Critical legal scholars have made us aware that law is made up not only of rules but also of language. But who speaks the language of law? And can one lawfully speak in one’s voice? For the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, to answer these questions we must not separate who is speaking from the very act of speaking; moreover, we must recuperate the material singularity and relationality of the mouth that speaks. Drawing on Cavarero’s work, this book focuses on the potentiality of the voice for resisting law’s sovereign structures. For Cavarero, it is the voice that expresses one’s living and unrepeatable singularity in a way that cannot be subsumed by the universalities and standards of law. The voice is essentially a material and singular passage of air and vibration that necessarily reveals one’s uniqueness in relationality. Speaking discloses this uniqueness, and so one’s vulnerability. It therefore leads to possibilities of resistance that, here, bring a fresh approach to longstanding legal theoretical concerns with singularity, ethics and justice.

Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is.

Adriana Cavarero has been, and continues to be, one of the most innovative and influential voices in Italian political and feminist thought of the last forty years. Known widely for her challenges to the male-dominated canon of political philosophy (and philosophy more broadly construed), Cavarero has offered provocative accounts of what constitutes the political, with an emphasis on embodiment, singularity, and relationality. Political Bodies gathers some of today’s most prominent and well-established theorists, along with emerging scholars, to contribute their insights, questions, and concerns about Cavarero's political philosophy and to put her work in conversation with other feminist thinkers, political theorists, queer theorists, and thinkers of race and coloniality. A new essay by Adriana Cavarero herself closes out the volume. Political Bodies ventures beyond the familiar boundaries of Cavarero's own writing and is a testament to the generative encounters that her philosophy makes possible.

The Future of the World Is Open examines the work and thought of three prominent Italian feminist philosophers, Lea Melandri, Luisa Muraro, and Adriana Cavarero, as it delves into the significant experiences that shaped them, highlighting their converging and diverging positions. Also appearing here for the first time in English translation are three essays by renowned author, journalist, and political figure Rossana Rossanda. Rossanda's essays offer a critical perspective on some of the contentious theoretical nodes with which Italian feminist thought has wrestled. Written in terse and engaging language, this book explores challenging philosophical and political questions, with themes including masculine domination; the body as the site of sedimented lived experience; sexual difference; the symbolic; the imaginary; feminine political authority; feminine subjectivity; and material humanism. A vivid picture of the socio-political context of Italian feminism emerges—illuminating its strong commitment to practice—and informing and enriching contemporary discussions at the intersection of different disciplinary perspectives.

There follow essays by Carol Lazzaro-Weis, Lucia Re, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, Lea Melandri, and Teresa de Lauretis, in which the authors explore the concept of sexual difference, female authority, relational identity, gendered roles, and homosexual desire in its relation to heterosexual normativity. The volume brings Italian feminist theory squarely into the arena of the most important contemporary feminist debates, revealing both its connections to and disjunctions from more dominant French and North American theories and practices."--Cover.

Stately Bodies explores the curious prevalence of bodily metaphors in conceptions of noncorporeal institutions: the state, the law, and politics itself. The book builds on work from Adriana Cavarero's well-received study, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. In that work Cavarero--as political theorist, philosopher, classicist, and close reader--examines literary and philosophical texts from Greek antiquity to modern to reveal the paradox that characterizes notions of the "body politic" in Western political philosophy. She examines bodily metaphor in political discourse and in fictional depictions of politics, including Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Timaeus, Livy, John of Salisbury, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Hobbes' Leviathan. An appendix explores two texts by women that disrupt these notions: Maria Zambrano's Tomb of Antigone and Ingeborg Bachmann's Undine Goes. Cavarero exposes the problematic nature of the mind/body dualism that has been essential in Western thought. Her insight that the expelled, depoliticized body is a female one becomes an instrument for decoding many paradoxical tropes of the political body. For instance, Cavarero revisits Antigone as the tragedy in which a body that is displaced, bleeding, and matrilinear allows the construction of a political order where misogynous rationality rules. Throughout the book, Cavarero argues that women have been cast by male thinkers into the realm of the corporeal as nonpolitical, and also suggests that this nonpolitical position is also a source of knowledge and power, that politics is a masculine pursuit that should not be admired or envied. Adriana Cavarero is Professor of Philosophy, University of Verona, and frequently is Visiting Professor. New York University. Her books Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy were published by Routledge.

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence. Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.

In order to create a greater dialogue between new and emerging Italian philosophy and established continental traditions of thought, Silvia Benso and Antonio Calcagno bring together the work of well-known figures in Italian philosophy such as Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Remo Bodei, Gianni Vattimo, Massimo Cacciari, and Adriana Cavarero with important thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Schmitt, Heidegger, Gadamer, Irigaray, Arendt, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault. In Open Borders, Benso and Calcagno introduce to a larger English-speaking audience the thought of highly regarded late twentieth-century Italian philosophers who seek to redefine concepts such as freedom, interpretation, existence, woman, male-female relationships, realism, emotions, and aesthetics. The diverse contributors to this book often transgress and redefine the limits and insights of philosophy itself and bring to the fore a new body of thinking that offers new ways of self-understanding while deeply engaging the issues and questions of contemporary society.

Italy has a rich philosophical legacy, and recent developments and movements in its political philosophy have produced a significant body of thought by internationally renowned philosophers working on questions and themes such as the critique of neoliberalism, statehood, politics and culture, feminism, community, the stranger, and the relationship between politics and action. This volume brings this conversation to English-language readers, considering well-known Italian philosophers such as Vattimo, Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, as well as philosophers with whom English-language readers are less acquainted, such as Luce Fabbri, Adriana Cavarero, and Lea Melandri. In addition, the essays extend the conversation beyond the realm of Italian philosophy, bringing its thinkers into dialogue with philosophical figures including Badiou, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Wittgenstein, and the Peruvian historian and sociologist Anibal Quijano.

If Madame Bovary's death in Flaubert's 1857 novel marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential unconscious double (capable of expressing the body, and thus also the intimate damage caused by disease) in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Giorgio Pressburger (1937-) and Giuliana Morandini (1938-)) all make use of individual 'infected' or suppressed voices within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more (conventionally) dominant narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, a function related to the very nature of narration itself.