Episode 142 - Natality with Jennifer Banks

Transcript

Ellie: 0:17

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:19

The podcast were two philosophers engender exciting new discussions about everyday life.

Ellie: 0:25

I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:26

And I'm David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:28

David, there's often one thing that people focus on as the inevitable fact of a human life, and that is death. Or maybe you could say death and taxes, if you will. Sometimes people will focus the on those as two,

David: 0:43

I take it, we're not talking about taxes today.

Ellie: 0:45

We're not talking about taxes today, but we're also not talking about death because even though people often focus on death as the inevitable feature of a human life. There's also another very important and inevitable feature, which is birth. All of us will die, and also all of us were born.

David: 1:09

What birth and death have in common is that they are transitional points between being and non-being. Birth is the pivot point, which is our entrance into existence and mortality, of course, is our exit into non-being, barring, of course, theological, religious and spiritual interpretations that presuppose the existence of an afterlife. And so in that sense, both of these themes bring us face-to-face with the limits, not only of a life, but also with human understanding because it's so difficult to really think about who we were. Were we anything before birth, and who we will be or where we will be after death. And so they are the bookend not just for our existence, but for the very possibility of thinking our existence.

Ellie: 2:00

Wow, controversial. Who were we before we were born? Didn't know we were awaiting into. Pro-choice debates today? I mean, I guess it is an episode on Natality, but no, I will say on that point, I think there's an interesting disanalogy at the same time where if we follow Heiddeger on his account of death, and I think his account of death is actually great, specifically being towards death. Death is the possibility, our own most possibility, which is the possibility of no longer having any possibility. And I think if we apply that to birth, we could say that what we see instead there is the actuality of my possibility. What birth brings about is myself as having all kinds of life possibilities. Of course, those life possibilities are gonna be constrained in some ways. They're not infinite, and there are more constrained options for some than for others. I think there is nonetheless sort of that actualization of possibility that we see with birth. Then again, as you pointed out, we don't have any understanding of our own birth or first person experience of it. I grew up with a mother who was a doula. She's very like big, you know, on natural birth and a sort of approach to birth that resists kind of medicalization of it. Not that she's like anti-establishment. I feel like in the MAHA era we have to be super clear about that. She would mostly work with people who were giving birth in hospitals to be there as a sort of support for them. And she went through a phase when I was young in the nineties where she was like really interested in some of these like regression therapies where you could revisit your own birth. I think that's like sort of a funny, very nineties moment of like, oh, let's try and let's try and do this like regressive therapy where we can remember our own birth. Because I think central to the experience of birth is that you maybe not only do you not remember it, I think the question of whether you experience it is an open one too.

David: 3:56

Of course, but you begin by saying that there is a difference between death and birth in relation to this. But there is still a similarity even in connection to the doulas because now there are what are called death doulas, individuals who accompany others at the moment of death, either to offer some form of consolation, maybe we can use that term or merely company. I have a friend who describes himself as a death jeweler whose primary activity in those moments is to play classical music to people who find themselves at that transitional pivot point and who were music lovers. And so for them music offers a passageway. You know what it is a passageway to, unclear. We can't think it, we can't know it as Heidegger says it's the limit of our possibilities, but I like the idea that we often want company in those moments where we are navigating the boundary or the borderland between being and non-being, I think it brings into focus just how deeply our reliance on other people and our desire for connection is.

Ellie: 5:09

and the condition of being born is essentially condition of being connected to others. That's what a lot of philosophers who focus on birth note, you're not born.

David: 5:18

Alone.

Ellie: 5:18

All by yourself, right? You're born out of another person's body and then you're taken care of by others upon your arrival into the world. And so the concept of birth has been really important, especially in feminist approaches within philosophy for focusing on the relational nature of the self. Where Heidegger says that we only ever die alone. Nobody can die your death for you and therefore death individualizes us. Those who are interested in talking about birth will often focus on the fact that you aren't born alone. And shouldn't that be at least equally important to the idea that we are towards our own death? And I recently read Allison Stone's book, being Born Birth and Philosophy. And in this book, I haven't actually finished it yet, so I shouldn't say I recently read it. Let's say I started it a while back and then put it on pause for a while and I need to return to it. But this is a really fascinating account where she suggests that our human condition is one of relational mortality, and the condition of being born indicates that for us and when we're born. Into this kind of inescapable situatedness of relationality. We're also born into social norms and unequal power dynamics, and so she defends a goal of equal birth. She says, the features of our natal condition generate a case for equality, for natal equality as an ideal goal. So death she suggests is to an extent an equalizer, whereas birth is an unequalizer because we're born into very different social positions and she thinks we need to defend a notion of natal equality, where we are given more, you know, equal options. Once we enter the world, than currently we experience in this world of extreme inequality.

