Le secret de la naissance

What secret might be hidden in birth? none, it seems, since being born is a natural reality that all living beings share. Yet, despite this apparent clarity, birth is a subject to which philosophy has returned, which still returns time and again, and which has also been of central importance in the famous reflections of Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. After presenting the arguments of these two authors, who analyse birth as as access to Life (Henry) and as an antecedent that cannot be appropriated even from a biological point of view (Ricoeur), the article proposes to find the secret of birth in the notion of filiation. This motif, which has already been analysed by Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion on the basis of paternity, we will approach starting from the Hymn to the Virgin that Dante Alighieri has Saint Bernard pronounced in the 33th canto of the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy, where the Virgin Mother is invoked under the title 'Daughter of your Son'. From this title, we will try to show how the epithet, although attributable to a single Virgin mother and Daughter, has nevertheless inaugurated a possibility which, although at first glance incredible, by its very happening offers itself as a possibility of and for all filiation.