Adriana Cavarero: Resistance and the Voice of Law

205 Pages·2018·1.193 MB·English

by  Elisabetta R. Bertolino

Adriana Cavarero
Critical legal scholars have made us aware that law is made up not only of rules
but also of language. But who speaks the language of law? And can one lawfully
speak in one’s voice? For the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, to answer
these questions we must not separate who is speaking from the very act of speak-
ing; moreover, we must recuperate the material singularity and relationality of the
mouth that speaks. Drawing on Cavarero’s work, this book focuses on the poten-
tiality of the voice for resisting law’s sovereign structures. For Cavarero, it is the
voice that expresses one’s living and unrepeatable singularity in a way that cannot
be subsumed by the universalities and standards of law. The voice is essentially a
material and singular passage of air and vibration that necessarily reveals one’s
uniqueness in relationality. Speaking discloses this uniqueness, and so one’s vul-
nerability. It therefore leads to possibilities of resistance that, here, bring a fresh
approach to longstanding legal theoretical concerns with singularity, ethics and
justice.
Elisabetta R. Bertolino has completed a doctorate in law and legal theory at
Birkbeck Law School in London, UK, where she has also taught seminars in juris-
prudence and criminal law. Currently, she teaches legal subjects at the University of
Palermo, Italy. She has been interested in the theme of the voice and the work
of Adriana Cavarero for several years, and conducted an interview with the Italian
philosopher which was published in d ifferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies in 2008.
Nomikoi: Critical Legal Thinkers
Series editors: Peter Goodrich
Cardozo School of Law, New York, USA
David Seymour
School of Law, City University, UK
Nomikoi: Critical Legal Thinkers presents analyses of key critical theorists whose
thinking on law has contributed signifi cantly to the development of the new inter-
disciplinary legal studies. Addressing those who have most infl uenced legal thought
and thought about law, the aim of the series is to bring legal scholarship, the social
sciences and the humanities into closer dialogue.
Other titles in the series:
Rancière and Law, edited by Monica Lopez Lerma and Julen Etxabe
Hannah Arendt: Legal Theory and the Eichmann Trial, Peter Burdon
Žižek and Law, edited by Laurent de Sutter
Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political, Peter Langford
Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks, Kyle McGee
Deleuze & Guattari: Emergent Law, Jamie Murray
Althusser and Law, edited by Laurent de Sutter
Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City, Chris Butler
Carl Schmitt: Law as Politics, Ideology and Strategic Myth, Michael Salter
Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality, Jacques de Ville
Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism, Thanos Zartaloudis
Evgeny Pashukanis: A Critical Reappraisal, Michael Head
Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics, Elena Loizidou
Adriana Cavarero
Resistance and the Voice of Law
Elisabetta R. Bertolino
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 Elisabetta R. Bertolino
The right of Elisabetta R. Bertolino to be identified as author of
this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Bertolino, Elisabetta, author.
Title: Adriana Cavarero: resistance and the voice of law/Elisabetta
Bertolino.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |
Series: Nomikoi: critical legal thinkers | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037133 | ISBN 9780815366317 (hbk)
Subjects: LCSH: Cavarero, Adriana. | Law–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC K230.C395 B47 2018 | DDC 340/.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037133
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6631-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-3512-5956-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham, UK
Contents
Overview vii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction xi
PART I
The voice and its possibilities of resistance 1
1 Can one speak in one’s voice? One’s voice and the critique
and resistance of the law: a review of the literature 3
1.1 Resistance in terms of justice as fairness 11
1.2 Resistance and the good standard of human function 15
1.3 Resistance through critical ruptures in Judith Butler 19
1.4 Resistance through the voice in Adriana Cavarero 23
1.5 The Arendtian root of awareness of oneself and Butler’s
ethical approach 30
1.6 The voice’s engagement with and disengagement from law 38
Conclusion 49
PART II
The voice beyond sexual difference 53
2 The ambivalence of wounds, consent and the integrity
of the body 55
2.1 Law and the impossibility of consent 58
2.2 The case of Re MB (Caesarean Section) 62
2.3 Law and the idea of bodily integrity 68
2.4 The cut in relation to the subject 71
2.5 One’s corporeal voice 77
vi Contents
2.6 The ambivalence in the cut 81
Conclusion 84
3 Objectifi cation and voice in sex work 87
3.1 Law, objectifi cation and women in the sex industry 90
3.2 Speculating on objectifi cation 99
3.3 The focus on the voice in relation to objectifi cation 107
Conclusion 115
PART III
The ethical justice of the voice 117
4 Moving away from justice as resentment 119
4.1 Predictable Medea and resentment 122
4.2 The subject of resentment 127
4.3 Resisting the subject of resentment in feminism 130
4.4 Forgiveness: conditionality, unconditionality and circulation 139
Conclusion and progression in chapters 145
Concluding remarks 149
Bibliography 164
Index 175
Overview
Critical legal scholars have underlined that law is made up not only of rules but
