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Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal.

In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion.

Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.

About the Author

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion, where his interest in religion and politics, and more specifically in political theology and political philosophy, have guided courses such “God,” “Vampires” and “Mothers” for a number of years now. He is the author, among other books, of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Columbia University Press 2003) and Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press 2014). He has also edited Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion. Recent essays include “The Destruction of Thought,” “That Great Mother of Danger,” “The Rights of White (In Search of a Majority),” “D—nce,” and “Learning Waters.”

About the Speakers

Amaryah Armstrong is an assistant professor of race in American religion and culture at Virginia Tech. Her research cuts across the fields of Black Studies, American Studies, Political Theology, and Continental Philosophy of Religion to explore the relationship between religion and the reproduction of race in the aftermath of 1492. She is working on two projects: Reproducing Peoplehood: On the Afterlife of Christian Orde and A Measure of Existence: On the Value of Black Theology. She also has several articles in the works on the insights of various black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois, Hortense Spillers) and the relationship between black culture and political theology.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006; winner of the Salo Baron prize for First Book in Jewish Studies); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017) and a contributor to it.

Matthew Engelke is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. From 2018-2024, he also served as Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Engelke’s main research interests are on Christianity, secular humanism, media theory, materiality, and semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently working on a book about secularity and death, based on research among humanist funeral celebrants in London.

Zehra Mehdi is a PhD candidate in South Asian Religions, working at the intersections of religion, political violence, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is a thick psychoanalytic ethnographic account of how Muslims as religious minorities in India facing state oppression use religion to express themselves both emotionally and politically. Focusing on the lives of Muslims in north India, her research studies how persecuted religious minorities draw upon religion as a psychic reserve to articulate their trauma, mourn their losses, and forge political resistance against the state. Her dissertation is titled, “The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow.’”