Grounded Futurity: Time and Subjectivity in Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters

Abstract

In this article, I explore how moments of the “new” that Baraitser (2009) describes throughout Maternal Encounters are characterized by a time of futurity, a time marked by the potentialities of change. By tracing how futuristic time operates in the various maternal encounters that Baraitser details, including naming, interruptions, love and crying, and maternal “stuff,” I argue that each transitory moment is marked by openness to possibility for the maternal self. One of the main innovations of Baraitser's theory is its concurrent ability to ground futuristic force in such a way that enables an articulation of subjectivity in the midst of processes that work to unsettle fixed sureties. And this works two ways. Conjoining maternal subjectivity with futurity, Maternal Encounters has the important, indeed groundbreaking, effect of refiguring the mother, so often constructed as generator of the future, as a futuristic subject in her own right.

Notes

¹Lee Edelman's work No Future (2004) seems to perform a similar, though unacknowledged, philosophical maneuver, inferring the mother's body as generator of a determined future.