This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof.
The state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva-whose work will be my focus of attention here-has been criticised for her emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks reducing woman to the biological function of motherhood. Judith Butler, to give an example to which I will return at length, speaks of a 'compulsory obligation on women's bodies to reproduce'. 2 Kristeva herself has noted that 'it seems […] difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression'. 3 Kristeva's earliest thematisation of the maternal appears in her doctoral dissertation, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). It is here that she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora, associating it with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives. She borrows the Greek term chora from Plato's Timaeus (2001)-a dialogue that more than anything deals with the question of beginnings, as it narrates the story of how the cosmos and its living creatures were created. In much of her early work, Kristeva distinguishes between semiotic drives and the symbolic order (although as we shall see this distinction is by no means an oppositional one). 4 Put most simply, chora, for Kristeva, is the articulation of primary processes and drives. We may say that it is the material from which language emerges, and yet, as I hope to show, to characterise it merely as 'material' is both problematic and inaccurate. Kristeva explains that all discourse 'moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it'. 5 It is a 'preverbal functional state that governs the connections between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure' (RPL, p. 27). Kristeva underlines that the subject involved in such a process is no mere subject of understanding, but one inhabited by pre-symbolic drives and, importantly, one connected to and oriented towards the mother (not yet differentiated from her). Both Kristeva and Plato characterise chora in Fanny Söderbäck, Motherhood: A Site of Repression or Liberation? Kristeva and Butler on the Maternal Body Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk 2 maternal terms: Timaeus, in Plato's dialogue, famously likens it with a 'mother' [meter] and a 'wet-nurse', drawing on female connotations distinct from the paternal demiurge and creator present from the outset of his story. 6 For Kristeva, the maternal body is 'the ordering principle of the semiotic chora' (RPL, p. 27). One could object that such an account problematically seems to divide a pre-symbolic, drive-ridden, natural, passive, maternal mold or receptacle from a symbolic-logic, cultural, active, paternal force of creation, with the consequence that we, again, essentialise such categories along gendered lines. This is precisely what many feminist thinkers have done.
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