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ix a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s This book was born over a long period of time. While most of the texts contained in it were composed fairly recently, a few of them were written long ago. Looking back, I recall that many years ago, after a lecture I had given on Blade Runner at the University of Rochester, my dear friend Sharon Willis asked me to explain what I meant by the term “mother.” At the time, I was unable to articulate why I found the uncanny, photographic image of the mother to be so fascinating and so central to the film’s concerns. In many ways, this book is the belated response to that question. Given the long and complex genesis of the book, it is impossible for me to thank everyone who participated in all of its various stages over the years. I would like to thank a number of people, however, whose help and generosity were crucial to its emergence as a book. I am deeply grateful to the entire team at Fordham University Press. Helen Tartar, my editor, has been supportive and enthusiastic about the project from the very beginning. Thomas Lay oversaw the whole process with diligence and care. I would also like to thank Gregory McNamee for his sensitive and judicious copy editing of the manuscript. Kelly Oliver and David Wills both read the entire manuscript and offered generous and helpful suggestions for revisions. Hélène Cixous, Peggy Kamuf, and Avital Ronell offered continued inspiration and support. Elizabeth Rottenberg provided intellectual encouragement , keen insight, and warm friendship throughout the process. Several of the pieces in this book started off as invited lectures and/or contributions to journals and collected volumes. I would like to thank the following organizers and editors (some of whom are also friends) for including me in their various projects: Jennifer Bajorek, Jeanne Wolf Bernstein, Bruno Chaouat, Diane Davis, Mark Dawson, Karen Jacobs, Martin McQuillan, Steven Marder-Frontmatter.indd ix Marder-Frontmatter.indd ix 11/11/2011 2:42:03 PM 11/11/2011 2:42:03 PM x Acknowledgments Miller, Michael Naas, Nicholas Royle, Eric Prenowitz, Marc Redfield, Marta Segarra, Ashley Thompson, Charles Shepherdson, Philippe Van Haute, and Emily Zakin. Numerous other friends and colleagues discussed many of the ideas in the book with me. In particular, I would like to thank Branka Arsić, April Alliston, Eduardo Cadava, Cathy Caruth, Tim Dean, Rindala El Khoury Grizard, Lalitha Gopalan, Emma Henderson, Tom Keenan, Jill Robbins, Deborah Elise White, Sarah Wood, and Ewa Ziarek. Ariel Ross provided welcome assistance with the preparation of the final manuscript. I am deeply indebted to the graduate students at Emory University with whom I have worked over the last decade for their curiosity, generosity, and intelligence. Many of them will find responses to their inspiring and fascinating work embedded in these pages. I would also like to thank Deans Robin Forman, Robert Paul, and Lisa Tedesco at Emory University for their generous support of this project: Emory provided the press with a publication subsidy and gave me a valued research leave that afforded me the time necessary to complete it. I received constant encouragement from my family throughout. Dorothy Marder, my photographer -mother-who-didn’t-like-to-be-identified-as-a-mother, died while I was finishing this book and watches over it in her inimitable way. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Geoffrey Bennington, whose love and support make the impossible possible for me. Earlier versions of many of the chapters in this book were previously published in scholarly journals and edited collections, and I am grateful to all of the presses for permission to reprint them here. A version of Chapter 1 was published as “The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt,” Parallax: Inscr(i/y)ptions 15, no. 1 (2009): 5–20. The first section of Chapter 2 was originally presented as a lecture at the American Comparative Literature Association in April 2008, as part of the collective seminar “Jacques Derrida and the Singular Event of Psychoanalysis”; an earlier version of the chapter was published as “Mourning, Magic and Telepathy,” The Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 2 (2008): 181–200. A portion of Chapter 3 was published as “The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene,” in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms, ed. Jens De Vleminck and Eran Dorfman (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 121–137. An earlier version...

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