Leora Batnitzky is a Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies; Professor of Religion and Director of the Program in Judaic Studies at the Princeton University. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory.
Abstract:
Mothering Beyond Essence? Martin Buber, Bertha Pappenheim, and Donald Winnicott
As is well-known, Buber’s dialogical philosophy shares a number of affinities with feminist philosophies of care, including a conception of the self who is dependent on and responsive to the vulnerability of others, the notion that ethics and responsibility emerge from human dependence and vulnerability, and the characterization of dependence and vulnerability as “feminine” and in fact as a kind of “mothering.” Yet also like some (though not all) feminist philosophies of care, Buber essentializes the “feminine,” which brings his claims into sharp tension with more recent arguments that gender is not essential but is rather always and only constructed and performative. This paper considers the benefits and costs of reconceiving Buber’s notion of the “feminine” without its essentialist baggage. To do so, the paper turns to Buber’s correspondence with Bertha Pappenheim as well as to the relationship between Buber’s arguments about the “between” and Donald Winnicott’s conception of the “good enough” mother. In these contexts, the paper asks what it might mean to reimagine mothering beyond essence.