Adriana Cavarero
Adriana Cavarero | |
---|---|
Born | 1947 (age 76–77) Bra, Italy |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
Main interests | Feminism, political philosophy |
Adriana Cavarero (born 1947) is an Italian
Biography
Cavarero was born in
Work
Cavarero's interest in the intersection of political philosophy and feminist thought was further developed in Stately Bodies which examines the bodily metaphor in political discourse and in fictional depictions of politics, including
the remarkable paradox whereby politics expels the body from its foundational categories while for thousands of years the political order has been figured precisely through the metaphor of the body.[1]
Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000)
Definitively influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt, Cavarero wrote Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood in which she developed an original theory of selfhood as a "narratable self". Appreciated and discussed by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, this book, by contrasting the sovereign subject of the metaphysical tradition, confronts with the urge of rethinking politics and ethics in terms of a relational ontology, characterized by reciprocal exposure, dependence and vulnerability of an incarnated self who postulates the other as necessary. In fact, through readings of such diverse figures as Homer, Sophocles, The Arabian Nights, Isak Dinesen and Gertrude Stein, Relating Narratives presents a singular contribution to the intersection of narrative theory, ethics and political discourse.[2]
Cavarero claims that we perceive ourselves as narratable, as protagonists of a story that we long to hear from others. This desire for a story, for our story to be told, becomes the guiding element in the new approach to identity. Our identity is not possessed in advance, as an innate quality or inner self that we are able to master and express. It is rather the outcome of a relational practice, something given to us from another, in the form of a life-story, a biography.
For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005)
Cavarero's next book, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, "re-think(s) the relation between speech and politics – announced in Aristotle's formula whereby man's nature as a political animal [zoon politikon] is bound up with man's characterization as that animal which has speech [zoon logon echon] – by focusing her attention on the embodied uniqueness of the speaker as it is manifested in that speaker's voice, addressed to another. In this way, she radically departs from more traditional conceptions of what constitutes 'political speech,' such as the signifying capacity of the speaker, the communicative capacity of discourse, or the semantic content of a given statement. As in her earlier work, Cavarero continues to develop and deepen a number of themes foregrounded by Hannah Arendt—who asserts in The Human Condition that what matters in speech is not signification or 'communication' but rather the fact that 'in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.'. Refining the radically phenomenological perspective that Arendt puts forth in her work, Cavarero locates the political sense of speech in the singularity of the speaker's voice, the acoustic emission that emits from mouth to ear. For Cavarero this politic emerges from 'the reciprocal communication of voices,' wherein what comes to the fore is above all the embodied singularity of the speakers in relation to others, no matter what they say.[3]
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2008)
In her book, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Cavarero draws attention to various ways in which scenes of violence from the past century through the present (as well as what might be called ancient and early modern precursors to these scenes) cannot be adequately understood through the received categories of modern political philosophy -- 'terrorism,' 'war,' 'friend/enemy,' or 'state versus non-state sanctioned actions' -- and proposes a decisive shift in perspective. Taking note of the fact that, increasingly, we are dealing with victims who are almost all unarmed or defenseless – "inermi," defenseless/helpless – she argues that it is precisely this helplessness and these particular helpless people whose conditions and circumstances ought to orient our thinking about scenes of violence, rather than the socio-political aims or psychoanalytical perspectives of the perpetrators. Cavarero proposes the name "horrorism" for those forms of violence that are "crimes" which "offend the human condition at its ontological level." Pairing, unexpectedly,
Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016)
Adriana Cavarero's Inclinations critiques the characterization of the human being as upright, erect—in philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropological writings, literature and artworks. Her aim is to illuminate "the effects of this figuration, the 'truths' and 'power-relations' that these discursive or artistic figurations produce and install…[and to tally] the costs of depicting the human being as upright when it comes to our view of women, our overall understanding and collective self-conception."[4] The figuration of the human being as 'upright,' Cavarero suggests, obscures a more natural figuration: Inclination. In this book, she hones a "rhetoric of inclination," in order to superimpose it "like a transparent screen, over the rhetoric of the philosophical subject, to highlight the differences between the two ontological, ethical, and political models."[5]
Bibliography
- In Spite of Plato (1995) ISBN 978-0-415-91447-5
- Relating Narratives (2000) ISBN 978-0-415-20058-5
- Stately Bodies (2002) ISBN 978-0-472-09674-9
- For more than one voice ISBN 978-0-8047-4955-8
- Horrorism: naming contemporary violence ISBN 978-0-231-14456-8
- Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude ISBN 978-1-503-60040-9
References
- ^ Stately Bodies translated by Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shamek (Ann Arbor, MA: University of Michigan, 2002)
- ^ C.f. Paul A. Kottman, "Introduction" to Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Routledge, 2000).
- ^ Paul A. Kottman, "Introduction," For More Than One Voice (Stanford University Press, 2005).
- ^ Paul A. Kottman, Series Editor Preface to Cavarero, Inclinations, translated by Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), vii.
- ^ Paul A. Kottman, Series Editor Preface to Cavarero, Inclinations, translated by Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 14.