Cavarero Recritude

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology
Author(s): Adriana Cavarero

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE WITH THE
SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY (2013), pp. 220-235
Published by: Penn State University Press
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jsp
Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology
Adriana Cavarero
university of verona
At the very beginning of the history of philosophy, with Plato, we are told
the strange story of some men dwelling in a cave and looking at shadows.
Immobilized by chains since childhood for all their lives, they are forced to
sit on the cave’s floor and are impeded from standing up. Hence, whoever
they are and whatever they do, the label Homo erectus as a general category
denoting the vertical posture of the human animal is decidedly unfit for
their position. The strange story, however, goes on and recounts how one
of them, by managing to get rid of the chains, for the first time rises to his
feet. The familiar feature of Homo erectus, intended not as an extinct homi-
nid species but as the postural human standard, eventually enters the pic-
ture. But we are, of course, only at the beginning of the story and have to be
patient before reaching the crucial moment of its plot. Our upright hero, in
fact, turns and starts to walk and, after a difficult ascension that allows him
to exit the dark cave, succeeds in standing, vertical and motionless, under
the midday sun that shines outside, in order to contemplate the luminous
idea of the Good. He is Plato himself, actually, the true philosopher, the
contemplator: the prototype of the Philosophus erectus species. And it is pre-
cisely this new model of the human, resulting from a distinctive philosoph-
ical “orthopedy,” that ultimately enters the tale, disclosing its real meaning.
In other words, the strange story is not that strange after all: it narrates how
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 27, no. 3, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
JSP 27.3_02_Cavarero.indd 220 29/07/13 11:42 AM

recritude 221
philosophy inaugurates itself by celebrating theory as a perfect and solitary

verticality that makes the concepts of rectitude, rightness, uprightness, and
erection coincide.
Far from being malicious or provocative, the point I just made rests on
serious philological and etymological grounds. All of the terms I mentioned
above—rectitude, rightness, uprightness, erection—and the like originate
from the Latin rectus, which derives from the Greek orthos: both meaning
“right,” “straight,” “intended as vertical.” There is a long and noticeable
thread, woven within the history of truth, that starts with the Greek orthos
logos, proceeds then to the Latin recta ratio (right reason), and leads up to
right—Recht, droit, derecho, diritto—and then to uprightness, rectitude, cor-
rectness, and, not least, erection. The axis is vertical, not horizontal. The
philosopher, of which the Platonic contemplator is the archetype, knows
it for sure. Steadily balanced on its vertical posture, the philosophers’ sub-
ject does not lean, does not bend, does not incline; it stands upright, very
confident with the correctness of its erection. Thus, it is not only a matter
of unmasking the notorious symbolical role of the phallus. The question is
indeed more complicated.
And, of course, I do not need to remind you of Foucault’s analyses of the
various straightening dispositives in Discipline and Punish or the fact that, in
English, heterosexuality is coded as “straight.” Nor need I remind you that
Heidegger, by interpreting the myth of the cave, accuses Plato of replacing
the concept of aletheia, “truth,” with that of orthotes, “correctness.” Actually,
from a philosophical perspective, the topic is not only complicated but of
some importance. Yet, as it is worth noting—and this is exactly my point—
neither Heidegger nor Foucault ever properly engaged in a specific inquiry
on the very issue that comes here to the fore, namely, that of the structural
complicity between the various systems of truth constructed by philosophers
and the verticalized geometry or topography that frames them. This is true
not only for Heidegger and Foucault but also for other scholars: although
crucial, the issue is largely ignored or neglected by critics. In my opinion, on
the one hand, such a lack of intellectual curiosity is, at least, surprising, but,
on the other hand, it means that, in spite of the few traces left by rare criti-
cal incursions, the territory for speculating on the link between philosophy
and verticality is basically unmapped. Possibly as wide as the entire history
of philosophy, and almost limitless, it still has aspects to be explored. Given
that no detailed map is available, whoever dares to explore it needs therefore
to ponder the difficulty of the enterprise and choose a strategy.