David: 7:15

Of course, anytime we think about the concept of natality, which is our condition of being born, the philosopher that comes to mind immediately is Hannah Arendt, who writes about natality in many works, but especially in the human condition. And for Arendt, this concept does a lot of work, conceptual work for helping her articulate the importance not of endings, which is something that we often associate with Heidegger, but of beginnings and today to help us think about the significance of the concept of Natality in Hannah Arendt, as well as in a number of other figures from the history of philosophy we have with us, the author of a new book on the subject.

Ellie: 8:25

Jennifer Banks is senior executive editor at Yale University Press. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and Pleiades among other publications. She is the author of the recent book, natality toward a Philosophy of Birth. Jennifer, welcome to Overthink. We're so happy to have you.

Jennifer: 8:44

It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

Ellie: 8:46

Your book opens by explaining that birth has not exactly been a topic that has been a major focus Within philosophy. We love to talk about death, but philosophy in recent times, and not only in recent times, actually for most of the history of philosophy, has marginalized the topic of birth, discussing it very little with few exceptions. Why do you think this has been the case? Why have so many philosophers failed to think birth?

Jennifer: 9:15

The most obvious answer is that the history of thought was largely written by men who weren't, you know, at the center of the experience of giving birth? and attending to birth and. You know, I guess, I suppose fathers, but there was also a long sort of scribal tradition that was almost a kind of monastic tradition. So these were also sometimes people who weren't even around children, nevermind not being kind of at the center, either bodily or in terms of supporting a birth. So I think there was a distance and you know, I also think that there was, you know, birth, sort of confronts the history of thought with things that are difficult in terms of the vulnerability of the body, sort of the limits of our own memory. If writing is an attempt to take our experience and to give it some sort of form to create meaning out of it, birth sort of defies some of those attempt, set order, or perhaps rationality and that. That's sort of a stereotype too, that birth is associated with disorder or rationality, but I think in some ways there's a truth to that. birth is something we can't remember, which is interesting to think about. How do we try to access an experience that, in terms of our own experience of it, both men and women, anyone who has been born? Our consciousness cannot reach that point. Which is really a kind of confrontation with the limits of our own consciousness. I also just, you know, since the book has been published, I've thought a lot about the nature of language itself, and one of the puzzles I've really thought a lot about is one of the biggest predictors of falling mentality rates is literacy. It's also wealth than in cultures that become wealthier, birth rates go down, and of course education. Which on the one sense you think that part of what we're being educated about is learning how to create better lives and having, you know, more options available to us and less suffering and longer lives, and all these things that I think are very positive. But there's also, for me, something deeply puzzling about this, you know, that I think I've long, really always had this interest in birth and felt like there was so much there that was so rich and so imaginative and so much at the center of human experience and also devoted my life to language, you know, professionally, mostly as an editor, but also as a writer and. To think about the ways that birth somehow defies language that so many of the attempts to kind of put birth into language seemed to come up short. Somehow they failed to capture it. This is something that was told to me when I was having children, you know, it was kind of whispered. It's sort of the thing that. Get told to mothers, you know, it's beyond language. It's kind of annoying to hear that when you're someone who works with language and publishes books on every topic. It's frustrating to hear that this huge experience somehow is beyond language, just doesn't seem entirely true. But I do wonder, you know, language is this way of symbolizing the world and beginning to create abstractions from it. And there's something about birth that's so intensely physical that has that kind of messiness and unpredictability. And one of the quotes I love about languages comes from Ursula Guin , who also writes a lot about birth, but she talks about writing is the silencing of language, and you have oral traditions about birth of mothers and midwives and sisters kind of passing knowledge along. But somehow when you get to writing to actually fixing something in that form, it resists language or it language. Somehow can't bear that set of meetings. I think there's some something there. That said, I also was surprised just in reading and re researching the book and writing it, how much I really found that there really actually is a lot about birth in our traditions. I think that it tends to be de-emphasized though, so it was really striking to go back and realize, you know, how much of Greek philosophy, for instance, talks about birth? How many of our religious traditions, you know, birth is at the center of their stories, their theological formulations, their existential questions, the narratives. How many of the medieval mystics were talking about birth? How many of the early feminists or participants in the women's rights movements were writing about birth, but also, you know, I talk in the book about Nietzsche and how much birth we find in his work. So it can be very much at the center of the bodies of work of these very famous philosophers or novelists or theologians, but that's not the version that we usually get of them. So there is that, I talk about, it's kind of secondariness, it's the, you know, if women are the second sex, birth is somehow secondary. And just one last point, I think that illustrates it. If you look at, you know, you go into a Catholic church, for instance, you'll have the Virgin Mary and birth is so central to that, to their kind of ritual traditions, to the theology. But it's not what hangs at the center of the church. It's not the central object of ritual worship, and you have something like Easter in many Catholic communities is more theologically significant than Christmas.

