Natality with Jennifer Banks

Interactive Transcript

spk_0 Hello and welcome to Overthink.

spk_0 The podcast were two philosophers and gender exciting new discussions about everyday life.

spk_0 I'm Ellie Anderson.

spk_0 And I'm David Pena Guzman.

spk_0 David, there's often one thing that people focus on as the inevitable fact of a human life.

spk_0 And that is death.

spk_0 Or maybe you could say death in taxes, if you will.

spk_0 Sometimes you will focus on those as too.

spk_0 I take it we're not talking about taxes today.

spk_0 We're not talking about taxes today.

spk_0 But we're also not talking about death because even though people often focus on death as the

spk_0 inevitable feature of a human life, there's also another very important in an inevitable feature,

spk_0 which is birth.

spk_0 All of us will die and also all of us were born.

spk_0 What birth and death having common is that they are transitional points between being and non-being.

spk_0 Birth is the pivot point, which is our entrance into existence and mortality, of course,

spk_0 is our exit into non-being, barring, of course, theological religious and spiritual interpretations

spk_0 that presuppose the existence of an afterlife.

spk_0 Yeah.

spk_0 So in that sense, both of these themes bring us face to face with the limits not only of a life,

spk_0 but also with human understanding, because it's so difficult to really think about who we were,

spk_0 were we anything before birth and who we will be, or where we will be after death.

spk_0 And so they are the bookends, not just for our existence, but for the very possibility of thinking

spk_0 our existence.

spk_0 Wow, controversial.

spk_0 Who were we before we were born?

spk_0 Did know we were awaiting into pro-choice debates today.

spk_0 I mean, I guess it is an episode on Natality.

spk_0 But no, I will say on that point, I think there's an interesting disanalogy at the same time,

spk_0 where if we follow Heidegger on his account of death, and I think his account of death is actually

spk_0 great, specifically being towards death, death is the possibility, our own most possibility,

spk_0 which is the possibility of no longer having any possibilities.

spk_0 And I think if we apply that to birth, we could say that what we see instead there is the actuality

spk_0 of my possibility.

spk_0 What birth brings about is myself as having all kinds of life possibilities.

spk_0 Of course, those life possibilities are going to be constrained in some ways.

spk_0 They're not infinite and there are more constrained options for some than for others.

spk_0 But I think there is nonetheless that actualization of possibility that we see with birth.

spk_0 Then again, as you pointed out, we don't have any understanding of our own birth or first-person

spk_0 experience of it.

spk_0 I grew up with a mother who was a doula.

spk_0 She's very big on natural birth and a sort of approach to birth that resists

spk_0 kind of medicalization of it, not that she's anti-establishment.

spk_0 I feel like in the Maha era, we have to be super clear about that.

spk_0 She would mostly work with people who were giving birth in hospitals to be there as a sort of

spk_0 support for them.

spk_0 And she went through a phase when I was young in the 90s where she was really interested in some

spk_0 of these regression therapies where you could revisit your own birth.

spk_0 I think that's a funny, very 90s moment of like, oh, let's try and do this regressive therapy

spk_0 where we can remember our own birth because I think central to the experience of birth is that

spk_0 you maybe not only do not remember it, I think the question of whether you experience it is an

spk_0 open one too.

spk_0 Of course, but you begin by saying that there is a difference between death and birth in relation

spk_0 to this.

spk_0 But there is still a similarity even in connection to the doulas because now there are what are

spk_0 called death doulas, individuals through a company, others at the moment of death, either to offer

spk_0 some form of consolation.

spk_0 Maybe we can use that term or merely company.

spk_0 I have a friend who describes himself as a death doula whose primary activity in those moments

spk_0 is to play classical music to people who find themselves at that transitional pivot point

spk_0 and who were music lovers.

spk_0 And so for them, music offers a passageway.

spk_0 You know, what it is a passageway too unclear.

spk_0 We can't think it.

spk_0 We can't know it.

spk_0 As a high-degers says, it's the limit of our possibilities.

spk_0 But I like the idea that we often want company in those moments where we are navigating the boundary

spk_0 or the borderland between being and non-being.

spk_0 I think it brings into focus just how deeply our reliance on other people in our desire for

spk_0 connection is.

spk_0 And the condition of being born is essentially a condition of being connected to others.

spk_0 That's what a lot of philosophers who focus on birth note.

spk_0 You're not born alone by yourself, right?

spk_0 You're born out of another person's body.

spk_0 And then you're taken care of by others upon your arrival into the world.

spk_0 And so the concept of birth has been really important, especially in feminist approaches within

spk_0 philosophy for focusing on the relational nature of the self.

spk_0 Where a high-degers says that we only ever die alone, nobody can die your death for you

spk_0 and therefore death individualizes us.

spk_0 Those who are interested in talking about birth will often focus on the fact that you aren't

spk_0 born alone and should not be at least equally important to the idea that we are towards our

spk_0 own death. And I recently read Alison Stone's book Being Born, Birth and Philosophy.

spk_0 And in this book, I haven't actually finished yet.

spk_0 So I shouldn't say I recently read it.