222 adriana cavarero
As for my strategy, I tried already to make it clear, at the beginning

of this essay, by citing Plato and his Philosophus erectus in order to indi-
cate a credible starting point or a significant resource for exploration.
Notwithstanding my passion for Plato and ancient philosophy in general,
however, I will now leave the Greeks aside and focus, rather, on modernity.
In order to go deeper into the question, I will concentrate on two impor-
tant authors, taken as representative of early and late modernity: Immanuel
Kant and Elias Canetti. To tell it briefly, my task is, on the one hand, that of
examining how the concept of verticality affects their constructions of the
subject and, on the other, that of imagining how a different geometry could
succeed in inclining the arrogant uprightness of this very subject. Thus,
basically, my analysis articulates in two parts: the first dedicated to decon-
structing the vertical subject that inhabits modern individualist ontology,
the second dedicated instead to featuring an inclined subjectivity in order
to revisit what we could call a relational ontology, calling on vulnerability
and dependence for illumination.
For a start, I will thus turn to Kant and interrogate his notion of the
vertical subject by confronting it with a creature that, by definition, does not
stand upright at all: that is the newborn, the infant, the child. Not very sur-
prisingly, a “more or less selfish old bachelor,”1 Kant does not like children.
He complains that, because of their “deficiency” of reason and intellect,
they disturb “the thinking section of the community by banging, shout-
ing, whistling, singing and other noisy pastimes.”2 “Furthermore, when the
child tries to speak”—Kant notices—“the mangling of words is so charming
for the mother and nurse” that “this inclines them to hug and kiss him.”3 A
good educator, obviously, would not reward the lack of rationality displayed
by the human being as a child. And yet, mothers and nurses reward it with
a warm hug; so, at the end of the day, according to Kant, the core of the
matter lies in their natural inclination “to comfort a creature that ingratiat-
ingly entrusts himself entirely to the will of another.”4 In short, it is not
the children’s noise as such that bothers Kant but, rather, the very connec-
tion between maternal inclination and infantile dependence. The question
has a strict philosophical profile. Here, infancy, as a status of minority and
dependence, stands against the background of the Kantian paradigm of an
autonomous, free, and rational “I” who masters his or her inclinations and
who, most of all, does not need others to incline toward or lean over him
or her. Kant’s complaint about the natural inclination of women toward the
human creature in need fits precisely this picture centered on the normative

recritude 223
and vertical I. To put it shortly, Kant blames children because they are not
yet adult, and he blames women because they are naturally inclined to take
care of a creature that depends on others and, more precisely, on women
themselves. Between mother and child—where the child, in Kantian terms,
is still a larva of a not-yet-autonomous I—there is an alarming complicity
and also, interestingly enough, a question of exquisite geometry due to the
prevalence, in this scene, of the oblique line on the vertical one. Namely, the
maternal inclination toward the infant ends up delaying the fundamental
process that, by superseding human dependence, eventually produces an
autonomous I, a moral legislator of the “authentic self,” steadily balanced
on its internal axis and standing typically on its feet, vertical, upright: the
Homo erectus or, better, as I should prefer to put it, its Kantian version, the
Philosophus erectus.
In his ethical and anthropological writings, Kant discusses the topic
of “inclination” (Neigung) under the rubric of desires, namely, affects per-
taining to humans as natural beings, as, in a word, animals. For him,
inclination is a sort of “habitual sensible desire,” a habit, “a physical inner
necessitation to proceed in the same manner that one has proceeded until
now.”5 This, according to Kant, stimulates the arousal of disgust in us
because “the animal in the human being jumps out far too much: . . . here
one is led instinctively by the rule of habituation, exactly like another (non-
human) nature, and so runs the risk of falling into one and the same class
with the beast.”6 In Kantian terms, of course, the problem is particularly
alarming. Whereas as natural being, man is an animal of the species Homo
sapiens, as a rational and moral being—that is, as a proper human—man
is totally repelled at the idea of associating with beasts. In this light, Kant’s
impatience with mothers and children becomes, thus, more comprehen-
sible: vis-à-vis the zoological boundary between humans and animals, both
mothers and children are borderline figures. Mothers are so because, by
nurturing and raising their little ones, they show a natural inclination that
aligns them with the females of other species. Children, for their part, are,
substantially, still young little beasts.
However, in an extraordinary passage on the issue of freedom, Kant
seems to withdraw precisely this last equation. In his Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View, he writes: “Even the child who has just wrenched
itself from the mother’s womb seems to enter the world with loud cries,
unlike all other animals, simply because it regards the inability to make use
of its limbs as a constraint, and thus it immediately announces its claim to

