Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics ― Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek provide a reconfiguration of Hannah Arendt's philosophy of natality from the perspective of biopolitical and feminist theory. They show that Arendt provides new ways of contesting biopolitical threats to human plurality and the way biopolitics, along with sexism, racism and political theology target women's reproductive agency. They also extend Arendt's account of collective political action to include consideration of political hospitality, responsibility and story-telling as ways of countering the harms of biopower.

The book offers an insightful account of the political ontology of Hannah Arendt and forms new dialogues between her and major 20th- and 21st-century thinkers including Foucault, Agamben, Nancy, Kristeva, Esposito, Derrida, Levinas and Cavarero.

Rosalyn Diprose is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2008), Coporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas (SUNY, 2002) and The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (Routledge, 1994).

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2012), An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2001), The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995). She is the editor of Grombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (SUNY, 1998) and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY, 2005) and Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordham University Press, 2008) and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).