Disappointing Natality

Abstract: This article departs from an encounter between Hannah Arendt and Ingeborg Bachmann in 1962 and shows that both writers can be seen to be in an implicit dialogue around the question of natality in those years. Reading Bachmann's short stories "Alles" and, to a lesser degree, "Das dreißigste Jahr," the essay demonstrates that the Austrian writer develops a notion of a "disappointing natality" that charts a third course between Arendt's affirmation of natality and the negation of natality in queer theoretical work such as Lee Edelman's No Future . This disappointment is then shown to point the way to Bachmann's conception of futurity and her poetics of a "materiality of living."