freedom (a representation that no other animal has).”7 Quite obviously, as

Kant clarifies in a footnote, the newborn cannot possibly have a representa-
tion of freedom. How could he? Having just come into the world, he has
no representations at all. What he has, yet, according to a strange expres-
sion of Kant, is “an obscure idea” of freedom: an idea that determines so
strongly the child’s desire to be free, that it appears a real and unmistakable
passion—communicated through a cry at the moment of birth and, not
much later in infancy, through tears and desperate weeping. Disturbing the
“thinking section of the human community,” the newborn cries, according
to Kant, because he perceives the condition of “illiberty” inherent in the
incapability of governing his own body—or else, to put it more precisely,
because he perceives his lack of autonomy. Thus, obscure as it may be, the
idea of freedom is innate in the human animal—who, in fact, through that
first, highly annoying, emission of sound, manifests it clamorously. The
cry expresses neither an ostensible grief of separation from the maternal
womb nor a touching request for motherly help on the part of a helpless
and dependent creature. It is, on the contrary, a cry of indignation for not
having been scooped out already perfectly autonomous—that is, free. In
Tzvetan Todorov’s words, “If the newborn child cries, it is not to demand
what is necessary for life and existence; it is to protest against his depen-
dence in regard to others. As a Kantian subject, man is born longing for
liberty.”8 In this respect, a good family man like Hegel appears to be more
cautious. By focusing on the same phenomenon, Hegel says that, through
the scream, the child externalizes the feeling of his needs, and in par-
ticular, he bears witness to a condition of dependency and neediness far
greater than that of animals.9 For Kant, the annoying infant shriek, instead,
expresses rage at being impotent and incapable of self-determination. The
emphasis is fatally placed on autonomy. Moreover, the capricious behavior
typical of infancy and early childhood confirms Kant’s general assumption
that the child’s impulse “to have his own way and to take any obstacle to it
as an affront is marked particularly by his tone, and manifests a malicious-
ness that the mother finds necessary to punish, but he usually replies with
still louder shrieking.”10
Do not let yourself be misled by the half-ironic, half-benevolent tone
of the Königsberg philosopher. The problem is seriously philosophical—as
well as plausibly biographical. Maybe Kant, in his old age, has forgotten
that he was a child too, or maybe he never had the opportunity to care
for a baby or for other vulnerable and defenseless creatures. Maybe he

recritude 225
never leaned on someone or inclined himself toward another. Since “birth

and early childhood, for centuries belonged exclusively to a women’s uni-
verse,”11 Kant lacked the direct experience of the situation and its patholo-
gies. This is true for many philosophers, of course, but given his insistence
on the category of autonomy, the phenomenon, in Kant, becomes particu-
larly relevant. Even the mere hypothesis of a structural dependence in the
human—let us say in the human animal as an infant—is for him a serious
preoccupation. This is why the philosopher dares to claim that the baby
cries because she already has an obscure idea of freedom. And this is why,
here and elsewhere, in the work of Kant, the interpreter can perceive, as
Foucault would have it, “the presence of a deaf, unbound and often errant
freedom which operates in the domain of originary passivity.”12
Kant’s contemporaries tell us that the philosopher, as a person, was
sociable and agreeable: within the limits of his Königsberg he was, one
could say, a cosmopolitan. As a moral philosopher, instead, he seems to
have been obsessed with the model of an autistic “I” that legislates and
obliges itself, a vertical and steady I, displayed on the entire surface of the
earth, standing side by side with other equally autarkic I’s, one the exact
replica of the next. They are perfectly homogeneous, and their sum guaran-
tees the universality of moral law. The political order corresponding to this
arrangement ensures, as Kant claims, perpetual peace.
I have here accused Kant of a speculative prejudice against the human
condition of vulnerability and dependence, one that announces itself, with
the cry of the newborn, at the scene of birth. But the term vulnerability
belongs to our vocabulary, not to Kant’s, of course. Up to Lévinas, in the his-
tory of philosophy, the word vulnerability is virtually absent, and attention to
the vulnerable is only a recent acquisition. Although, together with Judith
Butler and other contemporary scholars calling on relational ontology, I am
very interested in vulnerability; here I will set this issue temporarily apart
and postpone its examination in order to focus a little bit more on Kant and
reflect on his version of Philosophus erectus.
“It is absolutely surprising”—Hannah Arendt writes in her
Denktagebuch—“that in the Critique of Pure Reason and in Kant’s moral
works he never speaks of the so-called fellow men. In truth, he focuses
exclusively on the self and on reason that works in solitude.”13 Shortly told,
in Kant “what is moral borders the space in which I think. It is solipsistic
in principle.”14 Such a mark of solipsism, which according to Arendt is
particularly problematic, could perhaps be elucidated if we frame it within

