In these liquid times

I just received a copy of a the book Philosophy in Turbulent Times by Elisabeth Roudinesco. I’m not going to start it for awhile because I’ve too many other things to clear from my reading list, but I did do a quick read of the introduction, and the following caught my eye.

“Everywhere the same questions, and everywhere the same answers, all claiming to bear witness to a new malaise of civilization. The father has vanished, but why not the mother? Isn’t the mother really just a father, in the end, and the father a mother? Why do young people not think anything? Why are children so unbearable? Is it because of Françoise Dolto, or television, or pornography, or comic books? And leading thinkers—what has become of them? Are they dead, or gestating, or hibernating? Or are they on the road to extinction?”¹

This makes me think of some of what I’m trying to work through in my podcast From78.

The Name-of-the-Parent

Te part that really caught my eye was the bit about fathers and mothers.

The father has vanished, but why not the mother? Isn’t the mother really just a father, in the end, and the father a mother?

Have we, in our contemporary times, replaced the Name-of-the-Father with a non-gendered Name-of-the-Parent? If we have, why have we done this?

Would the replacement of the Name-of-the-Father with the Name-of-the-Mother be something that is welcomed now? If so, what does this say about our society? Are we engaging in the defense of splitting, of seeing all things paternal as “all bad” and all things maternal as “all good”?

Of course, I don’t know the answers to these questions. Be that as it may, these are the questions I have for now.