INTRODUCTION

One of the central attributes of Sethe, the fugitive slave woman who is the central character in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, is that she never avows any sense of remorse in the aftermath of killing her infant daughter.

Perhaps one way that we can begin to account for the problematization of guilt in this novel is to recall its historical intertext: the case of Margaret Garner an escaped slave who killed her baby daughter in 1851 Morrison has acknowledged in numerous interviews that Garner’s story widely covered by newspapers at the time served as a provocation for her writing Garner’s case became as Morrison notes a ‘‘cause celebre’ for opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law Underlining the differing fates of her fictional heroine and the historical woman Margaret Garner on whom Sethe is loosely based Morrison comments that ‘‘my invention is much much happier than what really happened’’ (Taylor Guthrie 1994 ₽· 251) While pro-slavery forces saw in the Garner case an illustration of why Africans, with their near-animal capacities required the patronage of the white man, abolitionists sought to have Garner tried for murder on the argument that she must have legal responsibility to the state for her actions Abolitionist activists believed that having Garner charged with child murder in the state of Ohio would impel a test of the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law Garner’s guilt, in this way would be in Morrison’s words ‘‘a sort of success story” (Taylor Guthrie 1994, p.

That this novel albeit perhaps in obtuse ways anatomizes guilt is the perception that underwrites Slavoj Zizek’s (2000) recent recruitment of it in his discussion of ethics and politics In The Fragile Absolute, he points to Sethe’s murder of her child as a privileged instance of what he terms ‘‘the ethical act’’ (2000, pp. 152-156) For Zizek, drawing on Lacanian psycho­analytic ethics to articulate a relation between the psychic and the political the only truly ethical act is one that breaks with the cycle of law and transgression, evading the regime of the superego through a virtually suicidal ‘‘shooting oneself in the foot’’ (2000, p. 153) He argues that ‘‘what makes Sethe so monstrous is not her act as such but the way she refuses to relativize it to shed her responsibility for it instead of compromising her desire by assuming a distance toward her act, qualifying it as something ‘pathological’ - in the Kantian sense of the term - she insists on the radically ethical status of her monstrous deed’’ (2000, p. 156) In other words Zizek notes the character of Sethe refuses the conscription of her act into the given socio- symbolic framework that would insist on representing a mother’s murder of her child in terms of either crime or sin; furthermore she does not acquiesce to the ascription of pathological motives in the medico-legal sense: ‘‘criminal insanity’’ Importantly she represents the infanticide to herself as an act of resistance to the dominant slaveholder encoding of the African as ontologically less than human even as her act appears to a sheriff’s posse and plantation owner as empirical proof of their racist ideology ²

If however Zizek’s brief discussion of the infanticide at the heart of Beloved is illuminating for a reading of the novel, the novel itself invites us to a more profound analysis of Zizek’s ‘‘ethical act’’ Zizek’s attention to the subject position assumed by Sethe to the attitude toward the murder of her child draws us closer to the ethical aims of Morrison’s narrative and to the critique of guilt that is central to them At the same time reading Morrison’s novel emphasizes the limited nature of Zizek’s conception of the ‘‘ethical act” as part of a larger political strategy a subject to which he has frequently returned in his work over the past several years³ ‘‘This act,” he writes ‘‘far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned against oneself changes the coordinates of the situation in which the subject finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose possession the enemy kept him in check the subject gains the space of free action” (2000, p. 150) While ‘‘changing the coordinates of the situation” is legible here as a prescription for incipient social change the ‘‘act” appears to dissolve into a moment of individual liberation Henry Krips has recently argued that in many instances Zizek’s discussion of the act ‘‘fails to distinguish [itself] from the existentialist ethic of authentic gratuitous acts from which they derive much of their inspiration as well as rhetorical force’’ (Krips 2004, p.

Sethe’s act in Zizek’s analysis appears as precisely what it is not in Morrison’s narrative: detached from the larger historico-legal framework the ‘‘ethical act’’ constituted by the infanticide does seem closes as Krips argues to early middle Sartre Zizek would take issue with this reading of his work to be sure; he seems to understand the act as part of a larger strategy that ‘‘[liberating] oneself from the grip of existing social reality’’ entails ‘‘[renouncing] the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it’’ (2000 p 149) in an act that traverses all available social and symbolic legitimation Yet, it remains difficult to see precisely how this moment of individual liberation from social norms can be understood in terms of political transformation Claudia Breger has argued that it cannot, glossing Zizek in these terms: ‘‘Within the symbolic order resistance is pointless....In order to effectively challenge authority-by resisting the temptations of ideology and accepting the Real for example the leader’s body in its ‘meaningless idiocy - one must annul oneself as a subject’’ (Breger 200) p. 84) In Breger’s reading Zizek’s ethical act is instead a nihilist gesture proclaiming the hopelessness of any project of social change and taking refuge in suicide

Morrison’s project is distant from any sort of nihilism; her endeavor is to bring to representation that which is excluded - by design by forgetting or by historical conditions themselves - by history itself and in this way her novel hints at redemption at a future African-American subject emergent from traumas that are collective as well as individual.

In what follows, I want to propose a reading of Morrison’s novel that focuses on its exploration of violence and guilt I want to do this by reading the novel both alongside and against dominant psychoanalytic conceptions derived from Freud but also from Lacan’s re-reading of Freud and Zizek’s deployment of both Morrison’s novel is important for such an investigation because the anatomy of guilt that it submits is not simply focused on Sethe’s guilt or her lack thereof; nor is it solely concerned with guilt as a psychic experience what Freud called ‘‘the sense of guilt” and sought to distinguish from remorse stricto sensu.⁵ As the exploration of guilt in Beloved articulates the psychic with the social, it is suggestive of the ways in which the social field mediates the symbolic order An infanticide committed by an escaped slave in the 1850s may constitute a break with the social and symbolic scaffolding of subject-formation; but if we can read it in this way it is because Morrison’s novel offers a painstaking examination of how subjectivity is accorded to some and denied to others

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