Keeping the World: On the Maternal Conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg

January 6, 2025

Keeping the World: On the Maternal Conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg

 This dialogue is based on a conversation with Gil Anidjar and Lette Bragg in November 2024 about their recently published monographs. Approaching the topic from different perspectives, they grapple with the maternal as a philosophical and political concept, and the question of maternity at the limits.

Hannah Miller: Thank you so much for making time.

Gil Anidjar: No, no, thank you for setting this up. I’m very pleased to have this conversation. In fact, one of the things I wanted to say is that I’m really sorry I did not know Lette Bragg’s work earlier. Particularly because one of the first things that I wrote on this topic before the book was a piece on Jacques Derrida and the mother.[1] And Lette had written a beautiful essay on Derrida and maternal thought in Grant Farred’s book Derrida and Africa,[2] some of which has made its way into her book. I just wish I had known it at the time because that would have been part of the conversation. There is not that much that has been written on Derrida and maternity. So I’m very grateful for this dialogue.

HM: Well, you’re in conversation now. For me, this was also a great opportunity to read these two texts against each other. It was great, because even though obviously they are very different projects, they’re also in conversation with each other in many ways.

GA: Absolutely, absolutely. Maternal writing. But yes, Lette, I loved your really beautiful piece and the poetry of your writing. I’m sorry I didn’t know it before, but I’m very happy I know it now.

Lette Bragg: Thank you. I’m so touched that you read it. It was my first attempt at writing about maternity, and I remember being terrified. It came out of a conference presentation, and I was like, this is not going to go well . . . But it was a real moment of turning to a new kind of writing, a new kind of thinking. So yeah, thanks so much for reading it and for reading my book.

GA: I mean, I don’t want to presume anything. It’s just that when I started writing about mothers, I was feeling a little jittery myself.

LB: Right? There is no sure footing.

GA: You know, there’s still a part of me expecting somebody to say: “So another guy is going to tell us about mothers. That’s what we really wanted to hear these days.” But I’m hoping that I manage something. And I obviously don’t try to occupy the place of the mother. Even though there was a part of me that really wanted to pull a “Judith Butler on melancholia”—you know, the melancholy of the heterosexual for their bisexuality and therefore for their homosexuality is part of how Butler makes their argument in Gender Trouble.[3] I remember at the time I read it, it was kind of amazing. And in retrospect, I think there’s a part of me that keeps expecting Butler or someone else to make a similar argument about what it means that we so take for granted the understanding that to be male means not to be a mother and never being able to be a mother. And I don’t want to deny that womb envy and all of those things are absolutely there. But then, this is an understanding of motherhood and of maternity that doesn’t make room for the possibility that someone like me might say: “Oh my God. I could have mothered.” And yet so much is at stake in convincing heterosexual boys that motherhood is not for them. For good and bad reasons, I think. So, to actually articulate this in terms of a certain melancholia seemed important to me. And when I found the French translation of Sheila Heti’s book,[4] I was just stunned. The book is called Motherhood, but it was translated into French as La mère en moi: “the mother in me.” And I love that phrase so much that obviously I had to use it. Which I did. But it was the closest I could come to say “Me too.” Something of that order.

LB: I love all of that. Three things have occurred to me. I’ll see if I can remember them all. The first one is that I found it a real pleasure to read your work. Almost like a sense of relief. You know, I enjoyed seeing some of the theorists I had read when I was writing my dissertation and then had to let go of. I enjoyed seeing them come up in your book in this new way, and it was like greeting them again. And I think this turn to the maternal function and this listening is really rare and beautiful. So I really like that. And then the melancholia: On the one hand, I think it’s so hard to make these sorts of arguments, because it’s such a complex question. You know, everybody comes to it with their own positionality, and there’s this threat almost, you know, it just seems like there is a lot at stake. But I remember feeling at times myself: “Oh, I’m losing my maternity,” or “I’ve lost my maternity,” just because of the way life is set up in the United States, I think. And it was a real loss. And then how do you make that legible, how do you mourn it … I couldn’t even put it into words: I’m losing my maternity. And I just remembered what I was going to say, the third thing. “The mother in me” reminded me of Didier Anzieu, who used to say–

GA: He wrote The Skin-Ego, right?[5]

LB: Yeah, I think it was him. He says to care for the mother in him. So I thought the phrase came from him, actually, when I first saw it.

GA: Oh, wow. I’ll have to look at that again. Absolutely. Thank you.

