This essay outlines a Levinas- and Derrida-inspired politics of reproduction, via opening the ethics of reproduction, something previous work on the topic has omitted. It does so via a reassessment of two notable publications on Levinas and feminism, Stella Sandford's essay in the Cambridge Companion to Levinas (2002) and Lisa Guenther's volume The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2006).(1) Stella Sandford, Levinas, Feminism and the Feminine'. I particularly focus on this essay as its negative presentation of Levinas' potential for feminism in one of the main introductory texts on his work is an apparently definite dismissal. There is no space to undertake a full analysis of what Sandford has to say in The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. There is no doubting her familiarity with Levinas' texts, but the way in which she reads them is highly questionable. Her basic assumption is that texts can be treated systematically and she openly rejects Derrida's suggestion that we can find a number of different voices at work in Levinas. She thus prosecutes a reading which constantly attempts to restrain the radical potential of Levinas' text. Indeed, when she cannot find a suitably negative reading she puts words in his mouth by finding supposed parallels with writers such as Bloy, Rav Abbahu or Ebreo, on which basis he is accordingly condemned. The stunning radicality of Levinas' conception of subjectivity as fecundity is overlooked. Rather than being a celebration of masculine power, it is the discovery of the powerlessness at the heart of masculinity or any other subjectivity, a dissolution of virility. Sandford wrongly states that fraternity is for Levinas a simple universality and her treatment of it is underelaborated compared to Howard Caygill's account of the same term in Levinas and the Political. Sandford comes very close to recognizing that the fecundity of Totality and Infinity and the maternity of Otherwise than Being are very much two sides of the same coin. Yet again, rather than commend this move, she rejects the way of thinking at work, what I will call metaphorical thought, as a debiologizing. The phrase which will be so important for Guenther, becoming like a maternal body, is not even mentioned. Both of these are 10 or more years old years, yet have received little or no extended discussion despite a number of significant problems in their readings of Levinas. In particular, I challenge Sandford's insistence on a systematic rather than plurivocal reading of Levinas on questions of gender and sexual difference. I further stress the importance of a certain thought of metaphor as a way of thinking beyond existing relations. In Guenther's work I observe a tension between a desire to explore the potential of the metaphoric expression like a maternal body and a commitment to phenomenologize the act of giving birth. Arising out of the latter, I note the problematic characterization of maternity as a gift and a very Levinasian effacement of violence from the maternal relation. The latter tendency, together with an unwillingness to question accepted doxa on the topic, is partly responsible for Guenther's failure to proceed to the ethics of reproduction which should, in a Levinas-inspired work, inform and be informed by any politics of reproduction.