spk_0 Let's say I started it a while back and then put it on pause for a while.

spk_0 And I need to return to it.

spk_0 But this is a really fascinating account where she suggests that our human condition is one of

spk_0 relational mortality.

spk_0 And the condition of being born indicates that for us.

spk_0 And when we're born into this kind of inescapable situatedness of relationality,

spk_0 we're also born into social norms and unequal power dynamics.

spk_0 And so she defends a goal of equal birth.

spk_0 She says the features of our natal condition generate a case for equality, for natal equality as

spk_0 an ideal goal.

spk_0 So death, she suggests, is to an extent an equalizer,

spk_0 whereas birth is an unequalizer because we're born into very different social positions.

spk_0 And she thinks we need to defend a notion of natal equality where we are given more equal options

spk_0 once we enter the world than currently we experience in this world of extreme inequality.

spk_0 And of course, anytime we think about the concept of natality, which is our condition of being

spk_0 born, the flow suffer that comes to mind immediately is Hana Arndt, who writes about natality in many

spk_0 works, but especially in the human condition. And for Arndt, this concept does a lot of work,

spk_0 conceptual work, for helping her articulate the importance, not of endings, which is something

spk_0 that we often associate with Heidegger, but of beginnings.

spk_0 And today to help us think about the significance of the concept of natality in Hana Arndt,

spk_0 as well as in a number of other figures from the history of philosophy, we have with us the author

spk_0 of a new book on the subject.

spk_0 Jennifer Banks is Senior Executive Editor at Yale University Press. Her work has appeared in the

spk_0 Boston Review and Pleiades among other publications. She is the author of the recent book Natality

spk_0 Toward a Philosophy of Birth. Jennifer, welcome to Overthink. We're so happy to have you.

spk_0 It's great to be here. Thanks so much. Your book opens by explaining that birth has not exactly

spk_0 been a topic that has been a major focus within philosophy. We love to talk about death, but

spk_0 philosophy in recent times, and not only in recent times, actually for most of the history of philosophy,

spk_0 has marginalized the topic of birth, discussing it very little with few exceptions.

spk_0 Why do you think this has been the case? Why have so many philosophers failed to think birth?

spk_0 The most obvious answer is that the history of thought was largely written by men who weren't,

spk_0 you know, at the center of the experience of giving birth and attending to birth. And, you know,

spk_0 I guess I suppose fathers, but there's also a long sort of scribal tradition that was,

spk_0 was almost a kind of monastic tradition. So these were also sometimes people who weren't even

spk_0 around children, never mind not being kind of at the center either bodily or in terms of supporting

spk_0 a birth. So I think there was a distance. And, you know, I also think that there was, you know,

spk_0 births sort of confronts the history of thought with things that are difficult in terms of the

spk_0 vulnerability of the body, sort of the limits of our own memory, if writing is an attempt to take

spk_0 our experience and to give it some sort of form to create meaning out of it. Births sort of defies

spk_0 some of those attempts at order or perhaps rationality and that that sort of a stereotype too that

spk_0 birth is associated with disorder or rationality. But I think in some ways there's a truth to that.

spk_0 Birth is something we can't remember, which is interesting to think about how do we try to access

spk_0 an experience that in terms of our own experience of it, both men and women, anyone who has been born,

spk_0 our consciousness cannot reach that point, which is really a kind of confrontation with the

spk_0 limits of our own consciousness. I also just, you know, since the book has been published,

spk_0 I've thought a lot about the nature of language itself. And one of the puzzles I've really

spk_0 thought a lot about is one of the biggest predictors of falling Natality rates is literacy. It's

spk_0 also wealth, then cultures that become wealthier birth rates go down and of course education.

spk_0 Which on the one sense you think that part of what we're being educated about is learning how to

spk_0 create better lives and having more options available to us and less suffering and longer lives

spk_0 in all these things that I think are very positive. But there's also for me something deeply

spk_0 puzzling about this, you know, that I think I've long really always had this interest in birth and

spk_0 felt like there was so much there that was so rich and so imaginative and so much at the center

spk_0 of human experience and also devoted my life to language, you know, professionally, mostly as an

spk_0 editor, but also as a writer. And to think about the ways that birth somehow defies language

spk_0 that so many of the attempts to kind of put birth into language seem to come up short,

spk_0 somehow they fail to capture it. This is something that was told to me when I was having children,

spk_0 you know, it was kind of whispered. It's sort of the thing that get told to mothers, you know,

spk_0 it's beyond language. It's kind of annoying to hear that when you're someone who works with language

spk_0 and publishes books on every topic. It's frustrating to hear that this huge experience somehow

spk_0 is beyond language, which just doesn't seem entirely true. But I do wonder, you know, languages this

spk_0 way of symbolizing the world and beginning to create abstractions from it. There's something about

spk_0 birth that's so intensely physical that has that kind of messiness and unpredictability.

