Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude

Autor(en)

Viktoria Huegel

Abstrakt

her latest book Adriana Cavarero, Italy’s most eminent feminist philosopher, takes a journey through art, literature, history, and philosophy to offer a critique of a geometric figure underlying Western thought: the figure of verticality. This geometry symbolizes a model of subjectivity that represents the ethical and political agent as an erect, autonomous, and rational self. Cavarero argues that this individualistic ontology obstructs the development of an altruistic ethics, for it reduces ethics to abstract principles founded on philosophy’s abstract construction of the self. The intention of Inclinations is therefore to challenge, rather than negate, the vertical model of the subject: to “critique its limits, pretences and its uncritical adoption in the fields of ontology, ethics and politics” (p. 128). The figure of the inclining mother provides the imagery from where Cavarero extracts an alternative narrative that she superimposes over the rhetoric of the philosophical subject. She thus contrasts the two models of subjectivity underlying ontology, ethics, and politics: an individualistic and a relational model. By rethinking subjectivity through the category of relation, we can expand the geometry of our thinking in order to clear the ground for an altruistic ethics of relationality based on vulnerability and dependence.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Politikwissenschaft

Journal

Contemporary Political Theory

Band

17

Seiten

185–188

ISSN

1470-8914

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0154-7

Publikationsdatum

2018

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506013 Politische Theorie, 603116 Politische Philosophie

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/89d9c98e-2678-41ea-a6b2-c0f35c433cc0