@article{1477927,
      recid = {1477927},
      author = {Marder, Elissa, },
      title = {The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction :  Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction /},
      pages = {1 online resource (320 p.)},
      abstract = {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 patriarchal  accounts 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 the  unspeakable 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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477927},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823293063},
}