HM: I think the question of gender is an interesting one with regard to both of your works. I know neither of you is committed to bioessentialism, but you both purposefully write about motherhood, not about “parenting” or “caretaking.” There are, of course, gender-neutral terms for some of the things that are usually associated with motherhood, and it’s important that we talk about them. And the move to maybe dissolve the close tie between womanhood and motherhood is also important because it allows us to talk about queerness and transgender bodies and other forms of community. But still, where does that leave us with regard to the figure of the mother, or the concept of mothering, as something that has a gendered aspect to it, even if we are thinking of an abstract concept of femininity? I don’t have the answer, of course. You are the experts here.

GA: I have to say that although I think we’re really approaching that question differently, or offering very different approaches, it was striking to me that in many ways, gender is kind of secondary. Lette, correct me if I misunderstand, but for you the femininity of the maternal is absolutely not what is put forward. You’re opening up the question of hospitality. And questions of touch and of transformation. And I do have a question for later about the difference between ruin and transformation. But in terms of agenda, for me, it obviously was very important to affirm that historically there is really no way to deny the indissociability of womanhood and motherhood. Yet that distinction must be made, and it has some positive genderbending dimensions, but it’s also extraordinarily dangerous a time when there is a will to dissociate people from their bodies, and women from their bodies, mothers from their motherhood, even in technological terms and in legal terms. This seems to me also to raise questions about what it is we’re wishing for. Because the distinction is essential. And yet the lack of distinction is also dangerous and problematic. So I don’t know that it can be resolved, but it seemed to me absolutely aporetic.

LB: Yes, for sure. I’ve also felt this sense of aporia. The way I confronted this, you know, I was writing this as a graduate student, I think I started the project in my third year or so. And I was in a literature program, and then suddenly I was turning to this area that I didn’t have a lot of knowledge of, or hadn’t thought a lot about at the time. So the idea that I’m an expert in something is really hard for me to understand, because I thought, oh, I’m such a beginner. And I could see immediately all the problems, everything that was wrong, even with the kind of language that we have, like “mother” itself—we’re in this language, we’re in this framework of knowing things. So there were these problems, these vexations I couldn’t get out of. The one thing I noticed, though, was that moving toward maternity, or working to make sense of what motherhood is, pushing myself through all the problems to get there, brought these problems into a new light, almost like I was really forced to confront or encounter some of what I feel we need in the world today: just what it means to encounter another body and to be with another person without grievance, without oneself, to see what the other is bringing from outside of our frame of reference, to not rely on language or our own forms of knowledge or language to understand what’s in front of us.

This seemed crucial to me. To learn how to do it, that entailed pushing myself into these zones where I could be wrong, where I’m exposing myself to being wrong, to not thinking about things fully, but it seemed like the only way I was going to learn, to grow and think. And so I just followed it and tried to do so with vulnerability and a kind of exposure and some sort of courage. And on that path, I felt gender fall apart for sure. I felt that maybe when we say “mother,” we need to let go of gender and sex, everything like that. My daughter will be cross with me, but I remember that we had this dialogue about her bellybutton, and if I really went into that, into what was happening or where the body was forming, everything I knew about bodies and identification fell apart, you know, just through this play.

And then, as I moved toward this topic, I would also confront the question of what is at stake for others. So for me, for example, the question of kinship is crucial. You know, we need these radical modes of kinship. And what happens if I’m turning to the mother? What is being foreclosed there, you know? Why does it have to come back to something biological or familiar, when we need stuff that actually pushes us to a place where we are trying to think and be in new ways, which means getting away from what we know? But I found that working toward my particular maternity, in terms of just this encounter with another body, brought me even closer to this place. You know, it brought me closer to strangeness.

HM: Since you have been talking about motherhood in terms of origins—or even whether that actually makes sense or not—it’s kind of interesting that both of your projects are connected to Cornell. Not to attribute too much significance to the institution, but Gil, your book developed out of a lecture series at Cornell a couple of years ago,[6] and Lette, of course, you started to work on this project as a graduate student at Cornell. So there’s a connection here already in regard to how those two projects were conceived, so to speak.

But there is another connection here in regard to the question of beginnings. I found it interesting to just look at the first sentences, or the first paragraphs, of your books. Gil, your book starts with the sentence “I am my mother’s child.”[7] And Lette, your book starts like this: “A few years ago, when I hadn’t yet figured out how to write this book, I opened my freezer one day to find an invitation from my daughter.”[8] So you both start basically by setting the stage as “me and my mother” or “me as a mother and my child.” And then in the following pages, you are both grappling with that gesture. Gil, you said further into the preface: “I have not tried to show myself at all (I realize I am already breaking that rule and that I will again make one or two disclosures in what follows).”[9] So, even though I don’t want to do this, I’m putting myself into that book, necessarily. And Lette, in your case, there is this sort of ambivalence about what to do with the invitation. There’s the invitation in the freezer, which is also a metaphor for philosophy, and the question is: Do I go? Do I worry about it? Have I missed the party that my daughter invited me to? Or is there a way to ignore the invitation, or to not follow the invitation? Is that possible? Of course, at that point, you’ve already followed the invitation. But I was wondering: Is this part of the intervention you see yourself making—theoretical, methodological, political—, the project you’re undertaking? Is this personal beginning necessary or inevitable?

