JanMohamed Gayley Lecture D5 (blog version)

Thick Love: Birthing and the Reproduction of Death

Prefatory Notes:

A) This paper is a small fragment taken from a book project examining black

feminist neo-slave narratives that depict the vicissitudes of maternity in slave and

Jim Crow societies. Because this presentation is drawn from a lengthy chapter on

Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for the purposes of clarity I will provide brief titles for the

different sections that have been pulled together for this talk.

B) Before beginning, I would like define my use of two theoretical terms that H.

James might call “loose and baggy (theoretical) monsters.”

1) “Aporia” has many meaning for different people. I am using it strictly in the

way that Derrida uses it in his commentary on Heidegger’s articulation of

death as an “impossible possibility.” I will not go into whether this means the

“possibility of an impossibility” or the “impossibility of a possibility,” etc., etc.

Those of you who have read Derrida’s Aporia know that it can be a wonderful

recipe for a nasty migraine.

2) “Eros” is similarly a chameleonic term. My use of it hews closely to

Laplanche’s definition: for him, Eros is fundamentally the work of binding &

Thanatos is the work of unbinding. “Eros is the gatherer and tends to form

perpetually richer and more complex unities, initially on the biological level,

then on the psychological and social one. Finally . . . Eros tends to maintain

and to raise the energy level of the configurations whose intimate bonds it

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forms” (108). “Eros is what seeks to maintain, preserve, and even augment

the cohesion and the synthetic tendency of living beings and of psychic life”

(123).

Maternal Site

My analysis of the political deployment of death in my last book, The Death-Bound-

Subject, was restricted to the viewpoint of an individual heteronormative male subject,

namely Richard Wright, who does not feel burdened to keep a family together. In fact,

most of Wright’s fiction is unconsciously dedicated to the shredding of family ties. His

notion of the male slave is in some respects close to Frederick Douglass’ conception of

himself as a putatively self-sufficient individual struggling against the master. However,

the battle to the death between Douglass and Covey seems romantically luxurious from a

maternal viewpoint. Consider very briefly Harriet Jacobs’ perspective. Her protagonist,

Linda Brent, uses her biological capacity of impregnation and maternity as a political

weapon to protect herself from the master’s lascivious reach, and Jacobs also deploys the

prevailing trope of maternity very effectively in the literary construction of her

autobiographical novel. But maternity is both a weapon and a liability for Jacobs. In the

prolonged struggle against her master she makes it quite clear that she, like Douglass,

would prefer death over slavery if she did not feel obliged to care for her children. Her

maternal status requires a significantly different approach to death. Her seven-year

sojourn in the garret of her grandmother’s house – a period during which she experiences

the severest form of social death and several times comes very close to actual death – is, in

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my view, the maternal equivalent of the two-hour battle between Douglass and Covey.

One of the fundamental differences between the masculine and the maternal

consciousness of the dialectics of death is best captured by Jacobs’ feelings when her son is

recovering from a serious, potentially deadly illness.

As the months passed on, my boy improved in health . . . I loved to watch his infant

slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never

forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy . . . Alas,

what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death

is better than slavery. (62) (Margaret Garner episode took place in 1856; Harriet

Jacobs wrote Incidents between 1854 and 1861).

In short, this conflict between the simultaneous desire for life and for death

renders the maternal site the most complicated and aporetic of all the subject-positions

under slavery – it is indeed the site of impossible possibilities.

Regarding maternity I would like to begin by acknowledging the obvious fact that it

is a vast and complex subject that has received enormous scrutiny recently, and I am not

going to engage the bulk of that scholarship tonight. Instead I will be concerned solely

with maternity under slavery as a formation that is penetrated by the master’s deployment

of death, as a site occupied by a fundamental struggle between life and death, between

eros and thanatos. As Jennifer Morgan, Dorothy Roberts, and others have pointed out, the

master is capable of seeing the birth of a child almost solely as an augmentation of his

productive apparatuses. By contrast, for the slave mother, as for all mothers, that birth is a

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utopian moment, in principle full of boundless love and infinite possibilities. But we must

also acknowledge that this moment of utopian potentiality conflicts with the unconscious

tendency that allows bio-cultural reproduction to take place without significantly altering

the prevailing social relations of production. In the vast amount of fascinating work done

on the concept, structure, and function of mothering and birthing, there are two strands of

thought that I find most useful for interrogating biological and cultural reproduction under

slavery. The first is a line of phenomenological thinking best represented by the recent