another sentence from Arendt, taken from her essay “Some Questions of
Moral Philosophy,” where Kant is again a major object of investigation. In
occasionally reflecting on the term inclination and trying to provide a rigor-
ous definition of it, Arendt writes: “Every inclination turns outward, it leans
out of the self.”15 Faithful to the etymological root of the term—from the
Greek verb klino, which means “to bend, recline, lie down”—the definition
has the merit of immediately displaying the geometrical context it implies
and presupposes. What Arendt helps us to understand, in fact, is that the
very concept of inclination demands the self to incline “toward others, be
they objects or people,” and that this bending self is precisely an “I” that,
by assuming an oblique position, leans out of the vertical axis that allows
one to stand erect on one’s own basis as a perfect autonomous subject.
Differently told, by turning the subject outward, every inclination unbal-
ances it and displaces the internal barycenter on which the autarkic and
self-sufficient figure of the Kantian moral I as well as the various historical
samples of the Philosophus erectus species are constructed.
Not by chance, in the same essay, Arendt writes: “There exists a crucial
problem in this moral concern with the self. How difficult this problem
may be is gauged by the fact that religious commands were likewise unable
to formulate their general moral prescriptions without turning to the self as
the ultimate standard—‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ or ‘Don’t do unto oth-
ers what you don’t want done to yourself.’”16 As for the categorical impera-
tive of Kant, it even worsens the schema, of course. Here, in fact, the new
protagonist is an I, rid of any obedience to divine precepts and therefore
to heteronomous laws, who acts as the absolute legislator of him- or her-
self: “an integrally autonomous person.”17 No wonder, therefore, that this
I demands an internal redoubling in order to perform a dialogical mono-
logue in which he gives orders to himself. “Thou shalt,” notoriously sounds
his Kantian imperative formula. If this I had a gene—and were not, as he
is, pure form—we could thus bet it would be a “Selfish gene,” method-
ologically separable from the “Altruistic gene,” which plausibly affects the
inclined subjectivity embodied by mothers and nurses. To be sure, charged
by Arendt of being solipsistic, the Kantian moral subject is rigidly encap-
sulated in its formal rectitude, vertical, upright, and does not incline at all
toward objects or people, in particular toward special people like newborns
or children. If observed from a geometrical perspective, the Philosophus
erectus of Kant and the stereotypical figure of the mother inclined to infants,
as a matter of fact, cannot cope: they are mutually exclusive.

