This paper examines how Adriana Cavarero extends and offers an alternative to Hannah Arendt's understanding of speech and its relationship to politics and violence through a re-reading of Herman Melville’s, Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). The novella was examined by Arendt in On Revolution (1963) where she considers the apolitical character of the French Revolutionary Terror and establishes a link between violence, mimetic contagion, and the failure of articulate speech. I suggest that whereas Arendt’s reading only offers two possible responses to (...) violence—forgiveness or punishment (perpetuating violence)—a reading of the novella inspired by Cavarero’s work shows a third alternative, the prevention of violence, while equally revealing the blind spot of Arendt’s argument. The blind spot is Arendt's privileging of articulate speech and her failure to consider the embodied character of human expression. Cavarero’s ethics of inclination, however, allows for a response to, and responsibility for, the uniqueness of the human voice, and for the intention to convey meaning. To mediate between Arendt and Cavarero, the paper also reconsiders Nidesh Lawtoo’s understanding of mimesis, evokes Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm-setting queer reading of Billy Budd, and engages with Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s contrary takes on the relationship between violence and language. (shrink)

Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign (...) second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead]. I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative. (shrink)

This essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social theory, (...) yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition of smarginatura, and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech. (shrink)

Part 1 of this essay began to develop a philosophical interpretation of The Neapolitan Novels by grounding a vision of the work's moral psychology in the tradition of Italian difference feminism, particularly as it is expressed in the texts of the influential Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Part 2 advances the interpretive argument by presenting a more detailed literary analysis of the character of Lila Cerullo. After motivating the interest of various aspects of her symbolization by connecting them to important motifs (...) in feminist philosophy and literature, I present evidence of Lila's special status in the work, and the puzzles this status raises. I advance a reading of Lila as a brilliant woman capable of playing the superior role in a hierarchical relationship of entrustment—and of The Neapolitan Novels as a sympathetic yet critical exploration of the viability of such relationships and their connection to female friendship and female freedom. In support of this reading, I give an account of Lila's strange condition of smarginatura, the import of her perplexing earthquake speech in which this condition is explicitly addressed, and Elena Greco's troubling reactions. (shrink)

Con remisión a las obras de Michel Foucault y de Jacques Lacan, en el presente artículo se trazan los límites de la teoría de la performatividad de Judith Butler con respecto al sujeto de lo político y a su capacidad de acción tomando como referente fenomenológico la consulta que se llevara a cabo en Cataluña el 9 de noviembre de 2014. Dichos límites se hacen manifiestos mediante la distinción entre acción y acto políticos o entre subversión en tanto que transgresión (...) de la norma que da lugar a la reconfiguración del orden socio-simbólico e interrupción en tanto que transgresión de la norma que constituye un acontecimiento radicalmente otro de dicho orden. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than (...) asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene of birth, I argue that we have to insist on the very characteristics Cavarero attributes to it—ones, as this essay aims to show, that are ultimately missing in the Arendtian account thereof. (shrink)

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)

ABSTRACT The influence by Walter Benjamin on Arendt’s notion of narrativity has been firmly established, but little research has been done to contextualize his influence. This paper fill this lacunae by showing how, like Benjamin, Arendt was concerned to deploy a form of writing history that ensures the individuality of its agents, but that as she articulated her notion of the public space, the redemptive, messianic elements in his historiography were replaced with a secular and political mode of remembrance. The (...) notion of the public space and the accompanying secularization of Benjamin’s redemptive history should not be understood as the result of a linear development, but rather as responses to contemporary political events, of which I focus on three: (1) her early writings on totalitarianism, in which she tries to come to terms with the Shoah; (2) her reflections on the Greek city state, in which she criticizes the instrumentalization of politics in post-war democracies such as West-Germany; and finally, (3) the court room as a space for storytelling and the contestation over the history of anti-Semitism during the Eichmann trial. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, Europe’s immigration regulations have raised concerns regarding human rights and divided the public opinion on transnational movement, particularly with the ever-growi...