Levinasian theorization of critics such as Anne O’Bryan and Lisa Guenther. The second

strand consists of the Marxian analysis of critics such as Leopoldina Fortunati, Silvia

Federici, and above all Mary O’Brien’s work on the “dialectics of reproduction.” O’Brian

articulates a rigorous dialogue between the Marxian theorization of the “reproduction of

social relations of production” and the traditional view of this issue, which sees matters of

biological and cultural reproduction as belonging to the realm of “natural” rather than

social reproduction. Lisa Guenther theorizes the child as “gift”: one’s own birth, she says,

is “a generosity that gives me and is given to me” and, looking forward to the act of

birthing, the arrival of the child she views as the “giving of a gift that keeps giving.”

Considering the child as a gift allows us to understand, according to Guenther, that both

the receiving and giving of that gift entail a radical responsibility for the Other. This gift is

“neither circular nor linear” but rather discontinuous; she calls the giving and receiving

“an open circuit” that interrupts the phallocentric economic circle of “possession,

dispossession, and equivalent compensation,” proving to be the gift that Derrida thought

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impossible to achieve. Morrison diegetically theorizes the same political economy from

the slave master’s viewpoint. When Paul D compares Sethe’s value to his own (he cost the

master $900), he realizes that her value is infinitely higher than his because she is

“property that can reproduce itself without cost.”

Thus under slavery the maternal site becomes a war zone traversed by a murderous

struggle between the mother and the master. What the mother sees as a gift, the master

sees as a commodity. Consequently, the maternal site also becomes a transformative

matrix, one in which the mother either “allows” her child to be defined and appropriated

as commodity or she adamantly resists that attempt, even when infanticide remains the

only viable mode of resistance. In his commentary on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, A.

Kojeve insists that this struggle is the moment of anthropogenesis – that is, of the birth of

the human as a self-conscious species. If so, then every maternal site under slavery

consists of a battle over anthropogenesis. From the master’s viewpoint the slave is what

Agamben defines as “bare life,” that is, a putatively human life that can be killed without

that murder being considered either a sacrilege or a homicide. The slave is thus

suspended from the moment of birth between the realms of the divine, the human, and the

animal. Against this, Toni Morrison explores the slave mother’s insistence that her child be

defined as human. Thus under slavery the maternal site is one in which two radically

different political economies compete for dominance.

Mr Death and Ms life (Double helix)

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If under slavery life and death, eros and thanatos, are both instantly and insistently

present at the maternal site, then that struggle can produce a range of maternal subject

positions. Morrison diegetically explores these positions by arraying and dramatically, if

implicitly, contrasting them. I will return to these in some detail in a moment. But I think

it is useful to begin with an analysis of Morrison’s most general and highly stylized

allegorical representation of the battle between life and death. Even a cursory reading of

Beloved confirms that all its slave characters are bound by death in one form or another

and that their living and dying are interminable and full of pain. Whenever Sethe

recollects the horror of lynched bodies hanging from sycamore trees, it is the beauty of the

sycamore trees that overcomes and displaces the lynched bodies, and Sethe feels that she

can never forgive herself (or her memory) for this lapse of conscience. Like this struggle

between the beauty of the trees and the terror produced by the dead bodies, the beauty of

life and the horror of death, the joys of living and the pain of dying, together define the

elementary components through which the existential experiences of slaves are woven.

Microstructures of living and dying, one can say, together constitute something like a

double helix that forms the symbolic DNA of slaves. And the combinations of different

modes of living and dying furnish the range of different subject positions occupied by

death-bound-subjects on the asymptotic curve between life and death that is traced by this

novel.

This double helix reaches its clearest expression in Morrison’s allegorical,

genderized rendition of life and death. Depicted in the midst of Paul D’s incarceration in

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the chain gang in Georgia, the slaves are obliged to break rocks all day. They think of the

rocks as simultaneously representing life and death, and in order to survive they beat both

to death everyday. In this scene, death is represented as masculine, “Mr. Death,” and life is

represented as feminine, “Ms. Life,” but she is not just an ordinary woman; life is depicted

as a flirt:

Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they

killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the

next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only

when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones – the ones who had

been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her – kept

watch over the others who were still in her cock teasing hug, caring and looking

forward, remembering and looking back. (128)

........

