Keywords
the political
slaves
maternal difference
How to Cite
Abstract
I am my mother’s child. Still and always. Like everyone, like every individual in history or outside of it, I have been mothered. We have all been mothered. More or less well. More or less by our own mothers. You could say that, from that unavoidable universal, there emerged the reasons for my interest in dependence, I mean, in difference—that old word—and particularly in the difference mothers make or constitute. For the most part, though, and since writing On the Sovereignty of Mothers, I have continued to try to articulate something, well, different, something like maternal difference (a phrase that, incidentally, seems as rare and unused, Naomi Morgenstern (2020) can no doubt confirm, as “maternal sovereignty” or “maternal contract"). It is, at any rate, and to be more precise, maternal differences that have struck me as unavoidable. The French have this word, incontournable, which signifies the impossibility of going around, uncircumventable. Which means, of course, that such avoidance is not only eminently possible (recall Apollo’s denial of the very parenthood of the mother in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and its tricky inheritors), but might, in fact, be governing our thought and conduct, our communities and polities. Still, even in the denial, ignorance, or violent effacement they might be said to generate or engender, I would argue that mothers remain symptomatically unavoidable—and this as soon as mothers come to mind; as soon as one encounters, which is to say, reflects and remembers, but also effaces and erases, goes around and loses mothers (we have all been mothered); as soon as mothers and the maternal become an explicit (or, again, denied) matter of concern, a question or a series of questions to be confronted or avoided, if otherwise, I would insist, than as particular or personal, local or regional, questions. Mothers, I shall try to reiterate here, do much more than reproduce the family (that protean “unit,” if there is one, that so consistently occludes what takes place “outside” of it); they reproduce the polity.
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