Gil Anidjar on Mother and Slave

Bookhouse: American Sephardi Federation, Centro Primo Levi, Dan Wyman Books, a cooperative initiative.

Gil Anidjar, author of On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal, Columbia University Press, 2024, will discuss the political dimension of the “maternal” in a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, proposing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time.

It takes a village to raise a child.

We have all heard this common place, which may or may not derive from the proverbial African saying. We certainly know that it does indeed take a whole lot of people, past and present, as well as resources and support for a child to become an adult. But what exactly is a village? What kind of shared grouping and organized collective, what kind of tribe, what kind of regime or constitution is a village, a community or polity? 

And what does it take, if it takes a village, to become a mother? It seems obvious that, much like Simone de Beauvoir had it with regard to women, one is not born a mother. One becomes a mother. The difference may be slight, as some psychiatrists argue that “what a woman gives birth to in her mind is not a new human being, but a new identity: the sense of being a mother.” What exactly does such a second birth, such becoming, entail? What of the unbearable weight of becoming — all too often still, becoming to death — mother? What beginnings and what temporalities, what labor and what travails, what mind and what village, indeed, what motherings are carried and hidden under the image we still hold of the one mother, not only the lone or single mother, but —stronger and deeper than the belief in the one God of monotheism — the one and unique mother, the singular mother in and of that plural and proverbial village?

Gil Anidjar, author of On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal, Columbia University Press, 2024, will discuss the political dimension of the “maternal” in a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, proposing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time.

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He is the author, among other books, of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy; Semites: Race, Religion, Literature; Blood: A Critique of Christianity.  

Image: Louise Bourgeois, Maman (Mother), 1999