“Eighty-six days and done. Life was dead. Paul D beat her butt all day every

day till there was not a whimper in her. Eighty-six days and his hands were still,

waiting serenely each rat-rustling night for ‘Hiiii!” at dawn and the eager clench on

the hammer’s shaft. Life rolled over dead. Or so he thought.” (129)

The first, most elemental and almost tautological implication of this characterization

of life as a “flirt” is that life is eros itself; it is pleasure, sexual or otherwise; but more

crucially it is desire itself, which provides the fuel for life and pleasure; and the final

implication is that life is the capacity for cathexis, for binding, which in turn is crucial for

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connecting desire and its objects. Thus like the flirt, life is forever inviting one to succumb

to desire and to bind with the objects of that desire. Morrison’s aporia thus defines the

most fundamental nature of the double helix of life and death under slavery: the slave who

wants to “live,” that is, one who wants merely to survive, has to ensure the success of that

particular desire by beating to death the apparatus of his own desire in general as well as

his capacity to bind with the objects of his desire. Such a slave cannot afford to see death

only as an external threat, an eventuality that is controlled by someone else. Instead, he

must internalize that death and become the agent who will deploy it against himself,

deploy it to police his desire for a “full” life, a life that binds with all the things in life that

give him pleasure, including wives, parents, children, etc. The slave’s survival, his life,

depends on him becoming a successful agent of death. And ironically, his success in this

aporetic endeavor will ensure that he has effectively collaborated in his own formation as

a death-bound-subject. Yet his production of himself as a death-bound-subject is never

complete because life is always enticing; like a good flirt life is always inviting you to bind

with her. And for the slave, life will always have to be beaten to death. Thus the slave is

bound by this deathly struggle as long as he lives; the valences that constitute his

subjectivity are condemned to oscillate constantly between life and death within that

double helix.

This aporetic oscillation merits further theoretical considerations. The flirt, we

must remember, not only entices desire but also implicitly promises to fulfill that desire; in

other words, the flirt is both the source and the object of desire. If life is similarly the

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object/source of desire and if one has to beat it to death in order to survive, then that

imperative raises a series of questions: How do you beat to death your desire for life? Do

you kill desire itself? OR do you sever the link between desire and the capacity to bind?

OR do you cut the link between the capacity to bind and the object of desire? OR, finally,

do you kill the object of desire? It must be emphasized that a relatively coherent subject

can be constituted only via an adequate set of bonds between various psychic apparatuses,

and that the severance of anyone of these connections will debilitate “normal” subjective

formation. We must also note that within this allegory Morrison insists that these

processes of severance to which the slave has to bind him or herself are neither just

epistemic nor simply affective; they are that, but above all they are relations which

demand a concrete, repeated praxis: these processes, like the daily breaking of stones,

constitute repeated “investments” (cathexis) on the part of the slaves so that they can

function effectively as death-bound-subjects. In case there is any doubt about the erotic

nature of this binding with death, Morrison emphasizes it via Paul D’s eager, violent, and

phallic bonding with his “hammer’s shaft” and via the fact that he can only bring his body

under control by this form of bonding. This representation of what is required on the

somatic register for Paul D to suture himself as an adequately death-bound-subject is

echoed on the psychic register by the fact that these experiences “drove [Paul D] crazy so

he would not loose his mind.” In order to survive, the slave has to participate in his/her

own psychic disaggregation.

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If an “ordinary” slave’s subject position demands such self-policing and

disaggregation, then what does slavery do to the maternal slave’s desire? How does

maternity as a site designed for the reproduction of life react to death’s invasion of that

site and to the demand that the mother instead reproduce death-bound-subjects?

Morrison allows us to theorize that under slavery maternity is a space and a moment in

which the possibilities of life and death struggle against each other for mutual exclusion,

but they also aporetically bind with each other at the microstructural level in the manner

described above. So, we need to add here, that like Marx’s definition of the dialectical

relations between use and exchange value, the dialectical relations between life and death

are in this context at once mutually constitutive and mutually exclusive. This impossible

intertwining of the constitutive and the exclusive, which comprises a fundamental part of

the double helix, is what makes Paul D tremble uncontrollably and what provokes Sethe to

kill her own child.

Beloved is absolutely brilliant in its diegetic theorization of death-bound subjectivity,

and more can be said about Morrison’s explorations at this general level. However, time

forces me to turn to her concrete depiction of the different responses provoked by death’s

invasion of various maternal sites. Morrison contrasts, deliberately and systematically

though never explicitly, two examples of motherhood and two modes of love: Thick Love

and Thin Love, at times also called Big Love and Small Love.

