英文摘要 |
Aspects of several theoretical discourses—Marx’s notion of production and surplus, Freud’s economic understanding of the psyche, Bataille’s theorization of non-productive expenditure, and materialist feminism— are discussed in this essay. The intersection of these theoretical approaches sheds new light on Nancy Chodorow’s appraisals of infantile development, particularly as it is developed in The Reproduction of Mothering. I first develop a two-fold analogy which structurally links the ways Marx and Freud were re-read by feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Although materialist feminism and feminist readings of psychoanalytic discourse unchain these economies from a purely material basis, they tend to overdetermine the categories of production and reproduction while not giving sufficient attention to a theory of expenditure for either men or women. Bataille functions to link the two sides of this problem, suggesting new readings of Freud and Chodorow. The vector added by Bataille invites us to reconsider infantile primary narcissism and the function of the reality principle in ego formation. The alienation of consumption is the point of entry into the restricted economy whose center is the reality principle itself, and indeed scarcity is the motive force behind this development. But the understanding of scarcity and even motherhood and the return to this site of expenditure in adulthood, if we credence this element in psychoanalysis, are responsive to cultural and historical forces greater than individual psychology. We are concerned not only with the reproduction of mothering but of mothering as a means to expend, and the replication of forms of expenditure and consumption which characterize (for Freud and Chodorow) primary identification. |