [S]exuality is not justone manifestation of cognitive functioning; instead, cognitive functioning is onemanifestation of the sexualized breaching of neurocognitive matter” (1998, 204).

27. So while my argument has to do primarily with gender, its implica-tions necessarily extend to the mapping of gender myths onto “analogous” socialand biological hierarchies. In the late nineteenth century, for example, as AnneMcClintock shows (1995, 52–56, 118–20, 181–185), colonized peoples and the“dangerous classes” were stigmatized by association with “female atavism,” whilethe inherent degenerateness of, say, the white female “race” was explained by ref-erence to the pseudoscientiWc kinship of women with children, savages, or apes.

28. On retranscription, revision, or deferred action, see Laplanche and Pon-talis 1973, 111–14. The key Freudian texts are “A Project for a ScientiWc Psychol-ogy,” and “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.”

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The Mother of All Things: War, Reason, and the Gendering of Pain

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