Abstract

In Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012), Marxist philosopher Silvia Federici centers the theme of Reproduction, which she considers forgotten even by Marx in his analysis of relations of production. If Das Kapital (1867) showed that in capitalism value is generated by labor power, he neglected that Reproduction is the work that produces the workers themselves. Based on such premise, the present reflection ponders the reasons for this erasure of the political, social and economic role of Reproduction through the analysis of the 2017 film Mother! by Darren Aronofsky. The film tells the story of an anonymous woman who, after a devastating fire, tries to rebuild the house where she lives with her famous writer husband. However, the process of domestic rehabilitation ends up frustrated by crowds of admirers who invade and damage the house attempting to meet the writer they idolize. The architectural destruction gives material shape to the psychological damage caused to the protagonist and to her body. The body becomes a resource made available to perverse and abundant demands of her husband, those of his admirers and of his art. The way that Aronofsky’s film renders central the domestic space, as well as production conceived as art, will serve to question the extent to which the sociopolitical erasure of Reproduction results either from the glamorization and fetishization of the productive role of said Reproduction, or else from a process of the domestication of bodies is operated by the political category of space.