Table Of ContentToward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence
Toward a Feminist Ethics
of Nonviolence
Adriana Cavarero, with Judith Butler, Bonnie
Honig, and Other Voices
Timothy J. Huzar and
Clare Woodford, Editors
Fordham University Press
new york 2021
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First edition
Contents
Prelude 1
Timothy J. Huzar
Introduction: Adriana Cavarero, Feminisms, and an Ethics
of Nonviolence 7
Timothy J. Huzar and Clare Woodford
Scenes of Inclination 33
Adriana Cavarero
Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall: Interde pen dency and Ethics
in Cavarero 46
Judith Butler
How to Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero 63
Bonnie Honig
Scherzo
Thinking Materialistically with Locke, Lonzi, and Cavarero 93
Olivia Guaraldo
Études
Cavarero, Kant, and the Arcs of Friendship 109
Christine Battersby
Bad Inclinations: Cavarero, Queer Theories, and the Drive 121
Lorenzo Bernini
vi / Contents
Querying Cavarero’s Rectitude 131
Mark Devenney
From Horrorism to the Gray Zone 141
Simona Forti
Vio lence, Vulnerability, Ontology: Insurrectionary Humanism
in Cavarero and Butler 151
Timothy J. Huzar
Queer Madonnas: In Love and Friendship 161
Clare Woodford
Coda 177
Adriana Cavarero
Bibliography 187
List of Contributors 199
Index 203
Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence
Prelude
Timothy J. Huzar
I met Adriana Cavarero halfway up a mountain in Sicily. P eople from
across Eu rope had convened to talk about life, politics, and contingency;
Cavarero, as a po liti cal phi los o pher and the foremost Italian feminist
scholar writing t oday, was among a number of keynote speakers asked to
contribute their thoughts.1 As a student of the relationship between vio-
lence and politics I was aware of Cavarero’s Horrorism: Naming Con
temporary Vio lence; 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 Ital-
ian, 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 t hose who contributed their thoughts, provocations, and disagree-
ments. In between the talks p eople would gather in the courtyard to smoke
and drink coffee or beer, sheltering u nder 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 in-
troduced me to some of the key themes that can be found across her work:
not only the extrapolation and exploration of horrorist vio lence, but a pro-
longed 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 biopo liti cal tradition in Italian po liti cal philosophy that Cavarero
sits in proximity to, yet apart from. Toward the end of the first eve ning
2 / Timothy J. Huzar
Cavarero and I spoke briefly, but it wasn’t u ntil the second eve ning, when
enough time had passed for p eople to get to know one another and to re-
lax 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.
One of the many themes that can be found in Cavarero’s work is an
insistence on a re spect for the palpable truthfulness of the everyday: that
in p eople’s everyday experiences something of the world is revealed to
them, just as they continuously reveal themselves to the world. This means
that despite her classical training and her sophisticated and extensive en-
gagements with some of the major debates in twentieth- century conti-
nental philosophy, Cavarero’s work insists that meaning is not to be sought
in the rarified conceptual worlds of g reat thinkers, but is pre sent in the
ordinary world for anyone to see or hear if they only knew how to see or
hear it. Her work gives us the tools to make t hese sensory adjustments:
each of her books functions something like an eyeglass or a hearing aid
that we can use to help learn what it is to see meaning in the everyday
and unlearn the compulsive turning to those tropes dear to the Western
tradition that are now wearing thin.
During the eve ning of the second day of the summer school, Cava-
rero demonstrated that her skill at manifesting the meaning pre sent in
the everyday was not restricted to her academic work. As the sun set and
people drank and smoked, Cavarero suggested that song might be a good
tonic for the heady metaphysics that were given form in the reasoned dia-
logue of that day’s talks and discussions.4 With the help of Adriana’s
enthusiasm, as well as the limoncello and grappa that began to flow at the
bar, p eople stood or sat in the now star- lit courtyard, voices raised in song
reverberating around the centuries- old stone walls. Some of these songs
were known by all, and so the soloist quickly became a member of the
chorus, while others began as solo and were slowly joined by other people
as they e ither learned the patterns, remembered the words, or clapped to
the rhythms. Other songs w ere known only to the singer and so stayed
as a singular voice. Yet even here, this was a singularity destined for the
ear of another, or in this case many others; and the sociality that was con-
voked in this space—or what Cavarero would now call the pluriphony—
was palpable to all those pre sent.5 Cavarero, for her part, performed an
operatic duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni— “Là ci darem la mano”—
embodying both masculine and feminine parts and, in the pro cess, pro-
viding further evidence for Lorenzo Bernini’s intimation in this collection
that her reticence regarding Judith Butler’s notion of gender performa-
tivity is itself something of a per for mance.6
Prelude / 3
In the months a fter the conference I read all of Cavarero’s work, and
her thought profoundly shifted the direction of my thesis. As well as be-
ing inspired by her thematic foci, I found validation in her inter- and
transdisciplinarity: it was clear that for Cavarero, responding to the ma-
jor questions of twentieth- century continental philosophy required an-
swers that did not discriminate when it came to the form or content from
which they took their resources. As well as some of the major theoretical
debates of the twentieth century, Cavarero also engages classical Greek
texts, con temporary lit er a ture, Eu ro pean visual arts, and con temporary
feminist politics. Each of these bodies of thought helps her articulate a
philosophy that is anti- metaphysical, mounting a relentless critique of the
presumptively masculine subject of the Western tradition; she demon-
strates the absurdity of this figure, juxtaposing him to the singular lives
of those who live in the plurality of the world. However, Cavarero is not
content with critique alone. More impor tant for her is the articulation of
other forms of life— other ways of being or modes of existence— that are
systematically overlooked by the gaze of the Western philosophical tra-
dition. For Cavarero, while it is necessary to develop a critique of this tra-
dition, including the subject fabricated by this tradition, the politics of
this intervention falls short if this subject’s deconstruction becomes the
telos of this work.7 For Cavarero, then, it is necessary to name the forms
of life that she sees as existing despite this presumptively masculine sub-
ject, a naming that derives from the lived experience of those whose ex-
istence does not conform to his morphology or onto- epistemology. This
means her interventions are necessarily identitarian but are also left pro-
ductively open, encouraging others to pick up her concepts and make use
of them, causing trou ble in the archives of the canon of Western thought
and articulating a diff er ent tradition, hidden in plain sight.
Over the next year I had the opportunity to pre sent work to Cavarero
and her colleagues in Verona, and her colleagues and students presented
work at Brighton where I was studying. At vari ous conferences I attended,
Cavarero’s name was frequently mentioned by p eople presenting work
from a variety of disciplines. It seemed strange that, given her extensive
and diverse influence, an event dedicated to her thought hadn’t happened,
at least in the English- speaking world. A group of us, including her col-
leagues Olivia Guaraldo and Lorenzo Bernini and Mark Devenney and
Clare Woodford at Brighton, proposed organ izing an international con-
ference on Cavarero’s work, to be titled, “Giving Life to Politics.” The event
would coincide with the English- language publication of Cavarero’s In
clinations: A Critique of Rectitude, as well as marking Adriana’s seven-
tieth birthday.8 Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig— both long- term
