In this work, Andrew Parker undertakes a critical reconsideration of the frequently absent, or troubled, figure of the mother in theorists including Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Parker argues that while all philosophers have mothers and the idea of 'birth' makes frequent appearances in philosophy (theorists are said to give birth to schools of thought), mothers themselves are strangely absent. What accounts for this trouble with maternity, even in the work of some feminist theorists? Parker is a highly regarded critical theorist working with feminist and queer theory and this is a long-awaited book.

In The Theorist's Mother one of our subtlest literary theorists turns his attention to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical male critical theorists. Noting how the mother is made to disappear both as the object of theory and as its subject, Andrew Parker focuses primarily on the legacies of Marx and Freud, who uniquely constrain their would-be heirs to "return to the origin" of each founding figure's texts. Analyzing the effects of these constraints in the work of Lukács, Lacan, and Derrida, among others, Parker suggests that the injunction to return transforms the history of theory into a form of genealogy, meaning that the mother must somehow be involved in this process, even if, as in Marxism, she seems wholly absent, or if her contributions are discounted, as in psychoanalysis. Far from being marginalized, the mother shows herself throughout this book to be inherently multiple and therefore never simply who or what theory may want her to be. In a provocative coda, Parker considers how theory’s mother troubles will be affected retroactively by scientific advances that make it impossible to presume the mother's gender.

"“In the last chapter of The Theorist’s Mother, "Translating Revolution: Freud, Marx, and the Mameloshn," all of the threads of Andy’s book come together in a breathtakingly original reading…. [His] book is committed to asking a set of probing questions about how mothers disturb the very possibility of establishing any clear philosophical or critical distinctions at all.”" - Los Angeles Review of Books