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 trap of only focusing on the violence enacted on “bare life,”48 seeing this as a reiteration of a masculine trope central to metaphysics that can only understand humanness as a being-toward-death. Instead, for Cavarero, an important part of her feminist project is the articulation of forms of life that emphasize pleasure and happiness as being central to human existence, where life is to be lived and in its living gives human life meaning—what she describes in the “Coda” of this volume as an “imaginary of hope.” Indeed, it is this that makes the ethical stakes of the extreme violence she confronts in Horrorism all the more stark.
Honig has raised concern over the possibility that Butler’s and Cavarero’s work on vulnerability reflects a certain “mortalist humanism.” It is worth noting for those not familiar with political theory that there has long been suspicion of humanism as grounded on universal claims that can only ever include some and exclude others. As a consequence it may have seemed surprising to see these thinkers appear to turn back to questions concerning something Honig referred to as “humanness” and to increasingly refer to the human in their work, emphasizing that politics occurs in the very signification of what, or rather who, counts as human. As Timothy Huzar notes in this volume, it is clear that both Cavarero and Butler are not humanists in the traditional sense: they are not trying to define the human, but engaged in projects that work at the borders of what is deemed to be human, to question and problematize the notion of humanness at work and draw attention to the violence that such a notion effects. Yet more than just problematize the way that humanness functions for political thought, they both develop an ethics based, in Honig’s words, on “the ontological fact of mortality” that operates as a challenge to the traditional philosophical understanding that it is the capacity to reason that distinguishes the human from the nonhuman.49 In contrast, mortalist humanism, for Honig, makes central the capacity for “vulnerability and suffering.”50 Indeed, it is from here that Cavarero’s and Butler’s emphasis on nonviolence stems, since they mobilize this fact of vulnerability to assert a value for life and compassion that emerges from our equal capacity to suffer—and, particularly for Cavarero, to be cared for.
However, for Honig the specification of nonviolence as an ethics risks undermining this project, since any assertion of our shared mortalism and vulnerability could never guarantee the type of ethical response that is hoped for and risks disavowing its inherent violence.51 In contrast, Honig calls for an agonistic humanism that is not founded on our shared vulnerability, but that “sees in mortality, suffering, sound and vulnerability resources for some form of enacted universality.”52 Since these are “no less various in their significations than are the diverse languages that unite and divide us,”53 the appeal to ethics may attempt to circumvent the violence of political struggle; a violence that may be necessary in order to convince or persuade the witnesses of suffering that it is suffering that they are witnessing and that they should respond compassionately. Thus, for Honig, Cavarero’s ethics cannot avoid the risk of violence, and more worryingly, violence may even be necessary to defend the type of pacifism that both Butler and Cavarero articulate.
Indeed, Butler’s recent work The Force of Nonviolence suggests that vulnerability needs to be part of a wider constellation of “vulnerability, rage, persistence and resistance.”54 In this way, vulnerability is less ontological and appears more like Honig’s “resources for some form of enacted universality.” This is a resource that can inspire resistance through a movement for nonviolence that is, for Butler, a particular form of refusal.55 This is a refusal that is an engagement in struggle even if it refuses the violence that is expected and indeed demanded of it. For Butler, such a refusal of violence forms part of a wider politics of equality, a thread that links up what may otherwise appear to be separate movements. Relationality is at the heart of any politics of equality, but for Butler, rather than celebrate any particular form of relation, including care, it is important, if our solidarity is to succeed, to acknowledge the ambivalence of our relations with one another, the limits of our abilities to care, the value of our rage, and our ability to sometimes restrain our inclinations to lean toward or away, as she suggests in her contribution to this volume.
In the account we have provided here, we have endeavored to chart the criss-crossing paths of interaction and inspiration among these three thinkers, underscoring the productive tensions among their different yet complementary struggles. Read in this way, we can see that their work is engaged on different fronts. First, while Honig’s focus is always on the political tools that we and others can use to act upon the world, Butler and Cavarero here enact politics within the discipline of philosophy, their ethics posing a challenge to traditional ethics: “an insurrection at the level of ontology.”56 Second, perhaps both Cavarero and Butler are positing their ethics not necessarily as an achievable way of life but as a polemical challenge to our current way of living, demonstrating what is lacking in the space between our way of living and the vision they defend. In this sense, while Honig’s essay emphasizes the risks involved in fighting for political alternatives, and Butler’s asks if—and how—we might be able to avoid those risks while still engaged in the struggle, Cavarero offers a parallel vision of a world without those risks. In this sense, perhaps it is Cavarero who offers us the most hope, by daring to dream the wildest dreams.
Indeed, while Cavarero does invoke an ethics, this is not a traditional ethics in the form of a search for principles. Rather than something to be “deduced,”57 it is given a priori. It arises from the “altruistic ontology of the human existent as finite,”58 something akin to a Levinasian ethics of an encounter with the other. It is in support of this ethic that she mobilizes the stereotypical maternal scene to both highlight its initial deployment and to undermine the binary that gives rise to the stereotype in the first place.59 Despite concerns raised here, and in the interventions that follow, Cavarero does try to avoid fetishizing inclination; instead, her intention is to break the stereotype away from this tradition and use its resources to think a “new relational ontology of the vulnerable.”60 Bringing the various strands of her thought together, this relational ontology of the vulnerable insists that life cannot be disentangled from our relations to others; that embodiment is a crucial component of this relation; and finally that, rather than characterize life as a selfish existence turned toward death, an altruistic ethics can be discerned in the natal scene, where a mother is confronted with an irrefutable, primary ethical choice of either care or abandonment.61 Despite Honig’s realism and Butler’s caution, for Cavarero (and emphasized by Huzar later in this volume), this ethical relation and the rearticulation of existence that is coterminous with it are intended to contribute to an “imaginary of hope”: a postural geometry that indicates, in its collision with our current
