Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233111
Isabell Dahms
ABSTRACT This article explores queer spatial and feminist coalitional practices through Adriana Cavarero's concept of maternal and mimetic “inclinations”, Sara Ahmed's concept of queer “orientations” and a political action by the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP). It argues that through these paradigms, social histories become central to philosophical thinking about subjectivity. Ahmed and Cavarero conceive of subjectivity through postural and spatial relations. To explore how spatial and postural relations generate subjectivities, I focus on an example of a deliberate political takeover of space. In the article, Ahmed and Cavarero's concepts are explored through a historical analysis of the 1982 takeover of Holy Cross Church (London, UK) by the ECP. This political action offers a different starting point for philosophical inquiry and proposes an additional response by orienting and inclining us towards a feminist coalitional practice and commons that builds support without minimising difference. The paper will show that the conceptual tools of Cavarero, Ahmed and the ECP can be productively brought into conversation and used to conceptualise maternal inclinations through queer spatial relations and feminist coalitional practices.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233108
N. Lawtoo, W. Verkerk, Adriana Cavarero
At first glance, it may appear perplexing to join the ancient concept of “mimesis” with the contemporary concept of “inclinations” via the title of “mimetic inclinations” – and for more than one reason. After all, Plato staged a philosophical critique of mimetic arts in the Republic via the trope of a metaphysical mirror that turns the real world into an appearance, a shadow, or a phantom far removed from reality. As such, the scene was staged for an agonistic confrontation that pits the philosopher against the artist, placing the abstract Forms in the vertical sky of eternal ideas in tension with the horizontally inclined world of aesthetic simulations. From the vertical,meta-physical perspective, the dominant definition of mimesis understood as a mirroring copy or representation of reality that in-forms (gives form to) Western metaphysics is thus at odds with the pluralism internal to an embodied, dramatic, and relationally inclined ontology that, contra Plato, is now reappearing on the contemporary philosophical scene. This relational ontology is constitutive of what the Italian feminist philosopher, classicist, and political theorist Adriana Cavarero has recently grouped under the rubric of “inclinations” (inclinazioni). She provides a different position, or disposition, towards others that troubles the ideal of a self-possessed, autonomous, and solipsistic subject in favour of a magnetic and affective “force”. This force inclines subjectivity towards alterity – thereby proposing a different ontological posture to rethink ethical and political relations constitutive of being in common with others in this world. Adriana Cavarero is one of the most influential contemporary Italian philosophers writing today. A feminist thinker with a pluralist training in classics, political theory, and literary theory, Cavarero is a protean theorist whose work spans the history of Western philosophy – from Plato to Kant, Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler, and beyond. Furthermore, she develops a pluralist thought that goes beyond ancient quarrels between philosophy and literature to rethink the human condition for present and future generations. Cavarero’s influential and now classic works like In Spite of Plato (1995), Relating Narratives (2000), Stately Bodies (2002), For More than one Voice (2005), Horrorism (2008), and, more recently, Inclinations (2014) and Surging Democracy (2021) have rethought the foundations of the subject through a relational ontology attentive to vulnerability, precarity, and care, which she posits at the foundations of an ethics of non-violence. These concepts have been important for influential anglophone theorists like Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig, for instance.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233114
N. Lawtoo, Adriana Cavarero
ABSTRACT In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or pathos, that dispossesses the subject. While Plato tended to emphasize the pathological implications of mimesis, Cavarero and Lawtoo agree that both mimesis and inclinations go beyond good and evil and can be put to both pathological and democratic use. Picking up a dialogue started during a walk in New York City, Cavarero and Lawtoo, take their shared interests in Joseph Conrad's relating narratives as an occasion to discuss good and bad mimetic inclinations in contemporary politics and ethics. Joined in conclusion by the Gendered Mimesis team (Willow Verkerk, Isabelle Dahms and Giulia Rignano), topics addressed include new fascism, surging democracy, ethical responsibility for vulnerable others, hypermaternity and public happiness in a precarious world.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233112
Andrea Timár
ABSTRACT 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.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233113
Timothy J. Huzar
ABSTRACT 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.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233110
Giulia Ulla Rignano
ABSTRACT 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.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2233109
W. Verkerk
ABSTRACT This paper takes Cavarero’s arguments against the Homo erectus seriously and asks: how can we model an alternative to it? It proposes that a notion of the mimetically inclined subject is required, one that thickens Cavarero’s affirmative account of inclination by way of a new philosophical understanding of mimesis that includes habit and disciplinarity. Following Cavarero, the mother is positioned as a key figure to place nurturing and love at the centre of subject-making. However, they are shown to be a necessary but not sufficient step for the process of re-evaluation. An account of disciplinary mimesis which draws on a Nietzschean legacy in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, together with Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as a situation, demonstrate the pitfalls of idealizing the mother. I argue that to challenge the particularized universalism of the European subject with an affirmative account of mimetic inclination, other figures which embrace Cavarero’s notion of relational vulnerability alongside the mother are required. The agonistic friend who practices an open, feminist curiosity is proposed as one such exemplar and, in closing remarks, I gesture to other necessary models in feminist and Indigenous thought that are key to remaking the androcentric subject of European philosophy.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2195800
Bárbara Buril Lins
ABSTRACT This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents.
{"title":"Social Reproduction is not a Fairy Tale: A Conversation Between Axel Honneth, Silvia Federici, and Nancy Fraser","authors":"Bárbara Buril Lins","doi":"10.1080/14409917.2023.2195800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2023.2195800","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents.","PeriodicalId":51905,"journal":{"name":"Critical Horizons","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45496337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2195802
Itay Snir
ABSTRACT Children have always been an essential part of politics. However, the political struggles in which children are involved are rarely, if at all, for the equality of children as such. Struggles for the benefit of children are nearly always led by adults, focusing on children’s rights in an adult-dominated world. In this paper, I develop the possibility of Children’s political struggle for equality, informed by the political philosophy of Jacque Rancière. I present the educational backdrop for Rancière’s claim that all intelligences are equal, and argue that it implies that children are by nature equal to adults, hence also equally capable of political action. By demonstrating that children are a “part of those who have no part” in the existing sociopolitical order, I examine the possibility of a collective political subject of children, and articulate the implications child politics may have.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2023.2195804
J. Braun
ABSTRACT I emphasize how The Return of Work in Critical Theory: Self, Society, Politics deals with details on labor problems ordinarily not handled by modern day critical theory, whereas Experience: New Foundations for the Human Sciences to a large extent justifies the use of a phenomenological approach to psychology with applications for theory building in general, and Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory provides commentary on the concept of authoritarianism that has ramifications for use of critical theory for understanding political problems. I emphasize the distinction between naturalism of the sort practiced in the physical sciences and neo-Kantian historicism that reflects religious ideals of morality even if in secular form. Thus, I distinguish between motive (can be driven by psychological impulse, but often comes originally from the acceptance of cultural meaning), and mechanism that has explanatory value because of acceptance of the reality of physical causality, usually the result of social structure acting as a controlling mechanism. Similar distinctions are made by Scott Lash, for the purpose of distinguishing between deductive and inductive reasoning. The book on authoritarianism is discussed with emphasis on how their conceptualization fits neither deductive nor inductive conceptualizations entirely. I conclude with a commonsense discussion of these same topics.
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