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Lisa Guenther
Philosophy Department, University of Auckland
'Time and the Maternal Body'
Birth is often understood in terms of a cyclical temporality, in which the pregnant body is borne along by the endless cycles of 'nature' or 'the species.' But this mode of understanding risks presenting the individual woman's body as a helpless instrument of nature, a mere vehicle for species reproduction. Even Simone de Beauvoir, for example, theorizes pregnancy in relation to an immanent time of repetition which exposes women as (in her words) 'the prey of the species.' In this paper, I begin to rethink the temporality of the pregnant body along the lines of a discontinuous or diachronous temporality, in which the mother gives birth to a time which is not her own, but rather the unforeseeable future of the child. I borrow this concept of diachronous time from Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the difference between time of the self and the time of the Other is a condition for ethics, where ethics is understood as my unconditional responsibility for the Other. By thinking through the difference between the mother's time of pregnancy and the child's time of gestation, I suggest an understanding of birth as the irruption of a radically new time, rather than an instance of endless repetition. Further, I argue that this difference between a mother who 'is' and a child who 'is not yet' can be understood as a paradigm for ethics, insofar as my ethical responsibility commands me to give to the Other a time which is hopeful and new, thus disrupting the inevitability of cyclical time.
Bio: Dr Lisa Guenther is a new lecturer in 19th and 20th Century Philosophy at the University of Auckland. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto in Canada. Her dissertation, entitled 'Birth, Time, and Ethics' explores the significance of birth for continental philosophers, particularly Levinas, Heidegger, and French Feminism.
<lisagu@rocketmail.com>