Books by Adriana Cavarero

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.

This book is comprised of two essays on the biblical commandment against homicide. The first is authored by a Roman Catholic cardinal; the second by a leading Italian feminist philosopher. Together the two essays explore the religious, philosophical, political, historical, and moral significance of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" today.

Cavarero refutes a long-standing set of assumptions in moral philosophy by contesting the classical figure of the homo erectus or 'upright man,' and by proposing a feminist, altruistic, open model of the subject-one inclined toward others.

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter "what" she says. Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness.

Words like "e;terrorism"e; and "e;war"e; no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word "e;horrorism"e; to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the Iliad, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.

A major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero, this is a fascinating and challenging account of the relationship between the structure of the self and the structure of narrative.