Review: Exploring the Unexplored and the Unexplorable in Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters. The Ethics of Interruption

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

In this book I seek to articulate the potential within maternity for new experiences, sensations, moods, sensibilities, intensities, kinetics, tinglings, janglings, emotions, thoughts, perceptions; new coagulations of embodied and relational modes. I try to pay attention to the ways that motherhood may allow the generation of new ‘raw materials’ for experiencing ourselves, others and our worlds. [...]. I take as my starting point some rather mundane and usually overlooked moments of maternal experience that appear to trip us up, or throw us ‘off the subject’. It is to moments of undoing, I argue, that we need to apply ourselves theoretically, if we are to try to glimpse something we may term maternal subjectivity (p. 3).