Title
The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction : Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction / Elissa Marder.
ISBN
9780823293063
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright
©2012
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (320 p.)
Item Number
10.1515/9780823293063 doi
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 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.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780823240562
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pandora's Legacy
Part one. Psychoanalysis and the Maternal Function
One. The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt
Two. Mourning, Magic, and Telepathy
Three. The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene of Birth
Four. Back of Beyond: Anxiety and the Birth of the Future
Part two. Photography and the Prosthetic Maternal
Five. On Psycho-Photography: Shame and Abu Ghraib
Six. Avital Ronell's Body Politics
Seven. Blade Runner 's Moving Still
Eight. Nothing to Say: Fragments on the Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Part three. Photo-Readings and the Possible Impossibilities of Literature
Nine. Darkroom Readings: Scenes of Maternal Photography
Ten. The Mother Tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein
Eleven. Birthmarks (Given Names)
Twelve. Bit: Mourning Remains in Derrida and Cixous
Notes
Bibliography
Index