recritude 227
Among the philosophers who contribute to weaving the fundamental

threads of individualistic modern ontology, Kant is, of course, an author
of some importance. Basically—if you allow me to be very schematic—he
belongs to the optimistic stream of modern individualism. Although he
calls most of all on the concept of autonomy, his notion of the free and
rational individual can be easily inscribed in the liberal tradition inaugu-
rated by John Locke. Elias Canetti, the author I am now going to focus on,
is more a Hobbesian scholar that a Lockean one, instead. His vision of
the individual is definitely cynical and pessimistic. And his version of the
Homo erectus model, shaped in the egoic figure of the survivor, is decidedly
impressive.
Notoriously, Hobbes’s configuration of the subject insists on the idea
of a violent and aggressive individual, whose motor is, at all times, self-
preservation. The axiomatic presupposition of violence as an essential
feature of the human and of murder as distinctive of the human animal,
already dominant in a venerable political tradition, reaches a degree of par-
ticular emphasis in Hobbes’s individualistic ontology. Self-preservation,
according to him, consists of killing in order not to be killed. Interestingly
enough, the category of equality, which he elaborates and consigns to mod-
ern political theory, is constructed on the same basic postulate. “They are
equals”—Hobbes writes—“who can do equal things one against the other,
but they who can do the greatest thing, (namely kill) can do equal things.”18
Tellingly, the natural site for the application of the formula is the war of all
against all: a general and perpetual carnage in the course of which the liv-
ing and the dead are both on stage. Given the situation, the living should
therefore be called the dead-to-be. Canetti, instead, calls them survivors.
As we read in his masterpiece Crowds and Power and in other minor
works, the champion of humanity is, for Canetti, the survivor—that is, a
living man who stands, straight up, in front of a dead man, who lies hori-
zontally on the ground. On Canetti’s account, the living man never consid-
ers himself greater than when confronted with a dead man, someone who
never stands up again; at that moment he feels he has grown a little taller:
“The moment of survival is the moment of power. Horror at the sight of
death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. The dead
man lies on the ground while the survivor stands. It is as though there
had been a fight and the one had struck down the other. In survival, each
man is the enemy of every other, and all grief is insignificant measured
against this elemental triumph.”19 If, for Hobbes, human life consists of

“a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceased only in
death,”20 for Canetti, it consists of a surviving featured as perfect vertical-
ity in front of the death of the other. Unlike Hobbes’s natural individual,
who is caught in the perpetual movement of his desire for power, Canetti’s
survivor is a static figure, immobilized in the moment of his verticalization
before the dead body, a moment, for him, of unparalleled triumph.
Canetti wrote in the second half of the twentieth century; Hobbes’s fan-
tasy of the state of nature had already been superseded by mass wars brim-
ming with corpses. After the carnage, curiously enough, the survivor also
experiences an elating “sense of invulnerability.” “Something of the radi-
ance of invulnerability,” Canetti writes, “surrounds every man who comes
back alive from war.”21 The whole picture looks very coherent. Basically
built on the relationship between the man who lies down and the man who
stands up, Canetti’s geometry is organized on two main coordinates: the
verticality of the survivor and the horizontality of the dead. For the indi-
vidual, in Canetti’s theater of late modernity, there are two basic and related
postures: the upright one, which turns mortality into a temporary but elat-
ing experience of invulnerability, and the horizontal one, which turns mor-
tality into its perfect and, so to speak, enjoyable realization. Do not forget,
however, that the whole narrative, as in the case of Hobbes, can properly
work only if it is framed within an imagery of war or, more precisely, of kill-
ing and being killed. And do not fail to notice that the human condition of
vulnerability, in both systems, collapses immediately into that of killability.
At the end of the day, thus, what is on display is not the mortal as such but,
rather, the killable, that is, the individual who manages to survive his or
her incumbent murder and the individual who instead does not. Strictly
connected, vulnerability–mortality–killability, as a sort of semantic chain
mastered by the last term, constitutes the very logic here at work, a logic
made up of the axiom of violence that pessimistic individualism inherits
from the old but everlasting figure of the warrior and applies to scenarios
of modernity.
Evidently, with Canetti and his Hobbesian passion for surviving death,
we are far from Kant and, going back in time, from Locke and what is
known as the classical liberal tradition. Yet, as it is worth noting, if observed
from a geometrical point of view, the general picture allows some exemplary
lines of convergence to surface. The most remarkable one is, of course, the
axis of verticality, which is revealed to be so adaptable to modern individual-
ism as to cast a significant light on both its optimistic and its pessimistic

