Adriana Cavarero Research Articles

Horrorism in the scene of torture: Reading Scarry with Cavarero

Abstract In this article I read Elaine Scarry’s account of torture in her The Body in Pain (1985) alongside Adriana Cavarero’s account voice and its relationship to violence in her A più voci: Per una filosofia dell’espressione vocale (For More than One Voice) (2005) and Orrorismo: Ovvero della violenza sull’inerme (Horrorism) (2011). This serves a dual purpose: first, to demonstrate that Scarry’s account of torture is implicitly committed to an Aristotelian distinction between phone and logos which mirrors Cavarero’s account of ‘The Devocalization of Logos’ (2005: 33); and second, to probe the limits of Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’ by reading it against Scarry’s account of torture and some of Cavarero’s own examples from For More than One Voice (2005). Unlike Cavarero, for whom torture is a form of horrorism because it effaces the uniqueness of the prisoner, I argue that Scarry’s account of torture demonstrates the gross reverence that the torturer pays to the prisoner’s uniqueness. In this way I argue that torture places the prisoner’s uniqueness into a suspended state of dissolution.

The Performative Power of Narrative in Goliarda Sapienza’s Lettera aperta, L’arte della gioia and Io, Jean Gabin

This article investigates Goliarda Sapienza’s distinctive use of narrative as ‘performative’, focusing on narrative voice and structures in three works: Lettera aperta, L’arte della gioia and Io, Jean Gabin. The analysis postulates an evolution from a performative and deeply unstable narrating ‘I’ to the reinforced narrating voice and identity of an anarchist artist. In the analysis of narrative voice and structures, I draw on Adriana Cavarero’s notions of voice and narration and Jean-Claude Coquet’s reflections on body and language; I also employ Mark Turner’s concept of ‘blended space’ and Peter Brooks’ insights on plot and teleology. Sapienza’s narrative incorporates characteristics of both modernism and postmodernism in a highly disrupted and open narrative. It is, however, in transcending the same and giving voice to a conception of performative identity capable of producing agency and emancipation that the significant originality of Sapienza’s narrative lies.

Roundtable: Wild Sounds and Women's Voices

This roundtable discussion was conducted on October 19, 2016 with, Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue, the programmers for the fall 2016 Flaherty NYC program Wild Sounds during the Colgate/Flaherty Distinguished Global Filmmaker Residency with Sandra Kogut. We were joined by filmmakers Mary Helena Clark, Penny Lane, and Aura Satz. Wild is a technical term for an audio recording done independently of the main shoot. It is recorded without being synchronized to an image, though it may be synchronized later, in postproduction. For our Flaherty NYC program, the notion of a wild sound, with its connotation of autonomy and a relation to an image track that is not necessarily subordinate to it, offered a conceptually rich way of considering the placement and use of women's voices in film. The series explored the variety of ways in which women are heard in film, drawing on the gendered distinction between women's voices, closely allied with the body and pre-linguistic sound, and those of men, associated with the making of meaning, as theorized by Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman, and Adriana Cavarero. Against the dominant structures privileging male speech over female sounds, Wild Sounds explored the affective, sensorial, and political dimensions of women's voices. The notion of wild sound also offered a way of subverting the documentary expectation of sync sound realism and opened the practice to more experimental forms. The filmmakers who joined us for the roundtable, all of whom have used voice and sound in unconventional ways, represent the heterogeneity of documentary form today. Indeed, we chose this group because their innovative uses of sound are very at the heart of their redefinition and expansion of contemporary documentary practice.

Philosophy's Folds: Seneca, Cavarero, and the History of Rectitude

This article takes as its stimulus Adriana Cavarero's recent investigation of the postures of rectitude and inclination in the Western philosophical tradition (Cavarero 2013). To showcase how this book might catalyze productive interactions between feminist critics in different areas of the humanities, I will bring Cavarero into dialogue with a thinker she mentions in passing who extensively develops “rectitude as a general principle” (Veyne 2003): Seneca. I argue that a gendered ontology of rectitude is increasingly put under pressure and transformed in Seneca'sEpistles, and propose that the letters are a laboratory for developing a new model of inclination that arises from an urgent need to confront the consequences of political impotence and threats to bodily integrity for Roman aristocratic manhood in the 60sce. The playful, densely literaryEpistlesoffer multiple points of contact with Cavarero's own philosophical strategies, and emerge as a highly stimulating text for feminist thinkers interested in the ethical and political implications of acknowledging vulnerability. Reading Seneca alongside Cavarero reminds us that such investigations have a (tortuous, buried) history in Roman antiquity whose recovery is itself politically significant.