spk_0 And one of the quotes I love about language is comes from Urs Ligwen who also writes a lot about

spk_0 birth, but is Schucks about writing as a silencing of language. And you have oral traditions about

spk_0 birth of mothers and midwives and sisters kind of passing knowledge along. But somehow when you get

spk_0 to writing to actually fixing something in that form, it resists language or it language somehow

spk_0 can't bear that set of meanings. I think there's something there that said I also was surprised

spk_0 just in reading and researching the book and writing it. How much I really found that there really

spk_0 actually is a lot about birth in our traditions. I think that it tends to be deemphasized though.

spk_0 So it was really striking to go back and realize, you know, how much of Greek philosophy, for instance,

spk_0 talks about birth. How many of our religious traditions, you know, birth is at the center

spk_0 of their stories, their theological formulations, their existential questions, the narratives,

spk_0 how many of the medieval mystics were we're talking about birth, how many of the early feminists or

spk_0 participants in the women's rights movements were writing about birth. But also, you know, I talk

spk_0 in the book about Nietzsche and how much birth we find in his work. So it can be very much at the center

spk_0 of the bodies of work of these very famous philosophers or novelists or theologians. But that's not

spk_0 the version that we usually get of them. So there is that I talk about its kind of secondariness.

spk_0 If women are the second sex birth is somehow secondary. And just one last point, I think that

spk_0 illustrates that if you look at, you know, you go into a Catholic church, for instance, you'll have

spk_0 the Virgin Mary and birth is so central to that, to their kind of ritual traditions, to theology.

spk_0 But it's not when hangs at the center of the church. It's not the central object of

spk_0 a tour worship. And you have something like Easter in many Catholic communities is more

spk_0 theologically significant than Christmas. I was really struck by that part in your book where you

spk_0 say it's the crucifix and not the manger that hangs at the center. And you also, I mean, just to

spk_0 pick up quickly on the ancient grief point that you mentioned, Socrates' mother famously a midwife

spk_0 and Socrates described himself as a midwife of ideas. And so I also famously, you know, skeptical

spk_0 of the written word, I think, for Socrates. There was something philosophical that couldn't be

spk_0 captured in writing. And he conceived a philosophy as a kind of birth, although often an unsuccessful

spk_0 birth, he says, like a lot of times the babies that are being born are windags. They're like not

spk_0 actual babies, because ideas don't really have any life to them. Yes, in Plato too, you know, so much of,

spk_0 you know, work like the symposium. There's so much kind of birth language, gestational language

spk_0 that you find in that book. And this sort of hierarchy of birthing and the greatest births

spk_0 are the birthing of ideas and concepts and the lower kind of birthing as, you know, birthing of

spk_0 human beings and bodies. But yeah, striking how much you find, particularly in that period, I think

spk_0 that that kind of coming out of that axial age, there was something in that like fourth, fifth

spk_0 century BC where you start like all of this kind of blossoms and then there are all these traditions

spk_0 that grow out of that and come to fruition in different kinds of ways. And it really is, I mean,

spk_0 I think that sense of natality is very much woven through our histories of the books and attempt

spk_0 to kind of bring it more to the surface. I think most of us don't, you know, go to college and

spk_0 take a class on birth or we don't we don't have a sense of what are the great birth novels or

spk_0 I think still so many people who give birth, you know, say those words that I talk about in the book,

spk_0 you know, why didn't no one tell me what was this was like. And these are very often educated people

spk_0 who've had great educations. And I think even in mythology, we don't talk about birthing stories,

spk_0 we talk about origin stories, right? There's a sense in which beginnings get recast in a way that

spk_0 conceals that we're talking about something that is physical and generative that is a form of birth,

spk_0 even if it's purely symbolic or mythological. But your comments about language and birth also make

spk_0 me think about how difficult it would be to write, let's say, the story of birth or the biography

spk_0 of birth because it's unclear who the author of that story would be, would it be the infant who is

spk_0 born or would it be the birthing parent that becomes the subject of that narrative? There's a

spk_0 sense in which birth because it is a relational process and because it stands at the boundary between

spk_0 self and other, it's the moment where the self gets separated, it's really unclear who the

spk_0 the subject of birth even is to begin with. Yes, yeah, absolutely. I think even when I use the word

spk_0 birth, it's, you know, there is the experience of being born and there's the experience of

spk_0 giving birth. And I use it pretty interchangeably in the book, but obviously those are very different

spk_0 experiences. Well, and in your book, I think there is a critique of the history of philosophy

spk_0 for ignoring birth, but you do point out that there is a counter history that runs through. There

spk_0 have been a number of thinkers who have centered birth and this term, Natality, this English word,

spk_0 in one way or another in their work. And one of those thinkers that you focus on is the Jewish

spk_0 philosopher Hannah Arendt who uses the term Natality to articulate a philosophy of birth and a

spk_0 philosophy of politics that is really salient for thinking the present actually given the

spk_0 rise of totalitarianism in our world. And I want to have you define for us Arendt's notion of

spk_0 Natality. And then I would like you to talk a little bit about how that concept influenced your

spk_0 own thinking about what it means to articulate a philosophy of birth, which is what you try to do

spk_0 in this book. Yeah, just to briefly kind of summarize her story. She was Jewish woman who had grown

