About the book, from the publisher: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. Irina Aristarkhova 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, she 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. Aristarkhova 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.Learn more about Hospitality of the Matrix at the Columbia University Press website.
Irina Aristarkhova writes on and lectures in comparative feminist theory and contemporary aesthetics. She joined the University of Michaigan's School of Art & Design faculty as an Associate Professor in 2012. She edited and contributed to the volume Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference and to the Russian translation of Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
The Page 99 Test: Hospitality of the Matrix.
--Marshal Zeringue
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