Neither Mother nor slave: Reading On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal

Abstract

“All collectives that sustain themselves through time are dependent on one form of reproduction or another (and mostly more than one), whether sexual or ritual, social, legal, or economic. And they all need mothers, those who perform and have performed maternal functions” (Anidjar, 64). This quote, I believe, encapsulates the totality of Gil Anidjar’s most recent text, On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal, which seeks to expand the category of mother to all who perform its functions, even those who are barred from its titular and juridical headings. He notes that the stability of any collective, spanning all the way back to the biblical period, has and always will rely on mothers. A significant portion of the book is dedicated to connecting the role of the Biblical mother to the ways in which the maternal role is inherently plural, historically supported and ultimately allocated to nurses, maids, slaves, and servants. This multiplicity of mothers in the reproduction of a collective supports Anidjar’s argument that the “mothering of mothers” is foundational to the political and social structures we have built over and in time. In essence, our dependence on mothering throughout history, exposes how discursive investments in the paternal and patriarchal as the epitome of our political and social life misunderstands a more basic condition: intrinsic to any social body is the fact that, to persist, “a collective must mother” (Anidjar, 21). Mothers write the world by guarding it, preserving it, and protecting us from it. Motherhood and maternality are not reducible to an event, like birth, but are structured by repetition, a rewriting across generations, reproduction, family, nation, and species that embraces iterability and rejects unity or maternal unicity. Hence, what Anidjar offers is a move away from “the Father,” and even “the Mother,” and towards “mothers,” a plurality governed by a “maternal contract” that undergirds all forms of relation and permits the reproduction of collective existence.