LB: This is such a tough question. First of all, I want to say how grateful I am to you, Hannah, for reading our books so carefully. I appreciate that so much. And I imagine I won’t be able to touch on the fullness of why I started at the personal. But the one thing I can say is that it wasn’t easy for me. It happened after maybe three to four years of trying to do it another way. You know, I tried to do it in a more academic way, where I was removed from the writing, to theorize theory . . . and then eventually I reached a limit, and I couldn’t do anything but begin with the self. And it was actually really hard for me. I remember feeling almost a sense of shame about it. Here I am in it.  But then I found that this allowed me to say something I wasn’t able to say otherwise. So it was kind of a necessity, I guess, you know, for me to say the thing I needed to say. And I also started to think that maybe—I think, Gil, you mentioned this in your book. You cite somebody who is talking about the “knot of the soul.”[10] And I was like, oh, wow, this is kind of what’s happening. I often think that all philosophy—maybe I’ll just make that broad statement about philosophy—I mean, whenever we write, we’re grappling with some knots, you know, and I write to get closer and closer to what this knot is. And again, the self just seems a way to do that. And it also allowed me not to universalize. One of my greatest fears was that I would be entering a way where we compare maternities or the ways to be mothers and so on. And it’s hard for me to read about other people’s experiences of mothering because everyone is so different. You know, there’s no way to homogenize this. So I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t doing that. And one way I could do that was to be like “Hey, this is absolutely rooted in my experience.” And then at the same time, do that and say, okay, even though it’s absolutely my own experience, there is still something potentially shareable in this. Maybe we can get to a point where I’m not universalizing, but there is something shared, so it’s not self-indulgent. It’s not just me working through my stuff. It’s trying to build another way of writing and thinking out of the very way this is personal.

GA: That is a beautiful answer. And I do want to say that to me, one of the striking moments is when you say, perhaps this is my way of accepting the invitation. Or perhaps not. In other words, there is something about not being sure. And I feel strange saying this, but I think that there are so many affinities and—I want to call them realms—, where what you were saying resonated so much with what I wanted to say. But there is one, I think, major difference, and this is part of my trepidation, even though I really don’t want to give it up. It has to do with the fact that I do want to universalize. In other words, I find myself being the kind of philosopher I never wanted to be, never thought I could be in all the possible senses of “could.” But the ease with which we say: “I was born, I live, I die.” Or “I will die” or “We are born, we live, we die.” And nobody has any problem with this universality. In other words, it is a universality that is kind of imprinted on the way we talk about ourselves, even in the biographical sense of: I was born, and this happened to me, or whatever. And I think I reached a point where I became enraged with the ease of that phrase: “I was born.” Because I was not born. Someone gave birth to me. And it is not even possible to restrict the significance of that to a moment, to the moment of birth, which is why this – and even in the way you talk about it, Lette, you write about touch and the duration of motherhood – became absolutely imperative to me to foreground. Now, to go back to your question, Hannah. You know, I joke, but I wrote that about Derrida and then I wrote that about myself, which is that I am a mama’s boy, in the sense that I do not know a better expression, even though this one is also troubling. And I say this in reference to a very simple thing, namely that I speak to my mother every day. Every day, except on Shabbat, except on Saturday. But we speak every day, and we have absolutely extraordinary conversations. And I cannot think of any moment, any part, any fragment of my life that I have not shared with her and, according to my siblings, overshared. And vice versa. Now, is this good? Is this bad? Is it normal? All I know is that I am. I experienced as extremely fortunate the fact that I have an absolutely enduring, an elongated relationship to my mother. And no matter how much I try to think of what the opposite might be, it will not be possible to even asymptotically reach a moment where someone will not have been experiencing being mothered as something that has lasted. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose mother died when he was born, has obviously been with his mother and been marked by the absent mother to the point of calling his lover “Mama,” for the duration of his existence. And none of us are free of that. It doesn’t matter whether it was good or bad, it doesn’t matter if she was present or absent, we have all been mothered more or less well. And that duration is absolutely essential. So the first thing that I wanted to do was simply to testify to the duration of my relationship to my mother. And initially I thought I wanted to write a book about my mother. Now, my academic self is so allergic to that very idea, I can’t even tell you. I thought I was not going to write an academic book, that if I was going to write a book about my mother, it was not going to be an academic book. And then the invitation from Cornell for the lecture series came. And the book about my mother got kind of hijacked by these thoughts about Ishmael that started running in my head, about the fact that Ishmael had two mothers. And that just became a kind of obsession, and it snowballed into what the book became—still with the attachment to my mother, which I wanted and didn’t want to let go of. There’s still part of me that wants to say—and I say it with my mother, because my mother, as I think I wrote in the book, said: “Why do you need to write about me? What is there to tell?”[11] And I kept telling her: “I talk to people, and I talk about you, and people are just fascinated by you.” And she goes: “But why?” So it’s also a struggle about that, and the part of me that has my mother in me, goes: “What is there to say?” Yes, yes, I have a mother. I think she’s exceptional, but then, who doesn’t, right? Although many do not.

