Notice of field related talk – Friday Forum:

Friday, March 2, 2012 

4:00 PM, Room 4406

Andrew C. Parker

Amherst College

The Theorist’s Mother

Noting how the mother is made to disappear perennially both as the object of theory and as its subject, Andrew Parker focuses in his forthcoming book on the legacies of Marx and Freud, who uniquely constrain their would-be heirs to “return to the origin” of each founding figure’s texts. Analyzing the effects of these constraints in the work of Lukács, Lacan, and Derrida, among others, Parker suggests that the injunction to return transforms the history of theory into a form of genealogy, meaning that the mother must somehow be involved in this process, even if, as in Marxism, she seems wholly absent, or if her contributions are generally discounted, as in psychoanalysis. Far from simply being marginalized, the mother shows herself throughout The Theorist’s Mother to be inherently multiple, always more than one, and therefore never simply who or what theory may want her to be.