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Summary
2007 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy
A philosophical exploration of birth, maternity, and reproduction.
The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity.
“…[an] accomplished, first book.” — Philosophy in Review
“Guenther presents an original, compelling, and lucid analysis of birth as a gift that, if given rather than forced, grounds subjectivity, plurality, and ethical sociality. This is a groundbreaking work that revises Levinas’s ethics for feminist reproductive politics, and it will have a significant impact on key debates in existential phenomenology, feminist theory, bioethics, and biopolitics.” — Rosalyn Diprose, author of Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas
Lisa Guenther is Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at The University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Gift of the Other
A Feminist Approach to Levinas
A Levinasian Approach to Feminism
Birth, Time, Ethics
1. The “Facts” of Life: Beauvoir’s Account of Reproduction
Take 1: Birth as a Project
Take 2: Birth as an Ambiguous Situation
2. The Body Politic: Arendt on Time, Natality, and Reproduction
Vita Activa: Labor, Work, Action
The Temporality of Action: Promise and Forgiveness
Thinking Through Natality
Reproducing Natality: Cavarero's Reading of Arendt
3.Welcome the Stranger: Birth as the Gift of the Feminine Other
Derrida and the Gift of the Impossible
Cixous and the Gift of the Feminine
Levinas and the Gift of Hospitality I am welcomed: From ethos to oikos You are welcome: From oikos to ethos
4. Fathers and Daughters: Levinas, Irigaray, and the Transformation of Paternity
Paternity as Infinite Discontinuity
Otherwise than Paternity: Irigaray Reading Levinas
From Paternity to the Maternal Body: Isaiah 49
5. Ethics and the Maternal Body: Levinas and Kristeva Between the Generations
Time and the Maternal Body
Ethics and Herethics
Moses and His Mothers: Numbers 11:12
6. Maternal Ethics, Feminist Politics: The Question of Reproductive Choice
Defending the Imaginary Domain: Drucilla Cornell
Levinas Between Ethics and Politics
Ethics, Politics, and the Prospect of “Unborn Mothers”
Altered Maternities
