Adriana Cavarero
Adriana Cavarero (Bra, 1947) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy, and frequently Visiting Professor at New York University. She is an outstanding figure in contemporary Italian philosophy and a central voice in the international debate on the ‘philosophy of difference’. She is the founder, with Luisa Muraro, of a philosophical community called ‘Diotima’. English versions of her books, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, were published by Routledge, while Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender by University of Michigan Press.
Her pathbreaking In Spite of Plato engages in a deconstruction of ancient philosophers’ texts—mainly Plato, but also Homer and Parmenides—in order to free four Greek female figures from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a particular role. It endeavors to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. Building on the theory of sexual difference, Cavarero shows that death is the central category on which the whole edifice of traditional philosophy is based. By contrast, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking.
Her latest work, Orrorismo: ovvero della violenza sull’inerme (2007) deals with the horror of contemporary violence and aims to construct an ontology of vulnerability.