spk_0 up in Germany kind of came of age, you know, during the First World War was educated in the interwar

spk_0 period, studied theology was a student of Martin Heidegger, ended up, you know, as the Nazis came

spk_0 to power, was pushed out of Germany and was interred in France, escaped from the internment camp,

spk_0 and spent 18 years as a stateless person, and eventually ended up in New York, became a leading

spk_0 public intellectual writer, political theorist of the 20th century. And, you know, I think we often

spk_0 think of her, you know, we think of origins of totalitarianism, we think of phrases like the

spk_0 banality of evil, of course, scholars of her work known Natality well, it's not an unknown concept,

spk_0 but I don't think it says well known as other aspects of her work, but when you read her work,

spk_0 it's a very central idea. And I think the quickest way to understand what she meant by it is maybe

spk_0 to think about it as a foil for Martin Heidegger's idea of being toward death, you know, that we're

spk_0 thrown into the world by birth and he imagined us kind of always turn towards death horizon, you know,

spk_0 that's where we are headed. And she kind of flipped that and imagined what it would be like to be

spk_0 toward birth. And so even as we are aging, we are constantly have death before us, death is a reality,

spk_0 we are mortal, we wrestle with immortality. She also makes birth a constant reference point.

spk_0 You know, why did she do this? I think some of it was she was just interested in the nature of

spk_0 beginnings. This is there in her earliest work. She did her dissertation on St. Augustine,

spk_0 but later publishers love in St. Augustine in English. And it was very much an exploration of

spk_0 what is the nature of a beginning of origins. But you know, as she went through the World War

spk_0 2 and the Holocaust and its aftermath, her interest became much more political. And so she

spk_0 made very interest in birth, but what she was interested in is the political significance

spk_0 of birth. And so she had this belief that we are born not in order to die, but in order to begin.

spk_0 And birth was a reflection of our ability to begin things. So the fact that we're born means

spk_0 we're beginners. And to be a beginner means you are an actor. And so birth for her was very

spk_0 closely connected or virtually synonymous with action. This was a very key concept for her.

spk_0 And I think what she had seen in the Nazi era living in a totalitarian regime was that

spk_0 things had kind of closed down. So this was a period of endings and of people becoming very

spk_0 isolated from one another. The bridges between one another crumbling and people feeling

spk_0 increasingly impudent. So by the mid-20th century there had been all this progress and

spk_0 there was this tremendous kind of human mastery of the world. You know that we had developed and

spk_0 invented all these amazing things and controlled our environments and all these kind of ways.

spk_0 So you have this sense of tremendous power but also complete impotency, especially politically.

spk_0 And I think we still see this in our culture. We're at a moment where we can play any song we

spk_0 want on our phones, any moment. And we can snap our fingers and order something on Amazon.

spk_0 It's there. And so there's just like ways we have a lot more control. But simultaneously people

spk_0 feel like the political issues we deal with are intractable. And there's a little difference

spk_0 in individual can make. And she saw this, you know, 75 years ago or so and was observing it in her

spk_0 her own culture. And it's a very strange thing. And to me it's still incredibly surprising,

spk_0 you know, how she turned to birth. She was not a mother. She was not, was surrounded by children

spk_0 or worked with children. I think she was philosophically concerned with children. She thought

spk_0 about children but not immersed in domestic life. And for various reasons did not have children

spk_0 herself. But just birth, you know, so much of what she thought and believed in was based upon

spk_0 birth and the importance of people believing they can begin new things, including beginning

spk_0 a whole new life, you know, that they can they can welcome in in the next generation.

spk_0 And she did believe that once you had kind of lost trust in that human capacity that these were

spk_0 the conditions under which totalitarianism spreads. And this was one of the most interesting things to

spk_0 me about your book. It really made me think differently about birth is this idea that birth is

spk_0 political, but it doesn't necessarily need to be politicized, at least at origin. Of course,

spk_0 like, okay, there are lots of reasons why we should and do politicized birth. But I think what

spk_0 you're saying following a ren is that even prior to the politicization of birth as we think about

spk_0 it, including debates about population, pro-natalism, anti-natalism, eugenics, access to abortion,

spk_0 and so on and so forth, some of which we'll return to later, there's this ontological category

spk_0 of natality that is our very existence as birth debiings that is political at one step below all

spk_0 of those debates. And that one step below is that birth is as you quote in the book a mark of

spk_0 resistance. And that was just really interesting to me because I think coming out of feminist philosophy,

spk_0 I'm used to talking about birth in terms of the feminist political social and political issues that

spk_0 are very important to consider. But I'm really not used to thinking about birth just as an

spk_0 ontological condition that is really the condition for the possibility of our status as political

spk_0 creatures. And not only that, but also as a mark of resistance to totalitarianism. So maybe

spk_0 you could say a little bit more about that too. Like, why did a rent think that birth was

spk_0 resistant to totalitarian forces? Yeah, I mean, she equates birth and beginnings with freedom.

spk_0 Both the pro-natalist and the anti-natalist positions are largely about not equating birth

spk_0 with freedom. You know that to have a pro-natalist civilization, you have to have a coercive element.

