Adriana Cavarero Research Articles

Reanimating Public Happiness: Reading Cavarero and Butler beyond Arendt

Abstract This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.

Queer Madonnas, Nonviolence, and the Macho Christian Right; or “How to Do Mariology Without Men”

ABSTRACT This article asks whether Adriana Cavarero’s invocation of the Christian Madonna to inspire a pacifist feminist ethics could help counter the ever-strengthening alliance between Conservative Christianity and the radical right which I refer to as “Macho Christianity.” To flesh out Cavarero’s undeveloped invocation of the Madonna’s love as “non-stereotypical” I turn to queer and non-dominant indigenous Mariologies to provide a novel reading that demonstrates, against the dominant exegetical tradition, the radical absence of normative Man at the heart of the Christian story. This indicates that for too long the normative Man of patriarchy has held Christianity hostage, limiting and contorting its message. In response, I use these alternative Mariologies to develop Cavarero’s “non-stereotypical” love via a novel interpretation of the Christian love of enemies as a nonviolent, militant, performative political practice of interruption, from which less dominatory ways of relating to one another could emerge.

Rethinking Political Organization from a Feminist Standpoint: Politicizing an Ethics of Care and Vulnerability

In this paper, I develop a philosophical account demonstrating how alternative feminist concepts, in particular an ethics of care and vulnerability, would help improve our political policies and practices. I suggest that reviewing our political institutions from a feminist standpoint allows for a rethinking of these structures and practices in a more democratic framework, opening the field to all minoritized groups that are excluded from it still. I rely on a positive account of vulnerability, understood as an inherent relational dynamic of interdependency and solidarity between embodied subjects, rather than an individual show of weakness in reaction to violence. The central question I address is: if caring relations of solidarity are a possible response to vulnerability, how can this inform politics despite the ambiguity of vulnerability itself? Is such a positive reframing of the concept even possible? In other words, how do we articulate vulnerability with violence, and can it be reframed outside of these ties to violence? First, I look at Judith Butler’s positive renewal of the concept (Butler 2004). Second, I contrast this approach to the complementary findings of Adriana Cavarero (Cavarero 2011) that would allow for the emancipation of vulnerability from its dichotomous ties to violence. These findings could have political ramifications for addressing a revisited account of vulnerability that informs alternative political institutions and practices, which I explore in the final section.

OTHERTONGUES: MULTILINGUALISM, NATALITY AND EMPOWERMENT IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM

ABSTRACTWritten in German by the Black British author and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo, the novel Adas Raum (2021) intervenes in contemporary debates on colonial legacies to forge ‘a critical multilingualism’ (Yildiz 2012), challenging master‐narratives and tropes of founding fathers which privilege linear constructions of time and bounded concepts of nation and peoples. This article examines how Otoo foregrounds diasporic female figures as material agents by focusing on ambivalent experiences of childbearing, then argues that the multilingual feminist text rejects dualistic heteropatriarchal models to reconceive community in terms of intersubjective encounters and shared spaces. To illuminate the politics of Otoo's structural concern with rebirth, I take up the concept of ‘natality’ developed in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, which offers a model for imagining possibilities of political action that defy forms of domination. Black feminist thought further informs the ambivalent figuration of motherhood in Otoo's narrative and its central preoccupation with intertwined issues of gender, racial and class discrimination. Challenging the ethnocentricity that has been identified throughout Arendt's oeuvre, Otoo reveals instead how fifteenth‐century West African concepts of space and time can be understood as in dialogue with the post‐war philosopher's understanding of natality as the central category of political thought.

Can The Human Speak?

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals.

Minnenas magiska lykta: Om Ingmar Bergmans berättelse Laterna magica

Laterna magica (1987) is the first book Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) published whose content was not intended to be developed into film or theater. This autobiographical book has often been used in research as a reference in various contexts concerning Bergman’s life and art. From a research point of view, however, it is difficult to use the memory book as evidence for facts or truths, as there are many examples of it simply being fiction. It is therefore interesting today to read Laterna magica as a work of art in its own right and thus perhaps find a different “truth” than the one about Ingmar Bergman’s life. For his story of himself, Bergman has very consciously chosen a literary form that structures personal memories interspersed with more contemporary events. What memories then does his literary laterna magica show and what do they mean? Why are memories and events structured in a certain way? Is there any unity in the total of more than a hundred memory images in various forms that the book consists of? My reading of Laterna magica takes a point of departure in Adriana Cavarero’s (2000) theory of the “narrative self.” In Laterna magica the narrative self creates an identity through the story that consists of the merged memory images. It then becomes a story where Bergman’s narrative self is looking for answers to the question “who am I?” The reading of the “autobiography” also assumes that it is a literary work. Thus, the story of the magical lantern of memories can be analyzed as a literary composition where staging and truth-seeking are two important concepts.

