appreciate the deeper complexity of power relations. This complicates the ethic of inclination, emphasizing alongside Honig and Devenney that horror, and indeed violence, can emerge from inclination. As such, this postural ethics, which valorizes inclination over rectitude, may form part of a wider problematic radicalization of evil, prevalent in much post-holocaust ethical thought.
In a development of Butler’s turn to Kant, Christine Battersby draws on new research concerning Kant’s social life to consider whether Cavarero’s relational ontology can help us reorient the grounding principles of political and ethical theory toward vulnerability. The urgency of such a task is exacerbated today by the violences of power inequality and dependency, from what is taken to be the private lives of individuals right through the arena of international governance. Drawing on the history of a recently discovered champagne glass dedicated to Kant and his circle of friends, Battersby provides an account of this circle, and particularly Kant’s friendship with Joseph Green, an English merchant, to argue that Kant did value inclination, albeit not in the maternal form. Instead, his close circle of friends exemplifies another mode of relationality, one that unlike maternity or sorority is free of kinship ties. In reflecting on the importance of friendship for Kant, Battersby seeks to defend Kant, although differently to Butler’s defense in this volume. Complimenting Butler, Battersby finds a Kant inclined in friendship, against Cavarero’s “caricature.” Perhaps Kant was not quite as upright after all, and maybe inclination can be found in friendship as well as maternity.
Lorenzo Bernini’s contribution, “Bad Inclinations: Cavarero, Queer Theories, and the Drive,” celebrates Cavarero’s contribution to philosophy and elaborates on the dialogue between Cavarero and Butler’s work. It then, however, identifies an alternative queer theory that more strongly challenges Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, in particular because of Bernini’s use of the Freudian concept of drive. Rather than coinciding with sexual instinct, drive is a perversion of it and is often associated with homosexual sex as a way to exclude and subordinate homosexuality. Instead of responding, as Butler does, by seeking to struggle for recognition for sexual minorities, Bernini emphasizes Edelman’s argument that minorities should remain “antisocial”—outside of the spheres of signification and intelligibility, and also outside of the prioritization of the child and relationships of maternity and kinship. Complementing Butler’s and Honig’s emphases on ambivalence, Bernini recognizes the ambivalence of the figure of the child for our social lives, questioning the value of reproduction and virility for not only sexual relationships but care relationships, too. Bernini argues that by recognizing the interconnections of care and sex or even sex without care, we may be able to offer an alternative theorization of vulnerability for nonviolence, which, still in inclination, but without the mother and child relation at its center, radically exposes the self to the other.
In “Querying Cavarero’s Rectitude,” Mark Devenney begins by agreeing with Cavarero’s contention that inclination can subvert the order of masculinity and rectitude. Similarly to Butler, Devenney emphasizes the dependence of the upright “I” on the support of others. Yet he is concerned that Cavarero’s argument undermines itself and ends up itself enacting a violence—a form of propriety concerning the correct way to read philosophy—on the texts she reads. Submitting Cavarero’s text to an improper reading,63 Devenney suggests, in agreement with Honig, Butler, and Bernini, that there is more ambivalence in the mother-child relationship than Cavarero indicates. For Devenney this means that it cannot provide the basis for any ethics, since the very founding of an ethics introduces new hierarchies and order to the proper, however attractive they may seem to their designer. Devenney argues that in asserting an ontology of inclination, Cavarero enacts a new rectitude or rightness: inclination is now that which is correct. This move undoes inclination’s subversive power. Along with Honig and Forti, Devenney sees a violence in this forcing that cannot be acknowledged by Cavarero. Rather than assert a separatist heterotopian schematism, Devenney suggests that a project of nonviolence must instead engage in hegemonic struggle in the here and now, but that this must be a struggle that is not founded on a prescribed ethics.
In “Violence, Vulnerability, Ontology: Insurrectionary Humanism in Cavarero and Butler,” Timothy Huzar is more sympathetic to Cavarero’s position, seeing a deep complementarity between Cavarero and Judith Butler. He argues that both enact what Jacques Rancière would call a “poetics of politics” by staging an understanding of vulnerability that is not so much ontologically grounded but made urgent by particular histories of violence associated with normative conceptions of humanness. As a consequence, disentangling the ethical, ontological, and political stakes of their interventions becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task. By overlooking the scenes of violence that make urgent their account of vulnerability, Huzar argues that it becomes too easy to dismiss their interventions as merely ethical, or as another ontology of the human. Instead, the insurrectionary humanism of their accounts of vulnerability reveals the imbrication of the ethical, the ontological, and the political.
Finally, Clare Woodford’s étude “Queer Madonnas in Love and Friendship” mobilizes alternative Madonna iconography against Leonardo’s inclined Madonna to ask whether the rectitude of an upright Madonna and the inclination of subordinated bodies might complicate Cavarero’s ethic of inclination. Woodford unearths a queer kinship in the orthodox Catholic narrative of the Virgin Mary to question maternity as a familial and caring relation. Echoing Honig’s, Devenney’s, and Forti’s concerns, she highlights the veiled violence in the maternal relation. Exploring a theme introduced by Battersby’s étude, Woodford considers the importance of non-kinship relationality in the form of friendship. She notes the intertwining of rectitude and inclination in any friendship—the interplay of eros and filia that can dwell in any caring relation (as also discussed by Bernini) and that emerges in points of agreement and disagreement (and may threaten any friendship, exceeding, in such cases, Honig’s agonism). Unpicking the assumed necessary links between maternity and inclination, Woodford instead asks whether a provocative friendship that consents to dissent reveals the struggle at the heart of any care relation. This account of dissenting friendship, both inclined and upright, could offer a more promising relationality for a politics, rather than an ethics, of dissent and nonviolence.
In the Coda, Cavarero responds to the pluriphonic “surging democracy” that emerges in the exchanges herein. With exemplary graciousness, she acknowledges that she may have neglected Kant a little in her reading, but in the main stands by her methodology of theft and her provocative reading style with “bad intentions” to read a text against itself. Against concerns that she has overplayed the analogies between morality and geometry, overemphasized maternity and the altruistic side of care, and repeated a certain naïve imaginary of motherhood, she emphasizes the urgency of this purposefully naïve vision. This is not in ignorance of its limitations; instead, she asserts that these limitations cannot stand in our way of hoping—and therefore working—for a better future. Cavarero acknowledges a certain strategic utopianism. Inspired by the feminist movements of the sixties, her work sounds a note of discord in contemporary philosophy recalling us to “the generative power of interaction” that can be mobilized by any such “imaginary of hope.” By using the everyday exceptionalilty of Leonardo’s mother and child image, Cavarero has communicated to us the possibility of a world where altruism is not naïve or far-fetched, where caring for others is not deemed to be an exception, and where exclusion is opposed rather than accepted. The power of this vision resides in its simplicity. It generated the palpable dynamism and sense of community at the conference that inspired this volume. Its ripples continue to inspire and provoke across the globe today, bringing diverse scholars together engaged in a shared project: a feminist ethics of nonviolence, in pursuit of a better world.
Final Thanks
Sincere appreciation is owed to the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton for hosting the initial meeting that inspired this volume. As a result, we extend a massive thanks to all participants, particularly those not published here as authors but whose interventions still ring throughout these engagements. Thanks also to Mark Devenney for the immense work in coordinating the conference and to Ian Sinclair for his fabulous organizational
