_Highlights and critically assesses the work of contemporary Italian political philosophers._.

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention (...) to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways. (shrink)

Feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero claims in her bookHorrorism: Naming Contemporary Violencethat the core of the horror of Auschwitz is constituted by the figure of theMuselmann. I argue that Cavarero's lack of an accurate historical engagement with this figure in particular and with Auschwitz in general leads her to a speculative turn, thereby universalizing the phenomenon of theMuselmannby making ittheexample of Auschwitz, and moreover, the key factor to explain its singularity. I show that the phenomenon of theMuselmann, although a particular horrible (...) effect of Auschwitz, is not limited to this concentration and extermination camp system. Consequently, the characteristic that makes Auschwitz aunicumcannot be found in theMuselmann. Rather, as I elucidate, the singularity of Auschwitz and the Shoah in general must be understood in relation to the true goal of this camp: the final extermination of European Jewry. (shrink)

In this paper, I juxtapose the work of two contemporary feminist philosophers: Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero – both working within the Continental tradition – to show how they go well beyond feminist critique to produce different images of self-identity and conceptions of the political. Both reject traditional positions on selfhood but also stress the materiality of bodies and provide alternatives to the work of post-structuralists, such as Judith Butler. My aim is to draw out some of the politico-legal implications (...) of their differing images of selfhood. In the final section I then apply both their approaches to the concept of self to ask how their respective arguments can inform contemporary political questions regarding privacy and dissensus. (shrink)

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture (...) the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers. (shrink)

In this article, I critically engage Adriana Cavarero’s account of uniqueness via an analysis of her work on narrativity and violence. I suggest there is an ambivalence in Cavarero’s account of uniqueness: Cavarero argues both that uniqueness is susceptible to destruction, and that it cannot finally be annihilated. To make this clear I use Cavarero’s account to read a narrative offered by Miklós Nyiszli, of a woman who survived an Auschwitz gas chamber. I contrast this to Cavarero’s reading of Eurydice (...) and Orpheus, arguing that the ambivalence in Cavarero’s account can be resolved by thinking an excess proper to uniqueness. (shrink)

In this article the extent to which stories and personal narratives can and should be used to inform education policy is examined. A range of studies describable as story or personal narrative is investigated. They include life-studies, life-writing, life history, narrative analysis, and the representation of lives. We use 'auto/biography' as a convenient way of grouping this range under one term. It points to the many and varied ways that accounts of self interrelate and intertwine with accounts of others. That (...) is, auto/biography illuminates the social context of individual lives. At the same time it allows room for unique, personal stories to be told. We do not explicitly discuss all the different forms of auto/biography. Rather, we investigate the epistemology underlying the personal story in the context of social action. We discuss the circumstances in which a story may validly be used by educational policy makers and give some examples of how they have done so in the past. (shrink)

In this article the extent to which stories and personal narratives can and should be used to inform education policy is examined. A range of studies describable as story or personal narrative is investigated. They include life-studies, life-writing, life history, narrative analysis, and the representation of lives. We use ‘auto/biography’ as a convenient way of grouping this range under one term. It points to the many and varied ways that accounts of self interrelate and intertwine with accounts of others. That (...) is, auto/biography illuminates the social context of individual lives. At the same time it allows room for unique, personal stories to be told. We do not explicitly discuss all the different forms of auto/biography. Rather, we investigate the epistemology underlying the personal story in the context of social action. We discuss the circumstances in which a story may validly be used by educational policy makers and give some examples of how they have done so in the past. (shrink)

I claim that Adriana Cavarero’s concept of sonorous voice is significant in feminist teaching because, as she argues, dominant concepts of voice refer to voice in semantic terms thereby discounting voice in sonorous terms. This process of ‘devocalization’, spanning the history of Western philosophy, devalues the uniqueness embodied in each sonorous voice effecting a bias against female-sounding voices. In light of women’s history and experience of being silenced, this devaluing of sonorous voice has distinct implications for feminist teaching. A person’s (...) actual sounding voice, which constitutes her or his uniqueness, is missing from prior considerations of ‘voice’ in professional ethics. Because establishing a voice of authority is a central challenge starting off as a teacher, devocalization makes this challenge greater for those with female-sounding voices who take on and try out the dispositions and attitudes of an authoritative professional. Using the example of a voice workshop I designed for pre-service teachers, I re-consider it in light of ‘devocalization’ and the frankness needed to practice feminism, asking if it is possible to be frank and sonorous using irony. I conclude that it is, that Cavarero’s philosophical practice is a model for feminist teaching, and I re-write the workshop with ‘bad intentions’; for and in more than one voice. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the antagonistic character of democratic politics, specifically in relation to the neo-republican conceptualisation of politics, as outlined by Philip Pettit. I take up a problem not addressed in the neo-republican scholarship, namely, the broader dispute over the practice of contestation and the scope of its reach in relation to the activity of politics. This article proceeds through an examination of what I call Pettit’s method of political theory in order to approach sideways the concept of (...) ‘contestation’ as a marker for a sublimated antagonistic dimension of neo-republican politics. Drawing on the work of Rancière and the insights of post-Nietzschean critical theory (Derrida, Laclau and Arendt), I examine the relationship between populism, democratic contestation and non-domination in neo-republican discourse. As such, this article exerts pressure on Pettit’s privileging of a status concept of freedom as the supreme political ideal of republican politics. This article explores the political possibilities opened up through a re-politicisation of non-domination, and the radical potential that resides in a politics that does not foreclose on democracy, understood in terms of popular power and not popular control. (shrink)