The Mothership Strikes Back

“I am your mother, Luke,” said no Star Wars character ever. While Luke Skywalker negotiates relationships with a succession of father figures (Uncle Owen, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda) before Darth Vader declares himself to be Luke’s true father and hacks off his son’s hand with a castrating blow from his phallic lightsaber, Luke’s mother remains obscured in his incestuous romance with Princess Leia, who is ultimately revealed to be his twin sister. Just as it would have been unthinkable for Darth Vader—much less any Jedi Knight—to have been Luke’s mother in the Star Wars universe, when Jacques Derrida was asked, “What philosopher would you have liked to be your mother?” he responded, “It’s impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother … my mother couldn’t be a philosopher. [Switches to French] A philosopher couldn’t be my mother” (Derrida 2007). Derrida’s horrified reaction is used by Andrew Parker as a launching point for his own proposal in The Theorist’s Mother, which suggests “that what unifies the otherwise disparate traditions of critical theory and philosophy from Karl Marx to Jacques Derrida is their troubled relation to maternity” (1).

With fifty-six pages devoted to notes and a bibliography, the dense but elegant writing in the other one hundred fourteen pages of this “accidental book” provide both a challenging and pleasurable reading of Jacques Lacan and György Lukács in their roles as legitimate heirs to the traditions fathered by Freud and Marx. Preceding the three main chapters and a coda, the introduction in which Parker lays out his theoretical groundwork is the most compelling portion of the book. While claims to paternity have always been doubtful, those of maternity were assumed to be unambiguous until advances in reproductive technology made it possible for motherhood to be split along genetic, biological, and social axes. Because the identity of the mother has been revealed to be a social construction instead of a biological cornerstone, Parker concludes that such indeterminacy reveals three problems with employing the mother as a signifier: the distinction of the literal (procreating body) from the figurative (creativity), the relationship of the singular (“my mother”) to the general (“the Mother”), and the “border between a theorist’s life and writing” (22–25).

More or less corresponding to the three kinds of mother trouble identified in the introduction, the main chapters of The Theorist’s Mother deconstruct the relationship between texts and their supplements—becoming supplements themselves, located both inside and outside of the original texts. If the work of Freud and Marx were to be compared to the Star Wars original trilogy, and the work of Lacan and Lukács to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, then Parker’s book could be viewed as a highly sophisticated form of fan fiction that exposes the assumptions of canonical readings by rereading them from the perspective of a minor character. In the Star Wars sequel, the drama is driven by Chancellor Palpatine’s tug-of-war with Obi-Wan Kenobi over Anakin’s loyalty as a disciple; yet the death of Anakin’s mother and his brief romance with Luke’s mother function as fulcrums in the transformations of both Darth Vader’s pathology and the political economy of the Star Wars universe. Returning to the universe of The Theorist’s Mother, Parker’s work tries to locate the role of the Queen mother as a unifying agent—both biological and social—in the reproduction of modern theory.

In the first main chapter, Parker attempts to ground this project in his own experience by describing his original exploration of the boundary between the mind and the body in a 1985 essay he wrote about his mother’s hypochondria. Parker then segues into a discussion of Lacan reading his critics’ responses to his earlier work while he was giving his famous seminar on female sexuality. Parker argues that Lacan’s anxiety over the best method for reproducing his theoretical insights through the analytic practices of future students of...