Terror: live

ABSTRACT To what extent can the immediacy of live-streaming bring distant spectators into proximity with an event? In an article analysing the aesthetico-political stakes of terrorist-produced media, Lilie Chouliaraki and Andreas Kissas, drawing from Adriana Cavarero, differentiate between terrorism and horrorism in digitally mediated contexts: terror(ism) ‘is associated with proximity and addresses the eyewitness of violent death, horror is associated with mediated witnessing and addresses the distant spectator’. How then, should we make sense of terror attacks when they are live-streamed by the perpetrator? The Christchurch Mosque attacks marked the first time a terror attack was live-streamed on a mainstream social networking site, though as has been noted, it was not the first socially mediated iteration of performance crime. By live-streaming overt forms of violence, terrorists seek to destabilize the terror/horror dichotomy by bringing distant spectators into proximity with death. In this article, I argue that the capabilities of live-streaming technologies help to constitute a new kind of terror spectacle in which the affective capacity of images is intensified images in order to garner support and paralyze audiences who simultaneously participate in and consume the event.

Maternal Inclinations, Queer Orientations, Common Occupation

ABSTRACT This article explores queer spatial and feminist coalitional practices through Adriana Cavarero's concept of maternal and mimetic “inclinations”, Sara Ahmed's concept of queer “orientations” and a political action by the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP). It argues that through these paradigms, social histories become central to philosophical thinking about subjectivity. Ahmed and Cavarero conceive of subjectivity through postural and spatial relations. To explore how spatial and postural relations generate subjectivities, I focus on an example of a deliberate political takeover of space. In the article, Ahmed and Cavarero's concepts are explored through a historical analysis of the 1982 takeover of Holy Cross Church (London, UK) by the ECP. This political action offers a different starting point for philosophical inquiry and proposes an additional response by orienting and inclining us towards a feminist coalitional practice and commons that builds support without minimising difference. The paper will show that the conceptual tools of Cavarero, Ahmed and the ECP can be productively brought into conversation and used to conceptualise maternal inclinations through queer spatial relations and feminist coalitional practices.

Mimetic Apprehension: Care, Inclination and the Weather of Antiblackness

ABSTRACT In this article I further Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo’s discussion of “mimetic inclination” to consider the way a person can be known in their uniqueness. Cavarero says that we receive a sense of the uniqueness of another by relating their narrative. I suggest that this also reveals a sense of the uniqueness of the one narrating, and that this can be understood as a practice of care. This narration is, as a consequence, distinct from representation (which itself is distinct from mimesis) and is better described as apprehension. By drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I detail a primary form of care connected to apprehension that is engendered by what Sharpe calls “the weather of antiblackness”. Morrison both details this form of care in Beloved and practises it herself in her storytelling. This expands feminist analyses of vulnerability, providing critical resources for rethinking existence apart from its colonial and patriarchal articulation.

Inclining Mimesis: Continuing the Dialogue with Adriana Cavarero

ABSTRACT In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or pathos, that dispossesses the subject. While Plato tended to emphasize the pathological implications of mimesis, Cavarero and Lawtoo agree that both mimesis and inclinations go beyond good and evil and can be put to both pathological and democratic use. Picking up a dialogue started during a walk in New York City, Cavarero and Lawtoo, take their shared interests in Joseph Conrad's relating narratives as an occasion to discuss good and bad mimetic inclinations in contemporary politics and ethics. Joined in conclusion by the Gendered Mimesis team (Willow Verkerk, Isabelle Dahms and Giulia Rignano), topics addressed include new fascism, surging democracy, ethical responsibility for vulnerable others, hypermaternity and public happiness in a precarious world.

Cavarero’s Muse: The Troubling Power of Mimetic Inclinations

ABSTRACT This article engages with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of the Muse of Greek oral poetry to rethink the relationship between mimesis and narration, and the shaping power of the act of narration on the subject. I suggest that Cavarero’s reading of the Muse provides an understanding of mimesis that moves beyond representation to a form of contagion between embodied and temporal subjectivities. To clarify this, I show how Cavarero’s Muse anticipates her critique of rectitude in Inclinations and makes it clear that the inclined subject is not only the vulnerable and open subject as opposed to the vertical and autonomous one, but also the subject that has the power to incline the narratives that mimetically straighten it. The aim is to understand mimetic inclinations as destabilising voices of vertical narrations. As a concrete example of the troubling power of mimetic inclinations, I propose a rereading of Cavarero’s technique of theft presented in In Spite of Plato as a strategy of mimetic resistance.