HM: This is great. I also really like, Lette, that you mentioned how you tried to write an academic book, and it ended up being something more personal. And then, Gil, you wanted to write a non-academic book …

GA: Yes. a personal book.

HM: And it ended up being more academic than that. And so you two are meeting somewhere in the middle, with academic books that are also both very personal in some ways. That’s beautiful.

GA: I have to say, I’m extremely pleased, because gender does have a lot to do with it. And as assertive as I know I am. I also feel incredibly . . . audacious doesn’t even begin to describe it . . . obnoxious almost, I want to say, in having written this book. I could not refrain from it and yet there is something that is beyond audacity in having done it. I’m incredibly grateful for the conversation and for all the resonances that are there, between your book, Lette, and mine.

 LB: I feel the same way, grateful for the resonances, and then also the sense of obnoxious audacity while knowing that it still had to be done. I think it might have to do with the invitation, too. You know, I had an invitation from my daughter. And so I wanted to honor that invitation in a way, just the invitation that she is, which required this kind of book. It’s also her power that this was the book I had to write. And you had different invitations to honor.

HM: Another question I had, and I think this is another thread running through both your works, is the relationship between motherhood and writing, and the idea of motherhood as writing. I’m just going to quote again from your books here. So Gil, you write: “Within and also beyond their intentions (and against them too), they have translated themselves onto their children, in and onto the family, the village, and beyond, further onto the world—taking the measure of each. They have written the world with and onto (and sometimes without) their children.”[12] And Lette, in your book, there is the story about your daughter writing with bath crayons on the bathtub, drawing what you think are jellyfish but actually are meant to be tears:

Long before she wrote the invitation, my daughter used to take her crayons and draw round blobby faces with long lines coming down from them on the white porcelain of our bathtub. “Jellyfish!” I would immediately think, recognizing the shapes. But, no—when she was baby, she tells me, I used to wet her head. I suddenly remember how I would cry when I held her, so moved was I by her presence, so tired. I was in graduate school at the time, completing a PhD in English Literature, trying to establish mastery over my work, wanting this security, trying to make sense of things. From out of this story of my tiredness, she escapes, bearing her own sense of things: skin with water flowing down and, from this skin, a remembering, represented on porcelain like history. On the bathtub walls she draws again and again her jellyfish-tears-tentacles, changing my story to hers, a whole other experience building out of mine. Our memories come like crayon on porcelain, undoing the proper like the touch of water on skin.[13]

So there is this idea that motherhood is a form of writing in/through/onto the child, the child as something that goes out into the world. And there are of course a lot of things that are tied into this idea. I was thinking of the question of women’s writing, and traditionally, there is this idea of women writers and women writing as something that requires “a room of one’s own,”[14] to cite Virginia Woolf: this idea that for a woman to write, a woman who may be a mother but is not necessarily a mother, she needs a space of her own where she can be in solitude. And of course, the concept of solitude is also very important for your book, Lette. And this solitude allows her to basically develop a sense of self or being that flows into the writing.

And then on the other side is the idea of motherhood as something in which you lose yourself. Of course, a mother cannot have a room of her own, right? The child sleeps in your bed and writes into your notebooks, and there are toys and drawings all over your space. But it’s more than just not having a room of your own; you don’t even have a body of your own. Of course, some mothers grow a child in their body, but it’s more than that, right? The child constantly has demands on your body: sleeping and eating and being present … So I’m wondering, on the one hand, how you are negotiating this opposition of writing versus motherhood, of finding yourself versus giving up yourself; but on the other hand, in both of your books, there is a different way of thinking about this, namely the idea of motherhood as writing. And the flipside of that would be writing as motherhood. And I would love to hear you talk about that more.