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith (...) Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of the Muse of Greek oral poetry to rethink the relationship between mimesis and narration, and the shaping power of the act of narration on the subject. I suggest that Cavarero’s reading of the Muse provides an understanding of mimesis that moves beyond representation to a form of contagion between embodied and temporal subjectivities. To clarify this, I show how Cavarero’s Muse anticipates her critique of rectitude in Inclinations and makes it clear that (...) the inclined subject is not only the vulnerable and open subject as opposed to the vertical and autonomous one, but also the subject that has the power to incline the narratives that mimetically straighten it. The aim is to understand mimetic inclinations as destabilising voices of vertical narrations. As a concrete example of the troubling power of mimetic inclinations, I propose a rereading of Cavarero’s technique of theft presented in In Spite of Plato as a strategy of mimetic resistance. (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)

“Humanism” is a term that has designated a remarkably disparate set of ideologies. Nonetheless, strains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedom. This essay examines the emergence of a new humanistic discourse in feminist theory, one that instead finds its provocation in the unwilled passivity and vulnerability of the human body, and in the vulnerability of the human body to suffering (...) and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and “precariousness,” this new humanism is a corporeal humanism. This essay probes both the promise and the limitations of this emergent humanism with particular reference to recent work by feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering (...) moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals. (shrink)

This article draws from Adriana Cavarero’s considerations on the role of the body in diverse contemporary modalities of violence. We propose a conceptual path along some ideas from Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman in order to state, on the one hand, an onto-epistemological turn that understands the body as the effect of social norms and, on the other, an ethical and political reflection about the levels of violent exposure that suffer those bodies that are excluded from the cultural (...) frames that make a life livable. The concave mirror—as a possibility for other alternative ways of representing the body—is postulated as an alternative to the hegemonic ways in which the representation operates in the configuration of the body as a totality and unity: those that theory links to the flat mirror. (shrink)

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.

Background:The public domain of midwifery practice, represented by the educational and hospital institutions could be blamed for a subconscious ethical dilemma for midwifery practitioners. The result of such tension can be seen in complaints from maternity service users of dehumanised care. When expectations are not met, women report dehumanising experiences that carry long term consequences to both them and their child.Objectives:To revisit the ethical foundation of midwifery practice to reflect the feminist Ethic of Care and reframe what is valuable to (...) women and midwives during the childbirth experience.Research Design:A comprehensive literature review is presented from the midwifery and feminist ethics discourse.Ethical Considerations:Nil to report.Findings:Women are vulnerable during childbirth as they need care, yet they prioritise elements of relationship in their experience. The Ethic of Care approach equalises the relationship between the midwife and the woman, providing the space for relationship building and allowing midwives to meet the expectations of their accepted responsibility.Discussion:Some midwives manage to balance the demands of the institution with the needs of the woman. This is described as both an emotional and professionally challenging balancing act.Conclusion:Until there is a formal acknowledgement of the different ethical approach to midwifery practice from within the profession and the Institution, midwifery identity and practice will continue to be compromised. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

:This article interrogates “masculinity” as a named object of study for the social sciences, and sociology in particular, by drawing on the analysis of sense and language in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. While rejecting essentialist definitions of masculine attributes, sociologists have long insisted that masculinity can be defined as a strategic articulation in the pursuit of social goals. Developing Deleuze's notion of the “singularity” within signifying series, this article argues that sociological emphases on goal-oriented practices have elided important (...) problems around the individuation of social relations, as well as neglecting the subsequent textual work of naming such relations as masculine. To develop this argument, the article begins with R.W. Connell's concept of “hegemonic masculinity” as one example of empirical investigation that proceeds by way of specialised metaphors – strategies, positions, goals – that make masculinity appear self-evident as an innate communication between men. In scrutinising the efficacy of such metaphors, the article questions the paradigm of homosociality as a methodological a priori in social scientific research. Finally, the article asks how masculinity studies might engage a more critical relationship to observation and description, a question that remains urgent for developing the ethical vision of gender studies more broadly. (shrink)