Critiques of Violence: Arendt, Sedgwick, and Cavarero Respond to Billy Budd’s Stutter

ABSTRACT This paper examines how Adriana Cavarero extends and offers an alternative to Hannah Arendt's understanding of speech and its relationship to politics and violence through a re-reading of Herman Melville’s, Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). The novella was examined by Arendt in On Revolution (1963) where she considers the apolitical character of the French Revolutionary Terror and establishes a link between violence, mimetic contagion, and the failure of articulate speech. I suggest that whereas Arendt’s reading only offers two possible responses to violence—forgiveness or punishment (perpetuating violence)—a reading of the novella inspired by Cavarero’s work shows a third alternative, the prevention of violence, while equally revealing the blind spot of Arendt’s argument. The blind spot is Arendt's privileging of articulate speech and her failure to consider the embodied character of human expression. Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, however, allows for a response to, and responsibility for, the uniqueness of the human voice, and for the intention to convey meaning. To mediate between Arendt and Cavarero, the paper also reconsiders Nidesh Lawtoo’s understanding of mimesis, evokes Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-setting queer reading of Billy Budd, and engages with Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s contrary takes on the relationship between violence and language.

Contours of Dread

AbstractHannah Arendt’s and Isaiah Berlin’s incomprehension of one another resulted in one of the great missed dialogues in political theory. Arendt’s civic-democratic values find freedom in participation on a par with others in the political realm. Berlin’s liberal-democratic commitments define freedom as the space where individuals are unconstrained by the state or others. Modern democracy introduces the social-democratic commitment to the state’s ability to reduce inequality and provide for the public good. The strife, varyingly creative or destructive, among the liberal-, civic-, and social-democratic dimensions animates modern democracies. Kai Hiruta provides a comprehensive account of the Arendt–Berlin relation. Adriana Cavarero draws on Arendt’s conception of political participation to illuminate contemporary protests against injustice and racism in Western countries. Dilip Gaonkar examines, with emphasis on India’s democracy, the role of direct action, including riots, as forms of political participation by the demos. Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun, in their account of democratic “degeneration” in the US and Europe in light of globalization and populist and autocratic trends, postulate the social-democratic as the telos of democracy itself, diminishing the liberal- and civic-democratic and overlooking democracy’s ineluctable strife. By contrast, there is no telos in Arendt’s thought, which values beginnings and innovations.

Un acercamiento para repensar la voz y construir la paz: resistencias ante la violencia de género

The purpose of this article is to think about voice in order to reflect on the reasons for the exclusion of women’s voice in political contexts. It seeks to reinforce the connection between discourse and listening as a constructive path to social and political peace, especially from a feminist perspective that recovers voice as a central element for this construct and based on Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical approach. The absence of women’s voice from logocentric traditions cancels possibilities of resistance and separates voice and discourse, an issue underpinned by binary metaphysics that block plurality, singularity, and difference. From there emanate exclusionary univocentric totalitarian forms with the consequence of the emergence of violence. This voice in plurality demands a listening that is constituted as a horizon to promote the political space and the construction of peace.

Un acercamiento para repensar la voz y construir la paz: resistencias ante la violencia de género

The purpose of this article is to think about voice in order to reflect on the reasons for the exclusion of women’s voice in political contexts. It seeks to reinforce the connection between discourse and listening as a constructive path to social and political peace, especially from a feminist perspective that recovers voice as a central element for this construct and based on Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical approach. The absence of women’s voice from logocentric traditions cancels possibilities of resistance and separates voice and discourse, an issue underpinned by binary metaphysics that block plurality, singularity, and difference. From there emanate exclusionary univocentric totalitarian forms with the consequence of the emergence of violence. This voice in plurality demands a listening that is constituted as a horizon to promote the political space and the construction of peace.

Walking Badly

Taking Bruce Nauman’s video installation Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015/2016) as its starting point, this essay explores the postural, moral, and political implications of walking’s instability, proposing that the instability of walking underwrites its condition. It builds on the feminist scholarship of Adriana Cavarero to challenge the philosophical assumptions of masculine uprightness and to reveal instead the temporal limits of human balance and the essential threat of the misstep.

Revocalising human geography: Decolonial language geographies beyond the nation-state

This paper emphasises the decolonial importance of geographical engagement with the materiality of language as an embodied and embedded relation. It shows how abstractions of language(s) as discrete, codified and possessable objects participate in a ‘coloniality of language’ that risks obscuring alternative geographies of language within, against and beyond the territorialised monolingualism of the colonial nation-state. Through considering Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of Western modernity’s systematic ‘devocalisation of logos’ from a modernity/coloniality perspective, I argue that geographical consideration of language as a ‘revocalised’ relation could contribute to moving beyond colonial and (ethno)nationalist geographies of language.