GA: The short answer that I want to give is that I think we both read a lot of Derrida. But a fuller answer would be to say that what Derrida said about writing is absolutely essential to remember. And I had moments when that was actually quite scary. Because when I try to teach Derrida, one of the things that is obvious to me is that it feels so very distant today. Yes, we used to think of the author as dead, and I feel like saying this is how I was raised. I was raised on the death of the author. But part of the lighting strike that Derrida made was also to think of the reader as dead as well. That iterability is about the death of the author and the death of the reader, because the letter does not arrive at its destination. So having said that, to think of maternal writing means to think of the erasure of the author of my days, as it were; to think of writing as a constant process of erasure and not just writing as inscription, not simply as a presence. On the other hand, the trace is also that which lasts. Not because it cannot be erased, but because it has a lasting effect. And I have to say that there’s a moment in your book, Lette, where you talk about the fact that you still feel—and I don’t think this is quite the word you use, but I’ll render it in these words—you still feel the imprint of your daughter’s body on yours from when she was lying on you. And she no longer is. And one of the things I thought was absolutely brilliant about what you do is that is that you reverse the flow. You wrote somewhere “I inherit from her.”[15] You are the heir. And I thought that this is absolutely brilliant, because part of the question of birth and lasting and what is being given birth to, and who is being mothered, how is one being mothered, is of course also going in directions that we don’t expect. For me, that’s one of the reasons why it was so important to actually mark this very strange thing between Thomas Hobbes and Donald Winnicott, where Hobbes basically says that the mother can kill the child, and Winnicott says that the child must kill the mother.[16] I must destroy the mother, right? And what do you do about that very strange conversation, which I don’t think anyone has put on the table. And yet I think it is absolutely there. You were speaking, Hannah, of the fact that one must surrender to the child. And that puts the child in a position of sovereignty that is indubitable, at the same time as one might want to say, yes, but obviously the mother raises the child. And it’s not so simple. It’s not so simple. And this is where writing comes in, right? It’s a Socrates/Plato moment. So who is doing the writing? Who is doing the erasing? And I think mother and child raise questions as to who the mother is. And so again, for me, the mother in me: Is my mother writing me? Am I writing her? And I don’t want to take for granted the otherwise expected, which would be that I write instead of her. And therefore, you know, like every son from Roland Barthes and up, who has written himself, his mother instead of her . . . at no point do I want to say: Don’t worry, mothers who want to write—you have children, and so that’s okay. That’s obviously not what I’m trying to say. But I do think that the expansion of what we mean by writing, which is what Derrida gave us, is very important to take into consideration precisely with regard to the maternal.

LB: That’s lovely. Thank you. And it’s a really complex question, Hannah. So I was thinking about this, because I knew we were going to talk about writing. And I was trying to think about how to respond. And actually, the sentence that you had, Gil, at the end of your book, that was really helpful to me. It actually helped me see what I was trying to say. There was this moment when you described writing as a way to keep the world:

This is the sovereignty of mothers, who write and keep the world. Mothers guard and inscribe, they preserve and destroy. Mothers guard the world, they preserve it and also guard us from it. In time. Mothers keep the world and reproduce it (they write it). They keep the world, in time and for the time being. In that world, for that world and also safe from that world in which we live, in which they live and die, in which they mother and we all grow or die, grow and die, together and alone, mothers keep the world, they must keep the world at bay. Mothers, for now, keep the end of the world at bay.[17]

Maternal writing is a way of keeping the world. And so that really helped me grasp what I was trying to get at with writing the book, and why I was trying to move away from the “room of one’s own” and the sense of ownership entirely. And why my daughter’s experience was so meaningful to me. So what I was starting to see when you talked about writing as a way of keeping the world, in the sense that the world needs this keeping, and this writing has to—it’s not me who’s writing it, the writing is coming from the world in some way, but then it was also absolutely my own inability to do this on my own. Even my inability to love on my own. So writing was like almost a supplement; a supplement to love, or a way to love, or a way to keep the world. And the reason it happened, I think, in this particular relationship to my child, who came into the world, is because this relationship, her ability to escape my keeping, enabled me to keep the world better, because it’s always about letting the other person be. So it was a move to being and keeping, such that the authority is gone, even though it enables wonder almost, you know, the way we feel when we encounter the event, or when we are moved toward someone, or we see another person exist.