Ellie: 14:54

I was really struck by that part in your book where you say it's the crucifix and not the manger that hangs at the center. And you also, I mean, just to pick up quickly on the ancient Greek point that you mentioned, Socrates mother, famously a midwife, Socrates described himself as a midwife of ideas. And so I think also famously, you know, skeptical of the written word. I think for Socrates, there was something philosophical that couldn't be captured in writing. And he conceived of philosophy as a kind of birth, although often an unsuccessful birth. He says like a lot of times the babies that are being born are wind eggs. They're like not actual babies.'cause the ideas don't really have any life to them.

Jennifer: 15:36

Yes. And Plato too. You know, so much of, you know, work like the symposium. There's so much kind of birth language, gestational language that you find in that book and this sort of hierarchy of birthing. And the greatest births are the birthing of ideas and concepts, and the lower kind of birthing is a you know, birthing of human beings and bodies. But yeah, striking how much you find particularly in that period, I think that kind of coming out of that axial age, there was something in that like fourth, fifth century BC where you start like all of this kind of blossoms and then there are all these traditions that grow out of that and come to fruition in different kinds of ways. And it really is, I mean it, I think that sense of natality is very much woven through our histories. The books an attempt to kind of bring it more to the surface. I think most of us don't go to college and take a class on birth or we don't, we don't have a sense of what are the great birth novels or, I think still so many people who give birth, you know, say those words that I talk about in the book, you know, why did no one tell me what was this was like? And these are very often educated people who've had great educations.

David: 16:50

And I think even in mythology, we don't talk about birthing stories, we talk about origin stories, right? There's a sense in which beginnings get recast in a way that conceals, that we're talking about something that is physical and generative, that is a form of birth, even if it's purely symbolic or mythological. But your comments about language and birth also make me think about how difficult it would be to write, let's say the story of birth or the biography of birth, because it's unclear who the author of that story would be. Would it be the infant who is born?

David: 17:28

Or would it be the birthing parent that becomes the subject of that narrative? There's a sense in which birth, because it is a relational process and because it stands at the boundary between self and other, it's, you know, it's the moment where, the self separated. It's really unclear who the subject of birth even is to begin with.

Jennifer 17:50

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think even when I use the word birth, it's, you know, there is the experience of being born and then there's the experience of giving birth, and I use it pretty interchangeably in the book, but obviously those are very different experiences.

David: 18:05

Well, and in your book, I think there is a critique of the history of philosophy for ignoring birth, but you do point out that there is a counter history that runs through. There have been a number of thinkers who have centered birth and this term natality, this English word in one way or another in their work. And one of those thinkers that you focus on is the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who uses the term natality to articulate a philosophy of birth and a philosophy of politics that is really salient for thinking the present, actually given the rise of totalitarianism in our world. And I wanna have you define for us Arendt's notion of natality, and then I would like you to talk a little bit about how that concept influenced your own thinking about what it means to articulate a philosophy of birth, which is what you try to do in this book.

