philoSOPHIA

Looking at the title of this book, one would expect another study of Hannah Arendt. “Natality” (associated with finitude) is a signed concept; natality “belongs” to the Arendtian corpus. And no doubt, O’Byrne’s book contains a substantial engagement with Arendt. Yet her project is much more ambitious on two counts: first, O’Byrne does not limit her study to Arendt but pursues natality through investigations of Heidegger, Dilthey, and Nancy. Second, her project is not simply exegetical. O’Byrne is developing her own reflection by pursuing natality in areas where the above-mentioned authors might not have thought of inquiring.

The notion of natality operates in a plurality of discourses: biological, existential, political, metaphysical, and ethical. This semantic plurality is constitutive of the very concept of natality. Thus, it is crucial not to separate and isolate these senses but to consider them all at once; natality is political and existential, biological and ethical. The basic questions the notion of natality raises, in their naive and inescapable form, are often contained in interrogative laments: “Why was I born?” “Where do I come from?” These have no more answer than the question: “Why will I die?” Just as mortality is a feature of our present existence (even though death is necessarily futural), natality is also a feature of our present (even though our birth belongs to an immemorial past). If being-toward-death entails understanding the limited [End Page 105] nature of existence, natality entails realizing that one might never have existed at all.

It is an essential dimension of finitude that we cannot coincide with the two events that comprise us. For Dilthey, the fact that we never simply coincide with ourselves, that we exist at a distance from ourselves, makes asking the question of meaning both necessary and impossible. “Specifically, any attempt I make to discover the meaning of all the events in my life will fail because the whole in relation to which those events have meaning will never be available to me” (54). For this reason, in a metabolic as well as a generational sense, our existence can only be unachieved: “[W]e are neither finite nor infinite but rather we have in-finitude or living finitude as our way of being” (8). O’Byrne draws a parallel argument about “syncopated temporality,” that is, the mode of being in time whereby we grasp ourselves only belatedly, a delayed understanding whereby we (individual or society) comprehend ourselves only as we have been. The event of our birth is a prime instance of syncopated time: it is an event for others (mother, family, whoever else was present); in a sense, we were not present at our own birth and only later does it become “ours.” While O’Byrne resolutely sets out to investigate natality in terms of embodiment, this doesn’t mean that birth is a purely “natural phenomenon.” At best, biology can only address how we were born. Rather, birth is the event that joins the biological and the historical. To be born means that we arrive into a world that is already older than we are, which means that we are faced with the task of appropriating this past. What’s more, “Being born is an occurrence that cannot be expressed using an active verb. I was born. Birth happened to me and those around knew it as my birth long before it became possible for me to appropriate it as mine” (42). Thus, the reappropriation of our own birth is necessarily mediated by others, in particular, by a prior generation.

Using “metaphysics” in the common and pejorative sense of something ethereal and abstruse, O’Byrne reproaches Heidegger’s metaphysics for a “highly abstract discussion of Dasein as thrown into the world” (19) that does not correlate thrownness to natality. In its haste to analyze being-toward-death and futurity, the analytic of Dasein would have missed natality, even though birth constitutes the threshold between not yet and being there. This leads O’Byrne to reinterpret thrownness and even Befindlichkeit in terms of...