recritude 229
versions (if not on all of its versions, multiple and irreducible to my simple
binary scheme as, in truth, they are). Given my thesis on the paradigm of
erection as a distinctive mark of philosophy as such—no matter the phi-
losopher or the system that reconfigures it—this could seem, in a way, prej-
udicially obvious. I dare to claim, however, that, far from being a useless
exercise, the strategy of testing the archetype of Philosophus erectus on Kant
and Canetti has produced some valuable and interesting results. For the
sake of brevity, I will summarize them in a few points.
Solitary and solipsistic, the Kantian moral I, in whom verticality and
autonomy coincide, manifests a motivated alarm for the phenomenon of
inclination and therefore fiercely contrasts either the various inclinations—
passions, impulses, desires—that affect the human animal or the stereo-
typical attitude of mothers and women to incline toward the vulnerable
creature depending on them, the newborn, the child. As a matter of fact,
as Canetti suggests, it is a question of postures. The liberal individualistic
scenario, impersonated at its best by the Kantian autonomous I, and the
traditional if not stereotypical scenario of maternal care call on different
postures corresponding to different conceptions of subjectivity. The pro-
tagonist of the first scenario is the free and rational individual who stands
upright and whose correspondent political model postulates the natural
symmetry between equally autarkic individuals standing upright. Let us
call it “democracy,” for the sake of brevity. On the opposite end, the second
scenario presents us with the issue of a relational subjectivity, structurally
asymmetrical and unbalanced, consisting of the paradigmatic exposure of
the human as vulnerable to the inclined posture of the other who bends
over him or her. As for Canetti and his even more solitary and solipsis-
tic survivor, who stands upright in perfect symmetry with other equally
isolated and triumphant survivors, a further and curious problem arises,
actually. In Crowds and Power, in addition to the chapter on the survivor
where the vertical posture is strictly connected to the horizontality of the
dead, Canetti, in fact, dedicates a special chapter to the issue of postures as
such and, more precisely, to the topic “Human Postures and Their Relation
to Power.” Here, surprisingly enough, commenting on the vertical posture,
Canetti writes: “It is [the] pride of the standing up man to be free and not
to lean against anything. . . . [H]e who stands feels always to be autono-
mous.”22 “One of the most important and useful fictions in English life,”
that is, the liberal version of society, Canetti adds, takes profit precisely from
this posture: given that “equality within a social group . . . is particularly

stressed on occasion when all alike have, or can have, the advantage of
standing.”23 Thus, according to Crowds and Power taken as a wide-ranging
work, verticality is confirmed as a structural paradigm allowing rubrication
in the same agenda of either the aggressive I that comes from Hobbes or
the autonomous Kantian I that belongs to the liberal-democratic tradition.
Even more interestingly, as it is worth stressing, within the above-
mentioned special chapter focused on various human postures considered
per se, Canetti neglects the posture of the one who inclines. Differently
told, within the general analytics of human postures elaborated by Canetti,
inclination does not play any role whatsoever—which is, after all and in
substance, comprehensible and correct. In fact, if the inclination we have
in mind is that of the mother bending over the vulnerable child, why insert
it in a system focusing on human postures and their relation to power?
Aren’t women, in principle, as Canetti maintains for sure, methodologi-
cally out of the picture?
In approaching my conclusion, in order to reframe these questions,
I will briefly reflect on the theme of the vulnerable and its link with that
of inclination, indulging, for a start, in an etymological digression. The
word vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnus, “wound,” and it pertains
to the domain of skin, at least according to two meanings that are, to a
certain extent, similar but fundamentally different. The primary mean-
ing describes the traumatic rupture of the skin. In its textual context, it is
related to violence and mostly to the theater of war, armed conflict, or vio-
lent death. It is usually the warriors who wound each other, dealing lethal
blows or at least aiming at the infliction of death. This primal meaning
generates the semantic range that in the modern languages includes wound
in English, Wunde in German, and the Italian verb ferire and the Spanish
herir, both contractions of the Latin locution vulnus inferre (to deal the blow
that wounds). All in all, the vulnus is the result of a violent blow, dealt from
the outside with a cutting weapon that tears the skin. Although the wound
can penetrate deeper tissues and be lethal—or, better, although the wound
is essentially thematized as lethal—the tearing pertains primarily to the
skin, the bodily boundary, the enveloping barrier, but also to the surface
through which the body itself meets the outside and is, therefore, exposed.
Tellingly enough, however, the essential relationship between skin
and vulnus lends itself to a secondary, but very promising, etymological
speculation. According to this etymology, the meaning of vulnus, located
in the root vel, alludes to hairless and smooth skin, to skin that is the most

