(Re)productive Tensions: Aletheiac Revealing in Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”

Abstract

Martin Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art moves beyond an aesthetic reading of the artwork that focuses on questions of judgment towards a hermeneutical understanding of art as a realm where truth happens. Such a truth presents itself as an aletheiac unfolding of the strife between Earth and World, a tension revelatory of our historical situation. To better understand this truth, Heidegger turns to a painting of Van Gogh’s shoes, providing an account of the artwork that moves beyond the “thingly” character of the shoes to its “equipmental being”. That he attributes Van Gogh’s shoes to a peasant woman is telling in that her being female points to a gendered relation between woman and Earth. However, in only focusing on the equipmental being of her shoes and her labor in the fields, a historical truth about the tension between her labor of reproduction and production, a strain inherent in the Earth/World dynamic becomes eclipsed. This tension is felt as a reckoning of, not only one’s finitude, but of one’s natality. Heidegger looks to Van Gogh’s shoes and analyzes how toils in the field set up a world; however, as Gaston Bachelard notes, “Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as claimed by certain hasty metaphysicians, man is laid in the cradle of the house.2” To explore our natal origin that begins in the cradle and stretches along to our death, this paper presents a hermeneutical reading of two works of art, Berthe Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”, suggesting that in seeking an origin of the work of art and the tension that resides there, an understanding of reproduction (and its relation to production) should complement Heidegger’s treatment of the artwork.