A(M)other Logic (of Love): Languaging the Corporeal Culture of Placental-Chimeric-Maternal Relations

Abstract

Western culture as it was being established in ancient Greek civilization was erected on a faulty foundation in which consciousness was (in)formed by a series of oppositions housed in hierarchical binaries – nature vs. culture, body vs. mind, feminine vs. masculine, etc. Such bifurcated consciousness poses one aspect of the oppositional pair against the other, rather than as different and non-oppositional poles of a bi-unity. In this system, the body, nature, and the feminine were considered secondary to mind, culture, and the masculine. The maternal-feminine in this system was reduced to mere body and nature and was posed as that against which the (male) philosopher had to assert himself as an autonomous and transcendent subject. Hence, we could say that any alternative logic that would understand the maternal-feminine on its own terms was foreclosed and muted. As a result, the maternal-feminine was discursively rendered as the denigrated other of a faulty hierarchical binary logic. This logic has resulted in a mutilation of the capacity for loving relations with the (m)other, the model for all future loving relations. Due to her erasure as a subject in her own right, she was not able to provide a generative limit; an alternative, to what has become a sacrificial logic (of love). Through languaging of the corporeal culture embodied in both placental-chimeric-maternal relations, and differences in engendering between males and females, a path is opened for a(m)other logic (of love) to emerge as difference-in-relation.