Severed heads in Iraqi diasporic visual production: Aleiby, Baldin and Alsoudani

ABSTRACT This essay examines the trope of the decapitated, severed head as it appears in a range of works produced by three emigrant Iraqi artists: Afifa Aleiby, Baldin Ahmad and Ahmed Alsoudani. Drawing on a range of cultural, political and philosophical readings of the severed head by figures such as Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva and Francois Debrix, the essay seeks to map the diverse affects, meanings and contexts the severed head takes on in Aleiby, Baldin and Alsoudani’s paintings and sculptures from Saddam’s dictatorship to the present. What kind of affects – horror, disgust, pleasure, ecstasy – does the spectacle of the severed head generate? How does the figure of the head detached from the body become a metonymy or synechdoche for the political state of exile, displacement or alienation? Finally, what function does the representation of the severed head play in the production and articulation of loss, trauma and mourning.

“IN THE CENTRE OF OUR CIRCLE”

This article examines how non-linear time and circularity are deployed in the historical novel Nehanda (1993), written by Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera. Using Adriana Cavarero’s work on inclination, I suggest that circular time as well as spatial roundness, which pervade the novel, are mobilised to centre African women’s voices, bodies and experiences of colonial domination and anticolonial struggles. Rehabilitating women as key historical agents of anticolonial mobilisation, Vera also proceeds to re-legitimise African knowledge production and transmission by highlighting the importance of orality, prophecy and spirituality in the fight against colonialism. Through its implicit critique of verticality, Nehanda calls into question both Western historiography on Africa and African patriarchal narratives of resistance and liberation. In a colonial context where verticality, inspired by Kant’s philosophy, gestured towards the superiority of the European man as an autonomous subject, raising himself above the others, Vera highlights how Nehanda’s authority and legacy stemmed from her “relational subjectivity” (Cavarero), that is, from the strength of her connection with her people, her land and her ancestors.

Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker

Reviewed by: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza Michael Jimenez (bio) Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. Feminist Press, 2020. Pp. 184. Cristina Rivera Garza's book of essays Grieving opens with violence in Mexico against journalists as a context to comprehend global horrors against the bodies of the most vulnerable. In this sense, Garza's book is another study of the horror in recent Mexican history that has led to a deeper analysis of femicide. The subtitle would make Mexico the wounded country. However, Garza does not isolate violence in Mexico but looks at its global connections. She asks: "Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope" (7)? This is a personal question for Garza, who lost her younger sister to domestic violence (8–9). As she comments, "the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me" (72). The rage from this event, in light of the callous indifference and ignorance of elected officials toward our contemporary horrorism, fuels the essays of Garza's book. The forgetfulness toward violence comes with ignoring history. Garza declares: "Awake, history hungrily moves through the city streets or countryside. Sleepless jaws. History reminds us, as always, that we are mortal. That there are things left unresolved" (27). In a short poetic essay, "Horrorism," Garza builds off concrete history to espouse an "ontology of vulnerability" that does not allow [End Page 113] human beings to forget that we are beings-in-relation, charged with caring for one another (98–99). She continues this train of thought about vulnerability in an essay titled "Mourning," featuring the theoretical work of Judith Butler (135–38). The Other person can't help but change us, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, questioning the stability of the individual self in the first place. For example, it is impossible to think that Garza would be the same after losing her sister to violence. Garza points out that this is especially relevant for women's history: "It was a world founded on women's silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women—their demise—to keep functioning" (153). One way to deal with this forced silence is public mourning. The public nature of this event makes us "more vulnerable" and "more human" (138). Garza leans on the classic works on pain and horror by Elaine Scarry and Adriana Cavarero. The fact that these are not new studies reveals that the "frightening grind of femicide" has been around "for decades" (151). However, what differentiates Garza's book from others is the inclusion of literary and historical sources from Latin America. For example, one essay, "Writing in Migration: A Desedimentation with Chilean writer Lina Meruane," features a juxtaposition of Meruane's experience with Garza's (139–46). The comparison begins with both sets of grandparents and their migratory journeys; Meruane's traveled from Palestine to Chile and Garza's from Mexico to the United States. Garza utilizes this idea as a way to discuss how language, both bodily and verbal, carries over to their progeny. This is oftentimes an unconscious inheritance. Both Meruane and Garza physically return to the place of origins and attempt to retrace the steps. The closing section of this chapter has some of the best lines in the book. Here is just a sample: "There is always someone who has migrated before.… There is no tabula rasa. We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common" (146). As in the Meruane chapter, Garza's work continually circles back to Mexico, yet many essays have a global scope. In "Writing against War," Garza links the violence in Mexico with the war in Bosnia, wondering if both stories of violence will ultimately be forgotten (147–50). In addition, Garza references the people disappeared during the Cold War with special focus on the mothers of the disappeared. In short, femicide and the grief that accompany it are a worldwide problem that should not be separated by fictitious borders. On the one hand, what I find compelling about Garza's method...