Between Private and Public: Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Notion of ‘Natality’ Through Contemporary Feminist Thought

This article re-examines Arendt’s notion of ‘natality’ through a reinterpretation of her public-private distinction as dynamic, and engaging specifically with feminist reflections on ‘the maternal’ as provided by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. As the human capacity of beginning something new, Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’ implies that human beings come into the world not as self-generated, but as related to others. Nonetheless, this notion has been criticized for abstracting from the concrete experience and generative process of birth. More generally, it has often been argued that Arendt separates human beings’ first appearancein the world through birth from their capacity to appear in the shared scene of political life. Building on feminist reflections on maternity and suggesting an interpretation of Arendt’s public/private distinction as dynamic, this article shows that the private sphere exhibits its plurality and embodiment through intimate relations that inform the political space. This way, it argues that the interplay between what Arendt calls ‘first and second birth’ can be rethought as non-exclusive but connected, reconsidering the ‘first birth’ as a political and existentially significant event already staged within a network of relations.