Jennifer: 19:03

Yeah. Just to, to briefly kind of summarize her story. She was a Jewish woman who had grown up in Germany, kind of came of age, you know, during the First World War, was educated in the interwar period, studied theology, was a student of Martin Heidegger. Ended up, you know, as the Nazis came to power, was pushed out of Germany and was interd in France, escaped from the internment camp and spent 18 years as a stateless person. And eventually ended up in New York, became a leading public intellectual writer, political theorist of the 20th century. And you know, I think we often think of her, you know, we think of origins of totalitarianism. We think of phrases like the banality of evil. Of course, scholars of her work know natality. Well, it's not an unknown concept, but I don't think it's as well known as other aspects of her work. But when you read her work, it's a very central idea, and I think the quickest way to understand what she meant by it is maybe to think about it as a foil for Martin Heidegger's idea of being toward death. You know, that we're thrown into the world by birth and he imagined us, kind of always turned towards death's horizon, you know, that's where we are headed. And she kind of flipped that and imagine what it would be like to be toward birth. And so even as we are aging, we are constantly have death before us. Death is a reality. We are mortal, we wrestle with our mortality. She also makes birth a constant reference point. Why did she do this? I think some of it was she was just interested in the nature of beginnings. This is there in her earliest work, she did her dissertation on St. Augustine book later published love in St. Augustine in English. And was very much an exploration of what is the nature of a beginning, of origins, but, you know, as she went through the World War II and the Holocaust and its aftermath, her interest became much more political, and so she remained very interested in birth, but what she was interested in is the political significance of birth. And so she had this belief that we are born not in order to die, but in order to begin. And birth was a reflection of our ability to begin things. So the fact that we're born means we're beginners. And to be a beginner means you are an actor. And so birth for her was very closely connected or virtually synonymous with action. This was a very key concept for her, and I think what she had seen in the Nazi era, living in a totalitarian regime was that things had kind of closed down. So this was a period of endings and of people becoming very isolated from one another. The bridges between one another crumbling and people feeling increasingly impotent. So by the mid 20th century, there had been all this progress and. There was this tremendous kind of human mastery of the world, you know, that we had developed and invented all these amazing things and controlled our environments in all these kind of ways. So you had this, a sense of tremendous power, but also complete impotency. Especially politically, and I think we still see this in our culture where we're at a moment where we, you know, we can play any song we want on our phones, any at any moment, and we can snap our fingers and order something on Amazon and it's there. And so there's just like ways, we have a lot more control, but simultaneously people feel like political issues we deal with are intractable and there's a little difference an individual can make. And she saw this, you know, 75 years ago or so and was observing it in her own culture. And it's a very strange thing. And that to me, it's still incredibly surprising. You know, how she turned to birth? She was not a mother, she was not. Was surrounded by children or worked with children, or, I think she was philosophically concerned with children. She thought about children but not immersed in domestic life and for various reasons did not have children herself, but just birth, you know, so much of what she thought and and believed in was based upon birth and the importance of people believing they can begin new things, including beginning a whole new life. You know, that they can welcome in the next generation. And she did believe that once you had kind of lost trust in that human capacity, that these were the conditions under which totalitarianism spreads.

Ellie: 24:03

And this was one of the most interesting things to me about your book. It really made me think differently about birth. This idea that birth is political, but it doesn't necessarily need to be politicized, at least at origin. Of course. Like, okay, there are lots of reasons why we should and do politicized birth, but I think what you are saying following Arendt is that even prior to the politicization of birth, as we think about it, including debates about population pro-nataltism, antinatalism, eugenics, access to abortion, and so on and so forth, some of which we'll return to later, there's this ontological category of natality that is our very existence as birthed beings. That is political at one step below all of those debates. And that one step below is that birth is, as you quote in the book, a mark of resistance. And that was just really interesting to me because I think coming out of feminist philosophy, I'm used to talking about birth in terms of the feminist, social and political issues that you know are very important to consider. But I'm really not used to thinking about birth just as an ontological condition. That is the really the condition for the possibility of our status as political creatures. And not only that, but also as a mark of resistance to totalitarianism. So maybe you could say a little bit more about that too, like why did Arendt think that birth was resistant to totalitarian forces?

