Adriana Cavarero Research Articles

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

From Medieval Romance to Contemporary Opera: Philosophy, Allegory, Eros

Forget-me-not: Giving Voice to Memory in Mark Z. Danielewski's "The Familiar" and Elsa Morante's "La Storia"

Among the many, intertwining motifs spanning the volumes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, the repeated reference to forget-me-nots is not one that leaps off the page to the reader. Its presence in Xanther’s seizure in Volume 4: Hades speaks to larger notions of memory of tragedies such as the Armenian Genocide, or even the chronomosaic timelines present in Danielewski’s earlier novel, Only Revolutions. This paper, while exploring notions notions of memory through Adriana Cavarero’s theory of the narratable self, will argue that their root is in Elsa Morante’s 1974 novel La Storia, which centers on a Jewish mother and her son, both epileptic, in Rome during World War II. Yet, while both works utilize their characters’ epilepsy as a way to better acknowledge the suffering and tragedies occurring around them, Morante’s articulation of the crushing wheel of history differs from the more hopeful presentation Danielewski provides. Through her epilepsy, Xanther instead emerges as a character who highlights the importance of giving voice to others, especially those unable to speak for themselves.

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Remembering Carol Lazzaro-Weis (1949–2022)

Hearing Nothing: A More Than Human Silence

ABSTRACT This essay reflects on the more than human dimensions of silence; how silence is both more animal, and more divine, than the metaphysical figure of Man. But it also explores, with philosopher Adriana Cavarero, how silence (under the influence of western metaphysics) also becomes a matter of pure spirit that mutes the laughing, crying, screaming works of flesh. In order to listen more attentively to what the more than human registers of silence have to say, this essay creates an occasion to wander into the theologically inflected work of Simone Weil. In Weil’s description of a sounding silence (filled with the inaudible sonic life of embodied creatures), the essay argues, we find a political theology of silence; a more than human form of attention that is enacted or embodied in a ritual and conceptual space marked by a charged and potent awareness of divine absence.

On Speech as the Political Faculty in the Anthropocene. The Sensualities of Voice and Taste Combined

The paper revises the idea of speech as a fundamental political faculty in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene. First, it is argued that, rather than as a subsystem of language, speech should be conceptualised as the expression of the embodied capacity of voice (in this respect, the paper follows Adriana Cavarero’s [2005] argument). Secondly, vocality is linked to the faculty of taste (understood as in Arendt’s reading of Kant) to locate politics in the broader order of materiality (physis).

Violaciones a los derechos humanos de las mujeres en conflictos armados internos. Abordajes desde la literatura

In the last years of the 20th century, many countries in Latin America experienced internal armed conflicts in which violations of women’s human rights were a constant, especially those related to sexuality, reproduction and motherhood. This type of violence has been addressed in various literary works and this article will focus on three of them, the novels La hora azul, by the Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto; Los ejércitos, by the Colombian writer Evelio Rosero, and Roza tumba quema, by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández. Based on the ideas of Rita Segato and Adriana Cavarero, I will analyze the way in which violations of women’s human rights have been fictionalized in the context of three internal armed conflicts.

Intervenciones afectivas al archivo materno en "La caja Topper" de Nicolás Gadano

Through the study of the autobiographical novel La caja Topper by Nicolas Gadano (2019), this article addresses the uses of the archive in the narratives of the children of victims ––in a broad sense–– of the last Argentine military dictatorship. Following the theoretical propositions of Jacques Derrida, Sara Ahmed, and Adriana Cavarero, we analyze the interventions that Gadano makes on the objects that his mother kept in a sneaker box as memorabilia of the family exile experience. First, we study the way in which the old box and the objects contained in it function as a matriarchive. Second, we analyze the operations that Gadano performs on the materiality, content, and ordering of the objects in the box, which produces a generational transfer of authority over the archive. Finally, we conclude that, through his fidelity to the maternal affective style, the author disassembles the traditional model of emotional labor division, reshaping the links between gender, generations, and memory.