Thick Love vs Thin Love (Basic)

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Most readers of Beloved will remember the dramatic moment when Paul D levels the

charge of Thick Love at Sethe. (For those of you who haven’t read Beloved, I should point

out that the central claim of the novel is that Sethe’s cutting of her daughter’s throat is

motivated by a powerful love – and that Paul D characterizes that love as “too thick”).

Readers will also remember his attack on her claim to humanity: “You got two feet, Sethe,

not four,” he says in judgmental disgust.

However, rarely do readers remember the brief intervening dialogue between these

two charges. It is important to recall this dialogue since it articulates the grounds on

which thick and thin love are defined and on which they operate. After Sethe has finished

telling him the story about how and why she killed Beloved and tried to kill the rest of the

family as well, the following dialogue ensues (presented here in abbreviated form):

[Paul D] “Your love is too thick!”

[Sethe] “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t no love at all.”

[Paul D]: “What you did was wrong, Sethe.

[Sethe]: “I should have gone on back there? Taken my babies back there?

[Paul D]: “There would have been a way. Some other way.”

[Sethe]: “What way?”

[Paul D]: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four.”

It is important to note here that these two individuals are addressing each other on

completely different registers: Paul D occupies the normative ethical register, a vantage

point from which he is able to distinguish, without any hesitation, between right and

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wrong, between human and inhuman, between Thin Love and Thick Love (the latter

obviously falling on the wrong side of the moral register for him). Sethe, on the other hand,

insists on adamantly occupying what we can call the politico-existential register: she is not

interested in moral judgments and insistently demands concrete, practical answers that

will work within the actual prevailing political landscape. She matches Paul D’s moral

disgust with her contempt for his utterly vague alternative to the politico-existential

register (“Some other way”). These distinctions help to underscore that from the narrative

viewpoint, infanticide takes place and makes sense on the politico-existential register; in

her deep desperation, the novel implies, the mother cannot afford the luxury of the moral

register. These differences also allow us to appreciate that Thick Love articulates itself on

the politico-existential register and that Thin Love finds great solace for itself on the moral

register.

Modes of Infanticide: (cut section here re fact that all infanticides in Beloved take

place on the politico-existential register)

Baby Suggs as mother

The mode of Thin Love and the imperatives that structure it are articulated more

directly by Paul D than by Baby Suggs. Having been broken, at least temporarily, by his

experiences in Alfred, Georgia, Paul D dedicates himself to what he calls small love. And

while he has practiced that form of cathexis, he articulates it clearly only after his

encounter with Sethe’s Thick Love: “For a used-to-be slave woman to love that much was

dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he

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knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or

shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”

(54) After escaping from Georgia, Paul D practices minimal attachment in all his relations

and consequently becomes an itinerant worker without any telos or project, living

aimlessly from day to day.

While never articulating the strictures of thin love, Baby Suggs practices them

assiduously. In this she is, perhaps like most women under slavery, a “compliant mother,”

one “willing” (probably not quite consciously) to turn herself into a matrix which can be

used to reproduce the existing slave relations of production. While never explicitly

compared, the differences between Sethe and Baby Suggs’ maternal attitudes are starkly

clear: seven of the eight children Baby Suggs bears are appropriated by the master without

any significant resistance from her. Two of her daughters are taken away from her

without her even being allowed to say goodbye. Her third child is torn from her and

exchanged for a load of lumber. She has a fourth child with an overseer because he

promises not to sell that child, but does so anyway. And of course each severance wounds

her grievously. Morrison poignantly represents the evisceration of the erotic bonds of

affection in such a configuration of maternity:

Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips

with her own – fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother

recognizes anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth

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looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp?

What color did Famous’ skin finally take? . . . All seven of them gone or dead.” (164)

Experiencing each separation as a death, Baby Suggs inoculates herself by

“voluntarily” killing her maternal attachments. The fourth child, we are told, “she could

not love and the rest she would not.” In this shift from the conditional to the imperative

Morrison clearly emphasizes the transformation of necessity into intentionality. From an

external, socio-historical viewpoint we might say that her maternal decathexis is a product

of “forced choice,” that Baby Suggs has “no choice” but to acquiesce. However, it is equally

clear that from an internal, psychic viewpoint she embraces the negativity of the external

and willfully turns it into an internal, intentional negativity. Equally important here is the

fact that her putative lack of choice is utterly contradicted by Sethe’s choice of infanticide

as a mode of refusal.

