Ethics Of Interruption Research Articles

Victim/Victor: Stalking the Subject of Online Life Writing

This essay notes an intersection between extreme acts of online stalking and everyday acts of online identity construction: both are marked by repetition. I propose an “ethics of interruption” to address the relational stakes of constructing and consuming online lives, broadening the scope of what counts as an act of life writing.

Post-Partum Document and Affect

This paper aims to add a different inflection to the already expansive range of commentary and writing on one of the most well known artworks of the last forty years created by a female artist exploring the mother-child relation: Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (1973-1979 hereafter PPD). It does this by exploring the place of affect in PPD and in so doing reflects on it as a complex assemblage, a monument and potentially a place where things happen. In order to analyse PPD's asignifying aspects the paper invokes the thinking of Lisa Baraitser in her book Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption, as well as aspects of Bracha Ettinger's theory of the matrixial.

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

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.

Princess of Networks: Lisa Baraitser's Object-Oriented Maternities

This response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) puts the book in conversation with recent speculative realist thinking and object-oriented philosophies. Drawing on the democratizing onticology of Levi Bryant, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology, and Jane Bennett's political ecology of matter, I argue that Baraitser develops a “vibrant maternality” and an object-oriented feminism that gives nonhuman actants their due in a constellation of relations between maternal subjects and the objects they encounter.

The Potentiality of Encounters: A Response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters

This article is a response to Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009). It focuses on the concept of encounter as part of an emerging subjectivity or a subjectivity in production. By putting Baraitser's maternal encounters alongside art encounters the discussion starts to open up thinking on the different potential ways for humans to be interrupted and the implications of such potential subjective and ethical awakenings in this late capitalist contemporary era.

The Mother and the Process of Truth

Here we follow Baraitser (Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption,2009) as she formulates a maternal subjectivity, situated quite outside the mother-as-object in psychoanalysis—the mother-supposed-to-care. The backdrop is the Levinasian “implacable law of hospitality,” which is the feminine, elaborated by Ettinger (2006) as the “matrixial.” Subjectivity is realised in breaks in the continuity of being. And what emerges in this work is the subject and her fidelity to the Event, the truth and the living of it forever, beyond postmodern simulations of motherhood. In short, having a child changes you; you will never be the same again! Fidelity creates subjection, being thrown down, onto the bedrock of the Real. This is where everything begins!

Why Ethics? Why Motherhood? But Yes!

This essay contextualizes Baraitser's (2009) Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption with regard to a persistent neglect of the value of motherhood in Western philosophy. The author argues that Baraitser's approach foregrounds the “maternal encounter” in a way that is distinctive both with regard to mainstream philosophy and with regard to hegemonic versions of feminism. The text is also singular in its style and enactment of a more personalized experience of motherhood, which is nonetheless simultaneously articulated through a subtle and powerful reading of contemporary philosophy, most especially through the work of Alain Badiou and Julia Kristeva. The author argues that Baraitser avoids the more moralistic or naive versions of the contemporary “return to the ethical” and instead plots a powerfully original and iconoclastic philosophy of the maternal, which maintains an idiosyncratic subversive potential, both philosophically and politically.

Baraitser-Plus-Lacan: The Maternal Encounter, Interruption, and Language

This article explores how Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) mounts a challenge to traditional psychoanalytic discourse around communication, language, and analysis: places in which language and subjectivity are unpicked and restitched. It considers how Baraitser intersects with Lacan's later work on these issues and how her writings on the affects of motherhood can create “reflective spaces” in which to explore the self-in-speech. Baraitser's shifting focus from space to encounter helps to counter and sidestep the debilitating rhetoric of the mother in psychoanalytic discourse. Baraitser's maternal encounter brings about a new approach to subjectivity within psychoanalytic discourse, reworking the relationship of this (maternal) position to the unsymbolisable and ambivalence, and reinscribes it as a privileged model for social, cultural, critical, and analytic encounters.

Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption

Maternal encounters: The ethics of interruption

Book Review: Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

Book Review: Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

The Ethics of Interruption: Toward a Levinasian Philosophy of Communication

This essay attempts to mobilize some key concepts developed in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas into communication thought framework. The main argument is that Levinas's speculation on ethics as first philosophy provides an alternative perspective from which to view the relation between communication and ethics. At its core is the concept of interruption. It is suggested that ethical communication may lie in the interruption of communication—in instances where lateral exchange or concurrence between minds are troubled. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of concern for another, but rather its very beginning, for it is in such instances that communication faces the challenge of alterity. While bringing one to the verge of discursive possibilities, interruption gives rise to communication otherwise conceived, to exposure and vulnerability, and thereby to the possibility of responding to the Other.