Review: The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics, by Robin James

Review: <i>The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics</i>, by Robin James

‘A polyphonic tale’: Arendt, Cavarero and storytelling in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012)

This article proposes a reading of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012) through the work of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. Far from being a simple homage to her late mother Diane, Polley’s film is a ‘polyphonic tale’, a complex and multi-layered narrative which allows for an exploration of the many functions of (cinematic) storytelling. Highlighting the close link between relating narratives and personal identity, the film sheds light on both the innate desire for biography that characterizes us as human beings and the complex and dynamic relationship between storytellers and listeners. The way we tell stories affects the narrator(s), their audience and the fabric of the story itself in a process that ensures both continuity and change. Referring to Arendt’s notion of political storytelling, I conclude by suggesting that Stories We Tell, like the Greek polis, functions as an ‘organized remembrance’, a community whose purpose is to preserve fragile human deeds and words from oblivion.

Reciprocal narratives in Que bom te ver viva (Lúcia Murat, 1989)

Directed by Brazilian filmmaker Lúcia Murat, Que bom te ver viva [How nice to see you alive] (1989) interlaces the testimonies of eight female political prisoners with a monologue voiced by an anonymous female fictional character. All allude to the experience of torture under the military dictatorial regime in Brazil. Given that Murat was a militant student imprisoned and tortured during the dictatorship, the film appears to have an autobiographical motivation. I argue, however, that the interlacing of fictional monologue and ‘real’ testimonies effaces this motivation. Rather, the intersection between fictional and testimonial accounts offers a reciprocal recognition between interviewees and filmmaker, allowing for the inscription of these individual stories into the historical narrative. I also argue that this reciprocal recognition is anchored in the feminist practice of storytelling, practised in consciousness-raising feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of narration underpins my analysis.

Inclined language: a visual, material practice

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the experiential field of artistic pieces that incline language and words to work from their sound, material and rhythmic dimension. They are poetic and sound works freed from the verticality, rectitude and weight of the semantic. In our ordinary experience of language we forget the physical existence of words, their sounds, their rhythms. Without that physicality, words become transparent, completely resolved into what they mean. To incline them means to give them sound and rhythm. It means to make them material, bringing them to our attention and reconnect with their physical existence: the possibility of becoming an image. From the concept of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero as a relational model against verticality – to rethink a subjectivity marked by vulnerability – it is argued that inclining language, allows us to question ourselves about the ways in which sound relates to images, as it will be seen through works by Itziar Okariz and Gertrude Stein. A leaning that also dialogues with the ways of deviation from the established language proposed by Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. In turn, we re-experience our relationship with the materiality of language, the act of listening, as well as the visuality of sounds.

‘La donna di poche parole’ from Page to Stage: Envoicing Enchantment in Epic Poetry and Early Opera

ABSTRACT ‘Alle donne si addice il silenzio’: in early modern Italy these words aligned women’s public eloquence with wayward behaviour and their silence with chastity, thus generating significant and widespread debate. This essay traces how such considerations emerged across fiction and history in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s epic poems, and in early operatic representations of their siren-enchantresses: the Orlando furioso’s surprisingly speechless Alcina, and the Gerusalemme liberata’s loquaciously alluring Armida. The salvific qualities of Armida’s speech and song – her ‘vocal expression’, to follow Adriana Cavarero – influenced the development of female personalities on the seventeenth-century operatic stage. The performance practices analysed herein bring together threads of intertextuality and intermedial reception. Such interweaving of materials and modes in the construction of early opera’s musical poetics, which recalls the art of entrelacement, illustrates how poets, librettists, and composers transformed the complex coordination of agency and obstacles into which women – fictional and historical – were often embedded.

