The Theorist’s Mother by Andrew Parker (review)

Setting aside a hefty sixty-five pages of notes, bibliography, and index, this is a slim volume, comprised of an Introduction, three main chapters and a brief ‘Coda’; the second chapter (which is concerned with paternity in the Marxist critical tradition and specifically with how Lukács, in The Historical Novel, assimilated Scott’s Waverley) has no discernible bearing on the book’s overall argument, either as delineated in the Introduction or as developed in the other chapters. This ‘accidental book’ (p. xiii) proffers the term ‘mother trouble’ to describe the ways in which thinking about the mother disturbs the work of key figures in ‘the male theory canon’ (p. 2), most especially Lacan, Marx, and Freud. While the nod to Judith Butler is obvious, and her eminently maternal celebration of Andrew Parker’s ‘tremendous accomplishment’ appears on the book’s back cover, no explicit theoretical attention is paid by Parker to his term as an iteration of ‘gender trouble’. More generally, it is a shame that, while both queer theory and new reproductive technologies are repeatedly registered as significant determining factors in a contemporary crisis of motherhood’s meaning, there is no substantive engagement either with queer theory or with such suggestive new thinkers of technology in its evolving relationship with the human as Bernard Stiegler. The first main chapter reflects on an essay Parker wrote in 1985 about his own mother, in which he turned to psychoanalysis as a way of understanding his mother’s psychosomatic illnesses. Parker’s inevitable autocritique is set within a reappraisal of Lacan’s late seminar Encore, one that turns on the difficulty of teaching, or transmitting, psychoanalysis. Parker moves gracefully between Lacan, Derrida, and his own mother, but the concluding discussion of Lacan’s self-professed powers of ‘maternal divination’, which could have brought together this chapter’s somewhat disparate reflections, is too cursory to perform this function. Above all, his closing admission, that ‘I developed a terrible case of psoriasis while rereading myself reading my mother’ (p. 56), cries out for a more probing and less compliant exploration of his own implication in this quest for knowledge of his mother. Psoriasis, a non-contagious disease of the skin which may have a genetic component (and one can imagine how each of these characteristics could be significant) does not feature in the illustrative list of his mother’s ailments (p. 34), so it is frustratingly unclear how we are intended to understand this parting shot. Taking its cue from Derrida’s writing on translation, the third chapter considers translation in the work of Freud and Marx and strains to discern the kicked-over traces of a Yiddish ‘mother tongue’ in both of their bodies of work. ‘What if Yiddish were the language of Marxism?’ (p. 108), Parker wonders. Here, as elsewhere, Parker raises more questions than he answers.