Jennifer: 25:40

Yeah. I mean she equates birth and beginnings with freedom. Both the pro-natalist and the antinatalist positions are largely about not equating birth with freedom. You know that to have a pro-natalist, civilization, you have to have a coercive element. And on the other side, birth is associated with something that's being forced on people. There is a kind of an association in anti-natalism sometimes with both the oppressiveness of birth for the person giving birth, but even in some expressions of it for the person that's born, you know, that they didn't consent to birth, that this is like a, they're being conscripted into life against, against any kind of consensual will and what I was really interested in is in finding alternatives to those positions and what we find is that kind of between the cracks and crevices of the history of thought over the last at least 200 years or so, this period of a kind of liberal modernity. There are alternative ways of understanding birth and of drawing on developing paradigms that are about the kind of obligations of the individual to their community, but that also balance that with individual liberties. Arendt had that, but she also went deeper in terms of seeing birth as just fundamentally connected to our ability to act. And you know, I think, I think it's interesting, one of the, one of the lowest birth rates you, you know, in the world is in Eastern Europe. This is a culture that has had just such a long history of, to totalitarian regimes of warfare. You know, in cultures where there hasn't been a lot of freedom, these tend to be, these are often cultures that don't have high mentality rates. It's not exclusively true, but I do believe that there, there is a connection. And it's varied because I think, you know, one of the things I was trying to show in the book is how our understandings of birth are of course shaped by our conditions. And so there are all these different expressions. Freedom means something very different for Sojourner Truth, one of the people I track in the book who was a slave who gave birth to her children while she was, you know, owned by her master, but who ends up developing these very strong sort of arguments for the renewal of civilization that connect birth with what looks like gestational language and language of care and maternity. So I am interested in the variation that there are a lot of different expressions, partly as a way to recover alternative ways of thinking through these issues. I feel like the, a lot of the debates about birth are really stuck in these kind of binary positions and, you know, mo most of the lived experience is somewhere in the middle of that. I think that the rhetoric and the discourse doesn't always reflect how people experience birth is often one of the most joyful and happy and meaningful experiences of their life. And also one of the most challenging, and I think Toni Morrison in the book, I have a chapter on her. She describes birth as the most liberating thing that ever happened to her. You know, that's not really what I think people expect her to say, but you read her work And that you know, she describes birth under some of the most difficult historical circumstances and personal tragedy, but also there's always that sense of birth's liberatory potential.

David: 29:21

And that sense of the liberatory power of birth. I often think about it in terms of a reset of the subject of birth, whoever that is, but also a reinvention of the world because people often talk about, they live in a different world when they find themselves in the wake of a birth. Whether that is literally the birth of a new person or the birth of a new idea, the birth of a new project, the birth of a political movement. So there's a sense in which the world itself changes altogether because of birth. The world is reborn, but. I wanna here, pivot a little bit to thinking about that sense of possibility and maybe an ambiguity that it carries within it. Because when we give birth to something, we can't always predict how it will turn out. This is true of our children, much to my mother's chagrin, I probably did not turn out like maybe she envisioned. Who knows? That's true of all of us, right? But it is also true about birth in the more metaphorical sense of the term. Maybe I publish a book that has a life of its own that I didn't anticipate, and that maybe I don't embrace, that can happen.

Ellie: 30:32

Maybe you birth the wind egg instead of real baby. If you're one of Socrates interocular.

David: 30:37

Exactly. And so my point here is that there is all this liberatory potential. There is a sense of promise, but we can also give birth to something that either is or becomes or is perceived as dangerous or monstrous. And I'm thinking about this in connection to the chapter in the book where you talk about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Can you talk about the relationship between birth and monstrosity?

