Kill Mother

About

The best thing, according to Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, would be to not be born. Emil M. Cioran, in turn, titled his book De l'inconvénient d'être né/ The Trouble With Being Born (1973). One might say that to live is to take revenge for being alive. Along the same lines, Marguerite Duras conceives of the mother as a murderer. She kills her child while she gives birth to it. Nothing would be as close to murder, as the act of giving birth. Released into a harsh reality, the newborn experiences his birth as a problem. Reality becomes a narcissistic suffering when it threatens the (supposed) integrity or intactness of the subject. The one to blame is the mother. Torn between feelings of guilt and unacknowledged accusations against her, the child experiences its existence as precarious. The mother takes on a double role in this narrative: she is both a protective power and an unavoidable authority. Duras once said that she could not imagine a world without violence. Her heightened realism is fully resistant to whitewashing. Perhaps to live means to accept this irreducible violence that exists at the heart of intimacy, love and friendship.

Marcus Steinweg