Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence

by Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig

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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Philosophy

192 pages, Hardcover

Published January 26, 2021

About the author

Adriana Cavarero teaches philosophy of politics at the University of Verona, Italy, and is a visiting professor at New York University. Her field of research includes classical, modern and contemporary thought, with a special focus on the political significance of philosophy. Two main concerns shape her approach to the Western philosophical tradition. First, the 'thought of sexual difference', a theoretical perspective that enables the deconstruction of Western textuality from a feminist standpoint. Second, the thought of Hannah Arendt, reinterpreted in its most innovative categories: birth, uniqueness, action and narration. The result is an inquiry that foregrounds the individual and unique existence of the human being, as related to body and gender. Cavarero resists both the solitary abstraction of the philosophical Subject, and the volatile fragmentation of the postmodern subject, in the name of the living uniqueness of a self being generated through plural relationships with other human beings, and the acceptance of the constraints of individuality and the body.