The Theorist's MotherIn The Theorist's Mother one of our subtlest literary theorists turns his attention to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical male critical theorists. Noting how the mother is made to disappear both as the object of theory and as its subject, Andrew Parker focuses primarily on the legacies of Marx and Freud, who uniquely constrain their would-be heirs to "return to the origin" of each founding figure's texts. Analyzing the effects of these constraints in the work of Lukács, Lacan, and Derrida, among others, Parker suggests that the injunction to return transforms the history of theory into a form of genealogy, meaning that the mother must somehow be involved in this process, even if, as in Marxism, she seems wholly absent, or if her contributions are discounted, as in psychoanalysis. Far from being marginalized, the mother shows herself throughout this book to be inherently multiple and therefore never simply who or what theory may want her to be. In a provocative coda, Parker considers how theory’s mother troubles will be affected retroactively by scientific advances that make it impossible to presume the mother's gender. |
Contents
Philosophys Mother Trouble | 1 |
Rereading Teaching and Maternal Divination | 29 |
2 History Fiction and The Author of Waverley or Fathers and Sons in Marxist Criticism | 57 |
Freud Marx and the Mameloshn | 88 |
Other Maternities | 111 |
Notes | 117 |
| 149 | |
| 173 | |
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analysis become body chapter child conception criticism dialectical difference discourse distinction Écrits Eleanor Marx Engels English essay example experience fact father female Feminine Sexuality Feminism feminist fiction figure forget Foucault Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gender German giving birth Hegel Heidegger Historical Novel hysteria imagine Jacqueline Rose Jacques Derrida Jacques Lacan Jewish jouissance Karl Marx Kinship Kristeva Lacanian language Levinas literal literary Lukács Lukács's male Mameloshn Martin Heidegger Marx and Freud Marx’s Marxism Maternal Thinking metaphor mother tongue motherhood narrative never Nietzsche object origin passage Peggy Kamuf Penguin phallus Phillips philosopher political preface pregnancy psyche psychoanalysis question readers relation reproduction romance Roudinesco Ruddick Scott seems seminar sense Sigmund Freud signifier simply social Spivak Sprache Standard Edition Stanford Strachey teaching theorists Theory thought tion tradition Trans translation truth University Press Waverley Novels Waverley's woman women words writing Yiddish York