Jennifer: 31:07

Yeah, so I mean that chapter on Mary Shelley is really where I, I guess, come closest to talking about monstrosity? Perhaps in the Tony Morrison chapter two, where we see some of like the most trying and difficult expressions of birth, whether it's in Beloved or a book like The Bluest Eye, a young girl who's been impregnated by her father and is pregnant. And you know, one of the things I try to always kind of keep a part of the narrative. Is the tragedy that's interwoven with birth to, to me personally, I see it more as tragedy than monstrosity. I also, in the book, kind of included monstrosity and I'll talk a little bit about Mary Shelley's version, but I, you know, I think we have to keep, remember that throughout most of history, something like, I don't know, a third of births ended in death within the first year. Birth and death were very closely associated. And birth was this incredibly risky and often deadly thing, either for the infant or for the mother. Going back to Arendt, she connected birth with action, and action is always risky and it's riddled with error. Part of the totalitarian. Kind of a mindset or ambition is to avoid human error. To not open oneself up to something that can't be controlled. So once you act, you set in motion a sequence of events that you can't control. You have a child, you don't know what, what the child's gonna be like. You don't know if the child's gonna live. If they are, you know going to have a disability, for instance, or, you know, I have teenagers now. All kinds of new sides of their personality are emerging. And you're learning about things that are, that can be difficult in terms of, you know, no human life is, is ever quite what you expect it will be, but I think her account is still largely more positive that birth is action. Birth is connected to freedom. I think it's some of the other people in the book. I would say Mary Shelley probably has the most tragic account of birth, and I think that has everything to do with her own personal experiences of it. It was also the moment she was living in 19th century, it was a period of rapid kind of setbacks for women. They had fewer freedoms than they had before the Norman Conquest in England, it's also a period of industrialization and the, you know, height of the slave trade and secularism is setting in. But there's still a sense of that human master humans can't master their realities even as they're attempting that. And so she was born to Mary Wollstonecraft, the early Protofeminist, and her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, and then she went on to have five children of her own, and by the age 24, 4 of them had died. She had one son who outlived her. She also, you know, her husband's first wife committed suicide while pregnant. Her sister took her own life. She had or she had another sister who went through what we may. She has postnatal depression or even psychosis after giving birth, and, had to leave the child and the child died, I think before the baby was one. Also, one of her very close friends she went to down to France and tried to help her give birth to her first child, the mother died, the child died shortly thereafter, so she just witnessed. I mean, if you kind of add this all up, she saw more death in birth than birth, in birth. And she writes this account, this story, Frankenstein. Now of course, very famous, but what I see as one of the greatest birth narratives ever written, and it's just a brilliant book that's playing with all these different questions in a way that never resolves them, which is partly why I think it's, it's maintained so much power that you can go back and never quite kind of solve the riddles that she poses in the book, but really fundamentally concerned with these questions about creativity and creation. You know, what does it mean to create a new life? What does it mean if that new life that's created kills the creator? And you know, here's where we start to get some of the theological questions that need to, you know, 50 some odd years later, half century later, would be saying God is dead, he remains dead and we killed him. We are his murderers. And in the book we have a scientist who is kind of, you know, the, the product of the age of reason and enlightenment and progress. And he goes into his studio and decides he's gonna create a human life and he makes this kind of robot. And thinks it's going to be perfect and beautiful when it comes alive and is not beautiful. It's hideous and he's horrified and it's this monstrous birth. And the book becomes the story of him being pursued by his creation, who reeks all kinds of destruction and at the very end follows him to the arctic and kills him. So, you know, birth, not just in terms of, you know, I thought I would have this beautiful humanoid, and actually he was hideous. But actually the creativity is about creating something that in turn can potentially kill the creator.

Ellie: 36:41

Part of what you're speaking to, in addition to this theme of creation and the unknowability of the results of our creation, is also a question of control, I think, and that kept coming up for me as I was reading your book as well, and this also speaks to some of what you were just talking about. Birth is like death to a large extent outside of our control, right? Even the most planned birth like that of Frankenstein. Or we might think about like somebody in our society who has decided to start a family had been very intentional about the process and it's sort of like going forth, quote as planned is still gonna find that the process of actually giving birth is completely beyond the limits of one's own control. And then of course, once we talk about, you know, the actual child that is begotten, that is also outside of one's control. And I think we see something analogous in death, which is this sense in which death is also outside of our control in a really fundamental way, even in the cases when it is foreseen or perhaps even chosen. And I wanna think about the political implications of this control too, because it's not just outside of control on the individual level. It's also something that politicians, let's say, or political forces try and control. And so birth can very much be a site of oppression. As we alluded to earlier, we can oppress somebody by taking away their ability to give birth by forced sterilization programs. I didn't know before reading your book that there was the forced sterilization in 1970s in India of over 8 million people in a single year. And so there's this sort of eugenicist sterilization project that we see there, or as well among many black Americans. In the 20th century here in the US and we can also, of course, oppress people by forcing them to give birth against their will, which we have seen very much in recent years with the stripping away of Roe v. Wade. And so I'm curious how you think we should think about this violence of forced births or in general about birth as a vehicle of oppression, given the nature of Natality.

