Cite as: Angelo Bolaffi, Introduction to the lecture Adriana Cavarero, Framing Violence: Beyond War and Terrorism, ICI Berlin, 25 May 2010, video recording, mp4, 07:51 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e100525_3>
25 May 2010

Introduction

By Angelo Bolaffi

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:07:51
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/adriana-cavarero/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Lecture

Framing Violence: Beyond War and Terrorism / Adriana Cavarero

Based on her most recent book, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (Columbia University Press 2009), Adriana Cavarero argues for a renewal of our political vocabulary. “War” and “terrorism” do not adequately describe the specific phenomenology of contemporary human destruction. Instead, we must overcome the perspective of the warrior and rethink the phenomenology of violence from the point of view of its victims but without falling into the rhetoric of victimization. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s work, and above all, Judith Butler’s radical critique of the sovereign subject, Cavarero reflects upon a human “ontology” centered on the relations among vulnerable beings exposed to one another.

Adriana Cavarero teaches political philosophy 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. Cavarero resists the solitary abstraction of the emphatic philosophical subject as well as the volatile fragmentation of the postmodern subject and affirms instead the living uniqueness of a self that is generated through plural, concrete and corporeal relationships with other human beings.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Adriana Cavarero

Organized by

Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Berlino
In Kooperation mit dem ICI Berlin