Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig, a collection of critical feminist essays on Hannah Arendt, illustrates both the disorientation and the insights that can result when feminist philosophers come to terms with a canonical figure who is a woman.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life”A Phenomenological Analysis of PregnancySara HeinämaaTwo conceptions of human generativity prevail in contemporary feminist philosophy. First, several contributors argue that the experience of pregnancy, when analyzed by phenomenological tools, undermines several distinctions that are central to Western philosophy, most importantly the subject-object distinction and the self-other and own-alien distinctions. This line of argument was already outlined by Iris Marion Young in her influential essay (...) “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1984). The other dominant argument is related to the first one, and it states that organic birth is the event that establishes the first experiential separation between the self and the other. On this understanding, the mother-fetus relation would not involve any relations between two corporeal selves; all such relations would be postnatal. This notion has been defended, for example, by Christine Schües (1997; 2000) and Johanna Oksala (2003).1On the other hand, classical phenomenology is dominated by the idea that the rigorous first-person methodology that is essential to phenomenology dictates that the sense of birth must be studied primarily by reflection on the structures of our own recollection or memory. Consequently, the primary sense of human birth would be that of an unattainable limit. This is argued on the basis of the existential fact that we all are born but cannot recall our own birth, or else on the basis of the transcendental fact that the structure [End Page 31] of retention ties each living present to an earlier one and implies that the transcendental ego cannot be subject to generation.2 From this perspective, all analyses and reflections of the experiences of labor, gestation, and pregnancy would be secondary since the sense of birth that these experiences involve is the nativity of another human being and not the nativity of the reflecting self.This paper challenges both the feminist and the classical phenomenological approach. I maintain that careful phenomenological analyses of the experience of pregnancy undermine both notions. Such analyses show, on the one hand, that pregnancy does not imply a nondistinction or self-other fusion but on the contrary involves a specific self-other divide. At the same time, they demonstrate that the sense of birth is more complex than the classical recollection-paradigm suggests and that it includes more components than the signification of an unattainable limit. A proper phenomenology of birth must take into account not only the universal fact that we all are born, but also the equally universal fact that each of us is born from another human being, that is, some other human subject.3 This other human being who “gave” us birth or “from whose flesh we were born” provides us with a unique perspective on our own past, beyond the limits of our own recollection. Her perspective is incomparable to any other external perspective; rather than simply giving us an additional third-person viewpoint on our own organic birth, this one person is able to open a second-person perspective on our pre- and postnatal life and the transition between them—all of which is beyond our own recollection.My argument proceeds by the following steps:First, I develop a fresh discourse on the experience of pregnancy, by studying a set of remarks to be found in Julia Kristeva’s postphenomenological discourse on maternity, on the one hand, and in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse on feminine embodiment, on the other hand. I use these remarks as leading clues for a novel phenomenological study of the experience of pregnancy.4 Contra Young’s influential account mentioned above, I argue that gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other. The alternative account that I provide hinges on my analysis of the experience of fetal movements and the role of touch-sensations and kinesthetic sensations in such experiences. Ultimately, I argue that pregnancy does not erode the self-other boundary or the own-alien boundary but reestablishes both divisions.Second, I compare my account of the experience of pregnancy to Merleau... (shrink)

This chapter discusses how phenomenologies of pregnancy challenge traditional philosophical accounts of a subject that is seen as autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and independent from other subjects. Pregnancy defies simple incorporation into such universal accounts since the pregnant woman and her unborn child are incapable of being subsumed into traditional theories of the subject. Phenomenological descriptions of the experience of pregnancy lead one to question if philosophy needs to reject the subject altogether as central, or rather to revise traditional descriptions (...) of the subject. The chapter examines both options and argues for the later. The exploration of pregnancy in feminist theory upholds the value of working from the subject’s lived experience, but indicates that it is possible without viewing the subject as a disembodied universal agent. Finally, it