An “Unthought Known” of Her Own: The Aesthetics of Interruption (original) (raw)

2012, Studies in Gender and Sexuality

Although Baraitser (2009) investigates interruption as a condition of maternal subjectivity, this essay concerns itself with how maternal presence itself can interrupt aesthetic practice. Reading Baraitser with and through the work of the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, I interweave the aesthetic with the philosophical and psychoanalytical possibilities of taking ''maternity as the norm'' that Baraitser so suggestively explores (p. 10). McGuckian's poetry, I argue, answers Baraitser's question when she asks what kind of subjectivity emerges ''when we live in close proximity'' to a child and ''are somehow responsible for them, too'' (p. 11). Also calling upon the careful and enabling work of Christopher Bollas, this essay explores through the poetry how the ''unthought known'' or the ''maternal aesthetic'' described by Bollas as ''the first if not the earliest human aesthetic'' (Bollas, 1987, p. 32 can also be supplemented in light of Baraitser's evocative thesis. Lisa Baraitser's arresting Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) interposes itself in a recent reenergizing of thinking about and through the maternal in philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, creative writing and critical methodologies, converging practices increasingly identified as Maternal Studies. Baraitser's work explores ''interruption [as] the given of maternal experience'' (pp. 120-121) and enlarges on the implications of this ethical sociopolitical practice. In Maternal Encounters, Baraitser acknowledges important genealogical links with and takes care to distinguish her work from earlier feminist writers who also explored the conjunction between maternity, subjectivity, political, and ethical practice, such as Sara Riddick in her influential 1989 book Maternal Thinking. Baraitser locates her own interchangeable use of the terms motherhood and mothering in Adrienne Rich's key work on motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), in a ''bid to trouble the notion that 'experience' may lie outside of the cultural, political and social institutions that both shape and are shaped by it'' (Baraitser, 2009, p. 138), but it is in fact Rich's suggestive exploration of the aesthetics of motherhood in the germinal essay ''When We Dead Awaken'' (Gelpi and Charlesworth Gelpi, 1993) that Maternal Encounters most powerfully invokes. Whereas Baraitser investigates interruption as a condition of maternal subjectivity, this short commentary concerns itself with how maternal presence itself can interrupt aesthetic practice. Reading Baraitser with and through the work of the poet Medbh McGuckian, I interweave the aesthetic with the