From NoobGuides to #OpKKK: Ethics of Anonymous’ Tactical Technical Communication

ABSTRACTTactical technical communication research suggests its application to social justice. However, beyond a general advocacy of anti-institutional activity, de Certeau’s notion of tactics provides no detailed ethical framework for ethically justifying tactics. In acknowledgement of this gap, this article foregrounds the ethical thought of feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, particularly her concept of vulnerability, as a supplement for those employing tactics for social justice causes. The authors examine the technical documents produced by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

The (in)visibility of violence: Jasmila Žbanić’s post-war cinema

The aim of the article is to discuss Jasmila Žbanić’s Esma’s Secret ( Grbavica, 2006), On the Path ( Na Putu, 2010) and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales ( Za one koji ne mogu da govore, 2013) as a trilogy addressing the consequences of Bosnian War. The films are considered in the theoretical framework of women’s cinema as world cinema, exploring their location in relation to globalization. The article hence analyses each film’s aesthetic in light of influential feminist concepts and theories such as Rey Chow’s age of the world target, Adriana Cavarero’s horrorism and caring, E Ann Kaplan’s trauma and Judith Butler’s ethics. In these films the violated body is neither victimized nor considered as a natural being: each character is a biopolitical subject, geo-culturally located, and produced through processes originating from dynamics of power and responsibility, guilt and care.

Horror beyond Death: Geopolitics and the Pulverisation of the Human

Biopolitics often enters the sphere of geopolitics in the form of a series of necropolitical or thanatopolitical interventions.1 From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life and bodies in configurations of (geo)political power has generally involved the putting to death of large swaths of populations, whether they are directly targeted or they happen to be 'in the way'. Michel Foucault argued that biopolitics emerges when the power of the sovereign shifts from a 'right to take life' to a capacity to 'let live'.2 Thus, political power, the power of the geopolitical sovereign (generally), becomes concerned with the management, control, and enhancement of people's lives, with the 'health' of a population/body politic, and with the efficient utilisation and incorporation of individual bodies into political preoccupations (including the concern with the survival of the state or sovereign). Yet, as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, among others, have also argued, while Foucault's recognition that biopolitical power is primarily concerned with the maintenance of life is crucial, this capacity to 'make live and let die' is never completely separate from the old modality of sovereign power and geopolitical force that was/is premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, as Mbembe puts it, biopolitics is also about the 'subjugation of life to the power of death'.3 Agamben adds that 'if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones'.4 The distinction between biopolitics and thanatopolitics/necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. When biopolitics - the concern with the enhancement of human life/living - is the main object of geopolitical operations, what Mbembe calls 'the creation of death worlds' often becomes modern and late-modern geopolitics' primary objective (Necropolitics, p40).This essay, however, is not interested in reprising the many biopolitical arguments that have been advanced to demonstrate the close connections between biopolitics and necropolitics. It is clear and, in a way, it was so already for Foucault that, in order to maximise the life/living potentials of some populations and bodies, other populations or other bodies have to be sacrificed or must disappear (Society, pp254-258). Put differently, what brings geopolitics and biopolitics together is their devotion to making populations and bodies die (in other words, their attachment to necropolitics). This essay is also not concerned with the many necropolitical dimensions of latemodern geopolitics (whether we are looking at World War II and the camps, for example, or, more recently, at techniques of exclusion of bodies and disappearance of life in the long era of the global war on terror). Again, many studies have targeted this late modern condition of (geo)political life.5 Instead, my goal in this essay is to push further the biopolitical/necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, in some contemporary geopolitical configurations is what I have called the pulverisation of the human,6 or, to borrow Adriana Cavarero's language, a radical violence that, 'not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body'.7 What is at stake in some geopolitical scenarios is 'not the end of human life, but the human condition itself' (Horrorism, p8). With Cavarero's help, I have called this targeting of the human condition, of the fact of the human, or of humanity itself a matter of horror.8 Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical violence and destruction, may appear to be to put bodies to death. …

Dismembering the dead: Violence, vulnerability and the body in war

On 15 January 2010, two soldiers killed an unarmed boy in the Afghan village of La Mohammad Kalay before dismembering his body and posing for photographs with his corpse. Although the soldiers were eventually sentenced to prison for their involvement in this attack and two other incidents, very little has been said about the nature of the violence they inflicted on the bodies of their victims. Drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, this article will explore the violence inflicted by the so-called Afghan Kill Team, focusing particular attention on the ethical questions posed by a violence that ‘overshoots the elementary goal of taking a life and dedicates itself to destroying the living being as a singular body’ (Cavarero, 2011: 12). I will argue that this level of violence is no longer concerned with questions of life and death, but seeks to destroy the body as body, challenging the ways in which we have traditionally conceptualised the pain and suffering caused by war. This argument will refocus our attention on the constitutive vulnerability of the body, as well as the processes of dehumanisation that leave certain bodies more vulnerable than others.

