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Access provided by University of Wisconsin @ Milwaukee (2 Jun 2016 22:05 GMT)

The Mothership Strikes Back
Andrew Parker’s The Theorist’s Mother, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012

Ahuva Cohen

“I am your mother, Luke,” said no Star Wars character ever. While Luke
Skywalker negotiates relationships with a succession of father figures
(Uncle Owen, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda) before Darth Vader declares
himself to be Luke’s true father and hacks off his son’s hand with a castrat-
ing blow from his phallic lightsaber, Luke’s mother remains obscured in his
incestuous romance with Princess Leia, who is ultimately revealed to be
his twin sister. Just as it would have been unthinkable for Darth Vader—
much less any Jedi Knight—to have been Luke’s mother in the Star Wars
universe, when Jacques Derrida was asked, “What philosopher would you
have liked to be your mother?” he responded, “It’s impossible for me to
have any philosopher as a mother . . . my mother couldn’t be a philoso-
pher. [Switches to French] A philosopher couldn’t be my mother” (Derrida
2007). Derrida’s horrified reaction is used by Andrew Parker as a launch-
ing point for his own proposal in The Theorist’s Mother, which suggests
“that what unifies the otherwise disparate traditions of critical theory and
philosophy from Karl Marx to Jacques Derrida is their troubled relation to
maternity” (1).
With fifty-six pages devoted to notes and a bibliography, the dense but
elegant writing in the other one hundred fourteen pages of this “acciden-
tal book” provide both a challenging and pleasurable reading of Jacques
Lacan and György Lukács in their roles as legitimate heirs to the tradi-
tions fathered by Freud and Marx. Preceding the three main chapters and a
coda, the introduction in which Parker lays out his theoretical groundwork
is the most compelling portion of the book. While claims to paternity have
always been doubtful, those of maternity were assumed to be unambigu-

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 44: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2016) © 2016 by Ahuva Cohen. All rights reserved.

321
322  Ahuva Cohen

ous until advances in reproductive technology made it possible for moth-

erhood to be split along genetic, biological, and social axes. Because the
identity of the mother has been revealed to be a social construction in-
stead of a biological cornerstone, Parker concludes that such indetermi-
nacy reveals three problems with employing the mother as a signifier: the
distinction of the literal (procreating body) from the figurative (creativ-
ity), the relationship of the singular (“my mother”) to the general (“the
Mother”), and the “border between a theorist’s life and writing” (22–25).
More or less corresponding to the three kinds of mother trouble identi-
fied in the introduction, the main chapters of The Theorist’s Mother decon-
struct the relationship between texts and their supplements—becoming
supplements themselves, located both inside and outside of the original
texts. If the work of Freud and Marx were to be compared to the Star Wars
original trilogy, and the work of Lacan and Lukács to the Star Wars sequel
trilogy, then Parker’s book could be viewed as a highly sophisticated form
of fan fiction that exposes the assumptions of canonical readings by re-
reading them from the perspective of a minor character. In the Star Wars
sequel, the drama is driven by Chancellor Palpatine’s tug-of-war with Obi-
Wan Kenobi over Anakin’s loyalty as a disciple; yet the death of Anakin’s
mother and his brief romance with Luke’s mother function as fulcrums
in the transformations of both Darth Vader’s pathology and the political
economy of the Star Wars universe. Returning to the universe of The The-
orist’s Mother, Parker’s work tries to locate the role of the Queen mother
as a unifying agent—both biological and social—in the reproduction of
modern theory.
In the first main chapter, Parker attempts to ground this project in his
own experience by describing his original exploration of the boundary
between the mind and the body in a 1985 essay he wrote about his moth-
er’s hypochondria. Parker then segues into a discussion of Lacan reading
his critics’ responses to his earlier work while he was giving his famous
seminar on female sexuality. Parker argues that Lacan’s anxiety over the
best method for reproducing his theoretical insights through the analytic
practices of future students of psychiatry reveals a barrier between knowl-
edge and experience inherent in Lacan’s own theory of sexual difference.
Resuscitating the obscure Lacanian phrase “maternal divination,” Parker
suggests that the exhibition of the lecturer’s body might have been able to
overcome the limitations of language similar to the way Lacan had once
experienced the contact between his body and his child’s doing. Parker
 The Mothership Strikes Back 323