GA: Yes, it’s brilliant. I want to say that there’s … I put this in parentheses at some point, that if I were to write another chapter, I would want to have written it about property. Property and possessiveness. And the way in which you work, which I think is magnificent, because it is about recognizing that there is that strangeness, is also something that interrogates property. At the same time, one of the things that I keep thinking about, when you think about the predominance of rational choice theory and self-interest, there is—although we all know, of course, that there are all kinds of narcissism that might be operating in mothering and parenting—there is also the encounter with strangeness. Which makes it impossible to maintain whatever it would mean to say it is pure self-interest. There’s something about self-interest and possessiveness and property that is absolutely disrupted. And the word disruption, of course, is an important word in your writing. And I think we have to hold these two things together, right? The way possessiveness awakens, and at the same time the way it is undone in motherhood, in maternity.

HM: Another thing that is interesting is to hear the narratives children write about origins and motherhood. At three or four, my child’s story was that they were actually an alien who was cast out from their home planet and crash-landed on Earth and were taken in by me as their new family. Not to make it too anecdotal, but it is interesting to see how children make sense of this weird relationship that they have to their mother or to their parents, and that their story may be very different from that of the mother. And then of course they grow up, and the stories get replaced by other narratives, but it’s simply a very different way of conceiving of this relationship. The mother’s story is “I have grown you in my body,” but no, actually this is an alien who lives in my house. And there is also some kind of truth to that. There’s some truth to that.

GA: That is Superman’s origin story, right? It’s like reinventing the classics. You know, it’s brilliant.

HM: Yes, that is a very good point. So it’s kind of a classic myth. This next question is going to be a little heavier. You know, so many texts about motherhood imagine motherhood as nurturing and generative. You are creating something. And I find it interesting that there’s this other side to it that shines through in both of your works. The fact that the concept of motherhood almost seems inevitably tangled up with the idea of loss and death.

Lette, in your book you mention this moment where you wake up in the middle of the night and reach for your child, and the child isn’t there:

When my daughter was very small, I used to wake up with a start from a deep sleep and reach out a hand to check for her presence. If I encountered only bare sheets, I would be thrown into brief terror. The sheets were not a reminder that I had moved her (she was sleeping in her crib) but the cold horror of an absent certainty.[18]

If you are a mother, you are familiar with this moment. This brief moment of horror, of worry that the child is gone, almost comes automatically with being a mother. And Gil, in your book, you talk about mothers as the origin of the village, the origin of the polity. But then also there are these moments, in both of your works, of motherhood as a loss of community. So motherhood can mean being cast out. Lette, you mention that motherhood carries the risk of being cast out of academia, or being on the margins of academia. Gil, in the story of Hagar from the Torah/the Hebrew Bible that you focus on, becoming a mother is precisely what leads to her being cast out into the desert. And then there are these different theoretical and literary narratives of matricide, matricidal writing, infanticide. You already mentioned Hobbes and Winnicott earlier. And then there is the story of Jocasta who orders for her child to be killed to escape her prophecy. There is Hagar again, who abandons her child because she cannot bear to see him die. Instead of watching him die of thirst and hunger in the desert, she leaves him under a bush. There is, of course, the Pietà with Mary, who is grieving Jesus. Someone becomes a mother in the moment they have a child, but what happens to the concept of motherhood when either the mother or the child is gone? What does it mean that the idea of motherhood always already carries this fear of loss: loss of the child, loss of the mother, loss of oneself, loss of community?

LB: I think the question is always there. And so I’m trying to frame it in a way that explains how the book kind of came out of these questions. The one thing that I would confront is that as a mother, I’m going to lose the one to whom I belong. And so there this shifting sense of loss: You know it’s loss, but the loss is also their life, you know, their being. They are who they are, and they’re away from me, whether that’s living or dead. They are away from me at the same time that I’m always going to belong to this person, here or not here. This is the nature of my belonging. And so on one level, it was kind of descriptive. It appealed to me in the way you say your book is too, Gil, in the way that I just wanted to let this be something that we can think through, this nature of relationality. We also feel loss in death as the absence of material bodies, things we can touch, our own ability to be touched, to be loved, to touch another. And so the loss is not separate. It’s a kind of entangled loss that we feel. So one of the reasons writing became so central for me, I think, is that I was really trying to foreground writing as this thing that happens, as this almost desperate attempt to save ourselves and keep ourselves in the face of this possible loss. If we only think of ourselves as able to survive here alone, without others, in the face of loss, we’re only able to maintain some sort of “keeping of the world” if we can write it. And so writing to me is this last effort to keep the world and to keep ourselves in touch in the face of this. That was something I wanted to care for or bring forward, out of its vulnerability. That answer is incomplete. I’m kind of thinking through it here.

