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Adriana Cavarero, Feminisms, and an Ethics of Nonviolence

TIMOTHY J. HUZAR AND CLARE WOODFORD

The painting of the mother and child is held up as an example to be strategically exploited in order to make inclination a good point of departure, a point from which we might rethink the ontology of the vulnerable and constitutive relationality in the terms of a postural geometry that, far from displacing the human on the straight axis, displaces it according to a multiplicity of contextual, contingent and intermittent, and at times even random, directions. The maternal inclination, in as much as it is a posture linked to the scene of birth, can become the fundamental schematism, the founding gesture of a new postural geometry.

—ADRIANA CAVARERO, INCLINATION: A CRITIQUE OF RECTITUDE

Adriana Cavarero’s work is at the center of a feminist rethinking of relationality. It seeks to overcome the traditional blindness of philosophy and political thought to the real conditions of enfleshed bodies that relate to one another in love, in hate, and in the spectrum of relations that lie between. This is not to imply that prior to Cavarero philosophy or politics did not concern the body. Rather, it has typically subordinated the body and, in a particular way, the bodies of women. Although Cavarero’s work forms but one part of a much wider feminist endeavor, this volume celebrates in critical spirit her extraordinary contribution to philosophical and political debate over four decades. It demonstrates how her wide-ranging and critical interventions have helped reinvigorate a stagnant political scene, asserting against persistent claims that There Is No Alternative that there are many alternatives lived by people across the world in spite of, and even in defiance of, the marginalization and exclusion to which they are subjected.

The exchange that follows stems from a conference in the summer of 2017 at the University of Brighton. Although inspired by Cavarero’s recent work on an ethical maternal posture of inclination,¹ the responses by Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and seven other interlocutors situate Cavarero’s argument in her more longstanding themes of nonviolence and uniqueness, which not only offer a critique but also an alternative to the masculine symbolic of philosophy. This introduction endeavors to introduce Cavarero’s work, as well as to chart the journey of an increasingly productive dialogue between Cavarero and other traditions within feminism, bringing together what were initially perceived to be radically divergent positions. It also seeks to capture the collaborative but provocative spirit of the inspirational scholarly friendship between Butler, Honig, and Cavarero as they contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.

It is first worth noting two features of this volume, both of which seek to challenge the traditional boundaries of political philosophy. First, some of its interventions, following Cavarero’s example, draw on images and objects, beginning and ending with Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of Madonna and Child with Saint Anne, but passing through sixth-century icons of the Madonna Theotokos; two further portraits by Leonardo Da Vinci (St. John the Baptist and an image of St. John later painted over with an image of Bacchus); two Renaissance Madonnas (Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Bellini’s Alzano Madonna); as well as Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin; an inscribed goblet belonging to Immanuel Kant; Marie Stillman’s Antigone Giving Burial Rites to her Brother Polynices; and Sigmund Freud’s image of the vulture in the folds of the women’s dresses in Leonardo’s Madonna. Each informs discussion of different aspects of human relations, in particular those of motherhood, sorority, friendship, and love. The use of these images emphasizes the aesthetic qualities of our affective relations, overflowing theoretical debates.

Second, in tribute to Cavarero’s theorization of pluriphony for philosophy,² this collection stages its conversation between critical but friendly voices in the style of a musical arrangement. As Timothy Huzar notes in the preface, Cavarero’s pluriphony is neither cacophony nor harmony, but the plurality of singular voices. The interventions are presented as a medley, each of which forms a part of the wider ensemble. The themes laid out by Cavarero in the opening essay are problematized by Butler and Honig, yet defended by Guaraldo’s Scherzo, emphasizing the novelty of Cavarero’s ethics of inclination and the importance of her methodology. This is followed by six short études that reflect on inclination and nonviolence. These respond not only to Cavarero but also to Butler, Honig, and to one another. The interwoven and multilayered argument that emerges seeks to combine—without failing to acknowledge the differences between—the work of Cavarero, Butler, and Honig; to acknowledge Honig’s debts to Cavarero and to acknowledge Cavarero’s influence on Butler, which may come as a surprise to Anglo-American audiences; and to posit fruitful directions for future research that brings feminists of different stripes together to think a nonviolent future, in the context of an increasingly belligerent international political scene.