This difference raises an important theoretical question: is it possible that the

supposed absence of choice may be, in certain circumstances, a form of disavowal – a

disavowal that may accurately represent, on the conscious register, the reality of an

overwhelming force capable of totally denying the possibility of choice, while functioning,

on the unconscious register, as an alibi for “collaboration”? At what point does

“acquiescence” or “compliance” turn into “consent”? It seems to me that the apparent

“absence of choice” can function, on the unconscious register, as a very useful alibi for

voluntary consent that does not want to recognize itself as such. And consent of the

oppressed, as we all know, is crucial in the Gramscian theory of hegemonic formation. And

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it seems to me that this gray area regarding how (forced) compliance transform itself into

(voluntary) consent has yet to be adequately theorized. And of course religious beliefs –

the notion that these hardships are a part of some divine plan that will eventually rectify

all the problems and alleviate all the suffering – such religious beliefs can be and often are

used as alibis to mask political consent. However, in order to insist on the primacy of the

politico-existential register, Morrison mercilessly dismisses the religious/moral alibi. In

order to console herself, Baby Suggs leans on God. Contemplating the appropriation of her

children, she persuades herself that it is God’s will: taking the biblical injunction she says

to herself, “God take what He would,” but the narrative immediately adds rather

sardonically: “And He did, and He did, and He did . . . ” (28).

And so Baby Suggs does unconsciously consent to becoming a site dedicated to

reproducing death-bound-subjects. But in order to do so she has to embrace death. We

are told that when her last child, Halle, was born “She had been prepared better for [his

death] than she had for his life” (163). And of course it is one of the countless ironies of

Morrison’s mapping of the labyrinthine entanglements of eros and thanatos that the son

Baby Suggs has given up for dead is the one who manages to buy her freedom, which

allows her to move to Cincinnati in order to play a fateful role in the infanticide of her

granddaughter. Clearly, as a mother Baby Suggs has to bind herself to death as adamantly

as Sethe: the only viable choice available to a slave lies in deciding which mode of death

she prefers to embrace.

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However, Morrison also uses Baby Suggs to demonstrate that such a transformation

of maternity is not necessarily permanent and that the superadequacy of maternal eros is

so fecund and resilient that while it can be infinitely repressed, it can never be killed

totally. Accordingly, re-discovering her still beating heart upon crossing the Ohio River,

Baby Suggs immediately attempts in vain to collect all her children and bring them to live

in freedom with her. But the resurgence of her maternal eros manifests itself primarily in

the fabulous sermon she preaches in that natural cathedral in the woods. This sermon,

devoted entirely, unequivocally, and forcefully to eros, is too long and complex for a full

analysis here. Suffice it to touch on some salient points. Morrison has Baby Suggs tell her

congregation that “[W]e flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in

grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.” In

addition to getting her audience to laugh, sing, and dance, her sermon methodically

enumerates the body-parts and organs of the slave that have been despised by the

master’s society and subjected to torture, pain, and contempt, and she urges her

congregation to stroke, caress, kiss, and love each body part that has been disarticulated

by the master. The sermon is thus urging them to attend to the deeply introjected negative

unbinding imposed by slavery and to re-cathect positively with each body part. The

sermon is in effect an erotic resuturing of the slave who has been rendered a corps

morcele; it is a reconstruction of subjectivity that has been torn apart by the innumerable

aporetic formations that constitute slavery. And Baby Suggs is quite emphatic here about

the function of eros in the reconstitution of subjectivity: she pointedly separates the

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biological apparatuses of sexual reproduction from the affective site of bonding: “More

than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your

heart. For this is the prize” (102-104). To the extent that the heart is the ubiquitous figure

of love, Morrison is emphasizing here the re-doubling of cathexis: she is advocating that

the fundamental way of overcoming the effects of death-bound-subjectivity is not just to

(re)learn to love but to learn to love one’s capacity to love. As in Guenther’s articulation of

the baby as the gift that keeps giving, Morrison implies that maternal eros is also a process

that can keep giving infinitely. Baby Suggs’ thwarted love for her individual children

reemerges here as agape, as love for her community, and in repeatedly preaching this

sermon she is in effect giving birth to that community. The mother who “allowed” her

children to be taken now becomes the mother who re-births the community of survivors,

who sutures them together as a community and who teaches them how to re-suture and

love themselves. However, precisely how eros is transformed into agape remains

unexplored by Morrison.

