One thought on Arendt and Natality

The concept of natality, ascribed to Arendt is one way of thinking about the preliminary shape of a baby’s relationships. An astonishing amount of ink has been spilled over it, considering how little Arendt dwells on it (and an interesting example of what happens when you place a concept right at the beginning of a difficult book).[1] Arendt, a political thinker, is interested both in what we need to do to “provide and preserve the world for…the constant influx of newcomers” but mostly in the newness of the infant:

the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.[2]

Here we see what is likely a jab at Heidegger and his investment in death. But as we’ve seen, it is Anne O’Byrne who develops this insight such that the relationality of this newness is privileged, and she also does it by turning Heidegger on his head: “when we select death as the cipher for our finitude and understand it as Heidegger did in Being and Time, it turns out to be what individuates us; birth, in contrast, reveals us as being in relation”.[3]

On the one hand a baby is extracting itself from an intensely intimate relationship (in utero) and learning to remake itself in a world, but it is already bound up in relationships, some of the most essential and physical relationships it will ever have, and it is out of these relationships that it learns to form new ones.

---

[1] CITE The human condition

[2] CITE Arendt (emphasis added)

[3] (O’Byrne, 9).