spk_0 And on the other side, you know, birth is associated with something that's being forced on people.

spk_0 There is a kind of an association in anti-natalism sometimes with both the oppressiveness of birth

spk_0 for the person giving birth, but even in some expressions of it for the person that's born,

spk_0 you know, that they didn't consent to birth. That this is like a, they're being conscripted into

spk_0 life against against any kind of consensual will. And what I was really interested in is in

spk_0 finding alternatives to those positions. And what we find is that kind of between the cracks

spk_0 and crevices of the history of thought over the last at least 200 years or so, this period of a

spk_0 kind of liberal modernity. There are alternative ways of understanding birth and of drawing on

spk_0 developing paradigms that are about the kind of obligations of the individual to their community,

spk_0 but that also balance that with individual liberties. I read had that, but she also

spk_0 went deeper in terms of seeing birth as just fundamentally connected to our ability to act.

spk_0 And you know, I think it's interesting. One of the lowest birth rates, you know, in the world

spk_0 is in Eastern Europe. This is a culture that has had just such a long history of

spk_0 totalitarian regimes of warfare, you know, in cultures where there hasn't been a lot of freedom,

spk_0 these tend to be, these are often cultures that don't have high-notality rates. It's not

spk_0 exclusively true. But I do believe that there is a connection. And it's varied because I think

spk_0 that one of the things I was trying to show in the book is how our understandings of birth are

spk_0 of course shaped by our conditions. And so there are all these different expressions. Freedom

spk_0 means something very different for a surgeon or truth. One of the people I track in the book,

spk_0 who was a slave, who gave birth to her children while she was, you know, owned by her master,

spk_0 but who ends up developing these very strong sort of arguments for the renewal of civilization

spk_0 that connect birth with what looks like just a stational language and language of care and

spk_0 maternity. So I'm interested in the variation that there are a lot of different expressions,

spk_0 partly as a way to recover alternative ways of thinking through these issues. I feel like the,

spk_0 a lot of the debates about birth are really stuck in these kind of binary positions. And,

spk_0 you know, most of the lived experience is somewhere in the middle of that. I think that

spk_0 the rhetoric and the discourse doesn't always reflect how people experience birth is often one

spk_0 of the most joyful and happy and meaningful experiences of their life and also one of the most

spk_0 challenging. And I think Toni Morrison, the book I have a chapter on her, she describes birth as

spk_0 the most liberating thing that ever happened to her. You know, that's not really what I think

spk_0 people expect her to say, but you read her work and that, you know, she describes birth under some

spk_0 of the most difficult historical circumstances and personal tragedy, but also there's always that

spk_0 sense of birth's libertary potential. And that sense of the liberatory power of birth, I often

spk_0 think about it in terms of a reset of the subject of birth, whoever that is, but also a reinvention

spk_0 of the world, because people often talk about they live in a different world when they find themselves

spk_0 in the wake of a birth, whether that is literally the birth of a new person or the birth of a new

spk_0 idea, the birth of a new project, the birth of a political movement. So there's a sense in which

spk_0 the world itself changes altogether because of birth, the world is reborn. But I want to hear

spk_0 pivot a little bit to thinking about that sense of possibility and maybe an ambiguity that it

spk_0 carries within it. Because when we give birth to something, we can't always predict how it will

spk_0 turn out. This is true of our children, much to my mother's chagrin. I probably did not turn out,

spk_0 like maybe she envisioned, who knows, that's true of all of us, right? But it is also true about

spk_0 birth in the more metaphorical sense of the term. Maybe I publish a book that has a life of its own

spk_0 that I didn't anticipate and that maybe I don't embrace that that can happen. Maybe you birth the

spk_0 wind egg instead of a real baby if you're one of the top teeth and you're off your ass.

spk_0 Yes, exactly. And so my point here is that there is all this liberatory potential. There is a

spk_0 sense of promise. But we can also give birth to something that either is or becomes or is perceived

spk_0 as dangerous or monstrous. And I'm thinking about this in connection to the chapter in the book

spk_0 where you talk about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Can you talk about the relationship between

spk_0 birth and monstrosity? Yes, so I mean that chapter on Mary Shelley is really where I guess come

spk_0 closest to talking about monstrosity. Perhaps in the Tony Morrison chapter two where we see some of

spk_0 the like the most trying and difficult expressions of birth, whether it's in beloved or book like

spk_0 the blue-est eye, young girls, been impregnated by her father and his pregnant. And one of the things

spk_0 I tried to always keep a part of the narrative is the tragedy that's interwoven with birth.

spk_0 To me personally, I see it more as tragedy the monstrosity. I also in the book kind of included

spk_0 monstrosity and I'll talk a little bit about Mary Shelley's version. But I think we have to keep

spk_0 remember that throughout most of history, something like I don't know a third of birth ended in

spk_0 death within the first year. Birth and death were very closely associated and birth was this

spk_0 incredibly risky and often deadly thing either for the infant or for the mother. Going back to

spk_0 a rent, she connected birth with action in action is always risky and it's riddled with error.