leverages his own body language to conclude this chapter with the cryptic
confession that rereading his essay precipitated a case of psoriasis.
Obliquely referring to the troubled relationship between singularity
and generality, in the second main chapter Parker follows Lukács’s read-
ing of the eponymous hero of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverly. Accord-
ing to Parker, Lukács understands this character as a figure whose private
struggles are representative of larger historical conflicts and Scott as a
novelist whose dialectical resolution of those conflicts presaged Marx’s
interpretation of history. Parker goes on, however, to pick apart Lukács’s
conclusion—that the science of Marxism is the mature product of Scott’s
fiction—by examining Scott’s own uneasiness regarding the historical au-
thenticity of his novels and even his claim to authorship. Although Parker
himself does not make an explicit connection between Scott’s anxiety over
his audience’s reception and Lacan’s anxiety over the proper understand-
ing of his teachings, Parker’s catalog of Scott’s supplements to Waverly—“A
Postscript Which Should Have Been a Preface,” introductions to new edi-
tions, footnotes, and a variety of appendixes—remind me of Lacan’s ob-
session with “mathemes” and Borromean knots at the end of his career.
If the first chapter explores the boundaries between the mind and the
body, and the second explores the boundaries between fictional and his-
torical texts, then the third chapter attempts to explore the boundaries be-
tween the theorist’s writing and his life. Although the theorist’s mother
disappeared in the transition from psychoanalysis to Marxism, Parker res-
urrects her in the third chapter on translations of the works of Freud and
Marx. He begins by discussing the difficulty of determining which term
is the vehicle and which is the tenor in the phrase “the mother tongue”
when it is used to refer to a dialect. Following Derrida’s opinion that “the
mother tongue” is “the essential turn that must be taken to understand
what a mother means” (2007), Parker attempts to demonstrate a connec-
tion between maternity and translation in the term “Mameloshn,” which
literally means “the mother tongue” and is used by Jewish speakers of Yid-
dish to refer to the language spoken in the home. He suggests that Marx’s
adoption of German as the language of the revolution over Mameloshn
may have reflected his embarrassment over his mother’s lack of education.
Given the scarcity of evidence, the assertion is unconvincing, and in the
larger context of the fraught relationship of Jewish intellectuals to the Ger-
man language (Arendt 1968, 29–32), this connection seems particularly
strained.
324  Ahuva Cohen

Parker caps The Theorist’s Mother by putting the founders of discursiv-

ity back on the shelf, and reading from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
(2007) and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Bringing
Firestone together with Nietzsche is a queer pairing, because the former
was a woman who bluntly declared, “Pregnancy is barbaric” (180), and
the latter was a man who claimed in his autobiography, “As my father I have
already died, as my mother I am still alive and growing” (7). How would
Parker envision a new generation of theorists, descended from a feminist
who rejected maternity in favor of artificial reproduction, and a philos-
opher who frequently embraced maternity as a metaphor for creativity?
Would they march out like an army of clone philosophers, or would they
appear like Darth Vader, outfitted with artificial wombs in addition to
mechanical limbs and lungs? Or perhaps Parker is suggesting we could
find models for reproducing theory that would not equate channeling the
Force with wielding the lightsaber as its privileged signifier.
Reading The Dialectic of Sex for the first time, I was both impressed
and dismayed by how hard Firestone worked to employ the master’s
tools in her project to dismantle the master’s house—in particular, her
reliance on the Oedipus complex to explain race relations in the United
States (1970, 98). If anything, Freud’s and Marx’s theoretical frameworks
have often been too successful in reproducing themselves—even in fem-
inist readings such as Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering
(1978) and Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction (1981). Judith
Butler, however, in Bodies That Matter, first imagines which body part
could replace the penis as the lesbian phallus, but then concludes, “What
is needed is not a new body part, as it were, but a displacement of the
hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference and the critical
release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of eroto-
genic pleasure” (1993, 57).
By rereading modern theory as troubled by its own reproduction—
because the maternal has been effaced—Parker may have provided theo-
rists with a valuable new toolbox in which the penis could be replaced by
the womb, so to speak, as a privileged signifier. Privileging maternity over
patriarchy may not be a completely new strategy for critical analysis, but
Parker’s contribution is his recognition that maternity can be untethered
from gender. By employing maternity outside of the domain of feminism,
The Theorist’s Mother opens a new field for reimagining modern theory
outside the symbolic order of its founders.
 The Mothership Strikes Back 325

Ahuva Cohen has been awarded the Paul LeClerc Prize for the best research paper, and
the CLAGS Prize for the best undergraduate paper on an LGBT topic. She is currently
working on a memoir about her mother’s magic triangle.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 1968. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, edited by Hannah Arendt, 1–54. New York:
Schocken Books.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge Classics.
Derrida, Jacques. 2007. Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Vol. 1. Edited by Peggy
Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Derrida. 2002. Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Jane Doe
Films.
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 2007. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are.
Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press.