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Elissa Marder Fordham University Press, New York, 2012, 306pp., paper, $27.00, ISBN: 978-0-8232-4056-2; cloth, $80.00, ISBN: 978-0-8232-4055-5
The cryptic figure of the mother, one might say, marks the very birth of psychoanalysis. Elissa Marder’s The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction returns to the primal scene of birth in order to offer scholars a lucid account of the uncanny status of the maternal function – that which bears recurrent anxieties regarding the excluded memory of birth – within psychoanalysis, photography, and literature. Marder’s brilliant analysis of what she calls the “mechanical reproductions” of the maternal function within culture and society indicates the limitless milieu within which modern technologies usurp the maternal body in order to contain ostensibly uncontainable anxieties over maternal abjection and loss (p. 5). Insofar as culture is permeated with traces of the maternal function, Marder’s own conception of the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction demands a philosophical, if not psychoanalytic, theorization of the uncanny aporia of birth and the maternal body. Despite this intimacy and exile that characterize the subject’s relation to the event of birth, Marder suggests that the spectral presence of the mother, through language and imagination, facilitates the transformation of impossibilities into imaginable futures.
Marder carefully organizes her book into three distinct, yet interrelated, parts (each of which is constituted by four chapters) that respectively emphasize the spectral trace of the maternal function within psychoanalytic discourse, photographic technologies, and literature. Here, it is fascinating that, while Marder never directly attributes her categorical organization to Kristeva, each of these categories (psychoanalysis, photography, and literature) indirectly appears in a striking passage from Black Sun, in which Kristeva (1987) declares that “upon los