spk_0 Part of the totalitarian mindset or ambition is to avoid human error to not open one self up to

spk_0 something that can't be controlled. So once you act, you set in motion a sequence of events that

spk_0 you can't control. You have a child, you don't know what the child's going to be like, you don't know

spk_0 if the child's going to live. If they are going to have a disability for instance or I have teenagers now,

spk_0 all kinds of new sites of their personality are emerging and you're learning about things that

spk_0 are that can be difficult in terms of, you know, the no human life is is ever quite what you

spk_0 expect it will be. But I think her account is still largely more positive that birth is action,

spk_0 birth is connected to freedom. I think it's some of the other people in the book. I would say Mary

spk_0 Shelley probably has the most tragic account of birth and I think that has everything to do with

spk_0 with her own personal experiences of it. It was also the moment she was living in 19th century.

spk_0 It was a period of rapid kind of setbacks for women. They had fewer freedoms than they had before

spk_0 the Norman conquest in England. It's also a period of industrialization and the you know,

spk_0 height of the slave trade and secularism is setting in but there's still a sense of that human

spk_0 master, humans can't master their realities even as they're attempting that. And so she was born

spk_0 to Mary Wollstonecraft, the early proto-feminist and her mother died shortly after giving birth to her.

spk_0 And then she went on to have five children of her own and by the age 24, four of them had died.

spk_0 She had one son who who outlived her. She also, you know, her husband's first wife committed

spk_0 suicide while pregnant. Her sister took her own life. She had another sister who

spk_0 went through what we may see as postnatal depression or even psychosis after giving birth and

spk_0 had to be had to leave the child to end the child died. I think before the baby was one.

spk_0 Also one of her very close friends, she went to down to France and tried to help her get birth

spk_0 to her first child, the mother died, the child died shortly thereafter. So she just witnessed,

spk_0 you know, I mean, if you kind of add this all up, she saw more death in birth than birth and birth.

spk_0 And she writes this account, the story Frankenstein now, of course, very famous, but what I see is

spk_0 one of the greatest birth narratives ever written. And it's just a brilliant book that's playing

spk_0 with all these different questions in a way that never resolves them, which is partly why I think it's

spk_0 it's maintained so much power that you can go back and never quite kind of solve the riddles that

spk_0 she poses in the book. But really fundamentally concerned with these questions about creativity and

spk_0 creation, you know, what does it mean to create a new life? What does it mean if that new life that's

spk_0 created kills a creator? And you know, here's where we start to get some of the theological questions

spk_0 that need to, you know, 50 years later, half century later would be saying God is dead. Here

spk_0 means dead, we killed him. We are, we are his murders. And in the book, we have a scientist who is

spk_0 kind of, you know, the product of the age of reason and enlightenment, progress, and he goes into his

spk_0 his studio and decides he's going to create a human life and he makes this this kind of robot.

spk_0 And thinks it's going to be perfect and beautiful and it comes alive and is not beautiful.

spk_0 It's hideous and he's horrified. And it's this monstrous birth. And the book becomes the story of

spk_0 of him being pursued by his creation who wreaks all kinds of destruction at the very end,

spk_0 fallazam to the Arctic and and kill him. So, you know, birth not just in terms of, you know,

spk_0 I thought I would have this beautiful humanoid and actually he was hideous, but actually the

spk_0 creativity is about creating something that in turn can potentially kill the creator.

spk_0 Part of what you're speaking to in addition to this theme of creation and the unknowability

spk_0 of the results of our creation is also a question of control, I think. And that kept coming up for me

spk_0 as I was reading your book as well. And this also speaks to some of what you were just talking about.

spk_0 Birth is like death to a large extent outside of our control, right? Even the most planned birth,

spk_0 like that of Frankenstein or we might think about like somebody in our society who has decided to

spk_0 start a family had been very intentional about the process and it's sort of like going forth

spk_0 quote as planned is so going to find that the process of actually giving birth is completely beyond

spk_0 the limits of one's own control. And then of course once we talk about, you know, the actual

spk_0 child that is begotten that is also outside of one's control. And I think we see something

spk_0 analogous in death, which is this sense in which death is also outside of our control in a really

spk_0 fundamental way, even in the cases when it is for scene or perhaps even chosen. And I want to think

spk_0 about the political implications of this control too, because it's not just outside of control

spk_0 on the individual level, it's also something that politicians, let's say, or political forces try

spk_0 and control. And so birth can very much be a site of oppression as we alluded to earlier. We can

spk_0 oppress somebody by taking away their ability to give birth by forced sterilization programs.

spk_0 I didn't know before reading your book that there was the forced sterilization in 1970s in

spk_0 India, over 8 million people in a single year. And so there's this sort of eugenicist sterilization

spk_0 project that we see there or as well among many black Americans in the 20th century here in the US.

spk_0 And we can also of course, oppress people by forcing them to give birth against their will,

spk_0 which we have seen very much in recent years with the stripping away of Roe v. Wade. And so

spk_0 I'm curious how you think we should think about this violence of forced births or in general

spk_0 about birth as a vehicle of oppression given the nature of natality.

