Hill Place interval Irigaray and Ronell

Rebecca Hill

This chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s critical description of the maternal-feminine and the profoundly vulnerable nature of man’s limits in phallocentrism with Avital Ronell’s analysis of the maternal cartography of the battlefield and the home front in the Gulf War prosecuted by the United States against Iraq in 1992 (Ronell, 1994). For Ronell, perhaps all wars and all forms of paranoid aggression are motivated by a desire to control the space of the maternal body. To overcome paranoid aggression, Ronell calls for a relinquishment of the concept of proper place and an effort to generate an atopical community where the other is genuinely anticipated. In contrast, I draw on Irigaray and Aristotle to argue that the effort to escape the violent conflation of the maternal with space requires a concept of place. Place must be affirmed as the interval (Irigaray, 1993; Aristotle, 1983). This claim is by no means alien to Ronell’s position. Where the space of maternal cartography is construed as present to thought, quantifiable in the phallocentric logic of warfare, national defence and the insecure positing of the subject, the threshold of the interval is a place of open potentiality, a place in which the other is to come.