Blessed, writes Rilke, are the mother’s hands. Blessed is the support they offer the ‘dew’ and ‘days’ of this life. Blessed is the ‘plant’ of the mother and her memory.

When presenting my recent works on the role of the paternal figure in diverse public settings, ranging from universities and cultural festivals, schools of psychoanalysis and politics to theatres, town squares, social and religious centres, discussing its decline and the need for its radical rethinking ‘from the ground up’,¹ there is always, without fail, a point in the discussion in which a hand – usually female – is raised to ask the question: ‘What about the mother? Why don’t you talk about the mother? Why do you neglect the mother’s importance? What is left of the mother in our time?’

This book takes that question seriously and aims to give an initial, detailed response. In the following pages I focus on the experience of motherhood, on its inheritance and its fantasies, on the light and the shadows within it. I attempt to probe the mystery of motherhood, looking in greater detail at what is left of the mother at this time of decline in its patriarchal representation.

In recent years I have focused on the figure of the father, on his evaporation and, in particular, on what is left of his role at a time when the sadly oppressive figure of the father-as-master has been left behind. I harbour no nostalgia for his disciplinary authority, his severe gaze or his loud voice. To those who have accused me of wanting to exhume this paternal figure, I say that I have always welcomed the time of his dissolution. There is no remorse for the obscure fascination with the inhumane Law of the father-as-master.

By elevating the father to a sort of repressive disciplinary ideal, the culture of patriarchy had, at the same time, conveyed and imposed a version of the mother that was equally cumbersome. She is the mother of sacrifice and self-denial, the mother as the unavoidable destiny of every woman. The patriarchal ideology that is currently drawing its last, though perhaps desperate, breaths wanted to reduce being a woman to nothing more than being a mother. Only the figure of the mother could sanction a socially acceptable, beneficent, positive, healthy, generative version of femininity, whereas the woman detached from the maternal function appeared as the incarnation of the most malignant fantasies: nastiness, sinfulness, licentiousness, untrustworthiness, witchcraft, cruelty. Whilst the woman who realized herself through motherhood modified the most disturbing aspects of femininity, the woman who refused to be entirely absorbed by motherhood, and renounce her own freedom, carried with her the stigma of a dangerous and anti-social anarchy that had to be redeemed using the tools of moral pedagogy, psychiatry or ostracism from society. In short, from the perspective of the patriarchal ideology, only access to motherhood could provide a sort of beneficent and publicly acceptable manifestation of woman.

This is the schizophrenic, Manichaean version of femininity (mother = good, woman = bad) that forms the backbone of the patriarchal representation of motherhood, and that has been rightly criticized and overcome. The social and sexual freedoms acquired by women over the last few decades have, in fact, subverted that representation. Today women work, they are socially engaged and, much like men, they have little time to devote to their children. The way our lives are organized socially does not facilitate fertile integration between the woman and the mother, but actually favours their divorce. Fantasies are therefore unleashed that introduce new pathological versions of motherhood: no longer the traditional one of the mother who devours her own offspring, who will not let her own child go, but that hypermodern version of the mother who views her children as an obstacle to her own social affirmation.

Nowadays, motherhood no longer depends on the generative capacity and gender of the parent. Some of the certainties that regulated the process of filiation – that creation is derived from coitus, that sexuality is the primary condition of generation, and that the paternal and maternal roles are upheld respectively by a mother (woman) and a father (male) – are being irreversibly jettisoned. Science and the law place at our disposal the possibility to have a child without sexual intercourse and irrespective of the desire for motherhood as an event that arises from a loving encounter. A new industry has established itself, that of medically assisted reproduction, which has rendered the desire for motherhood independent of desire towards the opposite sex.

