The Germanic Review, 88: 150–164, 2013 Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2013.784678 Born Again: Arendt’s “Natality” as Figure and Concept Jeffrey Champlin Hannah Arendt introduces “natality” as a conceptual moment when one is born into the political as the sphere where acting together can create the truly unexpected. I argue that this new conception of freedom in The Human Condition draws its strength from a philosophical and rhetorical transformation of the question of the definition of man in theology and the natural sciences. I follow the lead of scholars who highlight Arendt’s relation to Heidegger and Augustine, but my method of close reading—I offer the first examination of each appearance of the term “natality” in The Human Condition—leads me to show how Arendt’s engagement with philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen opens the space for alternative conceptions of freedom. The figurative and corporeal insistence of her writing, enacted in an embrace of the materiality of language, not only indicates liberation from the strictures of the empirical (as one expects from a philosophical concept) but also demonstrates ways in which the unexpected can arise both in this sphere of freedom and as a fundamental shift of this sphere. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, Augustine, Christianity, feminism, freedom, Arnold Gehlen, Martin Heidegger, The Human Condition, natality, philosophical anthropology, second birth “I n 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe [ ... ].” 1 Scholars in a rush to get to a political or literary science-eye perspective on Hannah Arendt’s theoretical blockbuster “action” and its fashionable double “natality” tend to race past not only this opening line of The Human Condition but the entire prolog. In doing so, they often fail to emphasize the threats of historical and technological automation that compel Arendt to wrestle with the history of political philosophy and articulate a new idea of freedom. Yet her exposure of determinism in its many guises and forceful defense of the new seems particularly apt today, when free market economics appears to leave us with no choice but to accede to a neo-liberal “End of History,” and the internet age compels us to 1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1958), 1. 150 Downloaded by [Middlebury College] at 12:44 03 August 2013 CHAMPLIN  BORN AGAIN 151 surrender the time needed for reflection to the urgent need to press “reply” that keeps us in a world-wide web of constant hyper-connectivity. Arendt articulates a conception of freedom that is broader than the choices available within any particular mode of economics that would claim historical supremacy and funda- mentally different from the reductions of physical labor offered by machines. Instead, she introduces “natality” as a conceptual moment when one is born into the political as the sphere where acting together can create the truly unexpected. Yet while Arendt writes that natality “may be the central category” of political thought, she never presents it in a systematic fashion. 2 In an attempt to produce this missing center, scholars generally relate the term to Arendt’s philosophical precursors in order to show that despite the striking bodily resonance of the term, she does not mean that physical birth guarantees freedom but instead employs the idea of birth as a way of speaking about one’s insertion in social space. For example, Peg Birmingham and Horst Brunkhorst explain natality in terms of Heidegger’s notion of thrownness (Geworfenheit), while Stephan Kampowski sees it as emerging from Augustine’s emphasis on divine creation. 3 Such philosophical coordination helps us confront the challenge of Arendt’s natality in terms of a structural paradox: we must think of an emergence into a social world that both allows one to find one’s place but at the same time remains radically open to change. In their emphasis on birth as a concept, however, scholars have sacrificed attention to Arendt’s striking style and unexpected rhetorical formulations, specific uses of language that show how a world of meaning can shift from within. 4 In this article, I argue that Arendt’s critique of history and technology draws its strength from a philosophical and rhetorical transformation of the question of the definition of man in theology and the natural sciences. While natality opens a distance between man and his essence that is a general precondition for entrance to the political, Arendt also repeatedly employs the term in relation to the body. This corporeal insistence of her writing, enacted in an embrace of the materiality of language, not only indicates liberation from the strictures of the empirical (as one might expect from a philosophical concept) but also demonstrates ways in which the unexpected might arise within this sphere of freedom. Rather than trying to achieve a satellite-high view of natality, I offer a close reading of the handful of pages in which Arendt actually discusses it by name in the Human Condition. 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 149; Horst Brunkhorst, “Equality and Elitism in Arendt,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana R. Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188; Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 229. 4 While my emphasis on Arendt’s use of language aligns me with literary scholar Sussanah Gottlieb (see note 16 below), my interdisciplinary approach also draws on the work of such interpreters as the political scientist Bonnie Honig and the philosopher Peg Birmingham. For recent work attuned to Arendt’s rhetoric, see Avital Ronell, “What Was Authority,” in Loser Sons (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 19–34, and Judith Butler, “Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences,” Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 3 (2011): 280–95. Downloaded by [Middlebury College] at 12:44 03 August 2013