The sex of death and the maternal crypt -- Mourning, magic, and telepathy -- The sexual animal and the primal scene of birth -- Back of beyond: anxiety and the birth of the future -- On psycho-photography: shame and the Abu Ghraib -- Avital Ronell's body politics -- Blade Runner's moving still -- Nothing to say: fragments on the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction -- Darkroom readings: scenes of maternal photography -- The mother tongue in Phèdre and Frankenstein -- Birthmarks (given names) -- Bit: mourning remains in Derrida and Cixous.
This book examines the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.