The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form by Julie Beth Napolin

Reviewed by: The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form by Julie Beth Napolin Jean-Thomas Tremblay The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form. Julie Beth Napolin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 245. $105.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (eBook). What happens to us, as readers, when a scholarly monograph's organizing principle is not progression or demonstration, but resonance? If we are lucky, we experience a theoretical acoustics that pairs ostensibly disparate ideas without hierarchizing them, indeed that contests the hierarchies implied by principles of causality, linearity, and teleology. With Julie Beth Napolin's The Fact of Resonance, we are lucky. Modernist narrative, Napolin establishes, relies on the consolidation of "phenomena as the presence of substance, a here and now of imperial self-possession sensing itself" (3). This "consolidated vision"—a term that Napolin borrows from Edward Said—posits a synecdoche between subject and empire; the phenomenological subject's self-presence is possible within a "total and all-encompassing" England (3). The consolidated vision is conveyed by what Gérard Genette paradoxically calls a "voice." Paradoxically because this voice, a mere "textual effect of the verb's mode of action," is not audible; it presents itself as soundless and neutral (2). In the name of relaying fiction without friction, the so-called neutral voice silences "what is not immediately present in and as enunciation itself" (3). Napolin's ambition in The Fact of Resonance is to attune readers to the acoustics of what the neutral voice represses—that is, elements of sexual, cultural, linguistic, and especially racial difference as well as the forms of violence they register and incite. Colonial and postcolonial encounters, which Napolin surveys primarily in Joseph Conrad's corpus, grant us access to an acoustics that displaces and liminalizes modernist narrative's consolidated vision and neutral voice. Resonance determines at once the form, the content, and the method of Napolin's inquiry. Sound, the author tells us at the onset, is the novel's "motivating force, one that brings narrative into being" (1). The suggestion that literature is fundamentally sonorous—that is has a voice, that it is recitative, that it is tangled with oral practices—enables us to approach listening as, more than a metaphor for reading, an attribute of reading. On the book's concluding page, Napolin confirms what has by then become evident: that "literature and sound technology are coformations, that literature is a form of sound technology and sound technology a form of literature" (229). If Napolin draws our attention to "resonance," rather than "sound" more generally, it is because resonance is relational and therefore, per Édouard Glissant's theory of relation, creolizing. Resonance is a sonic byproduct of relations—relations between characters and relations between fields of study. The Fact of Resonance claims as relatives such varied fields as literary studies, sound studies, media studies, Black studies, postcolonial theory, and anthropology. Academic conventions would have us label this work "interdisciplinary," and Napolin muses about disciplinarity and its discontents on occasion, but a more significant methodological intervention is on display. Napolin's method is not additive (this field's concerns, plus this other field's concerns), but, I would venture, catachrestic. It consists in deliberately "misusing" theories whose medium specificity traditionally espouses disciplinary divisions. For instance, Adriana Cavarero, whose ontology of vocal uniqueness is contingent on audible expression, makes an appearance in a discussion of narrative voice. Napolin's gambit reaps dividends: it teaches us that real methodological misuses are occasioned by the disciplinary partition of phenomena—audible vocal expression and narrative voice—that are co-constitutive. Although Napolin does not explicitly state such an aim, a catachrestic method also deflates the ableism that informs a theory of vocal expression like Cavarero's. [End Page 390] "If the sound of history is a reverberation, then it cannot be linearly reconstructed," writes Napolin (229). Without historical or narrative chronology as a guide, The Fact of Resonance triangulates three key concepts: voice, echo, and sinister resonance (7). A feat of criticism, the inaugural chapter grows into a vast close reading of the first two words of Conrad's debut novel, Almayer's Folly: "Kaspar! Makan!" (quoted in...

Relating Someone Else’s Story: A Comparative Reading of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember and Édouard Louis’ Histoire de la violence

The article is a comparative reading of Everything I Don’t Remember by Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Histoire de la violence by French author Edouard Louis. The main theoretical framework is Deleuzian/Guattarian affect theory, coupled with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of storytelling and selfhood. Both novels depict a narrative situation where a person has their story told by someone else, and thus provide striking accounts of how individuals relate and affect each other. Moreover, the narrative form of the novels presents identity, solidarity, and love not as predefined categories language can represent, but rather as troubled and unstable phenomena produced and altered through stories.

