Adriana Cavarero
Encyclopedia
Adriana Cavarero is an Italian
philosopher
and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona
. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California
, Berkeley
and Santa Barbara
, at the New York University
and Harvard. Cavarero is widely recognized in Italy, Europe and the English-speaking world for her writings on feminism
and theories of sexual difference, on Plato, on Hannah Arendt
, on theories of narration and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature. Along with Giorgio Agamben
, she represents one of the most interesting and widely discussed thinkers within contemporary Italian philosophy.
– a group dedicated to feminist philosophy as political engagement. Trained in ancient philosophy – with a special focus on the writings of Plato
– and inspired by feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray
, Cavarero first drew wide attention with her book, In Spite of Plato, which pursues two interwoven themes: it engages in a deconstruction of ancient philosophical texts, primarily of Plato
, but also of Homer
and Parmenides
, in order to free four Greek female figures (a Thracian servant, Penelope, Demeter and Diotima) from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a domestic role. Secondly, it attempts to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. By contaminating the theory of sexual difference with Arendtian issues, Cavarero shows that, while death is the central category on which the whole edifice of traditional philosophy has been based, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking.
' Antigone, Plato
's Timaeus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hobbes' Leviathan, Maria Zambrano
's The Tomb of Antigone and Ingeborg Bachmann
's Undine Goes. The book explores:
, 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.
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.
's notion of natality and Thomas Hobbes' description of maternal dominion as the power to "nourish or destroy," Cavarero elaborates this ontology as one of "vulnerability" – a reciprocal exposure in which we are given over to either the other's care or harm, "almost as if the absence of harm or care were not even thinkable". She argues that it is precisely this alternative between care and doing harm – and not some "pure, gratuitous cruelty" – that is the "generative nucleus" of horror, precisely because this vulnerability is the condition of human life as it is given from birth to death. Horrorism is, so to speak, a radical rejection of care – a wound inflicted precisely where care was most needed. Therefore, the violence strikes more deeply at the "dignity" of the unique, bodily life that is harmed; or better, because horror is a form of violence that is made possible by the heightened vulnerability of helplessness, it also implicitly reveals this dignity.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona
University of Verona
The University of Verona is a university located in Verona, Italy. It was founded in 1982 and is organized in 8+2 Faculties.-History:In Verona, at the beginning of the 1950s, a group of Catholic intellectuals established the "Ludovico Antonio Muratori" Free High School of Historical Science...
. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
and Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara is the county seat of Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Situated on an east-west trending section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States, the city lies between the steeply-rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean...
, at the New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
and Harvard. Cavarero is widely recognized in Italy, Europe and the English-speaking world for her writings on feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and theories of sexual difference, on Plato, on Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
, on theories of narration and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature. Along with Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer....
, she represents one of the most interesting and widely discussed thinkers within contemporary Italian philosophy.
Biography
Cavarero was educated at the University of Padua, where she wrote a thesis on philosophy and poetry, in 1971, and spent the first years of her Academic career. In 1983 she left Padua for the University of Verona, where she was co-founder of DiotimaDiotima
Diotima may refer to:*Diotima of Mantinea, an ancient female philosopher and tutor of Socrates*423 Diotima, an asteroid*Diotima , a 2011 album by experimental black metal band Krallice...
– a group dedicated to feminist philosophy as political engagement. Trained in ancient philosophy – with a special focus on the writings of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
– and inspired by feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
, Cavarero first drew wide attention with her book, In Spite of Plato, which pursues two interwoven themes: it engages in a deconstruction of ancient philosophical texts, primarily of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, but also of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
and Parmenides
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...
, in order to free four Greek female figures (a Thracian servant, Penelope, Demeter and Diotima) from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a domestic role. Secondly, it attempts to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. By contaminating the theory of sexual difference with Arendtian issues, Cavarero shows that, while death is the central category on which the whole edifice of traditional philosophy has been based, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking.
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 SophoclesSophocles
Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...
' Antigone, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Timaeus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hobbes' Leviathan, Maria Zambrano
María Zambrano
María Zambrano Alarcón was a Spanish essayist and philosopher.Zambrano studied under and was influenced by José Ortega y Gasset and went on to teach Metaphysics at Madrid University from 1931 to 1936...
's The Tomb of Antigone and Ingeborg Bachmann
Ingeborg Bachmann
Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet and author.-Biography:Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, in the Austrian state of Carinthia, the daughter of a headmaster. She studied philosophy, psychology, German philology, and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna...
's Undine Goes. The book explores:
Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (2000)
Definitively influenced by the work of Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
, 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
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...
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.
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.Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (2008)
In her most recent 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, Hannah ArendtHannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact...
's notion of natality and Thomas Hobbes' description of maternal dominion as the power to "nourish or destroy," Cavarero elaborates this ontology as one of "vulnerability" – a reciprocal exposure in which we are given over to either the other's care or harm, "almost as if the absence of harm or care were not even thinkable". She argues that it is precisely this alternative between care and doing harm – and not some "pure, gratuitous cruelty" – that is the "generative nucleus" of horror, precisely because this vulnerability is the condition of human life as it is given from birth to death. Horrorism is, so to speak, a radical rejection of care – a wound inflicted precisely where care was most needed. Therefore, the violence strikes more deeply at the "dignity" of the unique, bodily life that is harmed; or better, because horror is a form of violence that is made possible by the heightened vulnerability of helplessness, it also implicitly reveals this dignity.
External links
- Adriana Cavarero website http://www.cavarero.eu http://www.cavarero.eu