Adriana Cavarero

“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.”

Reading guide

Relating Nar­ra­tives chal­lenges the structure of the millennia-old Western philo­sophical enter­prise of naming the world and human exis­tence through uni­versal def­i­n­i­tions. Cavarero’s excep­tional prose aims to think not in terms of an inner essence that defines all humanity, but in a new under­standing of exis­tence as a rela­tional expe­rience that occurs, pre­cisely, in the exposure of the self to an inter­action with others. Cavarero argues that the dis­course of phi­losophy, as we know it, can only provide def­i­n­i­tions of “what” Man is, but never “who” someone is. This “who” is crucial in Cavarero’s thought, since it is what defines the uniqueness of each human being, a uniqueness that is not definable through any essence or sci­en­tific knowledge. 

 Cavarero’s cri­tique of Western phi­losophy points to the fact that it oblit­erates the uniqueness of each person by rel­e­gating it to a domain outside of knowledge and the “sayable. ” Def­i­n­i­tions account only for the question “what” a person is, therefore defining some­thing that does not exist since “ ‘Man’ is a uni­versal that applies to everyone pre­cisely because it is no one. It dis­in­car­nates itself from the living sin­gu­larity of each one, while claiming to sub­stan­tiate it” (8). The “living sin­gu­larity” is, then, a journey that, instead of focusing on knowing the essential inner deter­mi­na­tions of a self, focuses on knowing identity from outside, in an unavoidable inter­re­lation with others. Con­se­quently, nar­ration by others of our own story is the activity where resides “who” we are. Therefore, for Cavarero, identity and exis­tence are nar­ratable, sayable, and knowable in their uniqueness. 

The second part of the book called Women is devoted to a bril­liant dis­cussion about women and the Western tra­dition. As Cavarero puts it, the “whole of the Western tra­dition, with phi­losophy at its base, becomes Man’s field of self-representation (49). However, Cavarero warns us about the danger of fol­lowing the meta­physical pro­cedure con­tained in the def­i­n­ition of Man, empty as it is by the centuries-old obsessive tax­o­nomic enter­prise, in order to attempt a def­i­n­ition of the uni­versal Woman. For the Italian thinker, this emp­tying process of sup­pressing the uniqueness in favor of a uni­versal def­i­n­ition of Man is an “entirely mas­culine tragedy” (52). Moreover, women are usually the ones to tell life-stories, that is to say, the story of the unique, the par­ticular, the “who.” For Cavarero, whether “ancient or modern, their art aspires to wise repu­di­ation of the abstract uni­versal, and follows everyday practice where the tale is exis­tence, relation and attention” (54). What is more, “entrusted to such a fem­inine art, is thus seem that a phi­losophy of nar­ration is by now the only cure that could save the very name of phi­losophy from its tragic fate” (54). Cavarero’s book is a crucial text that impulses a new under­standing of lit­er­ature, phi­losophy, and Western culture. As Laurie E. Naranch justly writes in her essay The Nar­ratable Self: Adriana Cavarero with Sojourner Truth, “Cavarero’s phi­losophy takes our exposure to others as central to an ontology, ethics, and pol­itics that reframes the dom­inant humanist tra­dition” (424).

A few questions

Departing from this striking and eye-opening text, what follows are some ideas, ques­tions, provo­ca­tions to start our dis­cussion about this crucial text:

• What are the dif­fer­ences between Cavarero’s nar­ratable self and an indi­vidual, in the sense of tra­di­tional philosophy?
• Cavarero’s use of terms such a political scene or pol­itics draws from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political. In this text, what are the par­ticular and spe­cific impli­ca­tions of such terms?
• What is the rela­tionship between biog­raphy and auto­bi­og­raphy in the text, and why biog­raphy is priv­i­leged over auto­bi­og­raphy, pri­marily due to the latter reli­a­bility on memory? Fur­thermore, how does Cavarero’s under­stand memory altogether?
• How does Cavarero under­stand dialectics?
• What does a phi­losophy of nar­ration entail?
• What is the rela­tionship between the private and the public in Cavarero’s ideas about the exis­tence and the exposed?
• What is the role of the accidental/contingency in the fem­inine art of narration?
• Why is the other necessary?
• How does Cavarero under­stand the ethics of contingency?