Description: This book analyses the relationship between the body, technology and language by focusing on the uncanny figure of the mother in psychoanalysis, photography, and literature and contends that the concept of human birth is represented through mechanical repetition and technological modes of reproduction rather than as a natural event.
Brief description: Elissa Marder is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University and Distinguished International Faculty Fellow at the London Graduate School. Her most recent book is Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert).
Review Quotes: In this intellectually luxuriant book Elissa Marder analyzes a whole series of effects that come into play by virtue of our being 'not present' at, yet haunted by, constantly mourning our birth. But her coup de génie is to conclude thereby that the relation to birth, and indeed the constitution of the maternal body, is prosthetic, even technological: we cannot not return to the birth that stays with us throughout our life, and we cannot not set about producing a variety of mechanical reproductions of the "experience." Marder explores those reproductions-- from Cixous to Racine and Mary Shelley, from Derrida to Blade Runner, infanticide and Abu Ghraib--with an extraordinarily uncanny set of intellectual and academic antennae, producing ingenious insights from a minutely attentive reading practice.-----David Wills, University at Albany-SUNY