Author Description

"All mothers write when they inscribe themselves onto their children and onto the world. We must take the measure of this field of inscription, the maternal field, and rethink mothers in terms that far exceed the body and the family, the tribe or the nation. On the Sovereignty of Mothers seeks to contribute to political philosophy from multiple perspectives: religion; feminism, sex, gender, and critical race studies; psychoanalysis; marxism; and personal reflection. Gil Anidjar reads the biblical story of Hagar and Sarah as the founding (if ignored) scene of what Hegel famously called "the dialectic of master and slave." Reconsidering the meaning of motherhood and of slavery in what binds and separates them, he argues that the two, particularly as they were read by Saint Paul, illuminate and perhaps govern the history as well as the political economy of motherhood. The dialectic of mother and slave prompts us, with James Baldwin and Hortense Spillers, to rethink race and gender in these terms. Recognizing that Ishmael and Isaac, the children of Hagar and Sarah, had two mothers-as did Moses, Buddha, Socrates, Oedipus, and Antigone-one of whom had absolute authority over the other, has not led to any theoretical advance, much less to a reconsideration of motherhood. Drawing on Hobbes's view of women's elevated status in the state of nature and Foucault's notion of pastoral power, the book identifies the maternal contract by which mothers have the power to preserve and to destroy (exemplified by abortion and infanticide) as the essence of sovereignty and the political"--