Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture
Irina Aristarkhova
Abstract
The question “Where do we come from?” has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of “matrixial/maternal hospitality” producing space and matter of and for the other. This book theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, it applies this theoretical framework to the scien ... More
The question “Where do we come from?” has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of “matrixial/maternal hospitality” producing space and matter of and for the other. This book theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, it applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question “Can the machine nurse?” is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. The book concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other.
Keywords:
chora,
womb,
incubator,
maternal,
matrix,
self,
other,
artificial womb,
neonatal incubators,
maternal body
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231159296 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231159296.001.0001 |