recritude 231
exposed. Words such as avulsion and avulsed are part of this family. The two
etymologies, although framed by different imaginaries, are not totally in
contrast: they both deal with skin. By avoiding the figure of the warrior, the
second etymology, however, calls on the valence of skin as a site of radical,
immediate, hairless, and unprotected exposure. Vulnerable is here, in fact,
the human body in its absolute nakedness, emphasized by the absence of
hair, cover, protection. The picture is easily enlarged to include the concept
of the human in general, and the war scenario, with its cutting weapons
but also with its protocol of symmetric violence and lethal outcome, does
not appear decisive or necessary anymore. Here, on the contrary, the war-
rior vanishes to accommodate a new figure, emblematic of vulnerability
as an essential human condition; if imagined in the totality of the exposed
skin, as hairless as kids and sometimes old people are, the “vulnerable” by
definition becomes, in fact, the “defenseless.” The warrior, with his hairy
body and uncouth beard—all signs of unquestionable virility—leaves the
scene, replaced by a human archetype whose naked and smooth skin is the
sign of absolute exposure. The change of perspective is remarkable. When
vulnerability is pure nudity, when the defenseless embodies the meaning
of the vulnus, death moves to the background and the battle comes to an
end. In other words, the concepts of vulnerable, mortal, and killable break
their long-standing pact and part. The whole system, endorsed by Hobbes
and Canetti, if not by the mainstream Western political tradition, crumbles.
Now we can in fact eventually affirm that the human condition of vulner-
ability coincides neither with mortality nor with killability.
When the topic at stake is vulnerability, a special mention of Lévinas is,
of course, due. I am not thinking of all of his writings, where sometimes
the face of the other persists in the old vice of evoking death if not the temp-
tation of murder, albeit together with its prohibition. I am, rather, alluding
to works of Lévinas where vulnerability is decidedly intended as naked skin,
“the extremity in which [the body] begins or ends,” subjectivity as sensibil-
ity, exposure to others, responsibility in the proximity of others, in keeping
with a relational model of total dependence and asymmetry. In Lévinas,
moreover, vulnerability is significantly germane to “maternity, respon-
sibility, proximity, contact,”24 and it is often associated with the stranger,
the widow, and the orphan. And interestingly enough, this very notion of
vulnerability as nude exposure to the other—absolute hospitality—in con-
trast with the primum logicum of violence inhabiting the tradition, is often
associated with the dimension of the feminine. The specific scenario of

the mother bending over the child, however—by the way, one of the most
powerful icons of Christian imagery but also of the fundamental gallery of
Western art—does not appear among the topics of Lévinas’s speculation.
Likewise, symptomatically, it does not appear among those investigated by
Hannah Arendt, in spite of the fact that she focuses on the category of
natality and appreciates the Gospel “glad tidings”: “A child has been born
unto us.”25
Unlike Kant, who is fond of the verticalized I’s autarky and irritated by
children’s noise, Arendt uses the newborn’s status as a speculative resource.
Fragile and naked, new and unpredictable, the newborn at the scene of
birth is, for her, the emblem of the human condition. A newborn exhibits
“the naked fact of our original physical appearance”26 together with a pri-
mal relationality marked by exposure and dependence. But dependence on
whom? And according to which postural geometry? Unfortunately, Arendt
does not take these questions into account.
In Precarious Life, Judith Butler acutely notices that what vulnerability
reveals, “in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous
and in control,”27 is our being constituted by our relations, bodily ties, and
dependence. In the course of her argument, this dependence is crucially
referred to the newborn because of his paradigmatic condition: “a condi-
tion of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue,”28
she writes. Thus, the relationality at stake, in keeping with the exemplary
vulnerability of the child, calls on a theater of univocal and total exposure to
others. As a matter of fact, as Butler argues, the important question, here, is
not that of “promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one
or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality.”29 The question
is, indeed, more complicated. In order to clarify my position, I will summa-
rize it in the following way: first of all, we should discard a certain notion
of relationality that implies reciprocal exposure on the horizontal plane and
focus instead on a scene of dependence—like that of birth—which displays
an unbalanced and asymmetric relationship between the protagonists on
stage. Namely, to argue that the newborn, as an emblem of our always
already naked status, is intrinsically dependent is an incomplete statement
if we do not specify on whom she depends. In the relational phenomenology
that frames the theater of natality, there are two humans on stage: the new-
born and the mother. If we expel the mother from the scene, the newborn
per se, becomes, most probably, an abstraction. Actually, sooner or later,
we should give some serious thought to the censorial effect generated by

