Joseph D. O'Neil. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 312 pp.

Summary

As many of us would concede and regret, we live in a moment of crisis of the political and in times of incredibly divisive politics. Joseph O'Neil's Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe may be motivated by this crisis, but it also shows us, beyond the current moment, that the antagonistic and contingent is at the very heart of the political. Our wish for a “pacified globe” (Carl Schmitt, as quoted by O'Neil, 25) might never be fulfilled, but that could be a good thing. At the core of this project is the question of how political action is possible without relying on essentialism. We do not need to be reminded of current discussions to understand that this is a timely project. O'Neil offers a sophisticated account of the concepts behind these debates which delivers to the reader both a panoramic display of political theory and a careful consideration of literary texts.

Drawing on twentieth-century heavyweights on both sides of the political divide, most notably Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, O'Neil sets out to explore and reconceptualize the political in the age of Goethe. The author does not understand his contribution as a genealogy of political concepts from Lessing to Arendt and beyond. His interest is more structural than historical. O'Neil argues that the conceptualization of the political in literary texts around 1800 is characterized by features of contingency and rupture that are captured in metaphors of birth and are best understood using Arendt's concept of natality. The book's premise is that “birth qua natality is the main marker of a discourse of the political in the decades around 1800” (25). Natality, as second birth, overlaps with birth where it promises something absolutely new and it diverges from birth where the latter is bound to causation and determinism. Natality promises both novelty and contingency and is, for Arendt, the precondition for entering the political sphere as an acting being. To put it in Schmittian terms, natality marks the state of exception in which the sovereign acts and “the power of real life breaks through the crust of mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (Schmitt, as quoted by O'Neil, 21).