The Theorist's Mother

In 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. Paying particular attention to 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 Lukacs, 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, always more than one, 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.
"This fascinating and beautifully written book does for maternity what a good deal of theory, starting with Freud, has done for paternity. Andrew Parker shows that many members of the 'male theory canon' have developed strategies to make the mother disappear. He investigates the role of mothers in philosophers' lives and the treatment of mothers in their thought, shrewdly circling around issues of the maternal, the relation of biographical experience to theoretical articulation, and the nature and functioning of authority." Jonathan Culler, author of The Literary in Theory "Andrew Parker leads us from Derrida imagining his granddaughter as that philosopher he'd like to have had as his mother to Barthes becoming his mother's mother. Along the way, we revisit the hated mothers of Nietzsche and Marx, the psychosomatic body of Parker's own mother, Pontalis' droll image of the mother we spend a lifetime trying to change because we cannot change our mothers, and the originally ersatz mother. The mother becomes a figure of impossible origin: lacking original meaning, plural, split. The mother's status as natural may seem to have ceded to the technologically mediated mother, or to apparently new possibilities - 'assisted' reproduction, pregnant men, but Parker reminds us that the mother has never been natural or biological. As we move from the problem of reproducibility in Marxism and psychoanalysis, through translatability and the problematics of the mother tongue, ending with the pregnancy of Thomas Beatie, the figures of the literal mother has long since collapsed, the mother has never been natural, teleological or original - the mother we meet with Andrew Parker is queered and invigoratingly plastic."
Penelope Deutscher, Northwestern University