GA: You’re right that it’s heavy. And I don’t see how it could not be. If I may invoke Derrida again, one of the questions that I try to address in that early piece on Derrida was that when we think of mothers, is the mother text or context? And I don’t think that this is something that can be decided. So the mother–Winnicott calls her “the environment,”[19] right? So the mother is the context of the child. It’s really about the child, right? Which is where Lee Edelman comes in.[20] It’s all about the child, except it’s not all about the child, because the child is also, you know, if I may quote William Wordsworth, the child is also mother to the mother.[21] And so it is about mothers, and it is about understanding the vanishing of world. The making of world and the vanishing of world. No mother has ever had a child just for her. The child always had to be in the world, for the world, and raised therefore with the world or against the world. You have this moment when you talk about “counter-worlding,”[22] which I thought was also such a striking expression. And, yes, there is a loss of community. But to me, it was more important to recognize that collectives are also their own death. And I recently finished writing something about the death of the people. So we think of the nation and birth, foundations, principles, you know, everything that is about origins and beginnings and foundations. But the death of the people is also something that seems important to think of, the idea that communities don’t last forever. We make fun of the Nazis because they wanted a thousand-year Reich. But no one is paying attention to the fact that the American stamp of choice says “Forever.” Forever. Now there’s a megalomanic dream. I thought nothing was forever. So to think of the maternal as political, which is what I really want to try to do, is to recognize that the collective is also about loss and about death and about giving itself the right to kill. And keeping people at bay. And having to decide who comes in and who doesn’t. And strangely enough, never delegating that power to the mothers who have had to exercise it. And part of the fear of not finding the child is also a kind of recognition of that power—I want to say, it is the psychoanalytic remainder of that capacity.

So I think even before loss, it is to recognize the possibility that after all, it is about the contingency of our being in the world. I was brought into this world. I didn’t have to. I didn’t choose it. I might not have. And it was in my mother’s capacity, in my mother’s power not to bring me into the world. And what is freedom, what is sovereignty, if it is not the power not to? And so, to recognize that the making of community, the making of a collective involves also the capacity to not; to say: these are the boundaries; to say: so many children. I joke that one of my favorite sentences in the English language is “We want to start a family.” And unless I’m mistaken, nobody has ever uttered the sentence “We didn’t have a family before.” In other words, it was not the origin of that family. Now, we all know what it means colloquially, but nevertheless, it’s a strange phrase. And on the other hand, on the other end of that, no one has ever said: “We want to start a family, but just for one or two generations. After that, we’ll stop.” No one has ever put a kind of time limit on the future of a family one starts. And yet, families do have, if not an expiration date, then a limit. And we need to think of that limit as well as part of what we think of with the maternal. And I hope that people will not read me as speaking figuratively when I say that I think it’s absolutely essential to recognize the maternity at work. And again, what that means in terms of gender, even in terms of norms and normativity, is open because I don’t want to be prescriptive. But I want us to recognize what has been and how it has been possible. And some of it is horrible. Yes. It’s Hagar and it’s Sarah and it’s Jocasta and it’s Merope, the poor woman who was never remembered by anyone, even though she raised and named and fed and did all the work for Oedipus. And I don’t know … psychoanalytically, I’m wondering what it means to bring up the taboo. That’s also why I don’t know exactly what I’m doing when I say that it’s important to recognize a capacity and even perhaps a necessity for a child not to be born, and to recognize that extraordinary factoid that I learned about, namely that the most popular form of contraception throughout human history has actually been infanticide. And it’s horrifying, and yet if that’s the case, what are we supposed to do? If we want to think our humanity, as the expression goes, if we don’t confront that.

LB: Yes, the only thing that I’m left with is just the amount of work. Just the amount of work and time and bearingness this takes, how much you have to hold. I always think, how do I have to change everything to develop a way to hold just one person? It’s so much, you know? So I’m just left with the work.

GA: I’m afraid that, for me, it’s staying in the same line, which I alluded to before: ruin and transformation. Because the word “ruin” evokes—and you do say it, I think, once or twice—something much, much more devastating than “transformation.” And what you did was so powerful and beautiful, that it sounds like I want to ask for something else or something more, although more would be welcome! But there’s something about that word “ruin” that I thought was very striking to me and resonated with what we were just talking about.

