proposed organizing an international conference on Cavarero’s work, to be titled, “Giving Life to Politics.” The event would coincide with the English-language publication of Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, as well as marking Adriana’s seventieth birthday.8 Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig—both long-term interlocutors of Adriana’s—were invited as keynotes, and both readily accepted. The event brought together academics from across the world; there were so many compelling responses to the call for papers that the event was extended to three days. Some of those who attended had been reading Adriana since the start of her academic life; others, like me, had only recently discovered her thought. Some were long-term friends with countless stories of their time with Adriana, some not dissimilar to the story of her orchestration of the singing in Sicily where I first met her; other people were meeting Adriana for the first time. Despite a sweltering early-summer heat wave, the event was relaxed and friendly, absent of the jostling of egos that typically mark academic conferences. Like all conferences, people debated the finer points of Cavarero’s work, and while these conversations were important, what was also significant was the presence of generative conversations that occurred in between sessions, or just before a session started, or in a pub at the end of the day, or over food during dinner. Here new friendships were formed, inchoate but nonetheless important points could be expressed, support could be offered, and celebration could flourish. These ways of being can be found in any academic conference, but it is no coincidence that a conference on Cavarero’s work fostered this furtive, generative, and celebratory “co-appearing,” as she might say.9 Her work authorizes us to build new worlds; to take risks in the hope that a new sense of what it is to be—which has been right under our noses the whole time—might be made apparent. Cavarero gives us a taste of freedom that stems from her work’s generosity, free from a proprietorial control over its arguments, playful yet studiously diligent in its engagement with the thought of others. Adriana’s work is seemingly effortless in generating something akin to Hannah Arendt’s “public happiness,” and this quality is carried over into the life she leads, demonstrated by the remarkable community of people who gathered to engage with her work, to renew old friendships, and to forge new ones.10
I most recently saw Adriana in Verona, where I presented a paper and spoke to her about how this edited collection was progressing. As ever, she was supportive and encouraging, expressing her happiness and gratefulness at how the project was developing, humbly asking for feedback on her contributions and taking seriously the few substantive comments I had. As we walked back into town from the university, she bought me a gelato, and I asked about her politicization as a young person. Her earliest memories of being politically engaged involved the internal migration of southern Italians to the Northern industrial city of Turin during her teenage years in the 1960s and her activism resisting the racism that confronted them. Since then she has been involved in a number of political projects, most notably in Italian feminist movements and research groups in Padua and Rome and Diotima at the University of Verona; these were a major contributor to the development of Italian sexual difference theory, with its emphasis on an embodied, materialist approach to understanding sex / gender.11 As Olivia Guaraldo notes in this volume, these political experiences have profoundly influenced Cavarero’s work: they contributed to shaping an original combination of materiality and conceptuality; a theoretical concreteness always engaged in naming philosophically embodied singularities and their irrepressible vitality.12 It is not by chance that Cavarero’s current thought brings together two new conceptual devices to intervene in contemporary politics: first, the concept of pluriphony, which is neither the unpleasant noise of cacophony nor the pleasant noise of harmony, and is a way of articulating the vocalic sonority of a plurality of people; and second, the concept of surging democracy, which describes the pluralizing interaction present at the inaugural moments of political movements. In this way, Cavarero continues to furnish an “imaginary of hope,” which is a form of care for the world and for the singular, plural lives who both inhabit this world and constitute it, refusing their superfluity and manifesting an alternative in their everyday, spectacular sociality.13
Notes
1 1. Life, Politics, Contingency Summer School, University of Palermo, Erice, Italy, June 8–12, 2015.
2 2. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
3 3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 176.
4 4. See Cavarero and Elisabetta Bertolino, “Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference: An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2017): 161, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2007-019; and Ryan Dohoney, “An Antidote to Metaphysics: Adriana Cavarero’s Vocal Philosophy,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 15 (2011): 70–85, https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2011.0002.
5 5. See Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 7; and Cavarero, Konstantinos Thomaidis, and Ilaria Pinna, “Towards a Hopeful Plurality of Democracy: An Interview on Vocal Ontology with Adriana Cavarero,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 3, no. 1 (2018): 84, https://doi.org/10.1386/jivs.3.1.81_1.
6 6. Lorenzo Bernini, “Bad Inclinations: Cavarero, Queer Theories and the Drive,” in this volume.
7 7. Cavarero, Thomaidis, and Pinna, “Towards a Hopeful Plurality of Democracy,” 88.
8 8. Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016).
9 9. Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 89–90.
10 10. On public happiness, see Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 123–24. See also Olivia Guaraldo, “Public Happiness: Revisiting an Arendtian Hypothesis,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 397–418, https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201866218.
11 11. For more on this history, see Dohoney, “Antidote to Metaphysics,” 71.
12 12. Guaraldo, “Thinking Materialistically with Locke, Lonzi and Cavarero,” in this volume.
13 13. Cavarero, Thomaidis, and Pinna, “Towards a Hopeful Plurality of Democracy,” 88. For more on superfluity, see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017), 599. For more on refusal, see Tina Marie Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 79–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1573625; and Bonnie Honig, “How To Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero,” in this volume.
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
