Advanced investigation of the rhetorical dimensions of various modes of discourse. Specific topics to be announced.

In this course, we will collectively work to answer a question: By what protocols of writing and reading might we approach the philosophical and psychoanalytic figure of the mother? We begin this interrogation with the maternal figure as the silent substrate of deconstruction, encapsulating the fundamental othering within Derrida's system. To track this figure's development, we follow a sequence of foundational encounters:


We will read Of Grammatology alongside Rousseau’s Confessions and Dissemination alongside Plato’s Timaeus to analyze the maternal as the repressed, formless receptacle enabling paternal logos. The course then moves to Glas for a discussion of the Hegelian family unit and Derrida’s fissuring of the circular enclosure of the paternal Law and the son-father dyad. We will also read segments from Derrida’s Circumfession (and Bennington's Derridabase) alongside St. Augustine’s Confessions (Book IX). In this transition, the dying body of Georgette Safar becomes the site for Derrida’s own "confession," reenacting and shattering the Augustinian tradition of mourning for the mother. In a shift to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, we examine Derrida’s relation to French as a maternal language, one of both mastery and subjection.



In the last part of the course, we will bring Derrida's maternal to bear on the conception of the "mother lack" in psychoanalysis as shaped by Lacan's phallus and Deleuze's fetish. We will also read Kristeva's Powers of Horror on the abject maternal, Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (her work on Circumfession) and "Echo," Spillers' "Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight," and Sora Han’s "[flesh of her flesh]" on the ambiguity of the mother-daughter relation. These final readings illustrate the ramifications of presenting the philosophical mother as the ultimate lack and horizon for writing from in between marginal (and southern) worlds.

Repeat Rules