Movement, Embrace: Adriana Cavarero with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (and the Death Drive)

AbstractAn experience of helplessness during the production of a collective autobiographical narrative offers an opportunity to explore points of convergence between Adriana Cavarero's postural philosophy and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's matrixial borderlinking. The narrative is treated as a live scene that enfolds the movement of the drive conceptualized in such a way as to avoid the prioritization of death over life. Five successive moves, inspired by Ettinger'srotation of the phallic prism, illuminate affinities between the two thinkers. The first rotation explores the matrixial and relational qualities that compose the scene. The second rotation approaches death from a notional beginning, prioritizing the presence of the mother and her assymmetrical relationship to the infant. The third rotation emphasizes the transformational character of Ettinger's matrixial movement and border-crossing, especially when examined in conjunction with Cavarero's maternal inclination. In the fourth rotation we show how inclination (clinamen) in Lacanian psychoanalysis is linked to the disappearance of the mother from the scene. The (re)introduction of the mother disrupts the Lacanian logic with the possibility of a beginning just as immanent as desire and lack. Movement, qua embrace and unity-disunity (fifth rotation), becomes an indispensable component of feminist ontology that captures the immanence of sharing in the matrixial-maternal plane.

Vulnerability and the Human in Judith Butler’s and Adriana Cavarero’s Feminist Thought: A Politics of Philosophy Point of View

In this article I explore the use of the term vulnerability in the work of two leading feminist theorists, Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. Approaching their work with the ‘politics of philosophy’ method I show how Cavarero’s and Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability in relation to other terms in their texts testifies for differences in their relation to the academic tradition of philosophy. I argue that Cavarero’s usage of the term shows that she engages with the basic questions of the phenomenological-existential tradition of Husserl and Heidegger through the notion of the human, while arguing for the view of singular human existent as vulnerable and relational. In contrast, Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability expresses distancing from the basic questions of the same tradition of the abstracted and transcendentalized human. Instead, Butler’s systematic connecting of vulnerability to social norms and infrastructures which are contingent and historically changing points towards the antifoundational challenge that she presents in relation to this particular tradition of philosophy.

Strange Characters: Dialogic Selves and Cosmopolitanism in Carl Van Vechten's Peter Whiffle

Carl Van Vechten's novel Peter Whiffle. His Life and Works (1922) is a work of ‘autobiografiction’, merging biography and autobiography, and drawing attention to the fictional elements of life writing. It problematizes authorship and posits selfhood as a dialogic, polyphonic construct, dependent on the strategies, content and structure of narrative. The article explores the complex intertextual presence of George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man in Van Vechten's novel: they both propose different aspects of a similar story of two friends with cosmopolitan and refined tastes, whose subjectivities are mediated by constant references to other literary characters, and who depend on one another's narratives to have access to their own selves, or at least to become authors of works of art about themselves. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's and Lucia Boldrini's studies on auto/biographical selves, and on Rebecca Walkowitz's and Homi Bhabha's theories of cosmopolitanism, the article argues that Peter Whiffle's emphasis on dialogic subjectivity questions the notion of authorship and creates a problematic, parodic form of cosmopolitanism. This type of cosmopolitanism does not contribute to any productive experiences of self-knowledge or of knowledge of the foreign ‘other’, but rather asks crucial questions on the very possibility of these experiences.