Jennifer: 38:57

Yeah. I mean part of the reason I was interested in that connection with Birth and Freedom is to think through these issues because we have histories of both antinatalists coercion of governments deciding, you know, we are gonna have a kind of biopolitics that controls birth rates, or enforces, sterilizations. And of course you have the opposite pro-natalist policies, which, you know, whether it's outlawing abortion or controlling birth in, in other kinds of ways, and of course the future, we have technologies that would allow for all kinds of ways that birth could be controlled by people with the power to do so. But I think there's two things I think one is, and this is a little bit more of an intuitive feeling, and this is to some degree, going back to my own experience, to my experience of raising girls who we talk about, you know, do you wanna have children? And for me, having children was always something I wanted. I wanted very badly from a young age to have children. I can't imagine what that experience would've been like if that was something that was forced. I wonder how much birth becomes something people want to do and invest in and engage in when they don't have the space of freedom for this to be something that grows out of desire. You know something that is, comes out of their own family's wishes, their own understanding of their place in the universe, their own personal histories. The minute you have a kind of state sponsored control of people's bodies. To me that seems like a world that, you know, I'd be nervous about putting new lives into. And I think we see this with the younger generations, that there is this sense that they don't think they wanna have children. And so there's kind of pro-natalist policies that are being put out there, but intuitively. It doesn't seem like that would necessarily have the desired effect. I also, you know, some of the stuff I've read, this is actually a really wonderful book, these that just came out, it's called After the Spike population Progress and the Case for People. It's by two demographers and one of the things, they actually have the statistics, so I'm kind of going by intuition a little bit, but they actually have the statistics to show just how these different policies largely don't work. My husband was a third child in India, born to an untouchable family in a period where there were four sterilizations of people in his cast. And I think there was a limit of two children that families were supposed to have. And so the birthing of him was this act of defiance. And I, I imagine deep desire on his family to, to have this third child, they wanted a third child. But one of the things they, they look at in the book is how both antinatalist coercive policies and pro-natalist coercive policies don't have the effect that they're supposed to. And they look at the statistics. So something like, they do a comparison of China and the one child policy, and they map the birth rates alongside that in Romania, which had pro-natalist policies and things like women getting pelvic exams at work, forced pelvic exams at work. The rates are basically the same. You can't tell, the kind of demographic patterns are the same. So I do think that there's something so deep that birth is so huge and this is about really every part of our lives. This is the fact that we're alive, that we come through the world, through other people, that we don't really completely understand what that process is. That it's connected to desire, it's connected to will. It's also connected to things that are completely outside our control and that these are such deep and basic parts of being alive that aren't easily managed. And I, I think in the book I tried to kind of connect birth with some of that unruly natal spirit or energy. And Nietzche wrote about this so beautifully. You know, he says, you must have chaos within yourself to give birth to a shooting star. That birth was connected with a kind of chaos. So some of these policies, I think, can be an attempt to control that chaos. And there are real ethical considerations and, you know, the debates about things like abortion. I think that were very complex debates that we need to have and not easy answers. But again, I was most interested in this kind of submerged other possibility about a kind of freedom that is also connected with with care.

David: 43:50

I think you captured that unruliness that you're talking about in the book wonderfully when you say that birth is both the norm and the exception in every domain in which we can speak about it. But Jennifer, thank you very much. This has been a wonderful discussion and we recommend your book Natality toward a Philosophy of Birth to all of our listeners and our viewers, it's a wonderful take on the history of philosophy, on feminism, on the politics of birth, and I just wanna add that it also does a really great job at combining the philosophical also with the personal 'cause. There are really vivid and compelling portrayals here of the birth of the individuals that you're talking about, and of their relationship, as you mentioned earlier, to children, to giving birth in the cases where that, where that happens.

Ellie: 44:47

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Jennifer: 44:50

Thank you so much for having me.

David: 44:55

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Ellie: 45:19

David, this is our second interview in a row where we've been introduced to a major cast of characters. This cast of characters is more literary and a philosophical, at least like explicitly speaking than the cast of characters we got with our last guest, Lindsay Stewart, where we were talking about Voodoo Queens, for instance. So let's check that episode. Check out that episode if you haven't listened to it yet. But I think one of the things that I really appreciated about this book was how much she went into the lives of the thinkers that she's discussing. You know, this is more, I would say, of a nonfiction work that kind of hybridizes biography and philosophy than it is a straightforward work of philosophy. And so it was really interesting to hear her after reading the book, which was really enjoyable, talk about both the philosophical implications and also a bit of how that tied into the biography. What are your thoughts after this?

