Unholy Matricide

I was struck by the headline Boy guilty of shooting his mother. There are few things shocking in this world anymore, but matricide is one of them. It still retains the metaphysical shudder that regicide once did. Albert Camus discusses this in the context of the execution of King Louis XVI in L'Homme révolté. Camus remarks how for Saint-Just and his revolutionary coterie, monarchy was "not a crime, but crime itself . . . in other words, absolute profanation. . . . a sin against the ultimate nature of things." The absolute heresy of this notion can be properly situated if we consider kings as once equivalent to how we still see mothers: the necessity of their role was an unspoken assumption. Their legitimacy was beyond the bounds of questioning; the divine right of kings meant that kingship was sacred, even if individual kings were of greater or lesser worth. Although many of us now claim to be beyond sacred and profane, to paraphrase Nietzsche, most of us still have fealty to what we could call the divine right of mothers.

It may seem more natural to draw a parallel between patricide and regicide rather than matricide and regicide, due to a shared paternal role and the tradition of "a man's house is his castle." Yet I would argue sacrality matters more than gender in ultimate significance. The murder of a father by a son is of course an abomination in the eyes of most, but it can more easily be mitigated than murder of a mother. If the father is abusive and incestuous, we can understand if not openly applaud his murder; who would not have some sympathy for the murder by his daughter of that horrible rapist in Austria? Yet even though mothers may be equally abusive and even incestuous, there is still a greater distance that prevents us from accepting the murder of what is quite literally one's point of origin. If we can kill the person who bore us in her womb for nine months, to whom we owe our existence, what are we not capable of doing? Who are we not capable of killing?

After murdering Duncan, Macbeth states: "From this instant there's nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn." It is part of the unspoken compact of society that we take some essential things seriously, that we hold some essential matters of renown and grace sacred. To kill one's mother is not to just to kill a physical being, a "mere woman": it is to demonstrate one's lack of fealty to the katechon of civilization that holds back the destruction of every value. If one is not bound by loyalty to one's mother, at least bound enough not to kill her, what sort of loyalty is possible? The French revolutionaries established the general will of the people as sacred arbiter in place of the king. Yet the act of matricide seems to suggest an end to all sacred arbiters, as it is the most universal of taboos and shocking even to the most irony-infested and jaded. It is not just a blow against something inviolable; it is a blow against inviolability.

Even criminals in jail discriminate between lesser and greater degrees of criminality. Self-respecting murderers will treat child-rapists as abominable, because they still hold to some standard even if they violate others. Similarly, I would challenge all those who claim to be beyond morality to justify matricide. If this is not a crime, there can be no crime; and if there can be no crime, there can be no law and thus life becomes war of all against all. Come all ye anarchists, relativists, idol-smashers: gaze into the void! Can you be as strong as Louis XVI was on the scaffold and declare, "I shall drink the cup to the last dregs"? If you find something wrong with killing your mother, you are still on the side of society; and if you find something wrong with killing your mother, what of killing other mothers, and fathers and children? The question is no longer one of applying a standard, but the degree to which the standard is applied. And for those who still deny it? The guillotine.