spk_0 Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I was interested in that connection with birth and freedom is to

spk_0 to think through these issues because we have histories of both anti-natalist coercion

spk_0 of governments deciding, you know, we are going to have a kind of biopolitics that controls

spk_0 birth rates or, you know, enforces sterilizations. And of course, you have the opposite pro-natalist

spk_0 policies, which, you know, whether it's, you know, outlawing abortion or controlling birth in

spk_0 in other kinds of ways. And of course, the future we have technologies that would allow for all

spk_0 kinds of ways that birth could be controlled by people with the power to do so. But I think there's

spk_0 two things. I think one is, and this is a little bit more of an intuitive feeling, and this is

spk_0 to some degree going back to my own experience, to my experience of raising girls who we talk about,

spk_0 you know, do you want to have children? And for me, having children was always something I wanted.

spk_0 I wanted very badly from a young age to have children. I can't imagine what that experience would

spk_0 have been like if that was something that was forced. I wonder how much birth becomes something

spk_0 people want to do and invest in and engage in when they don't have the space of freedom for this

spk_0 to be something that grows out of desire. You know, something that is, comes out of their own

spk_0 family's wishes, their own understanding of their place in the universe, their own personal

spk_0 histories. The minute you have a kind of state-sponsored control of people's bodies, to me, that

spk_0 seems like a world that, you know, I'd be nervous about putting new lives into. And I think we see

spk_0 this with the younger generations that there is this sense that they don't think they want to have

spk_0 children. And so there's kind of pro-natalist policies that are being put out there, but intuitively,

spk_0 it doesn't seem like that would necessarily have the desired effect. I also, you know, some of the

spk_0 stuff I've read, this is actually a really wonderful book. These, it just came out, it's called After

spk_0 the Spike Population Progress in the Case for People. It's by two demographers. And one of the things

spk_0 they actually have the statistics, so I'm kind of going by intuition a little bit, but they actually

spk_0 have the statistics to show just how these different policies largely don't work. My husband was a

spk_0 third child in India, born to an untouchable family in a period where there were four sterilizations

spk_0 of people in his cast. And I think there was a limit of two children that families were supposed

spk_0 to have. And so the birthing of him was this act of defiance. And I imagine deep desire, honest

spk_0 family, to have this third child. They wanted a third child. But one of the things they look at

spk_0 in the book is how both anti-natalist coerce their policies and pro-natalist coerce of policies

spk_0 don't have the effect that they're supposed to. And they look at the statistics. So something like

spk_0 they do a comparison of China and the one child policy. And they map the birth rates alongside

spk_0 that in Romania, which had pro-natalist policies and things like women getting pelvic exams at work,

spk_0 forced pelvic exams at work. The rates are basically the same. You can't tell the kind of demographic

spk_0 patterns are the same. So I do think that there's something so deep that birth is so huge. And

spk_0 this is about really every part of our lives. This is the fact that we're alive, that we come through

spk_0 the world, through other people, that we don't really completely understand what that process is,

spk_0 that it's connected to desire, it's connected to will, it's also connected to things that are

spk_0 completely outside our control. And that these are such deep and basic parts of being alive that

spk_0 aren't easily managed. And I think in the book I tried to connect to kind of connect birth with some

spk_0 of that unruly needle spirit or energy. And I need to wrote about this so beautifully, you know,

spk_0 says you must have chaos within yourself to give birth to a shooting star. The birth was connected

spk_0 with a kind of chaos. So some of these policies, I think, can be an attempt to control that chaos.

spk_0 And there are real, real ethical considerations and the debates about things like abortion. I

spk_0 but again, I was most interested in this kind of submerged other possibility about a kind of

spk_0 freedom that is also connected with with care. I think you captured that unrulyness that you're

spk_0 talking about in the book wonderfully when you say that birth is both the norm and the exception

spk_0 in every domain in which we can speak about it. But Jennifer, thank you very much. This has been a

spk_0 wonderful discussion. And we recommend your book, Natality Toward a philosophy of birth to all

spk_0 of our listeners and our viewers. It's a wonderful take on the history of philosophy, on feminism,

spk_0 on the politics of birth. And I just want to add that it also does a really great job at combining

spk_0 the philosophical also with the personal, because there are really vivid and compelling portrayals here

spk_0 of the birth of the individuals that you're talking about and of their relationship. As you

spk_0 mentioned earlier, to children to giving birth in the cases where that happens. Thank you so much.

spk_0 This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

spk_0 Craving more overthink. Subscribe to our substock for an extended version of our episodes,

