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A philosophical exploration of birth, maternity, and reproduction. Winner of the 2007 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy
Winner of the 2007 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy
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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Gift of the Other
1. The "Facts" of Life: Beauvoir’s Account of Reproduction
A Feminist Approach to Levinas
A Levinasian Approach to Feminism
Birth, Time, Ethics
2. The Body Politic: Arendt on Time, Natality, and Reproduction
Take 1: Birth as a Project
Take 2: Birth as an Ambiguous Situation
3.Welcome the Stranger: Birth as the Gift of the Feminine Other
Vita Activa: Labor, Work, Action
The Temporality of Action: Promise and Forgiveness
Thinking Through Natality
Reproducing Natality: Cavarero's Reading of Arendt
4. Fathers and Daughters: Levinas, Irigaray, and the Transformation of Paternity
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
5. Ethics and the Maternal Body: Levinas and Kristeva Between the Generations
Paternity as Infinite Discontinuity
Otherwise than Paternity: Irigaray Reading Levinas
From Paternity to the Maternal Body: Isaiah 49
6. Maternal Ethics, Feminist Politics: The Question of Reproductive Choice
Time and the Maternal Body
Ethics and Herethics
Moses and His Mothers: Numbers 11:12
Notes
Defending the Imaginary Domain: Drucilla Cornell
Levinas Between Ethics and Politics
Ethics, Politics, and the Prospect of "Unborn Mothers"
Altered Maternities
Bibliography
Index