PAPA A. (2012). Tecnicizzazione della nascita e vita frozen. La categoria filosofica di natality di Hannah Arendt. MEDICINA E MORALE, vol. 2012/2; p. 209-233, ISSN: 0025-7834

This article examines the theoretical representation of our coming into this world within the philosophical tradition. Western philosophy has, in fact, always favoured thanatos and, therefore, the abandonment of this world. Hence the erroneous belief that ethos does not pass through the new and the generated, but through fact in a deterministic sense and through the destruction of bios. Our birth places us well within full citizenship and political ethics. On this front, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt has enriched the philosophical reflection on birth with the neologism natality and has had the merit of introducing a new category of thought. The danger that we run today, with the introduction of the artificial into the procreative act, is to transform birth into a procedure, risking at the same time to make it some sort of instrument of social hygiene, so as to fulfill a project of superior humanity. A “frozen” life - to use an Arendtian term , an impoverished life, or at least a fabricated life - like all eugenic practices that introduce fabrication into the public sphere, may therefore expose politics to a serious misunderstanding: that of assuming that public space (the space in which one appears and is born) can be "ruled" to control, for example, future generations. In this sense, bioethical reflection, opened by the practice of in vitro fertilization and of pre-implantation diagnosis, puts us in front of the danger of an ethical void and of the need for a theoretical development of birth (native) between randomness and planning of human source.