Abstract: This essay reads Lucy Hutchinson’s child as one who is consistently yoked to precarity and ruin. The figure of the child in Hutchinson’s work, that is, reveals and refuses the fantasy inherent in the belief that the meaning of life is located in—and guaranteed by—an endlessly proliferating and deferred future, and suggests instead that meaning is to be found in death and the endless destruction of the present. If there is futurity to be found in reproduction, it is a futurity that is born not out of the replication of existing social structures via the production of future generations but out of multiple episodes.
Li Qi Peh (Thu,) studied this question.