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 skills. None of this would have been possible without Tim Huzar and German Primera for instigating the whole affair, including Tim’s initial matchmaking between CAPPE at the University of Brighton and two research centers in Verona: the Hannah Arendt Centre (with Olivia Guaraldo) and PoliTesse (with Lorenzo Bernini), each of which collaborated with and supported the publication of this volume. Thanks to Bonnie Honig for reading and commenting on the entire draft. Thanks also, of course, to all of our contributors for their timely editing and responses, to Margaret Ferguson for her comments and enthusiasm, to Karen Bouchard and Matthew Martin, who went well beyond the call of duty, along with other librarians at Brown University to help with sourcing images, and to Tom Lay, Eric Newman, and Aldene Fredenburg at Fordham University Press for their endless patience and encouragement. Finally, this work is dedicated to Adriana Cavarero, whose exemplary generosity, care, and spirit of collegiality continue to provoke, support, and inspire our intellectual endeavors.
Notes
1 We are indebted to Mark Devenney, Joanna Kellond and Bonnie Honig for their incisive and generous comments on earlier versions of this introduction. We take full responsibility for any remaining errors.
2 1. See Adriana Cavarero, “Scenes of Inclination,” in this volume, and Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, trans. Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016).
3 2. 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.
4 3. Cavarero, Inclinations, 99.
5 4. Ibid., 174.
6 5. See, for example, the rise of religious and political opposition to