Fecundity and natal alienation: rethinking kinship with Levinas and Orlando Patterson

ENLisa Guenther’s essay raises the matter of identity straightaway. Guenther’s essay situates Levinas’s work on politics in relation to the notion of fraternity, which is always connected to a common father. Brothers are brothers. The idea has specific meaning. But what happens to that sense of kinship, politics, and community in the transatlantic slave trade, where notions of paternity (and maternity) are severed from community meaning, rendered instead as lines of private property and the (re)production of labor and capital? What of Levinas’s work survives this shift in context? If Levinasian politics and its ethical moment proceed from fraternity, what happens when that specific meaning is lost in another historical experience? With Orlando Patterson’s work as a frame, Guenther explores issues of social death and natal alienation in order to recast the problem of fecundity, not as paternity and the linearity of the name, but instead as a matter of “wounded kinship” and futurity won through struggle and loss—all of which recalibrates Levinasian thinking to another historical experience.