This is the hypermodern backdrop to this book, which poses a number of new questions. At a time when fertilization is no longer dependent on coitus and the parents’ gender no longer necessarily corresponds to anatomic heterosexuality, at a time in which sex is detached from the laws of nature and has been colonized by science, at a time in which the notion of neutral parents (1 and 2) seems ready to replace that of mother and father, does it still make sense to consider the problem of symbolic difference between the paternal and maternal roles? What is left of the mother at a time when the desire for motherhood is entirely emancipated from the immediate reference to the mother as the female biological parent, as the one who gives birth to a child?

What is left when becoming a mother is no longer a woman’s natural fate, but a free decision taken in her own time thanks to the support of science and law, and when sexuality and procreation are no longer indivisible?

There is a theme that runs through my recent work: that of inheritance. This theme forcefully raises the issue of the humanization of life. At play here is the way in which desire is transmitted from one generation to the next. It is the great theme of symbolic filiation that modern times force us to rethink, precisely because there is an increasing body of evidence demonstrating how the process of filiation does not depend upon the naturalistic dimension of the family. Though the family is no longer the natural basis for filiation, this does not in any way negate the centrality of symbolic filiation, but, if possible, further accentuates its importance.

Two symmetrical prejudices have conditioned the psychoanalytic reading of the maternal role. On the one hand, there are those who have identified the mother as a prison in which the child is detained, with the father as their necessary liberator. In this identification, the maternal capacity to give birth is overwhelmed by a culture that assimilates the mother with original chaos, a shapeless, pre-linguistic, indistinct place that only the father’s intervention is powerful enough to order and control.² On the other hand, there are those who attribute such an exclusive role to the mother in taking care of the children that they risk slipping into a rhetorical process of idealization that fails to give sufficient importance to the need for the child to be the product of Two and never just One alone.

In response to the first prejudice, this book would like to demonstrate the active centrality of the maternal role in the process of filiation and the humanization of life. In response to the second, it aims to demonstrate that the mother never excludes her ambivalence and her internal division, as well as showing how the idealization of the ‘all-loving’ mother only serves to feed sterile fantasies of omnipotence.

The mother that suppresses the woman (as occurred in the patriarchal version of motherhood) or the woman who denies the mother (as occurs in our hypermodern times) are not two representations of the mother, but two of her equally pathological variations. The book considers this, but has no intention of reducing motherhood to its pathologies. Lacan’s teachings have demonstrated how the existence of woman’s desire, which is not entirely absorbed by that of the mother, is the essential condition in order for the mother’s desire to be generative. Only if the mother’s gaze is not concentrated solely on the existence of the child can motherhood truly fulfil its function. This is what psychoanalysis teaches every day: only if the mother is ‘not-all-mother’ can the child experience the absence that makes it possible for them to access the symbolic and cultural world.

The contradiction between dedication to the role of caregiver and the drive of one’s own (legitimate) personal affirmation seems, today, to render the task of being a mother almost impossible. Maternal care comes into open conflict with the maniacal acceleration of time, entirely deprived of care, which is the cipher of our age, dominated as it is by the capitalist discourse.³ Maternal care, unlike that which is given in every aspect of our individual and collective life, is never anonymous, generic, regulated or standardized. We can never say enough about the importance of maternal care, which is never care for life in general, but always and only care for a particular life.

This care cannot be measured in the number of hours spent with one’s children. Psychoanalysis teaches us that presence without words or desire can be much more damaging than an absence that perhaps knows how to say the (few) right words. What continues to be irreplaceable about the mother is evidence that, in our time, a care can still exist that is not anonymous, a care that loves the most particular detail of the subject; a care that is capable of collecting the ‘dew’ that arrives with the light of day. Love for life does not exist any more than universal love. There is only love for the one to one, love for the name, as Lacan would say. And it is precisely this love that motherhood, despite all of the hypermodern transformations that have modified its phenomenology, is tasked with safeguarding. Its most profound lesson teaches us to oppose any care for the particular as an unshakeable resistance to the whirlwind that drives the absolute neglect of the capitalist discourse.

Milan, February 2015