Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence. Judith Butler
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nonviolence that has come to unite Cavarero and Butler’s recent work.
Key Themes in Cavarero’s Thought
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