Paideia and Cosmopolitan Education: On Subjectification, Politics and Justice

<em>Can human rights in education enhance students and teachers capacity to reimagine their local community and to rethink the rules and laws that support such a social community? This paper is a political philosophical inquiry into human rights in education, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis and Adriana Cavarero. By placing learning at the center of political philosophy through the notion of paideia, we need to ask how such an education can look like. According to Castoriadis, society exists only insofar as it is embodied in its social individuals. Society and its individuals are in a constant process of becoming toward relational autonomy that implies a moral self-limitation. At the core of my philosophical inquiry into moral subjectification is the need to re-think human rights and the pedagogical subject in relational terms that imply self-limitation and political engagement in a wider cosmopolitan community</em>

Poetic Seeing/Beyond Telling: The “Call” in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

In its compositional eloquence, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée preserves the representational complexities of “distance” while it discloses an inceptual, structural relationship to the very inescapability of writing as a scene of language enacted between spaces occupied by “liberal” and “liberated” subject categories. Framed thusly, Dictée , attentive to a developing vitality that is situationally oriented to transnationally constituted space, also performs a disavowal of the categorical-universal within secular-liberal knowledges. Between Rey Chow’s aesthetics, Erin Manning’s writing on performance and embodiment, and Adriana Cavarero’s political theory, this essay argues that origin, disentangled from the present via a transnational lens, is in fact always shared and experienced as criollo ; is a situation always revealing a historico-political imbrication of a creative beginning to a new language of forced imposition.

What's Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power

Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere.

Monsters of Biopower

The modern Greek word for monster τ?ρας, word which, according to J. B. Hofmann's Etymological Dictionary of Ancient Greek, in ancient Greek meant rare an unusual natural phenomenon, including wonder and everything that functioned as sign, an inauspicious omen, not unlike Latin monstrum, which also meant an that functioned as divine omen or portent sign, deriving from word monere, to warn, link between abnormal or unusual shape and warning being established from fact that or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impeding evil. Although seems to have its origin in another Greek word, τρ?eιν (to tremble), both words and terrifying would be translated in Greek as τeρατ?δeς.However relevant or not above etymological observations may be, fact that in contemporary English, terror and monstrous meet in context of acts classified as terrorist, notably in case of which, as Jacqueline Rose notes, is most often considered peculiarly monstrous . . . aberration performed by freaks of nature (or culture).1 In addition to terror, third signifier attaches itself to contemporary English semantic cluster of monstrous: as reaction with which acts, such as suicide bombing, supposed to be met. In his On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad devotes an entire chapter, titled Horror at Suicide Terrorism, to question: Why do people in West, at least liberal moralists, react to verbal and visual representations of suicide bombing with . . . such horror?2 Though I will propose different response than Asad's, I concur with him, and with Rose, that, in her words, bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare, so that the reactions it provokes must . . . reside somewhere other than in number of dead. Evidently, Rose continues, dropping cluster bombs from air not only less repugnant: it somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior and, hence, human rather than monstrous act. Beyond our history of official nuclear attacks, as Asad reminds us,Unimaginable cruelties perpetrated in secret or openly, by dictatorships and democracies, criminals and prison systems, racially oriented immigration policies and ethnic cleansing, torture and imperial wars all evident in world today.3And, while official and mainstream discourse labors to justify such policies and acts as reasonable and necessary for sustenance of civilization and freedom, why, as Asad asks, are there so many articles, books, TV documentaries, and films dedicated to reinforcing suicide bombing as horrendous monstrosity?4Incitement to HorrorI would like to begin by foregrounding that meeting representations of terrorist acts with horror reaction that reconfirms and seals labor of their characterization as monstrous, namely, to render them cases of inhuman aberration, thereby relegating them to domain outside humanity. If oldest, most ingrained definition of human thinking animal, experience of horror deprives human of its humanity, insofar as horror excludes, precisely, thought.That horror and thought exclude each other confirmed by otherwise divergent theoreticians who unanimously concur in that horror not cognitive but physiological or affective extra-discursive state of being. Not unlike state of, say, feeling nausea, horror state of being, whose manifestation, based on etymologies of Greek φρiκη [phrike] and Latin horror, may be described, as Adriana Cavarero writes, as a state of paralysis, reinforced by feeling of growing stiffon part of someone who freezing, and further, through her mythological reference to prototypical figure of horror, Medusa, as state of petrification. …

