Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Lynn Huffer. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference . Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Pp. viii + 199. $45.00 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). From the first page of this enlivening book, I was riveted, both because my own work on mother-daughter relations involves the question of nostalgia and because Huffer illuminates works—some familiar, some not—in powerfully convincing and, at times, moving ways. Huffer begins by stating that in a profound sense her study is about coming to terms with her mother's (and her own) lesbianism. Although her book is not autobiographical, the issues she grapples with are informed obliquely and punctuated explicitly by her personal narrative. Mothers and lesbians define the terrain of Huffer's study because they have been absent and invisible in "a particular Western, deconstructive tradition of thought that looks at language as the differential play of presence and absence" (3). In close readings of texts by Blanchot, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Huffer reveals and criticizes the workings of the presence/absence dynamic in literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic traditions by identifying it as a nostalgic structure based on an absent mother (3). To elucidate the structure of nostalgia, Huffer traces the ways in which woman has meant mother-womb. Woman-mother-womb signifies origin and end as well as man's negative: he is the thinking, desiring subject while she is the non-thinking, non-desiring object of his quest for knowledge, for love. Yet, as Huffer shows, "... patriarchy requires the repeated failure of the son to unite with his lost other. By repeatedly missing his maternal object of desire, the son sustains himself as an endlessly desiring subject" (16). In readings of Blanchot and of Freud, and Plato in conjunction with Irigaray and Kristeva, Huffer illustrates how tenaciously, how insidiously, nostalgia for a lost maternal origin structures our literary, epistemológica!, and ontological models. One of Huffer's most forceful contributions is her insistence on ethics as a crucial means to move beyond nostalgia and to enact a relational model of subjectivity. Defining ethics as "moral reflection on the quality of our social interactions" (135), Huffer, working through Levinas, exposes how the would-be social, revolutionary force of Kristeva's chora fails to move beyond the conservative, self-reflective dynamic of nostalgia. Huffer similarly—and more provocatively, given its present popularity—takes performative theory to task on the grounds of ethics. Although performative theory, as developed by Butler and Austin, is liberatingly anti-nostalgic in its disavowal of origins, it falls short of providing a model for change by not asking: "How does the first person account for and think the second person who would hear her, draw her up short, put her into question?" (27). By contrast, through analyses of Irigaray's metaphor of the lips and Brassard's metaphor of the holograph, Huffer argues that these lesbian writers offer ethical models for social change by figuring ways in which "the self and other meet 'eye to eye' (and I to I)" (27). Huffer does not claim that Irigaray and Brassard give us complete or even widely accessible blueprints for constructing feminist futures; however, they, like Huffer's book, point in possible positive directions. Katharine Ann Jensen Louisiana State University Laurie Corbin. The Mother Mirror: Self-Representation and the Mother-Daughter Relation in Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras. NY: Peter Lang, Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 1996. Pp. 169. $42.95. Laurie Corbin's book on "The Mother Mirror" promises much more than it actually delivers . Her project is ambitious: she proposes to study mother-daughter relationships and the repreVol . XXXIX, No. 2 85 ...