LB: Yes. On the one hand, it was just the word that I was given. But with it, I was moving toward the devastation, I think. I think sometimes when we think about a transformation in terms of changing ourselves or changing the world or something new, there’s often this feeling of triumph or survival or something almost thrilling that elevates us. And it comes about through our own capacity to think and to be and to love. And I was experiencing the sense of another possible world through this breakdown of myself that came from another. So it was really . . . I tried to push myself to survive the way I was. And I reached my own limits and had to experience this coming-undone in this really scary way, because I didn’t know how I was going to take care of my daughter on some level. I didn’t know how I was going to take care of her against the world, in the world I wanted it to be, while surviving the world that we are in. So there was something kind of terrifying about it, having to let go of defenses that had served me well, that were necessary. But I had to let go of them for something else to come. So I was trying to just kind of allow for the way that this is sometimes the way it works. And that means that if we’re in relation to each other, and we’re struggling to do something, we have to also be okay with that sometimes how we are with each other. It takes time for something new to happen, and it means we go through this real ending in some way. And I wanted to keep it, you know, that duality of it. But I didn’t want it to be “mess,” as in me not being able to handle it, you know, me not being able to manage. I wanted it to be in realization that there was something about a possible world or a possible being that was going on here. So in the end, there was a transformation or a stepping elsewhere, another way to think, another way to be that was emerging in this ungraceful way.

GA: Yeah, there’s real wisdom in the recognition that the transformation is not just triumphant. I’ll traverse that, and I’ll find myself on the other side being better, stronger, right? And there is transformation, but it doesn’t necessarily bring that triumph. One may… find oneself diminished, impoverished, and yet on the other side, nevertheless.

LB: Yes. In the end, it’s a very small thing I’m saying, but it was so hard to say.

GA: I don’t think it’s very small.

HM: Not small at all, yeah.

GA: Baby steps, baby steps, we might say.

HM: Thank you so much, both of you. I really appreciate you both making time and sharing your work with me and with each other and having this conversation.

LB: Hannah, thank you. This was such a gift. Truly. It was wonderful. Gil, thank you so much.

GA: No, thank you. I’m so, so grateful. I feel like saying “to be continued in some way.” And I hope we will.

 

Notes

[1] Anidjar, “Solicitude.”

[2] Bragg, “Jacques Derrida: The Mother as Figure of Thought.”

[3] Butler, “Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification”; Gender Trouble.

[4] Heti, Motherhood; La mère en moi.

[5] Anzieu, The Skin-Ego.

[6] The lecture series was sponsored by the Cornell University Lectures Committee as part of their Messenger Lecture Series, and the Jewish Studies Program. The lectures took place on October 24 (“Mother and Slave”), 25 (“The Mother’s Two Bodies”), and 27 (“The Sovereignty of Mothers”), 2022.

[7] Anidjar, On the Sovereignty of Mothers, xi.

[8] Bragg, The Ruins of Solitude, 1.

[9] Anidjar, On the Sovereignty of Mothers, xvii.

[10] Stefania Pandolfo, as paraphrased in Anidjar, 94.

[11] Anidjar, 91.

[12] Anidjar, 18.

[13] Bragg, The Ruins of Solitude, 17.

[14] Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

[15] Bragg, The Ruins of Solitude, 19.

[16] Hobbes, On the Citizen; Winnicott, The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.

[17] Anidjar, On the Sovereignty of Mothers, 84–5.

[18] Bragg, The Ruins of Solitude, 49.

[19] Winnicott, “Breast Feeding,” 391.

[20] Edelman, No Future.

[21] Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up.” The relevant line in the poem is “Child is father to the man.”

[22] Bragg, The Ruins of Solitude, 78.

 

Works Cited

Anidjar, Gil. On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

——. “Solicitude.” Derrida Today 16, no. 1 (2023): 3–19.

Anzieu, Didier. The Skin-Ego. 1995. Translated by Naomi Segal. London: Routledge, 2016.

Bragg, Lette. “Jacques Derrida: The Mother as Figure of Thought.” In Derrida and Africa: Essays on Derrida as a Figure in African Thought, edited by Grant Farred, 33–45. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.

——. The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2024.

Butler, Judith. “Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5, no. 2 (1995):165–80.

——. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Edelman, Lee. No Future. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Heti, Sheila. La mère en moi. Montreal: Éditions XYZ, 2020.

——. Motherhood. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018.

Hobbes, Thomas. On the Citizen. 1641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Winnicott, Donald W. “Breast Feeding.” 1945. In The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 2, 1939–1945, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, 389–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

——. “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.” 1960. In The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 6, 1960–1963, edited by Lesley Caldwell and Helen Taylor Robinson, 141–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. La Vergne, TN: Lightning Source, 2012.

Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up.” 1802.