Antigone after Auschwitz

This reading of Sophocles’s Antigone traces the roots of contemporary ethnic cleansings and genocides to the love of one’s own. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, it argues that it is time to read Antigone rather than Oedipus as epitomizing the tragedy of the violated incest taboo, and to see that violation in terms of ideologies that in advocating loving only one’s own, make the world uninhabitable for all others.

Drones, Targeted Killings, and the Limitations of International Law

The debate about drones has largely taken place on a legal terrain with various politicians, lawyers, and activists all seeking to establish whether or not targeted killings are legal under the existing framework of international law. In particular, they have raised concerns about the geographical and temporal scope of the “war on terror,” the legal status of those being targeted and whether or not these strikes can be considered discriminate, proportionate, and necessary. The aim of this article is not to settle these legal questions once and for all but to think about the limitations of framing the use of drones as a legal issue rather than an ethical, moral, or political concern. I will argue that the emphasis on international law distracts attention away from the horrors of war by masking the pain and suffering that is caused in favor of technical debates about the application of particular legal codes. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, and Elaine Scarry, I will argue that we need to turn our attention back to the embodied experiences of those affected.

L'uomo che verrà: Horrorism and the Face of Italy

This paper examines Giorgio Diritti's 2009 film L'uomo che verrà (The Man who Will Come) as the product of a post-national practice of commemoration by which the nation, whose death has been theorized by Gentile, Fogu, and others, is resuscitated from the ground up through the depiction of the massacre at Marzabotto. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's notion of horrorism, it argues that the film's emphasis on the faces of its feminine victims and heroines exists in productive tension with its Christological overtones, eventually militating, ambivalently, for a feminine, and decidedly maternal, face of the nation.

Sonorous Voice and Feminist Teaching: Lessons from Cavarero

I claim that Adriana Cavarero’s concept of sonorous voice is significant in feminist teaching because, as she argues, dominant concepts of voice refer to voice in semantic terms thereby discounting voice in sonorous terms. This process of ‘devocalization’, spanning the history of Western philosophy, devalues the uniqueness embodied in each sonorous voice effecting a bias against female-sounding voices. In light of women’s history and experience of being silenced, this devaluing of sonorous voice has distinct implications for feminist teaching. A person’s actual sounding voice, which constitutes her or his uniqueness, is missing from prior considerations of ‘voice’ in professional ethics. Because establishing a voice of authority is a central challenge starting off as a teacher, devocalization makes this challenge greater for those with female-sounding voices who take on and try out the dispositions and attitudes of an authoritative professional. Using the example of a voice workshop I designed for pre-service teachers, I re-consider it in light of ‘devocalization’ and the frankness needed to practice feminism, asking if it is possible to be frank and sonorous using irony (Cavarero’s way of writing with ‘bad intentions’). I conclude that it is, that Cavarero’s philosophical practice is a model for feminist teaching, and I re-write the workshop with ‘bad intentions’; for and in more than one voice.

Sguardo di madre – Ordine simbolico, colpa e liberazione in "Una bambina e basta" di Lia Levi

Il libro di Lia Levi preso in esame si presta a essere letto sia come un documento riguardante la persecuzione degli ebrei in Italia, sia come la testimonianza d’una infanzia negata, in cui la giovanissima protagonista è alla ricerca di sé, in un mondo intriso di retorica maschilista. Il contributo analizza innanzitutto il dispositivo colpevolizzante approntato dall’ordine simbolico dell’antisemitismo, e pone in evidenza come il suo meccanismo sia analogo a quello all’opera nell’ideologia del dominio di genere. Desumendo dalla riflessione di Adriano Cavarero la categoria dello 'sguardo', il saggio ne segue lo sviluppo nella storia di Lia Levi, dapprima soffermandosi sul rapporto della bambina con il mondo adulto, quindi sul rapporto senza infingimenti – ma sempre teso tra percezione della colpa e liberazione – con la madre. Si delineano così alcuni luoghi simbolici in cui la bambina ritaglia uno spazio di appartenenza a sé sottratto alla storia, alla violenza voluta dall’uomo. Quel che riesce a far fronte a un mondo orribile, d’altra parte, non è il 'diritto' escogitato dall’ordine simbolico maschile, del padre, ma l’ostinazione dello sguardo materno a cui la bambina è esposta sin dalla nascita, nella sua fragile creaturalità e carnalità. Sono centrali, a questo punto dell’esame del testo di Levi, non solo le riflessioni di Cavarero ispirate da Hannah Arendt, ma anche quelle di Theodor. W. Adorno e Jacques Derrida. Proprio il riconoscimento conferito da uno sguardo femminile che salva dal dominio e dalla violenza è ciò che in conclusione restituisce alla bambina di Lia Levi una vita senza attributi, degna d’essere vissuta per il semplice fatto d’essere stata generata da una madre.