Sethe as mother

In contrast to Baby Suggs, Sethe adamantly refuses to part with her children,

even when that refusal entails killing them. This contrast allows us to explore Morrison’s

radical rearticulation of the relations between eros and thanatos. First, as mentioned

earlier, the contrast gives a lie to the notion that the slave has “no choice.” It seems to me

that the choice of death, of a death in battle or via suicide, is ubiquitously present in

slavery and other conditions of oppression; however, it is rarely used because of the

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subject’s erotic attachment to his or her life – it is in the very nature of eros (of life) as a

structure of attachment that it is loath to allow itself to be terminated. As Steve Biko says

in his last piece of writing (aka a meditation on his impending death) one’s “fear of death

[is] highly irrational.” But, we should add, that the fear is as powerful as it is irrational.

Thus Toni Morrison’s novel reveals that this irrational fear of death and life’s

unconsciously adamant attachment to itself are the fundamentally constitutive elements

of eros that not only allow life’s superadequacy to be exploited infinitely, but perhaps they

even invite such exploitation. A fatal resignation to the absence of “viable” choice is thus

perhaps simply an alibi of that irrationality and that exploitability.

Sethe’s affirmative embrace of death entails, as we know, the killing of all her

children and herself. It is thus an absolutely radical negation, an act of profound

unbinding, which is paradoxically (as always in this novel) fueled by eros. Indeed it is

motivated in part by Baby Sugg’s advocacy of erotic resuturing as the necessary mode of

recovery from the disaggregating effects of slavery. Her sermons teach Sethe “how it felt

to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. . . . she had claimed herself.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111-12,

emphasis added). The transition from freedom to the claiming of freedom and then

defending that freedom with death traces a move from negation to affirmation to re-

negation (a move which G Deleuze defines as a fundamental Nietzschean trop). Freedom

is here implicitly defined as the end of bondage, of slavery’s claim on one’s body and

psyche. According to the logic of Baby Sugg’s sermon, claiming ownership of the freed self,

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which for Sethe includes all her children, then means cathecting deeply and positively

with the self, now seen not as property but as a human subject. This newly eroticized,

reaffirmed self is then faced with another potential negation that can take one of two

forms: either a return to slavery and social death or a willingness to embrace actual death.

Sethe is adamant that social death is far worse than actual death, that social death is a

negation that abrogates agency, while actual death is a negation that confirms agency. (I

am going to cite a passage here from the novel that illustrates the erotic nature of the

infanticide and the valorization of AD over SD. But the passage is quite gruesome and if

you have had trouble with what I have been saying thus far, you might want to stop your

ears. Passage is articulated from Denver’s viewpoint and focuses on what she thinks

Sethe wants Beloved to understand.)

Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning—

that Beloved might leave . . . before Sethe could make her understand what it

meant— what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel

the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would

stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot

through that adored body, plump and sweet with life— Beloved might leave.

Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that— far worse—

was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made

Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that

came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you

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couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and

couldn’t think it up. (295)

This passage (a part of which is the novelistic equivalent of a cinematic slow motion

shot), it seems to me, makes very clear that thanatos is here firmly subordinated to eros,

that each minute movement of the saw is totally bound by erotic considerations. And that

the deathly incision is itself in turn encased within an epistemological imperative – the

need for Beloved and the reader to understand that actual death is far preferable to social

death, for the latter is interminable while the former, if successful, puts an end to

suffering.

Like all of Richard Wright’s work, this novel also implies that the possibilities of

slave life are articulated by the dialectic between social and actual death. Baby Suggs’

maternity is controlled by the former and Sethe chooses the latter out of necessity. Yet, it

must be emphasized that Sethe internalizes that necessity just as much as Baby Suggs

internalizes hers. In killing Beloved Sethe affirms her maternal agency. Baby Suggs

subsists on the vicissitudes of thin love, and Sethe chooses the vicissitudes of thick love.

However, the novel also implicitly begs a series of questions: whose maternal suffering is

worse, Sethe’s or Baby Suggs’; which mother is more culpable for collaborating with

slavery and death; which mother’s action is morally more reprehensible or inexcusable;

and so on? Neither the novel nor the author offers any easy answers. Morrison is

impossibly enigmatic. When asked about the moral valance of the infanticide, Morrison

toys with the gap between the ethical and political registers and says, “It was absolutely

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the right thing to do . . . but [Sethe] had no right to do it.” While Morrison leaves us on the

proverbial horns of this moral dilemma, what remains clear is that Sethe’s suffering is a

product of a failure to complete her deathly embrace. If she had succeeded in killing all

her children and herself, the suffering would have ended, there would be no occasion for

the prolonged descent into mourning or melancholia or possession. Thus while the novel

focuses relentlessly on Sethe’s suffering because of the failure of her plan, I would wager

that Baby Suggs’ maternal decisions, more typical under slavery, are equally painful, if not

more so. In short, it would seem that thin love is in principle far more unbearable than

thick love.