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spk_0 David, this is our second interview in a row where we've been introduced to a major cast of

spk_0 characters. This cast of characters is more literary and if philosophical, at least explicitly

spk_0 speaking, then the cast of characters we got with our last guest, Lindsay Stewart, where we were

spk_0 talking about voodoo queens, for instance. So let's check out that episode if you haven't listened

spk_0 to it yet. But I think one of the things I really appreciated about this book was how much she

spk_0 went into the lives of the thinkers that she's discussing. You know, this is more, I would say,

spk_0 of a nonfiction work that kind of hybridizes biography and philosophy than it is a straightforward

spk_0 work of philosophy. And so it was really interesting to hear her after reading the book, which is

spk_0 really enjoyable, talk about both the philosophical implications and also a bit of how that

spk_0 tied into the biography. What are your thoughts after this? Yeah, so I really loved and it fits the

spk_0 subject so well, right? Because she goes through the books of all these figures, whether or not they

spk_0 had children, their relationship to marriage and family, their views on childhood. And there

spk_0 were a couple of details that really stood out to me. One of them, it's just a biographical detail

spk_0 that really made me stop on my tracks was her claim that when Hannah Arrent came to the United States

spk_0 after escaping the Third Reich, she was learning English while working as a housemaid. And you know,

spk_0 just made me think about something maybe unconnected to the subject matter of the book, but which is

spk_0 the experience of so many migrants who have to leave their careers behind and come to the United

spk_0 States and begin as gardeners, as housemates, as Uber drivers. And then you realize that there is this

spk_0 whole life behind them that you didn't know. But the book is just peppered with anecdotes of this kind

spk_0 that are actually not irrelevant, right, to the subject of birth also because immigrants come to

spk_0 this land for a new beginning. Yeah, political natality. The situatedness of our existence is crucial

spk_0 to the notion of natality as well. We've talked a lot in the episode so far about what it actually

spk_0 means to be born, but also we are all born of other people. And those people prior to giving birth to

spk_0 are pregnant. And in your David, you wanted to mention something in this context about thinking

spk_0 about natality in a slightly different sense. So tell us about that. Yeah, one of the things I want

spk_0 us to think about a little bit is the limits of birth or the way in which the concept of birth

spk_0 can sometimes limit our way of experiencing important moments in our own lives. Although I do

spk_0 think it's really important to think about the extent to which that concept has been eclipsed

spk_0 in the history of philosophy due to our interest and our fascination with its opposite, which is death.

spk_0 We think about our being towards death as with Heidegger. We think about philosophy as learning how

spk_0 to die, right, in the tradition of some ancient philosophers. Thinking about birth can also come with

spk_0 a slight danger. And that is that it can carry such a strong weight because of our associations of

spk_0 birth with novelty, with reproduction, with the nation state that the concept of birth sometimes

spk_0 can also prevent us from seeing certain experiences, especially experiences tied to pregnancy on

spk_0 their own terms. And this is an argument that I'm getting from a friend of mine, the feminist

spk_0 philosopher Margeline Ola, who writes about mourning things that are unarticulable or incomprehensible.

spk_0 So there might be moments where we lose things where we experience loss, but we don't really know

spk_0 what exactly it is that we lost. We don't have the language to articulate it. And in her work,

spk_0 which plays a lot with figures of the elemental, with figures of beginning and ends, she uses the example

spk_0 of miscarriages and stillbirds. According to Ola, when we live in a culture that places such a high

spk_0 value on birth and giving birth and being born, the very concept of birth can become so incandescent

spk_0 that it blinds us backwards and makes us see all pregnancies as necessarily having to follow

spk_0 atelos and only having meaning if they reach that telos. And because of that, almost like magnetizing

spk_0 power, when there are pregnancies that don't reach that final telos, that end point, we lose the

spk_0 capacity to process meaningfully the trauma of the boss. And I really think this is something to

spk_0 keep in mind. And she uses a statistic that really stood out to me, which is that 70% of

spk_0 conceptions do not terminate in birth. So it's actually a minor, you know, because they don't take

spk_0 because they're intentionally terminated. And so we're talking about a minority of pregnancies

spk_0 that end in birth. And so how do we also think about everything that leads up to birth but ends

spk_0 before it on its own terms? This is so interesting. I guess what light would you say that sheds on

spk_0 natality? Because I think that's like a super interesting point from a pregnancy standpoint.

spk_0 Is it just that like only some pregnancies lead to the condition of natality?

spk_0 Well, and I think it also might force us to reconsider more broadly the meaning of natality,

spk_0 because of course the concept of natality, which means birth, but it also means more generally

spk_0 beginnings or a new opening, the start of a new future. Sometimes we think about what starts as the

spk_0 opening of a door. But if we think about the experience of pregnancy from a more inclusive

spk_0 perspective, that's not just about this telos of birth determining everything retroactively,

spk_0 then maybe there can be some endings that don't lead to beginnings, but that have meaning

spk_0 nonetheless. And so I think it's a reminder that not all meaningful experiences need to be that

spk_0 open door. And sometimes there can be in fact a new beginning in a transformation of the self,

spk_0 in a transformation of how we think about ourselves in moments where we are not witnessing our world

spk_0 expanding through those doors, but potentially shrinking as in the case of these losses that are

spk_0 very difficult to articulate. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to

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spk_0 We'd like to thank our audio editor, Erin Morgan, our production assistants,

spk_0 Bayarma, Bat or Dean and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music.

spk_0 And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.

Natality with Jennifer Banks

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