Apprehending Care in the Flesh: Reading Cavarero with Spillers

Abstract:In this article I stage an encounter between Adriana Cavarero's account of uniqueness and Hortense Spillers's account of the flesh. Doing so is valuable for two reasons: First, it forces Cavarero's thought to consider not only the exclusion of women from the Western tradition, but also the anti-Blackness foundational to this tradition. This both expands and contorts Cavarero's thought, affirming her key claims while also altering them in the process. Second, reading Cavarero and Spillers together allows me to explore the way forms of life that evade representation can be known. Both uniqueness and the flesh are evasive of representation; by reading them together—supplementing Cavarero's consideration of the embodied character of uniqueness with Spillers's distinction between body and flesh—I develop an account of apprehension that emphasizes touch as a way of knowing apart from representation. Apprehension takes seriously the ambivalence in Spillers's account of the flesh, whereby it is both revealed through violence as well as through practices of care, which, as Saidiya Hartman has made clear, are often in a proximate relation in the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery.