Читать книгу Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence - Judith Butler - Страница 11

As noted, Cavarero has made an extraordinary contribution to political and philosophical debate over the last four decades. Pertinent to this volume is her method of theft; her critique of the role of the body in the philosophical tradition; her reappropriation of the body as unique, narratable, and vulnerable; and her consequent ethics of nonviolence concerned with inclined relationality and care.

Throughout her work, Cavarero steals and adapts familiar images, tropes, or stories of women, refiguring them to emphasize their central role in the myths and theories in which they fleetingly appear.³⁶ We have seen how in Inclinations she takes an orthodox image of the Madonna and child to undermine our ordinary relations of independence and uprightness. In In Spite of Plato—which reread the texts by Plato, Parmenides, and Homer, founding fathers of political philosophy—Cavarero subverted the masculinist themes of death and struggle by focusing on four female figures—Demeter, Penelope, Diotima, and a maidservant from Thrace—usually overlooked due to their marginal positions in the texts. This simultaneously revealed their constitutive exclusion from the Western tradition and created a space for them to be something more than a “functional subspecies” of humanity.³⁷ This method enables her to subvert patriarchy by reappropriating and renarrating the figures of the philosophical tradition.

In rethinking the philosophical tradition Cavarero identified a paradox at its heart. On the one hand, beginning with Aristotle, politics is premised on a conception of the human as disembodied: human to the extent that he is in possession of logos, his body is an unhelpful distraction from the task of expressing what, within the political community, is useful and harmful, what is just and unjust. On the other hand, the Western political tradition continuously articulates its principles, theories, and treatises with recourse to the metaphor of the body. This body, however, is not female but male. Nonetheless, the presence of a body as the guiding metaphor of the Western political tradition maintains an excess that the putatively disembodied accounts of politics found in this tradition are unable to fully master.³⁸

In considering what it might mean for political thought to take the body, and in particular the female body, seriously, Cavarero borrows Arendt’s category of uniqueness, famously articulated in The Human Condition.³⁹ For Cavarero, Western metaphysics has overlooked who people are, instead focusing on what people are. Who a person is—one’s uniqueness—is not a quality proper to a person, but emerges between people and is expressed by their singular, embodied form as much as, if not more than, their reasoned speech. For Cavarero, one always needs another to give one a sense of who one is; one’s uniqueness is not something that can be discerned on one’s own. Who a person is can be made apparent through the storying of one’s life by another. The figuration of selfhood only becomes apparent when narrated by another, often in hindsight. If Western metaphysics has focused almost exclusively on what people are, rather than who they are, then this distinction can be mapped onto the previously noted androcentrism of this tradition: its implicit, or often explicit, assumption that Man, far from being universal, is the morphological and onto-epistemological sine qua non of being. By presenting an abstract figure—Man, or the human—and analyzing what he is, this tradition fuses masculinity with this search for what it is to exist, abstracted from the everyday lived experience of particular people.

As noted, for Cavarero, this androcentrism means that women face a double exclusion: first, like many people, women are forced to reckon with a tradition that refuses to engage who they are in favor of what they are; and second, this what, which is presented to women in the figure of the universal Man, is masculine.⁴⁰ However, for Cavarero, one consequence of this double exclusion is that women, having been historically alienated from a universal conception of what it is to be, have instead sought forms of expression that, rather than drawing on the abstraction inherent in philosophy, have instead engaged the resources of storytelling to focus on the particularity of their embodied singularity.⁴¹ Men, by contrast, seeing themselves (or what they think of as themselves) reflected back in this universal figure of Man, have little impetus to search for other forms of expression outside the tradition of Western metaphysics. Cavarero’s response to this double exclusion is a philosophy of narration (or narration in opposition to philosophy) that focuses not on death but on birth. This brings into focus the figure of the mother (in both a literal sense and as any person responding to the primary ethical choice of either care or abandonment) as the primary person who reveals who the newborn infant is.

Furthermore, Cavarero identified the voice as expressive of a person’s uniqueness, understanding the significance of this voice not in the semantic meaning that it conveys, but in the voice understood as an embodied phenomenon that communicates a person’s uniqueness prior to any transmission of speech. Cavarero engaged here in a deconstruction of the Western tradition as “voice” has been understood in some of its most famous texts, demonstrating how the voice as an embodied phenomenon has been assigned to women, understood as feminine, whereas speech is the privilege of men and masculinity. This can be seen, for Cavarero, in one of the foundational texts of the Western political tradition: Aristotle’s Politics, in which he identifies logos, or reasoned speech, as the defining capacity of the properly political animal that is Man.⁴² For Cavarero, Aristotle, as well as the entire Western tradition, has obscured the fact that logos was, for the Greeks, both phone and semantike; it is the latter that has come to dominate accounts of speech, signifying the reason that is communicated in speech, while a person’s voice is at best understood as a mere vehicle for the expression of reason, at worst a quality that is dangerous, seductive, and properly feminine.⁴³ Cavarero traces this misogynistic history, identifying the ways women are consigned to the vocalic, but further, mining these counter-histories to demonstrate the absurdity of a masculine political tradition that believes it can do away with embodiment. The stereotype that Cavarero identifies is thus stolen from the masculine tradition and mobilized as a means of bringing to an end this tradition, opening a way of understanding vocality and embodiment as something more than the other of the disembodied, reasoning, autonomous Man.

Cavarero mobilized her account of uniqueness to make sense of a contemporary form of violence that she names as “horrorism.” Cavarero’s analysis emerged from the inadequacy of the notion of terrorism to name a violence that, rather than making one flee in terror, fixes one in place in the horror of its enactment.⁴⁴ For Cavarero, horrorism describes a violence that targets the uniqueness of a typically helpless person as it is expressed through her body. She describes this as an “ontological crime,” as it targets a quality—uniqueness—that is essential to what it is to be a human being, even as this essential quality does not reside within a person but emerges in relation to another.⁴⁵ Horrorist violence might include, for Cavarero, suicide bombing, whereby the embodied singularity of victim and perpetrator is collapsed in the extremity of the explosion; torture, where one is rendered helpless in the face of the infliction of extreme pain by a seemingly absolute power; and Auschwitz, where the figure of the Muselmann was the end result of an experimental, systematic destruction of humanness.

As well as developing a conceptualization of violence, Cavarero also developed an account of vulnerability as central to the human condition, engaging in a dialogue with Butler who was also theorizing vulnerability in her Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and later Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Both thinkers assert that vulnerability could provide the starting point for a powerful conception of ethics. By accepting our vulnerability rather than trying to hide or overcome it—as philosophy has traditionally sought to do—we might be able to build a more caring society in which we are all more attentive to the vulnerability of others.⁴⁶ While there is much overlap in Cavarero and Butler’s conceptions of vulnerability, in Cavarero one finds an emphasis on the dual meaning of vulnerability as something that both exposes us to violence (highlighted by the etymology of the Latin term vulnus as wound) as well as exposing us to care, affection, and caress (in the etymology of vel as bare, exposed skin).⁴⁷ This dual focus is important, as it signals the way that throughout Cavarero’s work she is not content to fall into the biopolitical trap of only focusing on the violence enacted on “bare life,”⁴⁸ seeing this as a reiteration of a masculine trope central to metaphysics that can only understand humanness as a being-toward-death. Instead, for Cavarero, an important part of her feminist project is the articulation of forms of life that emphasize pleasure and happiness as being central to human existence, where life is to be lived and in its living gives human life meaning—what she describes in the “Coda” of this volume as an “imaginary of hope.” Indeed, it is this that makes the ethical stakes of the extreme violence she confronts in Horrorism all the more stark.

Honig has raised concern over the possibility that Butler’s and Cavarero’s work on vulnerability reflects a certain “mortalist humanism.” It is worth noting for those not familiar with political theory that there has long been suspicion of humanism as grounded on universal claims that can only ever include some and exclude others. As a consequence it may have seemed surprising to see these thinkers appear to turn back to questions concerning something Honig referred to as “humanness” and to increasingly refer to the human in their work, emphasizing that politics occurs in the very signification of what, or rather who, counts as human. As Timothy Huzar notes in this volume, it is clear that both Cavarero and Butler are not humanists in the traditional sense: they are not trying to define the human, but engaged in projects that work at the borders of what is deemed to be human, to question and problematize the notion of humanness at work and draw attention to the violence that such a notion effects. Yet more than just problematize the way that humanness functions for political thought, they both develop an ethics based, in Honig’s words, on “the ontological fact of mortality” that operates as a challenge to the traditional philosophical understanding that it is the capacity to reason that distinguishes the human from the nonhuman.⁴⁹ In contrast, mortalist humanism, for Honig, makes central the capacity for “vulnerability and suffering.”⁵⁰ Indeed, it is from here that Cavarero’s and Butler’s emphasis on nonviolence stems, since they mobilize this fact of vulnerability to assert a value for life and compassion that emerges from our equal capacity to suffer—and, particularly for Cavarero, to be cared for.

However, for Honig the specification of nonviolence as an ethics risks undermining this project, since any assertion of our shared mortalism and vulnerability could never guarantee the type of ethical response that is hoped for and risks disavowing its inherent violence.⁵¹ In contrast, Honig calls for an agonistic humanism that is not founded on our shared vulnerability, but that “sees in mortality, suffering, sound and vulnerability resources for some form of enacted universality.”⁵² Since these are “no less various in their significations than are the diverse languages that unite and divide us,”⁵³ the appeal to ethics may attempt to circumvent the violence of political struggle; a violence that may be necessary in order to convince or persuade the witnesses of suffering that it is suffering that they are witnessing and that they should respond compassionately. Thus, for Honig, Cavarero’s ethics cannot avoid the risk of violence, and more worryingly, violence may even be necessary to defend the type of pacifism that both Butler and Cavarero articulate.

Indeed, Butler’s recent work The Force of Nonviolence suggests that vulnerability needs to be part of a wider constellation of “vulnerability, rage, persistence and resistance.”⁵⁴ In this way, vulnerability is less ontological and appears more like Honig’s “resources for some form of enacted universality.” This is a resource that can inspire resistance through a movement for nonviolence that is, for Butler, a particular form of refusal.⁵⁵ This is a refusal that is an engagement in struggle even if it refuses the violence that is expected and indeed demanded of it. For Butler, such a refusal of violence forms part of a wider politics of equality, a thread that links up what may otherwise appear to be separate movements. Relationality is at the heart of any politics of equality, but for Butler, rather than celebrate any particular form of relation, including care, it is important, if our solidarity is to succeed, to acknowledge the ambivalence of our relations with one another, the limits of our abilities to care, the value of our rage, and our ability to sometimes restrain our inclinations to lean toward or away, as she suggests in her contribution to this volume.

In the account we have provided here, we have endeavored to chart the criss-crossing paths of interaction and inspiration among these three thinkers, underscoring the productive tensions among their different yet complementary struggles. Read in this way, we can see that their work is engaged on different fronts. First, while Honig’s focus is always on the political tools that we and others can use to act upon the world, Butler and Cavarero here enact politics within the discipline of philosophy, their ethics posing a challenge to traditional ethics: “an insurrection at the level of ontology.”⁵⁶ Second, perhaps both Cavarero and Butler are positing their ethics not necessarily as an achievable way of life but as a polemical challenge to our current way of living, demonstrating what is lacking in the space between our way of living and the vision they defend. In this sense, while Honig’s essay emphasizes the risks involved in fighting for political alternatives, and Butler’s asks if—and how—we might be able to avoid those risks while still engaged in the struggle, Cavarero offers a parallel vision of a world without those risks. In this sense, perhaps it is Cavarero who offers us the most hope, by daring to dream the wildest dreams.

Indeed, while Cavarero does invoke an ethics, this is not a traditional ethics in the form of a search for principles. Rather than something to be “deduced,”⁵⁷ it is given a priori. It arises from the “altruistic ontology of the human existent as finite,”⁵⁸ something akin to a Levinasian ethics of an encounter with the other. It is in support of this ethic that she mobilizes the stereotypical maternal scene to both highlight its initial deployment and to undermine the binary that gives rise to the stereotype in the first place.⁵⁹ Despite concerns raised here, and in the interventions that follow, Cavarero does try to avoid fetishizing inclination; instead, her intention is to break the stereotype away from this tradition and use its resources to think a “new relational ontology of the vulnerable.”⁶⁰ Bringing the various strands of her thought together, this relational ontology of the vulnerable insists that life cannot be disentangled from our relations to others; that embodiment is a crucial component of this relation; and finally that, rather than characterize life as a selfish existence turned toward death, an altruistic ethics can be discerned in the natal scene, where a mother is confronted with an irrefutable, primary ethical choice of either care or abandonment.⁶¹ Despite Honig’s realism and Butler’s caution, for Cavarero (and emphasized by Huzar later in this volume), this ethical relation and the rearticulation of existence that is coterminous with it are intended to contribute to an “imaginary of hope”: a postural geometry that indicates, in its collision with our current ways of being, not only that another mode of existence is possible, but that it has been lived together by people throughout history, despite being overlooked by philosophy’s dominant narrative (or, perhaps, because of this overlooking).⁶² By reading Cavarero’s work as a staging of this collision between alternative imaginaries and one’s current way of being, it becomes clear that although not a self-proclaimed agonist, she is not necessarily circumventing political struggle, but dramatically counterposing one image of the world with another, performatively remaking it through the stories that she tells. It is true that her vision may appear to celebrate what has until now been a subordinate role of caring, but perhaps this need not be the case anymore. By insisting that we place inclined ethical relations center stage, Cavarero wishes to us this consciously naïve imaginary to disrupt and subvert—even if only by a little—the “pathetic blunder” that is our all-too-common conception of the world as comprised of apparently independent, self-sufficient beings.

Summary of Contributions

The essays that follow engage with different aspects of Cavarero’s project. Cavarero’s opening essay presents her ethic of inclination as responding to a postural geometric imaginary in the philosophical tradition that is irrefutably gendered. Opening with a reflection on the character of Irina in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, she draws out the inclined, sinuous, curving shapes of the female and contrasts them to the straight, upright, correct, and erect male figure. Linking this rectitude back to ancient Greek etymology, she traces its progress through the work of Plato and Kant, finishing with Proudhon, where the moralizing of philosophy’s gendered posture is explicit. Here, women are the embodiment of vice, physically weak, and always inclined in their two roles, sex and childbirth. The male subject is he who directs his own life, while the woman lives for and through others.

Yet it is from this devalued imagery of the female body as maternal that Cavarero begins her subversion of the philosophical tradition. Following Arendt’s valorization of the natal scene, Cavarero emphasizes the distinctive role of the inclined mother as caregiver as a central symbol of human interdependency rather than a weak, supporting role. This image of inclined motherhood forms the basis of Cavarero’s ethic of inclination—an altruistic ethic that upends the “imagined wholeness” of the dominant liberal model of the independent, self-sufficient, male individual.

Although Butler’s Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall: Interdependency and Ethics in Cavarero opens with shared points of agreement between herself and Cavarero, Butler then seeks to emphasize the importance of ambivalence in our affective ties, including the maternal ties that Cavarero celebrates. Butler begins with the observation that all upright bodies presuppose support that comes from inclination, including not only the inclined bodies of those looking after us when we are young or old, inclining over us to care, stabilizing us as we learn to walk, but also those who support us throughout our lives. Despite our adult claims and aspirations to “stand on our own two feet … no one stands on her own.” We are instead always dependent on the care and support of others. Further, Butler draws attention to the material, technical, and infrastructural support that exceeds caring relationships, such as the maternal and familial as emphasized by Cavarero, but also the sororal and friendly, as emphasized by Honig, Battersby, and Woodford, in this volume. Butler is indicating to us the necessity of welfare systems, healthcare access, social support systems, all of which are precarious and often under threat. Butler expresses her own gratitude to Cavarero, upon whom she admits that her own thinking relies more than can be easily acknowledged in a single chapter. She indicates, for example, her agreement with Cavarero’s argument regarding uniqueness, her critique of individualism, her Levinasian approach to ethics, and her critique of the masculinity of the “I.” However, Butler wishes to complicate Cavarero’s reading of inclination to emphasize that both the inclined and the erect figure “are not radically distinct and never fully oppositional”; instead we all move through inclination and uprightness throughout our lives. Crucially, Butler indicates that Cavarero’s stereotypical reading risks enacting the very move that she seeks to avoid: it could imply a denial of the dependency of the male subject; a denial of inclination in philosophy. Instead Butler seeks to reveal this dependency. Butler shows how Kant’s description of the vertigo that philosophy experiences in the encounter with the sublime reveals the inclination that is already at the heart of philosophy (an argument further extended by Christine Battersby’s research on Kant’s friendships in her contribution to this volume). This leads Butler to ask whether we need to be cautious of Cavarero’s analogies between geometry and bodily posture and geometry and morality. Butler argues that when considering the relationship between ethics, politics, and nonviolence it may be necessary to distinguish a predisposition, a disposition, an inclination, and a bodily movement or posture. We may be inclined to “lean” a certain way, but may restrain ourselves, perhaps for ethical reasons. Indeed, if we consider the ethical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Butler notes that such a clash of inclinations could be the decisive moment in resisting violent action. If we wish to further Cavarero’s project to establish a feminist ethics of nonviolence, then for Butler it is to this ambivalence at the heart of inclination that we must turn.

Indeed, it is precisely this ambivalence that runs through Honig’s “How to Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero.” In this essay Honig turns inclination toward sorority, agonism, and heterotopia on behalf of a more egalitarian and contestatory politics. Noting that care relationships are often rather more ambivalent than Cavarero seems to acknowledge, Honig urges us to recognize the agonism in inclination that she suggests could form part of a politics of refusal. Any such agonistic inclination would have to confront the violence that Cavarero disallows. In the female protagonists of Sophocles’s Antigone and Euripides’s The Bacchae, Honig identifies figures of inclination characterized by agonistic sorority instead of Cavarero’s maternity. Turning to Freud—so often disavowed or ignored by Cavarero and many Italian feminists—Honig recalls his argument that there is the figure of a vulture hidden in the folds of the painting Cavarero uses to inspire her theory of inclined maternity: Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. This draws attention to the darker side of maternal care (albeit also, as Honig points out, to Freud’s misogyny). Honig questions whether Cavarero’s ethics of inclination might be too separatist, failing to act against the order of rectitude, and crucially overlooking the epistemicide that any act of separation comprises. This confronts Cavarero’s feminist ethics of nonviolence with the inescapability of violence for politics. Honig is not seeking to promote violence. Rather, she heralds a politics of refusal that—in spite of and in full acknowledgment of the ever-present threat of violence—insists on a “return to the city” to continue the struggle against dominatory power.

These essays are then followed by a short Scherzo by Olivia Guaraldo, who defends Cavarero’s approach to rethinking the relationality of the sexual encounter. Reading Locke alongside Carla Lonzi and Cavarero, she argues that, surprisingly, there is continuity between Locke and Lonzi in that both read the sexual encounter as conflictual. This, however, is for different reasons. Locke’s aim is to domesticate the sexual, while Lonzi’s is to exaggerate it to resist sexual domination. Since for Locke, the sexual act is what founds the order of property, Guaraldo shows how redistribution of property is dependent on a rethinking of our sexual relations. A step toward this is found in Guaraldo’s reading of Cavarero’s theorization of sexual relations as beyond conflict. She therefore argues that the uniqueness found in Cavarero’s understanding of our relationality offers a more hopeful imaginary; a pleasurable, erotic, and empowering experience such that it need not comprise appropriation (Locke), control, or domestication (Lonzi).

We then move through the collection of études that respond to Cavarero’s provocative text in multiple ways. Simona Forti’s “From Horrorism to the Inclination of the Gray Zone” explores a disjunction between Cavarero’s work on horror and violence and her relational ethics of inclination. She begins with Cavarero’s argument that our human existence makes us dependent, opening us simultaneously to care or wounding. She then turns to Cavarero’s argument that horrorist violence is that which takes on an ontological dimension by striking at the heart of that which makes us unique. Yet, reading Cavarero alongside Primo Levi, Forti emphasizes the limitations of Cavarero’s reading of violence as comprised of victim and perpetrator, suggesting, in a counterpoint to Honig, that an ethic of nonviolence needs to appreciate the deeper complexity of power relations. This complicates the ethic of inclination, emphasizing alongside Honig and Devenney that horror, and indeed violence, can emerge from inclination. As such, this postural ethics, which valorizes inclination over rectitude, may form part of a wider problematic radicalization of evil, prevalent in much post-holocaust ethical thought.