Hannah Arendt as an ally for queer politics?

Feminist scholars interested in the thought of Hannah Arendt have often criticized her for excluding the questions of gender and sexuality from her political philosophy. Early readers, such as Adrienne Rich, Mary O’Brien, Hanna Pitkin and Wendy Brown present Arendt as a ‘masculine thinker’, a theorist who dismisses fundamental aspects of the human condition, such as embodiment, emotions and biological reproduction. In striking contrast, theorists motivated by an ethics of sexual difference, such as Adriana Cavarero and Julia Kristeva most notably, cherish Arendt as a feminine thinker, even as a ‘female genius’. Th is paper examines a highly marginal, but original, queertheoretical interest in Arendt’s works. I show how a number of gay- and queer-studies scholars, since the late 1980s have used Arendt as an ally in theorizing lesbian and gay rights as well as for understanding how the ‘closet’ operates in the production of myths about sexuality, race and gender. These readings that integrate feminist-, gayand queer-scholarship do not look at gender and sexuality in Arendt’s writings by asking whether Arendt qualifies as a feminist, whether she had anything significant to say about women, or whether or not she was a masculine thinker. They are instead concerned with the question of how certain groups of people come to be viewed as naturally inferior, as genetically predestined to remain so, and hence legitimately subjected to shame, unequal treatment and even annihilation. Why this is particularly important for a feminist project, is that crucial to this process of defaming is the ‘effemination’ and ‘social gaslighting’ of certain groups of people (Jewish and homosexual men in this case) as well as the pathologizing of so called ‘effeminate characteristics’. This raises a number of important questions: why is it, that effeminacy is needed for justifying the imprisoning, assaulting and murdering of certain persons? Furthermore, what do various moral, medical and political techniques of effeminizing reveal about a society, and more importantly, about the formation of the nation-State?

Encountering Violence: Terrorism and Horrorism in War and Citizenship

This article introduces Adriana Cavarero's concept of “horrorism” into International Relations (IR) discussions of the relationship between war and citizenship. Horrorism refers to a violent violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other's care and harm. With its motif of physical and ontological denigration, horrorism offends the human condition by making its victims gaze upon and/or experience repugnant violence and bodily disfiguration precisely when the vulnerable are most in need of care. The article argues that horrorism complicates disciplinary understandings of contemporary violence which tend to see terrorism, but not horrorism, in war and which generally neglect to theorize how violence—and particularly horrorism—is embedded in, and exchanged, through state/citizen relationships. To elaborate these arguments, the article analyses three pieces of war art: Jeremy Deller's “Baghdad, 5 March 2007,” Donald Gray's mural, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and a still image from Cynthia Weber's film, “Guadalupe Denogean: ‘I am an American.’” By taking the War on Terrorism as their subject, these pieces demonstrate how war makes visible the terror and horror in state/citizen relationships. The article concludes by reconsidering how encountering signs of horrorism might broaden our frames of war and further our empathic vision toward the precarious victims of horrorism or, alternatively, might confirm the patriotic allegiances of imperial citizens in ways that further bind their citizenship to state political and economic violence and narrow the scope for genuine empathy.

Canção popular: notas sobre a revocalização do logos

Este trabalho tem o objetivo de debater o processo de emudecimento do logos poético ao longo do tempo, a partir da análise de algumas canções populares. Apoiados nas observações levadas a público por Adriana Cavarero no livro Vozes plurais: filosofia da expressão vocal (2011), investigamos a presença dos “animais vocálicos”, tomando como exemplo a conhecida fábula da formiga e da cigarra de La Fontaine, passamos pelas avaliação da lírica como “voz do coração” e audição das sereias “mulheres que cantam” como signos da ontologia da poesia e da canção popular, até a polifonia vocal da mitopoética de Macunaíma, como representante de um ensaio sobre o Brasil.