Is it reassuring that no philosophical treatise ‘On the Mother’ seems to have been written in the history of occidental thought? Should we be relieved that nothing this violently direct, obscene, on the mother, seems to have been produced? Or should we rather be disturbed that ‘thinking mothers’ has not been a declared task for the mostly male-bonding and father-bound trans-generational band called ‘thinkers’? Would thinking, as philosophical thinking which in one of its traditional senses calls for thinking the essence of ‘a thing’, not require to think motherhood, maternity, or the Mother as the essence of mothers? Would thinking mothers in their supposed essence as giving birth, bringing to life, as a singular (mother) in relation to a singular (progeny), kill the mothers, each and every single one, by thinking that essence which they all would be supposed to share? Does the mother not allow us to think? Is thinking matricidal? Does the essence of mothers lie in not thinking the essence of mothers? Are mothers and thinkers engaged in a struggle for life and death, like two rivaling twins outside of themselves in a womb we have to invent in order to imagine it? Where can we find room to speculate a little differently facing the mirror of thinking mothers? Do we have to resort to psychoanalysis and literature in order to un-think these questions?
We will read authors whose writings resonate with this conundrum.