In a development of Butler’s turn to Kant, Christine Battersby draws on new research concerning Kant’s social life to consider whether Cavarero’s relational ontology can help us reorient the grounding principles of political and ethical theory toward vulnerability. The urgency of such a task is exacerbated today by the violences of power inequality and dependency, from what is taken to be the private lives of individuals right through the arena of international governance. Drawing on the history of a recently discovered champagne glass dedicated to Kant and his circle of friends, Battersby provides an account of this circle, and particularly Kant’s friendship with Joseph Green, an English merchant, to argue that Kant did value inclination, albeit not in the maternal form. Instead, his close circle of friends exemplifies another mode of relationality, one that unlike maternity or sorority is free of kinship ties. In reflecting on the importance of friendship for Kant, Battersby seeks to defend Kant, although differently to Butler’s defense in this volume. Complimenting Butler, Battersby finds a Kant inclined in friendship, against Cavarero’s “caricature.” Perhaps Kant was not quite as upright after all, and maybe inclination can be found in friendship as well as maternity.

Lorenzo Bernini’s contribution, “Bad Inclinations: Cavarero, Queer Theories, and the Drive,” celebrates Cavarero’s contribution to philosophy and elaborates on the dialogue between Cavarero and Butler’s work. It then, however, identifies an alternative queer theory that more strongly challenges Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, in particular because of Bernini’s use of the Freudian concept of drive. Rather than coinciding with sexual instinct, drive is a perversion of it and is often associated with homosexual sex as a way to exclude and subordinate homosexuality. Instead of responding, as Butler does, by seeking to struggle for recognition for sexual minorities, Bernini emphasizes Edelman’s argument that minorities should remain “antisocial”—outside of the spheres of signification and intelligibility, and also outside of the prioritization of the child and relationships of maternity and kinship. Complementing Butler’s and Honig’s emphases on ambivalence, Bernini recognizes the ambivalence of the figure of the child for our social lives, questioning the value of reproduction and virility for not only sexual relationships but care relationships, too. Bernini argues that by recognizing the interconnections of care and sex or even sex without care, we may be able to offer an alternative theorization of vulnerability for nonviolence, which, still in inclination, but without the mother and child relation at its center, radically exposes the self to the other.

In “Querying Cavarero’s Rectitude,” Mark Devenney begins by agreeing with Cavarero’s contention that inclination can subvert the order of masculinity and rectitude. Similarly to Butler, Devenney emphasizes the dependence of the upright “I” on the support of others. Yet he is concerned that Cavarero’s argument undermines itself and ends up itself enacting a violence—a form of propriety concerning the correct way to read philosophy—on the texts she reads. Submitting Cavarero’s text to an improper reading,⁶³ Devenney suggests, in agreement with Honig, Butler, and Bernini, that there is more ambivalence in the mother-child relationship than Cavarero indicates. For Devenney this means that it cannot provide the basis for any ethics, since the very founding of an ethics introduces new hierarchies and order to the proper, however attractive they may seem to their designer. Devenney argues that in asserting an ontology of inclination, Cavarero enacts a new rectitude or rightness: inclination is now that which is correct. This move undoes inclination’s subversive power. Along with Honig and Forti, Devenney sees a violence in this forcing that cannot be acknowledged by Cavarero. Rather than assert a separatist heterotopian schematism, Devenney suggests that a project of nonviolence must instead engage in hegemonic struggle in the here and now, but that this must be a struggle that is not founded on a prescribed ethics.

In “Violence, Vulnerability, Ontology: Insurrectionary Humanism in Cavarero and Butler,” Timothy Huzar is more sympathetic to Cavarero’s position, seeing a deep complementarity between Cavarero and Judith Butler. He argues that both enact what Jacques Rancière would call a “poetics of politics” by staging an understanding of vulnerability that is not so much ontologically grounded but made urgent by particular histories of violence associated with normative conceptions of humanness. As a consequence, disentangling the ethical, ontological, and political stakes of their interventions becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task. By overlooking the scenes of violence that make urgent their account of vulnerability, Huzar argues that it becomes too easy to dismiss their interventions as merely ethical, or as another ontology of the human. Instead, the insurrectionary humanism of their accounts of vulnerability reveals the imbrication of the ethical, the ontological, and the political.