De “Parangolé”, de Ana Martins Marques, a “Vestido com Vista pro Mar”: a vocoperformance de Juliana Perdigão

Visando contribuir para as pesquisas sobre os suportes da poesia, este artigo dedica-se, em particular, ao estudo da vocoperformance, da voz em performance, a performance vocal. Para isso, toma-se como base o poema “Parangolé”, de Ana Martins Marques (2011), musicalizado por Juliana Perdigão (2016) – com participação de Tulipa Ruiz – no disco Ó. Partindo de um fragmento de Marina Tsvetáeva (2017) em “O poeta e a crítica”, recorreremos, num primeiro momento, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1999) em seu Ensaio sobre a origem das línguas, procurando entender que espécie de voz é esta (aquela) que sussurrou aos ouvidos de Tsvetáeva (2017), dando-lhe ora indicações, ora ordens – “quando indica, discuto; quando ordena, obedeço” (TSVETÁEVA, 2017, p. 45). Em busca deste entendimento, desta voz que persegue, uma voz “da ordem da percepção poética e não da dedução” (ZUMTHOR, 2014, p. 15), seguimos com Friedrich Nietzsche (2001) em A gaia ciência, mais especificamente no aforismo “Da origem da poesia”; e Arnaldo Antunes (2014), em seu texto “Sobre a origem da poesia”. Como suporte teórico para o aprofundamento das questões, especialmente no campo dos estudos de canção, performance e poesia cantada, recorreremos a pesquisadores como Adriana Cavarero (2011), Enzo Minarelli (2010), Lia Tomás (2002), Luiz Tatit (1996; 2014; 2016), Paul Zumthor (2014) e Renato Cohen (2002).

Ouvidos atentos: as vozes plurais de Itamar Assumpção

Este trabalho apresenta uma leitura da canção “Prezadíssimos ouvintes”, de Itamar Assumpção e Domingos Pellegrini, gravada originalmente em 1985, no disco Sampa midnight — isso não vai ficar assim, de Itamar Assumpção — um dos nomes mais representativos da “Vanguarda Paulista” — cena musical bastante irreverente e criativa, que despontou inicialmente nos limites do pequeno teatro Lira Paulistana — também um selo de música independente, no qual Itamar Assumpção gravou seu primeiro LP, o Beleléu leléu eu, em 1981. O objetivo deste estudo é mostrar que, entre as diferentes estratégias utilizadas por Itamar ao longo de sua carreira, está um modelo composicional que privilegia a multiplicidade de vozes e de gêneros, estabelecendo, assim, diálogos com sua memória cultural e/ou afetiva, como veremos na canção abordada. A análise tem como base, sobretudo, as noções de voz e oralidade, de Paul Zumthor (2010); de “vozes plurais”, de Adriana Cavarero (2011); e canção e entoação, de Luiz Tatit, (2002).

Of Mothers and Sisters: Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s L’Arminuta

Set in Abruzzo, an Italian region seldom represented in the work of contemporary Italian women writers, Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s L’Arminuta (2017) is a compelling novel recounting the protagonist-narrator’s difficult journey toward self-realization following a double-abandonment by both her biological and adoptive mothers. An empowering bond with her long-lost younger sister Adriana, an extraordinarily resourceful and caring ten-year old, allows the protagonist to survive her new, hostile surroundings after her adoptive mother abruptly returns her to her biological family at age thirteen. Despite having gained popular acclaim and several literary prizes, L’Arminuta has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. To date, no scholarly studies of this work have been produced. This article intends to bring long-overdue attention to this neglected novel. In the first part of the article, after analyzing how language and communication signify the development of the protagonist’s identity and her evolving relationships with her two mothers, I engage with philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of motherhood in her rereading of the Demeter’s myth. Here, I argue that the failed mother-daughter relationships portrayed in L’Arminuta are the result of patriarchal constructions of motherhood that, albeit in different ways, deprive both mothers of the choice not to reproduce, and preclude the formation of validating bonds with their daughter. In the second part of the article, through the lens of Cavarero’s notion of “inclination,” I show how Adriana’s crucial acts of care toward the protagonist counteract her lack of lasting, loving bonds with her mothers, and allow her to endure her double abandonment. L’Arminuta is a powerful and necessary novel that denaturalizes persisting constructions of motherhood as women’s natural fate, and proposes a non-traditional model of care and nurturing that escapes patriarchal definitions of the family.&#x0D;