despite being overlooked by philosophy’s dominant narrative (or, perhaps, because of this overlooking).62 By reading Cavarero’s work as a staging of this collision between alternative imaginaries and one’s current way of being, it becomes clear that although not a self-proclaimed agonist, she is not necessarily circumventing political struggle, but dramatically counterposing one image of the world with another, performatively remaking it through the stories that she tells. It is true that her vision may appear to celebrate what has until now been a subordinate role of caring, but perhaps this need not be the case anymore. By insisting that we place inclined ethical relations center stage, Cavarero wishes to us this consciously naïve imaginary to disrupt and subvert—even if only by a little—the “pathetic blunder” that is our all-too-common conception of the world as comprised of apparently independent, self-sufficient beings.
Summary of Contributions
The essays that follow engage with different aspects of Cavarero’s project. Cavarero’s opening essay presents her ethic of inclination as responding to a postural geometric imaginary in the philosophical tradition that is irrefutably gendered. Opening with a reflection on the character of Irina in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, she draws out the inclined, sinuous, curving shapes of the female and contrasts them to the straight, upright, correct, and erect male figure. Linking this rectitude back to ancient Greek etymology, she traces its progress through the work of Plato and Kant, finishing with Proudhon, where the moralizing of philosophy’s gendered posture is explicit. Here, women are the embodiment of vice, physically weak, and always inclined in their two roles, sex and childbirth. The male subject is he who directs his own life, while the woman lives for and through others.
Yet it is from this devalued imagery of the female body as maternal that Cavarero begins her subversion of the philosophical tradition. Following Arendt’s valorization of the natal scene, Cavarero emphasizes the distinctive role of the inclined mother as caregiver as a central symbol of human interdependency rather than a weak, supporting role. This image of inclined motherhood forms the basis of Cavarero’s ethic of inclination—an altruistic ethic that upends the “imagined wholeness” of the dominant liberal model of the independent, self-sufficient, male individual.
Although Butler’s Leaning Out, Caught in the Fall: Interdependency and Ethics in Cavarero opens with shared points of agreement between herself and Cavarero, Butler then seeks to emphasize the importance of ambivalence in our affective ties, including the maternal ties that Cavarero celebrates. Butler begins with the observation that all upright bodies presuppose support that comes from inclination, including not only the inclined bodies of those looking after us when we are young or old, inclining over us to care, stabilizing us as we learn to walk, but also those who support us throughout our lives. Despite our adult claims and aspirations to “stand on our own two feet … no one stands on her own.” We are instead always dependent on the care and support of others. Further, Butler draws attention to the material, technical, and infrastructural support that exceeds caring relationships, such as the maternal and familial as emphasized by Cavarero, but also the sororal and friendly, as emphasized by Honig, Battersby, and Woodford, in this volume. Butler is indicating to us the necessity of welfare systems, healthcare access, social support systems, all of which are precarious and often under threat. Butler expresses her own gratitude to Cavarero, upon whom she admits that her own thinking relies more than can be easily acknowledged in a single chapter. She indicates, for example, her agreement with Cavarero’s argument regarding uniqueness, her critique of individualism, her Levinasian approach to ethics, and her critique of the masculinity of the “I.” However, Butler wishes to complicate Cavarero’s reading of inclination to emphasize that both the inclined and the erect figure “are not radically distinct and never fully oppositional”; instead we all move through inclination and uprightness throughout our lives. Crucially, Butler indicates that Cavarero’s stereotypical reading risks enacting the very move that she seeks to avoid: it could imply a denial of the dependency of the male subject; a denial of inclination in philosophy. Instead Butler seeks to reveal this dependency. Butler shows how Kant’s description of the vertigo that philosophy experiences in the encounter with the sublime reveals the inclination that is already at the heart of philosophy (an argument further extended by Christine Battersby’s research on Kant’s friendships in her contribution to this volume). This leads Butler to ask whether we need to be cautious of Cavarero’s analogies between geometry and bodily posture and geometry and morality. Butler argues that when considering the relationship between ethics, politics, and nonviolence it may be necessary to distinguish a predisposition, a disposition, an inclination, and a bodily movement or posture. We may be inclined to “lean” a certain way, but may restrain ourselves, perhaps for ethical reasons. Indeed, if we consider the ethical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Butler notes that such a clash of inclinations could be the decisive moment in resisting violent action. If we wish to further Cavarero’s project to establish a feminist ethics of nonviolence, then for Butler it is to this ambivalence at the heart of inclination that we must turn.
Indeed, it is precisely this ambivalence that runs through Honig’s “How to Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero.” In this essay Honig turns inclination toward sorority, agonism, and heterotopia on behalf of a more egalitarian and contestatory politics. Noting that care relationships are often rather more ambivalent than Cavarero seems to acknowledge, Honig urges us to recognize the agonism in inclination that she suggests could form part of a politics of refusal. Any such agonistic inclination would have to confront the violence that Cavarero disallows. In the female protagonists of Sophocles’s Antigone and Euripides’s The Bacchae, Honig identifies figures of inclination characterized by agonistic sorority instead of Cavarero’s maternity. Turning to Freud—so often disavowed or ignored by Cavarero and many Italian feminists—Honig recalls his argument that there is the figure of a vulture hidden in the folds of the painting Cavarero uses to inspire her theory of inclined maternity: Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. This draws attention to the darker side of maternal care (albeit also, as Honig points out, to Freud’s misogyny). Honig questions whether Cavarero’s ethics of inclination might be too separatist, failing to act against the order of rectitude, and crucially overlooking the epistemicide that any act of separation comprises. This confronts Cavarero’s feminist ethics of nonviolence with the inescapability of violence for politics. Honig is not seeking to promote violence. Rather, she heralds a politics of refusal that—in spite of and in full acknowledgment of the ever-present threat of violence—insists on a “return to the city” to continue the struggle against dominatory power.
These essays are then followed by a short Scherzo by Olivia Guaraldo, who defends Cavarero’s approach to rethinking the relationality of the sexual encounter. Reading Locke alongside Carla Lonzi and Cavarero, she argues that, surprisingly, there is continuity between Locke and Lonzi in that both read the sexual encounter as conflictual. This, however, is for different reasons. Locke’s aim is to domesticate the sexual, while Lonzi’s is to exaggerate it to resist sexual domination. Since for Locke, the sexual act is what founds the order of property, Guaraldo shows how redistribution of property is dependent on a rethinking of our sexual relations. A step toward this is found in Guaraldo’s reading of Cavarero’s theorization of sexual relations as beyond conflict. She therefore argues that the uniqueness found in Cavarero’s understanding of our relationality offers a more hopeful imaginary; a pleasurable, erotic, and empowering experience such that it need not comprise appropriation (Locke), control, or domestication (Lonzi).
We then move through the collection of études that respond to Cavarero’s provocative text in multiple ways. Simona Forti’s “From Horrorism to the Inclination of the Gray Zone” explores a disjunction between Cavarero’s work on horror and violence and her relational ethics of inclination. She begins with Cavarero’s argument that our human existence makes us dependent, opening us simultaneously to care or wounding. She then turns to Cavarero’s argument that horrorist violence is that which takes on an ontological dimension by striking at the heart of that which makes us unique. Yet, reading Cavarero alongside Primo Levi, Forti emphasizes the limitations of Cavarero’s reading of violence
