ABSTRACT: REPRESENTING MATERNITY IN PHILOSOPHY
Few living philosophers would conjecture that women cannot be philosophers; however, the classical notion that those who generate life cannot create ideas continues to inform philosophical notions of maternity. It is unfair to require exclusion on the basis of sex; however, the inconvenient possibility is that Aristotles notion of maternity promotes skepticism, not about the political status of women, but about the merits of political equality as an over-arching, regulative ideal which applies to all relationships. As Arendt notes, while the opposition of two worlds so long associated with the feminine and the masculine risks consolidating sexist ideologies, the possibly greater risk occurs when philosophers personalize metaphysics. Arendt sidesteps some of these thornier issues propagated by Aristotles notion of maternity by replacing maternity with natality. Natality gestures towards the infants promise to be unpredictable; in doing so, the concept highlights how infants complicate our attempts to extrapolate identity from biological circumstance. Like Arendt, Klein uses the context of reproductive biology to highlight the manner in which ambiguity permeates memory and identity but, unlike Arendt, encourages her readers to analogize from maternity rather than natality. By widening the scope of her lens of analysis to include maternity, Klein destabilizes the philosophical habit of regarding birth from the point of view of he who is born but does not bear. Kristevas subject in process is this same trajectory fully realized. Destabilizing the boundary between the creation of ideas and the generation of life permits philosophy to return to its conceptual progenitors, the physical and the metaphysical, with the legitimate hope of reproducing a most fertile offspring: s/he who generates life and creates ideas.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03312010-081841 |
| Date | 07 May 2010 |
| Creators | Ambrose, Robin |
| Contributors | David Wood, gregg horowitz, Kelly Oliver |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03312010-081841/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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