Naples: The mother city

Suspended in the corporeality of the baroque, with its emphasis on cycles and simultaneity, rather than linearity, Naples epitomizes the mother space that has been objectified and appropriated by male subjectivity and its alienating rationality, as articulated by the homogenizing discourse of psychoanalysis. This paradigmatic metropolis which actualizes its ancient Greek signification as a "mother-city"---Naples was originally named after the Homeric siren, Parthenope, and associated throughout history with various feminine incarnations (the Cumaean sibyl, the Madonna)---asserts a form of reason that transcends the imposition of the Lacanian signification of the phallus and its dichotomizing paradigm of subjectivity. In Anna Maria Ortese's Il mare non bagna Napoli (1953), the phallus is revealed as a void, which subverts not only the "enlightened" knowledge of the phallus, but the debasing obliteration of the feminine as the "unsayable." In Naples, the mother signifies through the negativity, nothingness, and absence emblematic of the womb. Literally "debellied" by the modernizing impetus of a unified Italy after the cholera epidemic of 1884, Parthenope embodies a feminine grotesque aesthetic, as articulated by Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992), in which the preeminence of bodily processes effects a critical interruption of Naples's transition to the "Enlightenment." The womb rejects the univocality of the phallus and arguably signifies through nourishment, which, unlike the libido, affirms a subject that emerges out of a counter-paradigmatic continuity with the mother, who can simultaneously be and endow others with being. The mother prevents the subject from imposing an artificial self-sufficiency, as evinced in Jean-Paul Sartre's Spaesamento: Napoli e Capri (2000), where the protagonist debases the maternal nourishment prevalent in Naples in order to empty it of its life-giving power. In turn, by affirming a dialectic that emerges out of the maternal body, Naples bypasses the civilizatory claims of repression and its dualistic mechanization of the psyche in terms of the conscious and the unconscious, and thereby fulfills the all-encompassing realm of the fantastical, which, as in Ortese's Il Monaciello di Napoli (1940), attains its validity through a paradoxically creative and destructive maternal reason that is both a sign of excess and containment.