David: 46:13

Yeah, so I really loved, and it fits the subject so well, right? Because she goes into births of all these figures, whether or not they had children, their relationship to marriage and family, their views on childhood. And there were a couple of details that really stood out to me. One of them, it is just a biographical detail that, that really made me stop on my tracks was her claim that when Hannah Arendt came to the United States after escaping the Third Reich, she was learning English while working as a housemaid. And you know, by then she was a philosopher, a well-known thinker. And that really just made me think. About something maybe unconnected to the subject matter of the book, but which is the experience of so many migrants who have to leave their careers behind and come to the United States and begin as gardeners, as housemaids, as uber drivers. And then you realize that there is this whole life behind them that you didn't know. But the book is just peppered with anecdotes of this kind that are actually not irrelevant right to the subject of birth. Also because immigrants come to this land for a new beginning, for a political natality.

Ellie: 47:27

The situatedness of our existence is crucial to the notion of natality as well. We've talked a lot in the episode so far about what it actually means to be born, but also we are all born of other people, and those people prior to giving birth to us are pregnant. And I know, David, you wanted to mention something in this context about thinking about natality in a slightly different sense. So tell us about that.

David: 47:58

Yeah. One of the things I want us to think about a little bit is the limits of birth, or the way in which the concept of birth can sometimes limit our way of experiencing important moments in our own lives. Although I do think it's really important to think about the extent to which that concept has been eclipsed in the history of philosophy due to our interest and our fascination with its opposite, which is death, we think about our being towards death. As with Heidegger, we think about philosophy as learning how to die, right? In the tradition of some ancient philosophers. Thinking about birth can also come with a slight danger, and that is that it can carry such a strong weight because of our associations of birth with novelty, with reproduction with the nation state, that the concept of birth sometimes can also prevent us from seeing certain experiences, especially experiences tied to pregnancy, on their own terms, and this is an argument that I'm getting from a friend of mine, the feminist philosopher, Marjolein Oele, who writes about mourning things that are un-articulable or incomprehensible. So there might be moments where we lose things, where we experience loss, but we don't really know what exactly it is that we lost. We don't have the language to articulate it. In her work, which plays a lot with figures of, the elemental, with figures of beginning and ends. She uses the example of miscarriages and stillbirths, , according to Oele, when we live in a culture that places such a high value on birth and giving birth and being born. The very concept of birth can become so incandescent that it blinds us backwards and makes us see all pregnancies as necessarily having to follow a telos and only having meaning if they reach that telos. And because of that, almost like magnetizing power, when there are pregnancies that don't reach that final telos that endpoint, we lose the capacity to process meaningfully the trauma of the loss. And I really think this is something to keep in mind. And she uses a statistic that really stood out to me, which is that 70% of conceptions do not terminate in birth. So it's actually a minority. Yeah. You know, because they don't take because they're intentionally terminated. And so we're talking about a minority of pregnancies that end in birth. And so how do we also think about everything that leads up to birth , but ends before it on its own terms.

Ellie: 50:45

This is so interesting. I guess, what light would you say that sheds on Natality, because I think that's like a super interesting point from a pregnancy standpoint. Is it just that like only some pregnancies lead to the condition of natality?

David: 50:59

Well, and I think it also might force us to reconsider more broadly the meaning of natality because of course the concept of natality, which means birth, but it also means more generally beginnings or a new opening, the start of a new future, sometimes we think about what starts as the opening of a door, but if we think about the experience of pregnancy from a more inclusive perspective, that's not just about this telos of birth determining everything retroactively, then maybe there can be some endings that don't lead to beginnings, but that have meaning nonetheless. And so I think it's a reminder that not all meaningful experiences need to be that open door, and sometimes there can be, in fact a new beginning in a transformation of the self, in a transformation of how we think about ourselves in moments where we are not witnessing our world expanding through those doors, but potentially shrinking as in the case of these losses, that are very difficult to articulate.

Ellie: 52:06

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David: 52:15

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Ellie: 52:30

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