Finally, Clare Woodford’s étude “Queer Madonnas in Love and Friendship” mobilizes alternative Madonna iconography against Leonardo’s inclined Madonna to ask whether the rectitude of an upright Madonna and the inclination of subordinated bodies might complicate Cavarero’s ethic of inclination. Woodford unearths a queer kinship in the orthodox Catholic narrative of the Virgin Mary to question maternity as a familial and caring relation. Echoing Honig’s, Devenney’s, and Forti’s concerns, she highlights the veiled violence in the maternal relation. Exploring a theme introduced by Battersby’s étude, Woodford considers the importance of non-kinship relationality in the form of friendship. She notes the intertwining of rectitude and inclination in any friendship—the interplay of eros and filia that can dwell in any caring relation (as also discussed by Bernini) and that emerges in points of agreement and disagreement (and may threaten any friendship, exceeding, in such cases, Honig’s agonism). Unpicking the assumed necessary links between maternity and inclination, Woodford instead asks whether a provocative friendship that consents to dissent reveals the struggle at the heart of any care relation. This account of dissenting friendship, both inclined and upright, could offer a more promising relationality for a politics, rather than an ethics, of dissent and nonviolence.

In the Coda, Cavarero responds to the pluriphonic “surging democracy” that emerges in the exchanges herein. With exemplary graciousness, she acknowledges that she may have neglected Kant a little in her reading, but in the main stands by her methodology of theft and her provocative reading style with “bad intentions” to read a text against itself. Against concerns that she has overplayed the analogies between morality and geometry, overemphasized maternity and the altruistic side of care, and repeated a certain naïve imaginary of motherhood, she emphasizes the urgency of this purposefully naïve vision. This is not in ignorance of its limitations; instead, she asserts that these limitations cannot stand in our way of hoping—and therefore working—for a better future. Cavarero acknowledges a certain strategic utopianism. Inspired by the feminist movements of the sixties, her work sounds a note of discord in contemporary philosophy recalling us to “the generative power of interaction” that can be mobilized by any such “imaginary of hope.” By using the everyday exceptionalilty of Leonardo’s mother and child image, Cavarero has communicated to us the possibility of a world where altruism is not naïve or far-fetched, where caring for others is not deemed to be an exception, and where exclusion is opposed rather than accepted. The power of this vision resides in its simplicity. It generated the palpable dynamism and sense of community at the conference that inspired this volume. Its ripples continue to inspire and provoke across the globe today, bringing diverse scholars together engaged in a shared project: a feminist ethics of nonviolence, in pursuit of a better world.

Final Thanks

Sincere appreciation is owed to the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton for hosting the initial meeting that inspired this volume. As a result, we extend a massive thanks to all participants, particularly those not published here as authors but whose interventions still ring throughout these engagements. Thanks also to Mark Devenney for the immense work in coordinating the conference and to Ian Sinclair for his fabulous organizational skills. None of this would have been possible without Tim Huzar and German Primera for instigating the whole affair, including Tim’s initial matchmaking between CAPPE at the University of Brighton and two research centers in Verona: the Hannah Arendt Centre (with Olivia Guaraldo) and PoliTesse (with Lorenzo Bernini), each of which collaborated with and supported the publication of this volume. Thanks to Bonnie Honig for reading and commenting on the entire draft. Thanks also, of course, to all of our contributors for their timely editing and responses, to Margaret Ferguson for her comments and enthusiasm, to Karen Bouchard and Matthew Martin, who went well beyond the call of duty, along with other librarians at Brown University to help with sourcing images, and to Tom Lay, Eric Newman, and Aldene Fredenburg at Fordham University Press for their endless patience and encouragement. Finally, this work is dedicated to Adriana Cavarero, whose exemplary generosity, care, and spirit of collegiality continue to provoke, support, and inspire our intellectual endeavors.