Giving Life to Politics: Adriana Cavarero and Critics

February – June 2017

A 17-session seminar series leading to the conference Giving LIfe to Politics: Adrian Cavarero, June 2017 

Part 2: Wednesday 1st of February, Pavilion Parade,

10.30 – 12.30

Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2: pp. 1-56 (56 pages)

We begin the series on Adriana Cavarero in preparation for the conference and workshop in June with one of her earliest texts available in English (translated 1995): In Spite of Plato. This book seeks to provide a feminist rereading of four characters from ancient Greek texts freeing them from the patriarchal discourse in which they have been entombed in order to reinterpret their significance for today.

Part 2: Wednesday 8th of February, Pavilion Parade,

10.30 – 12.30

Chapters 3 and 4: pp. 57-120 (64 pages).

 Part 3: Wednesday 15th of February, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12.30

Intro and Parts I and II: pp.1-80 (80 pages)

Drawing on an array of thinkers from philosophy and literature, Cavarero here develops a challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration.

 Part 3: Wednesday 22nd of February, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12.30

Part III and IV:  pp.81-144 (63 pages)

Wednesday 1st of March Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Chapter 1: pp. 13-98 (86 pages)

This book builds on the earlier text In Spite of Plato  to explore the prevalence of bodily metaphors in conceptions of noncorporeal institutions: the state, the law, and politics itself.

Wednesday 8th of March, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Chapters 2 and 3:pp. 99-188 (89 pages).

Wednesday 15th of March, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Introduction and Part I: pp.1-67 (67 pages)

Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, this text sees Cavarero rereading the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history-along with the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality-might be grasped as the “devocalization of Logos,” as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures-from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers-provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a “politics of the voice” wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking.

Wednesday 22nd of March, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12:30

Sections from Parts II and III: pp.95-138 and 165-212 (92 pages)

Wednesday 29th of March, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12:30

Chapters 1 and 2 pp.3-82 (79 pages).

We will be welcoming Judith Butler to Brighton to act as respondent at the conference on Cavarero in the summer. Given that CAPPE recently hosted a reading group on the work of Judith Butler we are only spending one week on her writing this time round. We have chosen the text where she explicitly engages with Cavarero’s work to develop and challenge her own earlier writings.

Wednesday 26th of April, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

pp. 1-59 (59 pages)

Words like “terrorism” and “war” no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world’s most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word–“horrorism”–to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Through her analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.

Wednesday 3rd of May, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

pp.60-124 (64 pages)

Wednesday 10th of May, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12:30

pp.49-110 (62 pages)

This week we read Cavarero’s contribution to this dialogue with Angelo Scola, the Archbishop of Milan, over the contemporary meaning of the biblical commandment not to kill. The result is a series of erudite and wide-ranging arguments that move from murder and suicide to just war and drone strikes, from bioethics and biopolitics to hermeneutics and philology, Less a direct debate than a disputation in the classical sense, Thou Shalt Not Kill proves to be a searching meditation on one of the unstated moral premises shared by otherwise bitterly opposed political factions. It will stimulate the mind of the novice while also reminding more advanced readers of the necessity and desirability of thinking

Wednesday 17th of May, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Introduction and parts IV V: pp.1-14 and 77-122 (60 pages)

This week we turn to the work of Bonnie Honig who will be attending the conference as a discussant of Cavarero’s latest work. We will read sections of two of her most relevant texts over the next two weeks. This week, in Democracy and the Foreigner we will consider her answer to the question: What should we do about foreigners? This dilemma underlies age-old debates about immigration, citizenship, and national identity that are strikingly relevant today. In Democracy and the Foreigner, Bonnie Honig reverses the question: What problems might foreigners solve for us? Instead of lauding the achievements of individual foreigners, she probes a much larger issue-the symbolic politics of foreignness. In doing so she shows not only how our debates over foreignness help shore up our national or democratic identities, but how anxieties endemic to liberal democracy themselves animate ambivalence toward foreignness.

Wednesday 24th of May, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Chapters 1-3: pp.1-64 (64 pages)

In this next book, Honig seeks to look beyond mainstream political theory for inspiration on the topic of political emergencies. Drawing on Jewish thinkers alongside political agonistic theory she looks at at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, She argues that democracies must resist emergency’s pull to focus on life’s necessities (food, security, and bare essentials) because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.

Wednesday 31st of May, Pavilion Parade,

10:30-12:30

Introduction and chapters 1-5: pp.1-64 (64 pages)

In this text Cavarero examines the moral and political significance of vertical posture in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of inclination. Contesting the classical figure of homo erectus or “upright man” she proposes an altruistic, open model of the subject-one who is inclined toward others. Contrasting the masculine upright with the feminine inclined, she includes both philosophical texts and works of art in her detailed analysis.

Wednesday 7th of June, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30

Chapters 6-11: pp.65-120  (56 pages)

Wednesday 14th of June, Pavilion Parade

10:30-12:30