Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

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Judith Butler. Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

CONTENTS

Prelude

Notes

Introduction

Inclination in the Work of Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero and Feminism

Key Themes in Cavarero’s Thought

Notes

Scenes of Inclination

Notes

Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall

Notes

How to Do Things with Inclination

Postures of Refusal

An Inclination Reading of the Bacchae

An Inclination Reading of Antigone and the Sphinx

Leonardo’s Madonna: Inclination as Altruism or Agonism?

Toward an Agonistic Inclination

Notes

Thinking Materialistically with Locke, Lonzi, and Cavarero

1

2

3

4

5

6

Notes

Cavarero, Kant, and the Arcs of Friendship

Notes

Bad Inclinations

Cavarero in European Sexual Difference Feminism

Cavarero and Butler

Cavarero and Antisocial Theories

Notes

Querying Cavarero’s Rectitude

Cavarero’s Inclined Politics

The Politics of Reading

Dispositifs: Ontology, Ethics, Politics

Mother and Child Reunion

Notes

From Horrorism to the Gray Zone

Notes

Violence, Vulnerability, Ontology

Notes

Queer Madonnas

Eros, Friendship, Domination

Weaving Dissent

Notes

Coda

Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

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TOWARD A FEMINIST ETHICS OF NONVIOLENCE

I met Adriana Cavarero halfway up a mountain in Sicily. People from across Europe had convened to talk about life, politics, and contingency; Cavarero, as a political philosopher and the foremost Italian feminist scholar writing today, was among a number of keynote speakers asked to contribute their thoughts.1 As a student of the relationship between violence and politics I was aware of Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence; however, I hadn’t encountered the rest of her oeuvre, and the book, in isolation, had been swept up in a large number of texts I was reading in the early stages of my Ph.D.2 Cavarero’s talk was in Italian, and having no Italian, I was left with the sonority of her voice and her embodied communication; Cavarero at times sitting behind her desk, at times standing and leaning in to the audience, her paper discarded as her oration carried her into the room, focusing in on the interventions from those who contributed their thoughts, provocations, and disagreements. In between the talks people would gather in the courtyard to smoke and drink coffee or beer, sheltering under the shade of a grafted citrus tree from the relentless midsummer Sicilian sun. I spoke to Gianmaria Colpani and other students of Cavarero’s about my thesis, and they introduced me to some of the key themes that can be found across her work: not only the extrapolation and exploration of horrorist violence, but a prolonged engagement with vocality, feminist materiality, narration, and, above all, Hannah Arendt’s category of uniqueness.3 It became clear that there was a glaring gap in my research, perhaps accounted for by the sway of the biopolitical tradition in Italian political philosophy that Cavarero sits in proximity to, yet apart from. Toward the end of the first evening Cavarero and I spoke briefly, but it wasn’t until the second evening, when enough time had passed for people to get to know one another and to relax some of the unspoken proprieties that lie just below the surface of the social world of academia, that a sense of who Adriana Cavarero was became more apparent.

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Honig’s relation to these two thinkers charts a rather different trajectory. Like Butler’s work on performativity, Honig’s reading of Arendt was also inspired by the performative in Austin. While Butler’s extension of the theory of performativity to sex/gender inspired Honig’s radical reading of political action in Arendt,31 rather than simply apply Butler’s theory Honig has developed a unique feminist theory of her own, navigating the tension between her poststructuralist approach and her longstanding sympathy for Cavarero’s sexual difference project. Indeed, Honig’s “agonistic sorority”32 operates in the very space between—in fact, the space opened up by—this “postmodern”/sexual difference debate.

By tracing the development of Cavarero’s feminism in this section we have seen how her perceived initial distance from Butler has lessened over time, and that Honig’s agonistic feminism provides us with a way to productively map their differences. We will see in the next section that Honig’s more direct engagement with agonism leads to her effort to take an alternative path to Cavarero’s heterotopian feminism. This also generates Honig’s distinctive critique of the politics of nonviolence that has come to unite Cavarero and Butler’s recent work.

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