Event Date: 9 May 2018
Room B01
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck, University of London
Torrington Sq.
London WC1E 7JL
The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities present:
Mothers by Jacqueline Rose
Book launch and discussion
In Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Jacqueline Rose makes a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge – or rather bury – the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealisable, of course) to repair. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Unless we recognise what role we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and for the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.
Jacqueline Rose and Amber Jacobs will discuss these ideas, drawing on psychoanalysis and the theme of matricide that have also been central to Jacobs’ own writing on motherhood.
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