One could say that The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse is a book on auto-theory, except that the self – the author and authority in this book – is precisely what meets its ruin. In this book-length essay, Bragg interrogates the limits of autonomous thought and subjectivity when one’s own skin is claimed by another. How do we conceive hospitality when one’s own body cannot be whole, since it is no longer alone, and instead falls at the presence of the infant who has unraveled selfhood and puts into question our pretenses of autonomy and independence? With poetic prose in the ebb and flow of its sentences, The Ruins of Solitude engages Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, and others in an exploration of motherhood from the phenomenological perspective of the thinking body. Bragg’s essay is a call to theory rooted in the threshold between self and other, the space of care, where solitude is no more.

~ Margarita Saona, author of The Ghost of You

The Ruins of Solitude

by Lette Bragg

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In The Ruins of Solitude, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces of the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes of thinking and ethics that emerge from her experience of reading continental philosophy while caring for her infant child. Dwelling on what she would have once excluded from her intellectual work—her maternity, the mole on her chest, her palm against another body, her exhaustion at the work of deconstruction—Bragg details a shift in her orientation and method that leads to creative theoretical thought, allowing her to illuminate and interrogate what she names “solitude,” a condition of academic discourse that limits our critical-liberatory projects of transformation.

Ultimately, The Ruins of Solitude lets go of authority and mastery, and engages in a poetic and fractured writing style that lets in the relationality of thought, offering a philosophy of bodies beyond solitude, an intimacy of love and writing that fractures solitude, bringing forward the possibility of selfhood and authorship uncontained by the isolationist, tangible time of the present. Bragg’s book also unravels familiar narratives of childcare, considering the parallels between poststructuralist theory and the embodied materiality of relation.

About the Author

Lette Bragg received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Cornell University in 2018, with a Graduate Minor concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests span continental philosophy, feminist theory, and postcolonial literature, and she has published articles in Cultural Studies Review, The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, and Feminist Theory. Her work experiments with form and genre in an effort to stay with what is often effaced or smoothed over in academic discourse. The Ruins of Solitude is her first book.