Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice - Paperback

by Rosalyn Diprose (Author), Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Author)

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek provide a reconfiguration of Hannah Arendt's philosophy of natality from the perspective of biopolitical and feminist theory. They show us that Arendt provides new ways of contesting biopolitical threats to human plurality and the threat of biopolitics - along with sexism, racism and political theology - to women's reproductive agency. They extend Arendt's account of collective political action to include political hospitality, responsibility and story-telling as ways of countering the harms of biopower. Diprose and Ziarek give us an insightful account of the political ontology of Hannah Arendt and form new dialogues between her and major 20th- and 21st-century thinkers including Foucault, Agamben, Nancy, Kristeva, Esposito, Derrida, Levinas and Cavarero.

Front Jacket

A reconsideration of Arendt's work from the perspective of contemporary biopolitical theory Diprose and 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 twentieth-century as well as contemporary thinkers including Foucault, Agamben, Nancy, Kristeva, Esposito, Derrida, Levinas and Cavarero. Rosalyn Diprose is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Buffalo.

Author Biography

Rosalyn Diprose is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has published numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on concepts and issues at the intersection between philosophies of embodiment, existential phenomenology and biopolitical theory. Her book publications in this field include Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (SUNY 2002), The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Difference and Embodiment (Routledge 1994/2007). She is co-editor of Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (Acumen 2008/ Routledge 2014) and Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Allen & Unwin, 1991).

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).