recritude 233
the suspicion—often a feminist suspicion—that targets the stereotype of

maternity within radical theory. Even Kant knew that when the focus is on
the newborn, there is necessarily a mother in the picture, and, symptom-
atically, even Kant admitted that, most often, in perfect keeping with the
stereotype of maternity, she nurtures the defenseless creature rather than
abandoning or injuring him—as sometimes, anyway, happens and as psy-
choanalyst scholars, including Butler, tend to emphasize. Postulating that,
in the birth scene, the imaginary of violence and violation prevails is, in my
opinion, at least, distortive. What I would rather suggest is to observe more
closely the univocal dependence dramatized by this very scene. In terms
of responsibility, to use Lévinas’s vocabulary, only the mother, or whoever
occupies her position, is accountable for the face of the Other. There is no
symmetry and no face-to-face either, no possible reciprocity or struggle for
recognition, no interlocution. The vulnerable, as archetype of the human in
its inaugural moment, is here completely consigned to the other or, better,
to her inclination.
In an early fragment on Kant, Walter Benjamin argues, almost in
passing, that a critical rethinking of the term inclination could transform
it into one of the key concepts of morality. Benjamin’s short text does not
clarify the matter any further, but I am deeply convinced that when we
make the effort to rethink vulnerability in terms of a primary relationship,
we should keep Benjamin’s suggestion in mind. One way to get rid of the
Philosophus erectus model, and of the axiom of violence it often endorses,
consists, perhaps, in imagining the human according to a different geom-
etry of postures. In this geometry, maternal inclination is not only a tradi-
tional oblative, or nurturing, paradigm whose specular alternative would
be the always possible, and always execrable, violence against the infant.
Maternal inclination is, rather, the postural archetype of an ethical sub-
jectivity already predisposed, and even willing, to account for the depen-
dence and the exposure of the naked and defenseless creature. As it is
worth stressing, we are dealing, here, not with the old alternative between
healing and injuring, between the icon of the Madonna with child and the
mask of Medea, but with their structural premise. What we are focusing
on, in fact, is the inclined posture of an “I” that leans out of itself, that is
to say, the inclined line that constitutes the axis of the relational geometry
within this framework. In substance, within this framework equally freed
from verticality and horizontality, “mother” is therefore simply the name
of a necessary configuration, an indispensable inclination. Maybe there are

more things in Kant’s impatience for mothers and children than Plato and
his Philosophus erectus’s fortunate progeny could or would ever imagine.
notes
1. Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch,
www.readbox.net; original Spanish edition: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los
hombres y en los pueblos, in Obras Completas, vol. VII, ed. M. García Blanco (Madrid:
Escelicer, 1966–71), 110–11.
2. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 222.
3. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 168.
8. Tzvetan Todorov, Life in Common: An Essay on General Anthropology (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 5.
9. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie des Geistes, §396, Anmerkung.
10. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 168.
11. Todorov, Life in Common, 43.
12. M. Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e],
2007), 39.
13. H. Arendt, Denktagebuch (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2002), 634; translation mine.
14. Ibid., 599; translation mine.
15. H. Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and
Judgment (New York: Schoken Books, 2003), 81. For a further critical reading of
the topic, see my “Inclining the Subject,” in Theory After Theory, ed. Lane Elliot
and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2011), 195–204.
16. Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” 68.
17. Ibid., 70.
18. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, I, 3.
19. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1984), 227.
20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XI.
21. E. Canetti, “Power and Survival,” in The Conscience of Words (New York:
Seabury, 1979), 21.
22. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 386.
23. Ibid., 387.
24. Emanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag, 1981), 76.

recritude 235
25. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1958), 247.
26. Ibid., 176.
27. J. Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso,
2004), 23.
28. Ibid., 31.
29. Ibid., 24.

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Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Author(s): Adriana Cavarero

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 27, no. 3, 2013

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philosophy inaugurates itself by celebrating theory as a perfect and solitary

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As for my strategy, I tried already to make it clear, at the beginning

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freedom (a representation that no other animal has).”7 Quite obviously, as

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never leaned on someone or inclined himself toward another. Since “birth

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Among the philosophers who contribute to weaving the fundamental

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the suspicion—often a feminist suspicion—that targets the stereotype of

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25. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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