Thick love vs Thin Love

These considerations of the complex entanglements, which constitute the political

economy of the double helix of eros and thanatos under slavery, allow us finally to

differentiate categorically the characteristics of thin love from thick love and also to

define the relations between the “death contract” and the “maternal contract.” Thin love, I

would argue, is one which is motivated by a subject’s desire to avoid actual-death, to

avoid a death that is perceived as an eventuality external to subjectivity, inimical to its

very existence, and thus to be avoided at all costs. However, as we have seen in the

analysis of Paul D’s notion of thin love, instead of remaining external to the subject, death

permeates every facet of the subject’s erotic energies and turns the subject into the

deathly agent that polices his own processes of cathexis. In short, Thin Love is a state in

which thanatos becomes the agency that dominates eros; the threat and fear of

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unbinding infiltrates, (re)articulates, and controls all the processes of binding; and

hence the death drive determines the entire political economy of subjectivity. Thin

love in effect enters into an unconscious contract in which the subject consents to the

definition of its life as “superadequate” ((gloss superadeaute – Spivak’s term) – that is, it

agrees to “live” on the most minimal erotic energies needed for survival and agrees to

turn over the fruits of its remaining life and labor to the master; it allows itself to become

the engine for the production of surplus value for the master. And the slave mother who

is bound by thin love implicitly agrees to turn her reproductive capacity over to the

master.

Thick love, by contrast, is characterized by the incorporation of death within the

folds of life; it sees death as immanent to life and hence views it as an implement available

for the enhancement of life. Thick love is based on an adamant commitment to all forms

of binding, paradoxically even to binding with the very process of unbinding. It views the

instrumentality of death as a political rather than a moral eventuality, and to the extent

that the deployment of death is an existential part of the political landscape, thick love is

willing to bind erotically with death. Thick love is one in which thanatos is subordinated

to, and determined by, the needs of eros. Sethe is thus the perfect emblem of thick love

since her deployment of life as well as death is equally erotic. Her capacity for binding her

whole family in her wide loving arms can be used either in the service of eros or thanatos.

Yet thick love should not be romanticized as some exalted form of political resistance.

The novel emphatically insists on fully articulating the gruesome aporia that is thick love.

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As we have seen in the above description of Sethe cutting Beloved’s throat, the erotic

deployment of death demands enormous fortitude and determination.1

Such subordination of thanatos to eros has powerfully transformative effects on a

wide range of intra- and interpsychic relations, only a few of which can be examined here.

The most important of these is that Thick Love nullifies two implicit contracts: the death

contract and the maternal contract, both of which are predicated on the structure of eros

as that which binds with everything, most emphatically with itself. Thus the slave’s death

contract relies on his unwillingness to die, on his abject attachment to life, and the

maternal contract similarly relies on the mother’s implicitly total commitment to the

continuity of her children’s lives. Sethe’s thick love is clearly able to reject both of these

contracts, and in the process it revels that perhaps the “superadquacy” of life that allows it

to be exploited so easily is based not only on life’s capacity to produce surplus eros

(including surplus labor) but perhaps also on eros’ tendency to bind adamantly to its own

continuity. Like the flirt, eros wants to become the object of its own desire. (And here a

question creeps up whether life’s adamant attachment to itself does not contain some

pathological element).

Master’s and Slave’s Use of Death

1Morrison’s decision to emphasize the conjoining of excruciating pain with love is highlight
by a narrative decision to have only a handsaw, instead of a large knife or a machete,
available: cutting a child throat with a handsaw is no doubt far more painful than same act
performed with a large knife.

