Fido the Yak

plurality, natality, supply chain management....

There is no reason that all human existences should be constructed on some one, or some small number of patterns. If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 3.

Maternal love for the ordinary life--and not the progress of vitalist technology that can engulf this love or, on the contrary, the backward-looking rejection of this progress on the part of conservative religions that are vociferously probirth--is in a position to guarantee our human condition as beings concerned with the meaning of being there. From this perspective, and taking into accounts threats faced by this life (a life that some people venture to reproduce through technology in "total freedom" and that others mandate through religion and thus grant no freedom), we could predict that life, as Arendt understood the term, is either a feminine life or nothing at all. Of course, psychic bisexuality, which psychoanalysis sees in everyone, allows us to posit that a man could assume femininity of that sort, or even experience maternity defined as a tension present in the love between zōē and bios. And this situation will endure until technology has eliminated the threat of death--but will that ever be possible?

Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 48.

posted by Fido the Yak at 4:20 AM.