On Jennifer Banks’s Natality

“contemplating our mortality has again become fashionable.”

“Talking about birth, by contrast, is unfashionable”

“birth is chthonian—messy, organic, a reminder of our embodiment and earthly nature.”

“Jennifer Banks’s elegantly subversive new book, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, demonstrates that, in fact, the opposite is the case: birth and its richly generative metaphors feature centrally in a range of constitutive philosophical and poetic frameworks.”

“Our power to create another human being is the greatest power we have—it is, in Hannah Arendt’s words, the “supreme capacity” of human beings.”

“Banks’s ambition is to (re)establish birth as the foundational experience around which our culture should organize itself. “Birth, like democratic politics,” she writes, “challenges us with otherness, with the putting aside of oneself to make room for another person, and with the challenges of difference and plurality.””

“Although Arendt remained child-free, beginnings and birth took center stage in her philosophy. Perhaps this was in part a response to one of her lovers, Martin Heidegger, who, like most male philosophers, fetishized death.”

“Arendt, by contrast, wrote in The Human Condition (1958) that we are “not born in order to die but in order to begin.””

“Again, perhaps with the Nazi-sympathizing Heidegger in mind, she also considered natality an antidote to totalitarianism—birth as a force that epitomizes our creative capacity for generative action.”

““I’ve hungered for a different set of principles, new models, a culture less reconciled to its own extinction,” she writes. “I keep imagining it: a society rooted in gestation, intimacy, vulnerability, growth, creativity, reciprocity, change, and otherness—in that strange and unrivaled symbiosis, the entering into the bloodstream of another human being.””