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Some critics (including Toni Morrison to some extent) have argued that Sethe’s

deployment of death as a political tool is no different than master’s, but I think that careful

scrutiny of thick love reveals a very different political economy. The master’s use of death

for the production of surplus value takes two related forms. First, he deploys the threat of

death in order to split the slave’s life in two. The slave is allowed to retain the use-value

of his bare life; he is permitted to live from day to day at a bare minimal level of life in

exchange for his coerced and enforced agreement to turn the superadquate capacity of his

labor and his life over to the master, who eventually transforms that capacity into

exchange and surplus value. Using the slave’s unwillingness to die, the master

appropriates the vast majority of the slave’s capacity to bind and transforms it into his

own profit. The master thus politicizes the “end” of life, i.e., the “natural” eventuality of

death, and uses it as a political tool to coerce economic value from the slave; he turns the

slave’s fear of death into a means of production. Second, using the same means, the

master is also able to reach into the maternal matrix and appropriate the infinite maternal

capacity to reproduce, thus using the slave’s fear of death to appropriate her capacity to

produce life. And in doing so, the master prevents the mother from binding with the

capacity to bind that she has just produced. In both cases, he succeeds by appropriating

and exploiting the potentiality of eros. His political economy thus pits death against the

very nature and structure of eros.

Sethe by contrast is paradoxically willing to use death to guard the sanctity of eros,

to guard the “use value” of each child as a unique subject. She wants neither her maternal

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capacities nor her children to be transformed into the sources of exchange value. (Insert

here Marx’s notion that exchange value only available via the forgoing of the use value of

the object) It is perhaps worth emphasizing in this context that both Morrison and Sethe

are more invested in guarding the reproductive capacity of the maternal site rather than

in protecting the erotic site of sexuality per se. Thus Morrison confines Sethe’s “rape” to

the violation of her breasts and milk, and Sethe makes it repeatedly clear that she is

offended more by the appropriation of her breast milk than by the whipping she receives.

Sethe is willing to die for her children, if necessary, and she is willing to kill them, if

necessary. In short she is willing to use death to guard the love that binds her and the

children together; for her the maternal site is precisely the erotic bond between herself

and the children. And for her this erotic bond includes the right to kill her children rather

than let the master bind them with the threat of death. Hence her paradoxical statement

that “. . . if I hadn’t killed her [Beloved] she would have died and that is something I could

not bear to happen to her” (236). There is a not-so-subtle distinction here between two

forms of death: actual death as a protection against slavery can be embraced when

necessary; whereas social death as mode of enslaved life must be avoided at all costs.

Thus by embracing death Sethe is able to abrogate the unconscious death contract and the

maternal contract that together permit slavery to exist in the first place. One can say that

Sethe deploys the master’s tools to fight the master, but in the process of doing so she

radically redefines those tools. Unlike the master’s political economy, Sethe’s maternal

political economy seems to be guided by an urgent utopian goal: to ensure that her

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children are not appropriated and violated by slavery, as she and other slaves have been.

And the main benefit of her infanticide, as she points out, is that she and her other

children have been saved from slavery. As I have argued elsewhere, fear of actual death is

a precondition for slavery, but an embrace of actual death is a total negation of social

death and slavery: by embracing the latter, Sethe has eliminated the former.

In order to appreciate fully the negative and positive effects of Sethe’s deployment

of death we would have to substantially examine Denver’s life -- to see how she is

structured as the most death-bound-subject in the novel and how she subsequently

becomes what I would call a “life-giver.” At the end of the novel Morrison shows how

Denver, Sethe, Ella, and Stamp Paid, and perhaps even Paul D begin to emerge as “life-

givers.” But that is another labyrinthine trail that we cannot follow today. Suffice it to say

that it is Sethe's and Denver’s willingness to die for the sake of the family that together

creates the opportunity for them to begin to bind again with the possibilities of life

outside the strictures of slavery.

In closing this analysis of Beloved it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that

this novel not only deeply and thoroughly maps the entanglement of eros and thantos but

the that construction of the novel is itself a superb product of that entanglement: Beloved

is a text that is at once excruciatingly painful and exquisitely pleasurable to read. Not

only the capillary structures of the contents of the novel but also the capillary structures

of its style are a product on a prolonged sojourn in the double helix of life and death

produced by slavery. Toni Morrison once remarked that the writing of Beloved was like

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pitching a tent in a cemetery and trying to live in it for the duration of the writing process.

I can think of no better way of formulating an appreciation of this commitment then to

cite Derrida’s comment about tarrying with death: “This concern for death,” says Derrida,

“this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this conscience that looks death in the face is

another name for freedom”. Beloved and Morrison’s other novels take us through the

terrors of slavery’s political deployment of the threat of death so that we can better

appreciate the tenacious desire for freedom as well as the cost of freedom.

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