Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth Hardcover – 2 May 2023
by Jennifer Banks (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not solely an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality, the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth's active role in our lives. In this ambitious, revelatory book, Jennifer Banks begins with Arendt's definition of natality as the "miracle that saves the world" to develop an expansive framework for birth's philosophical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic significance.
Banks focuses on seven renowned western thinkers--Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison--to reveal a provocative countertradition of birth. She narrates these writers' own experiences alongside the generative ways they contended with natality in their work. Passionately intelligent and wide-ranging, Natality invites readers to attend to birth as a challenging and life-affirming reminder of our shared humanity and our capacity for creative renewal.
272 pages
2 May 2023
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Thought-provoking... Many sections of this book are so human, so humane, and so lovely. I found myself repeatedly inspired... I stand in awe of Banks' accomplishments in grappling in a unifying way with such deep and passionate thinkers. Her book succeeds in raising the question of natality so that we might move, as the subtitle indicates, a few steps farther 'toward a philosophy of birth.'--Dixie Dillon Lane "Current"
Unusually thoughtful... Banks is a lively writer of capsule biographies and a deft interpreter of thorny philosophical concepts... [Natality is] fresh and reflective.--Becca Rothfield "Washington Post"
To describe the revelation of Jennifer Banks's Natality, I find myself reaching for words like original, fertile, generative--words to describe not only the book but the way it acts upon you, and upon the world. Natality is a work of astonishing brilliance, beauty, hope, and generosity. I know I'll be buying it for everyone.--Devorah Baum, author of On Marriage
With poetic precision, Jennifer Banks moves deftly through various literary, living, and intellectual cultures to tell us about our beginning at a time when the gradient of most narratives dips toward our end. I will read Natality again and again, to feel alive, to be reborn.--Sumana Roy, author of How I Became a Tree
Natality is a quietly disruptive book. At a time when public discussion of motherhood and childbirth too quickly devolves into political talking points, Jennifer Banks unearths voices from the past that challenge us to consider the profound and inscrutable nature of birth. Natality reminds us that there has never been a singular conversation around childbirth, but by tending to the mystery, beauty, and contradictions of birth, we contemplate humanity itself.--Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne
Jennifer Banks has brought to light a dimension of experience that is both universal and weirdly neglected. This is a lucid, provocative, and groundbreaking book.--Christian Wiman, Yale University professor and author of My Bright Abyss: Mediation of a Modern Believer
A gripping exploration of some of society's biggest contradictions: our adoration for life but ignorance about birth, our reverence for mothers but disregard for their needs, and our focus on mortality but--until now--neglect of natality. This is a fascinating read.--Dana Suskind, MD, author of Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential, Fulfilling Society's Promise
In this resplendent tapestry, each chapter a riveting discovery, Jennifer Banks witnesses the hidden gestations within the wombs of literary history. Natality is not just about giving birth. Natality is at the heart of culture care, of all generative making, and it opens paths uncharted.--Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art and Faith: A Theology of Making
Natality is not just one way to think about the human condition, but an indispensable way, without which nothing else makes much sense. This gripping, hopeful, and inspiring book, written in a spirit of fellowship that gives the whole book a human glow, is a splendid antidote to the nihilistic temptation.--Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School
About the Author
Jennifer Banks is senior executive editor at Yale University Press. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and Pleiades, among other publications. She lives in Massachusetts.
Product details
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (2 May 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 272 pages
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Ren
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking and clearReviewed in the United States on 31 May 2023
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Sometimes new ideas can be hard to wrap one’s head around, but Jennifer Banks thoughtfully brings her reader to and through her arguments on why birth and its associated becomings deserve more consideration than we currently give it, and her explanation of ways to do so. In a world where we can feel stuck in ruts of thought, this is a refreshing read. If you are looking for a new perspective and a break from the ordinary, pick up this book. I look forward to reading more in the future.
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Ezra Thomas Hark
5.0 out of 5 stars StunningReviewed in the United States on 22 May 2023
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What a beautiful, life-affirming book! Banks explores a topic that is universal to the human experience and yet so misunderstood (or even forgotten) in our collective narratives. A thoroughly enjoyable read, Natality offers a refreshing perspective that engages, connects, and inspires.
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The Greatest Power We Have: On Jennifer Banks’s “Natality”
By Anna Katharina SchaffnerAugust 14, 2023
The Greatest Power We Have: On Jennifer Banks’s “Natality”
Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks
INTELLECTUALLY, WESTERN CULTURE is in thrall of death. Death is the ultimate philosophical subject, our deepest existential theme. As almost always with pessimistic topics, talking about death makes us sound serious and smart, rational and profound. Moreover, with the recent renaissance of Stoic philosophy, which is itself indicative of the times in which we live, contemplating our mortality has again become fashionable. While we may no longer opt for skulls or rotten fruit to suggest our finitude, there are now “death apps” that count down the days remaining to us.
