In this Book
- The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: Fordham University Press
summary
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the
mother in literature, philosophy,psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother
haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block
in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his
patriarchalaccounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The
figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly
and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and
magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of
mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional
psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation,
and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and
space.The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal
function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the
event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through
uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body
often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such
as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive
properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal
function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties
that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother
invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of
language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in
literary texts opens us up to theunspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so
doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might
otherwise have remained unimaginable.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xi
- Introduction: Pandora’s Legacy
- pp. 1-16
- Two Mourning, Magic, and Telepathy
- pp. 37-52
- Six Avital Ronell’s Body Politics
- pp. 111-129
- Seven Blade Runner ’s Moving Still
- pp. 130-148
- Eleven Birthmarks (Given Names)
- pp. 214-228
- Bibliography
- pp. 285-300
Additional Information
ISBN
9780823249510
Related ISBN(s)
9780823240555
MARC Record
OCLC
821725659
Pages
288
Launched on MUSE
2012-08-22
Language
English
Open Access
No