discusses how phenomenologies of pregnancy are attuned to discussing difference thereby aiding philosophies that take into account the political, historical, and cultural conditioning that shape experience and theory. (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Time For Beginners:Natality, Biopolitics, and Political TheologyRosalyn Diprose and Ewa Płonowska ZiarekDespite The Growing Interest in Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality and its relationship to politics,1 natality is rarely discussed in the context of biopolitics.2 This is all the more puzzling since Arendt is not only a thinker of natality but also, as Agamben acknowledges in Homo Sacer, the first thinker of biopolitics (Agamben 1998, 3–4). While we will (...) elaborate the complexity of what these two terms mean shortly, a useful provisional definition of “natality” is birth as “event” and as the figure of a new beginning in political life. Michel Foucault defined “biopolitics” as the government of the biological life of a population where the state holds the right to life and death in terms of the power to “make live and … let die” (Foucault 2003, 254). We are interested in the relation between natality and biopolitics with regard to maternity in particular, first of all, because this intersection marks the site of some of the more surprisingly volatile conflicts of contemporary political life, and second, because the biopolitical regulation of giving birth raises the question of the fate of political transformation and agency within a biopolitical framework. This second point is illustrated by two relatively short-lived but volatile political events, one in Australia in December 2005–February 2006 and the other in the United States early in 2012.The Australian Case of Ru486A public debate erupted in Australia in late 20053 when, in an unprecedented move, four women senators from across the political party spectrum sponsored a “private members bill” to repeal the federal minister for health’s jurisdiction [End Page 107] over the licensing of RU486 (the so-called “home abortion pill”).4 The senators were protesting how the then conservative Australian government (the so-called Howard Government) was continuing to block the licensing of the drug despite Australia’s relatively liberal approach to surgical abortion, which has been legally available since the 1970s. The debate exposed how the Howard Government, in one of its first legislative acts after assuming power in 1996, had placed abortive agents such as RU486 under its own jurisdiction (instead of the independent body, the Therapeutics Goods Administration, which regulates all other drugs). Even though protest at this situation was well overdue by 2005, it was surprising that RU486 in particular became the focal point of contestation of government authority over life at that time. There were a number of other aspects of the government’s wider legislative agenda that were more publicly contested—harsh refugee policies, participation in the war in Iraq, draconian antiterrorism legislation, legislation deunionizing the labor market and tightening the marriage act to define marriage in terms of sexuality. Yet only RU486 succeeded in mobilizing a wave of defiance of prime ministerial authority sufficiently strong to push the debate in parliament to a rare “conscience vote” (a “free vote” that suspends the usual allegiance to one’s political party required in the Westminster system) and, even more rare, a vote that the prime minister and minister for health lost. Perhaps heartened by the success of this expression of dissent, others within the government (and the Labor opposition) began to challenge other aspects of the Howard Government’s conservative legislative agenda, eventually leading to a change of government in 2007.What does the RU486 event reveal about the relation between maternity, the politics of reproduction, political agency, and government of the life of a population? Why did administration of a home abortion pill become such a focus of dissent against totalizing government, sufficient to effectively reactivate democracy? And more specifically, what does this event say about political agency, biopolitics, and the significance of reproductive self-determination? Our second example illustrates the converse—the ever-present threat to close down women’s reproductive self-determination.The Case of the U.S. “Birth Control Mandate” of 2012In February and March 2012, the Republican Party presidential campaign veered off course from its disciplined focus on fixing the economic crisis and engaged instead what the media called “the war... (shrink)

At the very beginning of the history of philosophy, with Plato, we are told the strange story of some men dwelling in a cave and looking at shadows. Immobilized by chains since childhood for all their lives, they are forced to sit on the cave's floor and are impeded from standing up. Hence, whoever they are and whatever they do, the label Homo erectus as a general category denoting the vertical posture of the human animal is decidedly unfit for their (...) position. The strange story, however, goes on and recounts how one of them, by managing to get rid of the chains, for the first time rises to his feet. The familiar feature of Homo erectus, intended not as an extinct hominid species but as the postural human standard .. (shrink)