The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (review)

Lisa Guenther’s The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction is a book I have been waiting for a long time. It is one of the first studies to undertake the ambitious project of articulating the philosophical and the ethical significations of maternity in the context of feminist politics of reproduction and abortion rights. The Gift of the Other shifts philosophical discussions of finitude from mortality to natality and proposes to approach the event of birth not as a fact of biology but as a primary ethical gift that orients human existence toward being with others prior to becoming oneself. Yet, as Guenther argues, given the history of the political exploitation of maternal responsibility and the history of forced reproduction, any ethics of birth depends on the politics of reproductive freedom for women. Thus the book negotiates between the ethical significance of birth and the politics of reproductive choice—a negotiation that shows the political implications and interventions of ethics into abortion debates, and provides an alternative justification of reproductive freedom to the one offered by the liberal notion of the self-possessed individual.

Drawing her inspiration from a number of philosophical and ethical orientations— existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and French and American feminisms—Guenther argues that birth is a primary ethical gift of generosity that founds the subjectivity it welcomes to the world. Such a gift then is both aporetic and anarchic: aporetic insofar as it blurs the boundaries between the recipient and the gift; anarchic because the recipient of the gift has never been cotemporaneous with the event of generosity that founds her existence. As an ethical event, birth opens a dimension of temporality that has never been present to experience. Evocative of the temporality of Emmanuel Levinas’s trace of the other, the event of birth belongs to the anarchic past, which can neither be remembered nor forgotten by the recipient of that gift. According to Guenther, the anarchic temporality of birth as the gift of another undermines the self-possession of subjectivity and constitutes it as always already open and responsible to others. As she puts it, “to be born is to be given to another in a time of irrecoverable pastness that is not my home, but rather a time from the Other and ultimately for the Other” (10). Consequently, we learn about our birth only retrospectively from the stories of others who may or may not have witnessed that event. Thus the event of birth is given to the subject at least twice—as the corporeal ethical event and as linguistic narratives of that event. It is precisely this irretrievable past event of birth given by others that constitutes an ethical subject as always already welcomed and being with others.

The book begins with the critical analysis of Simone de Beauvoir’s ambiguity between freedom and facticity. Guenther’s reinterpretation of that ambiguity in relation to birth constitutes the first step in her conception of embodied ethics. And yet, despite Beauvoir’s contestation of the patriarchal myth of woman’s biological destiny and despite her argument for women’s reproductive freedom, Guenther argues that the existentialist notion of freedom does not allow Beauvoir to explore a positive ethical significance of birth. The subsequent chapters develop further the importance of embodiment and freedom by rethinking Hannah Arendt’s distinction between biological reproduction and the political realm of natality, which is the source of plurality and freedom. Beginning with a well-known feminist critique of Arendt’s opposition between private and public, Guenther offers her own brilliant reinterpretation of birth from the perspective of reproduction, production, and natality.

In the book’s second part, we see a shift from the discussion of the ambivalent relationship between birth, embodiment, and freedom in existentialism and Arendt’s political philosophy to the understanding of birth as an ethical event and its anarchic, disruptive temporality. This discussion begins with Jacques Derrida’s and Hélène Cixous’s...