Communality Across Time: Responding to Encounters with Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

Abstract

I am grateful to the editors and contributors for this wonderful collection of articles that respond to Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Baraitser, 2009). Rather than restaging the arguments I made in the book, I attempt here to extend my discussion of the maternal subject as a figure that disrupts or interrupts our notions of subjectivity and ethics. Following Elisabeth Freeman, I propose that the temporality of maternal labor binds a socius that is enunciated not just by an irruption of subjectivity (the “discontinuity in the Real”) but also by an irruption of collectivity in the present tense of neoliberalism. This irruption, in other words, creates a commons, that is, the endurance of communality across time.