Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence. Judith Butler
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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.
Inclination in the Work of Adriana Cavarero
We begin our brief introduction to Cavarero’s work with the guiding image of Leonardo’s Madonna, central to Cavarero’s account of a postural ethics of nonviolence. The painting is an unusual portrayal of three figures from the Christian Holy Family. Rather than the child Jesus with his mother, Mary, or also with his father, Joseph, it shows Jesus and Mary with Mary’s mother, Anne: two mothers, two children, Anne with her daughter, Mary, sitting on her lap while Mary’s child, Jesus, plays alongside. It inspired Cavarero because, in its time, it was a subversive image of motherhood despite its apparent orthodoxy today. What may seem an innocent decision to place Jesus at Mary’s side contravened the dominant convention that required the child Jesus to be seated on Mary’s lap, held in her arms but with his back to her, facing the viewer. Mother and child were not meant to look at one another. The same convention dictated that all figures should be structured vertically. Instead, Leonardo portrays all three figures inclined and twisted around each other. In Cavarero’s words the painting
breaks with this system of symmetrical verticality, presenting a mother who is face to face with her child; a child whose head is twisted back to face the one who visibly tilts and stretches out to support him; and an Anne who observes them both with a smile. The asymmetry of this portrait, modulated as it is by inclination, translates nicely into the movement of a relationality that reflects the everyday experience of the maternal rather than the monumentality of the sacred.3
It subverts the authoritative conventions of its time and in doing so emphasizes maternity and the dependence of the child—here representing for Cavarero the vulnerable more widely—on the care that the mother provides.
It may seem strange to readers from an Anglo-American background that Cavarero chose a religious image at all, for even this once subversive image appears today as orthodox, traditional, and stereotyped. But Cavarero is not using the image in a religious context. Nor does she repeat traditional tropes of motherhood as passive or subordinated. Rather, she seeks to “strategically exploit” the imagery of motherhood to think differently about the everyday postures of our lives. The painting is her “point of departure,” an inspirational provocation that upends the everyday privileging of the “upright” and the “straight” in morality and philosophy as unnatural, artificial, and strange. As we read in the beginning epigraph, she is not simply replacing the archetypal straight man of philosophical and moral thought, but instead complicates the archetype, displacing it in “a multiplicity … of directions.”
Despite distancing herself from the religious significance of this image, Cavarero still mobilizes the religious element of this painting in two ways. First, the love characteristic of an ethic of inclination is the “enigmatic” love of Leonardo’s Madonna.4 The sense of mystery that this evokes is romantic, poetic, but, given its context, can never be totally separated from the spiritual or the religious. It draws on a particular Christian formulation of an ethical relationship of care for the other. Second, the use of this image shows maternity as more human than convention dictated, and yet still sacred. It holds a place in our symbolic imaginary, so much so that Cavarero uses it, as cited in the epigraph, to beget a “fundamental schematism” founding a new order.
A feminist ethics inspired by a religious image representing maternity may seem incongruous today. However, discussion of religious iconography is not irrelevant to the world of the twenty-first century. The appropriation of cultural images and the imaginary of the maternal are a ripe political battleground, given that years of feminist struggle are at risk of being undone by a vicious backlash that blames feminism for many, if not all, of the world’s ills.5 While this battle over the appropriation of religious imagery may resonate in some countries or communities more strongly than in others, the logic it utilizes is that of political contestation. Cavarero recognizes dominant social imaginaries as sites of struggle.
In this light it is helpful to dwell for a moment on the wider context and key debates that shape the terrain on which the dialogue of this book intervenes. Italian feminism has long struggled over the imaginary of motherhood in Italian life. Cavarero strikes at the heart of a certain hypocrisy in Italian politics, but one that is also identifiable beyond Italy’s borders, as noted by Janice Richardson in 1998:
Given the ubiquity of portrayals of the Christian mother and son in Italy [Cavarero] describes Italian feminists’ particular desire to resymbolise motherhood and birth. In so doing she theorises a link between the