also of language and the language of law expresses the violence of a sovereign and
abstract subject, disconnected from her body and the community. Such a legal
violence refl ects both the general voice of an essentialized sexual difference divide –
privileging the mind over the body and associating the body with the feminine –
and the limits of a liberal philosophical and political framework. It is thus pertinent
to ask some questions in relation to this. Who speaks in law? Can one speak in
one’s voice with respect to law?
For Adriana Cavarero, to answer those questions we must not separate w ho is
speaking from the very act of speaking and we must recuperate the material sin-
gularity and relationality of the mouth that speaks within language and signs. For
Cavarero, the voice that comes from one’s mouth is capable of recuperating the
very meaning of signifi cation. One’s voice expresses a living and unrepeatable
singularity that cannot be subsumed under universalities and standards. Drawing
on Cavarero’s theory, the book focuses on the singular and unique voice
(as opposed to law’s general voice) and its potentiality for resisting law and its
structures.
Within the critical legal tradition – following Jacques Derrida – there has been
a political demand to return to the lived experience of w ho speaks by using signs
and texts. This book intends to take the voice as its point of departure, supple-
menting the critical legal discourse with an understanding of the singularity that
emerges from a material and corporeal self through one’s voice. A focus on one’s
voice changes the approach to the voice. I am using the term “one’s voice” as it
implies less possessiveness than, for instance, “one’s own voice.” One’s voice
contains multiple implications in terms of subjectivity, sexual difference, ontology
and justice, thus reversing the Derridean understanding of the voice as metaphys-
ics and as a system constructed as voice.
Furthermore, any subject of resistance within law can be said to be limited
since it is caged within the narrow boundaries of the liberal framework that
appears to conceive the subject as autonomous, independent and, in a way, righ-
teous and vertical. Yet I consider such an approach as partial, embedded in par-
ticular ideological assumptions. The subject of resistance offered by John Rawls
viii Overview
and Martha Nussbaum marks the limits of this approach. On the contrary, in this
book, I focus on a resistance that begins with one’s voice, as opposed to a linguis-
tic and political frame already conceived for us.
In the case of female genital cutting (FGC), 1 law attempts, for instance, to resist
the practice of cutting and wounding the vagina through the linguistic produc-
tion of non-consenting subjects and by constructing mutilated bodies that lack
integrity within an illusion of a discourse on autonomy, freedom and informed
consent; whereas in the case of women in the sex industry law re-appropriates a
moralizing objectifi ed notion of woman that refl ects an essentialist understanding
of sexual difference, in which the female self is constructed as object, or less than
a subject.
In critical distance from such a frame of thought, I understand scholars such as
Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero to have contended that the
corporeal and sexed subject is always already cut, impeded by the linguistic struc-
ture, and any attempt to stitch the subject into a whole results in incoherence,
and loss of autonomy and independence; they have thus argued for the necessity
to look for moments of rupture and aporia. Yet, in my opinion, it is only with
Cavarero’s corporeal and unique voice that suspension from such a linguistic and
political imposition becomes possible.
I have divided the book into three main parts. The fi rst part – which comprises
the introduction and Chapter I – deals with the theoretical focus on one’s voice.
The positions of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler
and Adriana Cavarero are mentioned or explored in relation to resistance and the
voice.
The second part of the book consists of Chapters II and III, which concern
two case studies – female genital mutilation and commercial sex. These are
intended to be illustrative of the argument for focusing on one’s voice, support-
ing such a focus while showcasing it and bringing one’s voice alive. Female geni-
tal cutting and commercial sex are seen as situations in which the cuts that are
performed on the legal subject are ingrained in the self and the body. Female
genital cutting and commercial sex show how a focus on one’s voice radicalizes
resistance.
The third part comprises Chapter IV and the concluding remarks. Chapter IV
brings up the question of ethics and justice in relation to one’s voice, exploring
in particular the relation between the possibility of forgiveness, one’s voice and
the law. Speaking in one’s voice discloses one’s uniqueness and the awareness of
vulnerability and, therefore, leads to potentially ethical possibilities of resisting
violence and resentment. Chapter IV offers the possibility of a level of justice that
escapes the institutional approach of law and politics but that can run parallel to
those levels. In the chapter, I talk of unpredictable actions such as forgiveness,
1 We shall use the term female genital cutting (FGC) rather than female genital mutilation (FGM)
because it is more neutral and avoids negative valence on the ritual.
Overview ix
where forgiveness is disconnected from standards and institutional requirements.
Forgiveness is rather connected to one’s voice, a singular and personal approach
from within, not imposed on one. Finally, in the concluding remarks I offer some
refl ections on why a focus on the voice may bring newness and fresh perspectives
to resistance.