Chapter 2 Matter as a Mirror: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance ...

Matter as a Mirror 89
By linking the ideas of deception, reproduction of an image, and
childbirth, the mirror in the female body becomes a highly concise figuration
of Ficino’s ambivalent attitude towards matter as a receptacle of all forms.
It is precisely the neutrality of the mirror (so desperately argued for in this
partenogenetic masculine discourse), its capacity to receive any form whatsoever,
and its unlimited potentiality that poses a threat to domination by form.
There is an obviously close conceptual relationship with the materia meretrix
metaphor discussed in chapter one. The womb is to be isolated not only from
insemination by other men, but also from alien images, phantasmata that
enter the body through the liver. The passive and hence female mirror is
imprinted and subsequently falls into danger of begetting monsters as well
as demi-gods. Viewed from this perspective, Ficino’s elaborate metaphysical
theory of reflection turns out to be an index for the patriarchal anxiety about
the legitimacy of the offspring. 135
An important consequence of these many and divergent functions
of the mirror is that the concepts of reflection and imprint become interchangeable.
As a womb may receive the stamp of a form in the way an image
is reflected in a mirror, so conversely the looking-glass may be inscribed
with forms, retain and eventually even transform them. In the latter case, the
womb (which previously had been explained by analogy to the mirror) demonstrates
an occult property of reflecting surfaces, namely that of retaining
and even transforming images. In an amazingly elliptical argument structure,
both mirror and womb reinforce the concept of transformative reflection that
structures all sorts of physiological functions and, at the same time, explains
perience, or linguistic trope, sexual union remains the most compelling and most primal
instance of the act of knowing. Even when unrecognized by metaphor, the experience of
knowing is rooted in the carnal. It does not, however, remain there. What classically distinguishes
knowledge is its essential thrust away from the body, its ambition to transcend
the carnal. Mind is not simply immanent in matter: it is transcendent over it. All visions
of knowledge must accordingly struggle with the dialectic between immanence and transcendence.
What is especially striking is how often the metaphoric field for this struggle
is that of sex and gender, and, I shall argue, how deeply these metaphors have influenced
the disciplines of knowledge.”
135 On the powers of the imagination and its ability to infect and contaminate, see
Theologia XIII, 4: II, 233–235. “L’affaire est claire: si la femme est le miroir de l’homme,
[…] elle ne possède en propre nulle lumière; mais c’est surtout que, comme tout principe
féminin, elle est la matière à quoi le mâle impose forme, comme l’artisan qui modèle la cire
ou la glaise, frappe ou cisle le métal, façonne le bois et sculpte la pierre.” Frontisi-Ducroux
(1997) 129–130.