Page 39 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

ONE CLEANS, THE OTHER DOESN’T 33

other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest
attempts to release the hold of maternal entity.
(Kristeva, 1980/1982:12–13)

The struggle of the human subject to differentiate him or herself from helpless,
mute physicality, to individuate, must first involve rejection of the nonhuman
and a psychic/physical separation from the mother. Kristeva’s theorization
stresses the fundamental importance of dirt, filth (as ‘not me’) to abjection and
subject formation; it also allows us to understand specifically how Freud maps a
narrative of psychic/symbolic difference on to one involving social difference.
The polarity animal/mother, within which (per Freud) the Wolfman psychically
differentiates himself, naturalizes the class difference upon which the Wolfman’s
desiring structure depends.
Insisting upon the significance of Grusha’s social position, Deleuze and Guattari
elaborate this point:

It is not a question of denying the importance of parental coitus, and the
position of the mother; but when this position makes the mother resemble a
floor-washer, or an animal, what authorizes Freud to say that the animal or
the maid stand for the mother independently of the social or generic
differences, instead of concluding that the mother also functions as
something other than the mother, and gives rise in the child’s libido to an
entire differentiated social investment at the same time as she opens the
way to a relation with the nonhuman sex? For whether the mother is from a
richer or poorer background than the father, etc., has to do with the breaks
and flows that traverse the family, but that overreach it on all sides and are
not familial.
(1972/1983:355)

In Deleuze and Guattari’s reinterpretation of this scene, desire and the social
order are inextricably connected:

Wouldn’t the Great Other, indispensable to the position of desire, be the
Social Other, social difference apprehended and invested as the nonfamily
within the family itself? The other class is by no means grasped by the
libido as a magnified or impoverished image of the mother, but as the
foreign, the nonmother, the nonfather, the nonfamily…. [Thus] Class
struggle goes to the heart of the ordeal of desire.
(1972/1983:354–5, my emphasis)

While Deleuze and Guattari theorize the significance of the maid’s position—
both on the floor and more generally, in the bourgeois family—they do not
consider the significance of her cleaning activities (which control the