In her recent book, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann Murphy suggests that the philosophical imaginary, in particular that of contemporary continental philosophy, is imbued with images of violence. The concept of the philosophical imaginary is drawn from the work of Michèle Le Dœuff to explore the role of images of violence in philosophy. Murphy sets the language of violence, reflexivity, and critique against that of vulnerability, ambiguity and responsibility. Her concern is that images of violence have become and may (...) become more ‘neutralised, domesticated or eroticised’ in objectionable ways. There is no doubt Murphy has isolated and highlighted a striking feature of the continental imaginary in a clear and thoughtful way. My paper takes Murphy’s argument further by elaborating a Le Dœuffian argument that theorises the reversal of priority from violent language to the violence of language. I take Murphy’s injunction for attention and sensitivity seriously by examining the language of violence and exposing that which is unfamiliar, what has become incorporated and what is revealed by the language that is used. The language of the third Reich and the language of the Rwandan genocide will be briefly compared to demonstrate these points. Our responsibility is to recognise the use of euphemism and metaphor to sometimes cover and sometimes blatantly advertise the horrifying truth. The focus on violence in philosophical language can lead us away from the violence of genocidal language and other violent language that philosophers, like all responsible people, are called to witness. (shrink)

Whistleblowers are a vital means of protecting society because they provide information about serious wrongdoing. And yet, people who speak up can suffer. Even so, debates on whistleblowing focus on compelling employees to come forward, often overlooking the risk involved. Theoretical understanding of whistleblowers’ post-disclosure experience is weak because tangible and material impacts are poorly understood due partly to a lack of empirical detail on the financial costs of speaking out. To address this, we present findings from a novel empirical (...) study surveying whistleblowers. We demonstrate how whistleblowers who leave their role as a result of speaking out can lose both the financial and temporal resources necessary to redevelop their livelihoods post-disclosure. We also show how associated costs involving significant legal and health expenditure can rise. Based on these insights, our first contribution is to present a new conceptual framing of post-disclosure experiences, drawing on feminist theory, that emphasizes the bodily vulnerability of whistleblowers and their families. Our second contribution repositions whistleblowing as a form of labour defending against precarity, which involves new expenses, takes significant time, and often must be carried out with depleted income. Bringing forth the intersubjective aspect of the whistleblowing experience, our study shows how both the post-disclosure survival of whistleblowers, and their capacity to speak, depend on institutional supports or, in their absence, on personal networks. By reconceptualizing post-disclosure experiences in this way—as material, embodied and intersubjective—practical implications for whistleblower advocacy and policy emerge, alongside contributions to theoretical debates. Reversing typical formulations in business ethics, we turn extant debates on the ethical duty of employees to speak up against wrongdoing on their heads. We argue instead for a responsibility to protect whistleblowers exposed to vulnerability, a duty owed by those upon whose behalf they speak. (shrink)

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial 'crashing' captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading (...) representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred. (shrink)

In this article I further Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo’s discussion of “mimetic inclination” to consider the way a person can be known in their uniqueness. Cavarero says that we receive a sense of the uniqueness of another by relating their narrative. I suggest that this also reveals a sense of the uniqueness of the one narrating, and that this can be understood as a practice of care. This narration is, as a consequence, distinct from representation (which itself is distinct (...) from mimesis) and is better described as apprehension. By drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I detail a primary form of care connected to apprehension that is engendered by what Sharpe calls “the weather of antiblackness”. Morrison both details this form of care in Beloved and practises it herself in her storytelling. This expands feminist analyses of vulnerability, providing critical resources for rethinking existence apart from its colonial and patriarchal articulation. (shrink)

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally (...) resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals. (shrink)

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

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)

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that ?A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes?. The idea for this dialogue comes from a conversation that Michael Peters and Morwenna Griffiths had at the Philosophy of Education of Great Britain annual meeting at the University of Oxford, 2011. It was sparked by an account of an assessment of a piece of work where one of the external examiners unexpectedly exclaimed ?I knew Jean-Paul Sartre?, trying to trump the discussion. This (...) conversation is a dialogue about comedy and humor as a basis for philosophy, education and pedagogy that provides an introduction to recent works and a context for ongoing research. The concluding section provides further reflection on some of the main themes, drawing attention to the significance of humor in dialogues within philosophy and education, and suggesting that it has a particular role in resisting managerialism at all levels of educational institutions. (shrink)

In _Vulnerability and Critical Theory_, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced.