Talking about birth, by contrast, is unfashionable: birth is chthonian—messy, organic, a reminder of our embodiment and earthly nature. Conversations about birth, creation, and renewal tend to be relegated to the esoteric feeler-corner of our culture. Rachel Cusk astutely observed that her 2001 memoir on new motherhood was not prominently displayed but banished to the section in bookshops “at the far end of recorded human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.”
Given these cultural biases, we may be forgiven for assuming that no serious philosopher has much to say about birth. 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. And so it should. 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. It shapes our life, “defining its limits and its possibilities,” according to Banks. Yet while birth has a profound existential, theological, and moral significance, it has remained curiously understudied.
Birth, Banks argues, “has long hovered in death’s shadow, quietly performing its under-recognized labor.” What, she invites us to consider, would our culture look like if we rethought some of the many death-centered maxims by which we live? Take, for example, Seneca’s famous phrase and reverse it: “Study birth always; it takes an entire lifetime to learn how to give birth or to come to terms with our having been born.” What if we were to start wrestling with our natality instead of our mortality? What might become possible if we “[kept] birth daily before [o]ur eyes”?
These are far from trivial questions. And Banks’s insights are nothing short of revelatory. Using Arendt’s concept of natality, she charts a counter-philosophy to our traditionally death-bound thinking, reminding us of the prominence of creation stories and past traditions that link birth to creativity, change, and renewal. Arendt defines natality as “[t]he miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.” 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.” Her key thesis is both simple and radical: we were all born, and our birth indelibly shapes our life from beginning to end.
In addition to Arendt, Banks’s case studies include Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Morrison. She recounts her subjects’ birth and life stories, and astutely analyzes the centrality of birth in their oeuvres. 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. Heidegger held that we are “thrown” into the world, and that our thrownness results in “being-toward-death”—our lives inevitably oriented towards death’s horizon. 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.
Nietzsche is one of very few male philosophers to celebrate birth—although his main claim to fame is his declaration of God’s death. Yet Nietzsche saw the death of God as an opening—for the creation of new traditions, a pagan reenchantment of the world, cultural and spiritual renewal. Birth features not just in the key notion of “becoming” in his work, or in the title of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which art is celebrated as the ultimate redeeming creative force, but also at the heart of his thinking about the superhuman. The purpose of Nietzsche’s Übermensch was, essentially, to create new values and thereby give birth to a new world.
Banks also points out that Nietzsche coded the Greek god of wine and music, Dionysus, as female, by associating him with darkness, chaos, irrationality, fertility, and fusion. In one of his last works, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889), Nietzsche describes the Dionysian as a “triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.” Wryly, Banks quotes Louise Erdrich here: “We owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.”
The 18th-century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft believed that birth could help society reimagine itself and inspire a more just and equal human order, one that honors creativity, maternal nurturing, and intimacy. Her daughter Mary Shelley, by contrast, held a darker vision of birth—from her imagination sprang a doomed creature made by a hubristic, Promethean creator-scientist. As Banks observes, Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) charts “a tragic realization of humanity’s natal dreams,” a monster—engineered by a sterile male brain—that eventually kills its creator’s loved ones out of revenge.
After she gained her freedom, the former enslaved woman Sojourner Truth spiritually rebirthed herself, becoming an itinerant preacher whose visions were infused with the language of birth and with birth’s “world-making” potential. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), Adrienne Rich explored the paradox that maternity was both the root of women’s oppression and the source of their power. As the fertile energy of creation, it enabled relationality and female potentialities. A mother’s work, Rich wrote in her essay “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” was socially, politically, and culturally crucial, for it is the “activity of world-protection, world-preservation, world-repair.”
In the novel Beloved (1987), in the last of Banks’s case studies, Toni Morrison explores “an example of maternal love pushed to its farthest reaches.” Her character Sethe, an enslaved woman, kills one of her children to protect her from the suffering and indignity she herself has suffered. Here, the birther and the birthed become murderer and murdered, and infanticide is turned into an extreme ethical case study in love.
In his poem “Journey of the Magi” (1927), T. S. Eliot asks: “[W]ere we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” Banks demonstrates that the choice as to whether we privilege birth or death in our philosophical and poetic imaginaries has profound ethical implications, both for our culture and for us as individuals. “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.”
It is time, then, to free birth talk, birth stories, and birth’s rich imagery from their stigma, and to liberate them once and for all from the disparaging gaze of all those fetishists of death.
¤
Anna Katharina Schaffner is a cultural historian and a coach. She is the author of Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press, 2016) and The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths (Yale University Press, 2021).
LARB CONTRIBUTOR
Anna Katharina Schaffner is a cultural historian and a coach. She is the author of Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press, 2016) and The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths (Yale University Press, 2021). Her journalism has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Psychology Today, AEON and PSYCHE.
