© 2002 by Society for French Studies
LA PREMIÈRE FEMME: THE MOTHER'S RESURRECTION IN THE WORK OF CAMUS AND IRIGARAY
1 Queen Mary, University of London
The 'murdered' mother underpins the thinking of two of the most explicitly ethical thinkers of the twentieth-century French tradition. Both Camus and Irigaray challenge the totalitarian rationalities - whether political or masculinist - of their cultural moment, and posit the value of sexual difference for cultural survival. The line separating narrative discourse from philosophy is blurred by the recourse of both writers to the inspirational power of the image as symbol and myth. Camus's fictional representation of the disintegration of the male subject as moral agent, undermined by its own repressed m/other, anticipates imaginatively Irigaray's more theoretical demand for the recognition of distinct female and male subjects as the prerequisite of a democratic ethics. It thus prefigures the shift from the absolutism and universalism of modernist epistemology and traditional ethical discourse to the pluralist and communitarian emphasis of contemporary feminist ethical thinking. The guilt, and psychological claustrophobia, experienced by Camus's isolated male protagonists derive from a conception of (self-)judgement unmitigated by love which originates in the imbalanced idealization of the maternal figure. Irigaray's vision of the divine as horizontal transcendence, where distinct female and male subjects assume responsibility and love for the other, offers an alternative, which L'Homme révolté could not do, to the sacrificial economy of patriarchy.
Key Words: 'Murdered' mother; democratic ethics; Camus and Irigaray; modernist epistemology; rationalities; traditional ethical discourse; sexual difference; communitarian emphasis; image; contemporary feminist ethical thinking; myth; guilt; disintegration of the male subject as moral agent; (self-)judgement; love; repressed m/other; divine.