Levinas's work persistently challenges the claim that the sovereignty of the ego is the foundation for ethics, a claim he attributes to the Greek philosophical tradition. This claim emerges in dominant accounts of responsibility, in which the agent's intentions define his or her culpability. However, in Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles also attempts to undermine this strict pairing of responsibility and deliberate choice. Oedipus undergoes a fundamentally Levinasian narrative arc by moving from self-assured sovereignty, based on his ability to comprehend the world, (...) to an awakening to responsibility. In this essay I examine the points of intersection and divergence between the tragic narrative of Oedipus and the traumatic subject in Levinas's work. (shrink)

In her recent book, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann Murphy suggests that the philosophical imaginary, in particular that of contemporary continental philosophy, is imbued with images of violence. The concept of the philosophical imaginary is drawn from the work of Michèle Le Dœuff to explore the role of images of violence in philosophy. Murphy sets the language of violence, reflexivity, and critique against that of vulnerability, ambiguity and responsibility. Her concern is that images of violence have become and may (...) become more ‘neutralised, domesticated or eroticised’ in objectionable ways. There is no doubt Murphy has isolated and highlighted a striking feature of the continental imaginary in a clear and thoughtful way. My paper takes Murphy’s argument further by elaborating a Le Dœuffian argument that theorises the reversal of priority from violent language to the violence of language. I take Murphy’s injunction for attention and sensitivity seriously by examining the language of violence and exposing that which is unfamiliar, what has become incorporated and what is revealed by the language that is used. The language of the third Reich and the language of the Rwandan genocide will be briefly compared to demonstrate these points. Our responsibility is to recognise the use of euphemism and metaphor to sometimes cover and sometimes blatantly advertise the horrifying truth. The focus on violence in philosophical language can lead us away from the violence of genocidal language and other violent language that philosophers, like all responsible people, are called to witness. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza el concepto de espacio público en el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt a partir de metáforas provenientes del ámbito teatral. El objetivo principal es reconstruir el camino entre las intuiciones provenientes del mundo del teatro y la construcción del concepto de lo público arendtiano. Después de algunas precisiones metodológicas, se enumeran las expresiones vinculadas con el ámbito teatral que se encuentran en distintas obras arendtianas. Posteriormente, se analiza la fuente de la metáfora teatral y se caracteriza el concepto (...) de espacio público a partir de ellas. Este trabajo muestra que: 1. La fuente de la metáfora teatral incluye a la tragedia antigua tanto como a formas contemporáneas de teatro. 2. Las formas contemporáneas de teatro permiten: a) conceptualizar las formas sociales de publicidad y, b) considerar el rol de los espectadores como políticamente relevante. (shrink)

This article explores the everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses through the embodiment of popular culture representations of war bodies in cosplay. In cosplay – the creatio...

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in finding stronger means of securitising identity against the various risks presented by the mobile globalised world. Biometric technology has featured quite prominently on the policy and security agenda of many countries. It is being promoted as the solution du jour for protecting and managing the uniqueness of identity in order to combat identity theft and fraud, crime and terrorism, illegal work and employment, and to efficiently govern various domains and services (...) including asylum, immigration and social welfare. In this paper, I shall interrogate the ways in which biometrics is about the uniqueness of identity and what kind of identity biometrics is concerned with. I argue that in posing such questions at the outset, we can start delimiting the distinctive bioethical stakes of biometrics beyond the all-too-familiar concerns of privacy, data protection and the like. I take cue mostly from Cavarero’s Arendt-inspired distinction between the “what” and the “who” elements of a person, and from Ricoeur’s distinction between the “idem” and “ipse” versions of identity. By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the example of asylum policy, I seek to examine and emphasise an important ethical issue pertaining to the practice of biometric identification. This issue relates mainly to the paradigmatic shift from the biographical story (which for so long has been the means by which an asylum application is assessed) to bio-digital samples (that are now the basis for managing and controlling the identities of asylum applicants). The purging of identity from its narrative dimension lies at the core of biometric technology’s overzealous aspiration to accuracy, precision and objectivity, and raises one of the most pressing bioethical questions vis-à-vis the realm of identification. (shrink)