Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude

by Adriana Cavarero, Adam Sitze (Translator), Amanda Minervini (Translator)

Overview

In this new and accessible book, Italy's best known feminist philosopher examines the moral and political significance of vertical posture in order to rethink subjectivity in terms of inclination. Contesting the classical figure of homo erectus or "upright man," Adriana Cavarero proposes an altruistic, open model of the subject—one who is inclined toward others. Contrasting the masculine upright with the feminine inclined, she references philosophical texts (by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, and others) as well as works of art (Barnett Newman, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Alexander Rodchenko) and literature (Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781503600416
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	10/19/2016
Series:	Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Adriana Cavarero is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Verona. Her books in English include For More than One Voice (Stanford, 2005) and Horrorism (2008).

Read an Excerpt

Inclinations

A Critique of Rectitude

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By Adriana Cavarero, Amanda Minervini, Adam Sitze

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0041-6

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CHAPTER 1

Barnett Newman

Adam's Line

I should demand the invariable application to individuality, this day and any day, of that old, ever-true plumb-rule of persons, eras, nations.

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

AT THE TATE MODERN IN LONDON, the abstract art lover can admire two paintings by Barnett Newman (1905–60): Adam (1951) and Eve (1950) (see Figure 1). The story of the founding couple of Genesis is one of the best-loved themes in all of art history and, over the centuries, has been represented in very different ways. Nevertheless, there is a certain constant element despite the diversity. In general, or at least in the traditional iconography dedicated to the story, Adam and Eve tend to appear together and mostly naked: at times they are innocent and immortal, at times ashamed and damned, driven from Paradise and on the way to mortality. Following a minor thread, Newman instead separates them, dedicating a distinct canvas to each of them. This choice breaks the couple and focuses attention more directly on sexual difference.

In Adam, a painting of considerable size, a red vertical stripe stands out against a blackish background, while two other red vertical lines — one thick, one thin, as though replicating through differing thicknesses the concept of red verticality — appear at each side of the canvas. The entire surface of Eve, a painting of almost the same size, is invaded by a red monochrome, whereas a thin, dark, straight stripe appears on the canvas's right border. For Newman, evidently, the vertical axis is decisive for representing the first man, but only marginal when it comes to representing the first woman. This, at least, is what appears from an immediate comparison of the two representations. But of course, it is by no means certain that Newman is working with the intention of representation. Abstract art, as we know, involves complex problems that often trouble even specialists in the field. This nevertheless rarely discourages the untrained eye, which often feels entitled to take bigger liberties. Everything, obviously, depends on the claims. Here the claims don't aspire to art criticism; nor are they overambitious. I simply take Newman's paintings as symptoms — or, if you wish, as effective illustrations of a conception of the human that insists in an explicit mode, even emphatically, on verticality.

In Newman's canvas, Adam, the first man, indeed seems to evoke an essential and constitutive verticality — the same that, according to the painter, would lead the observers to recognize themselves in the upright posture, just as peculiarly human, which they assume as they stand before the picture. Eve, for her part, seems to invoke an overflow or a void, even more so because of the vertical stripe that appears at the canvas's margins, which perhaps interrupts, organizes, or controls the rest of the canvas. Art experts know that Newman's work is characterized by vertical bands set against monochrome backgrounds. His masterpiece, The Stations of the Cross (1958–66), consists of a series of paintings that obsessively repeat the theme of vertical stripes. According to some critics, there are even more specific reasons for his painting of Adam. As the Tate website explains, Newman's inspiration for his portrait of Adam derives from his familiarity with the Hebrew story of creation, but perhaps also from the etymology of the name Adam, which is linked to terms such as earth, red, and blood, and from the doctrine that sees God and man united in a single vertical light beam that rises between the earth and the sky. The name Eve, meanwhile, which is approached with some caution by linguists, is related to the etymological root for the term life and means "mother of the living." More than any etymological suggestion, the relevance of these paintings consists of their colors and geometry. From this point of view, the schema seems explicit: what distinguishes Adam from Eve, in the confrontation suggested by Newman's work, is the accent on verticality in the representation of Adam. This very conspicuous verticality opens up two basic meanings, each consistent with the other. The first relates, in a naturalistic way, to the specificity of the human upright posture. The second, meanwhile, refers to the straight vertical line as the essential form of man's union or relation with God. In both cases, it is easy to argue, the spatial arrangement attributed to man is, structurally, a dimension that elevates him, making this elevation, this vertical rise from earth upward to heaven, the very mark of humanity. Adding a touch of mischief to the question of the comparison between Newman's Adam and Eve, one may ask why Eve is deprived of the vertical line, since she too walks upright, hence sharing with Adam the human tendency to rise toward God. Why then a void instead of a monumental straight strip? Why a homogenous color instead of a rising bar? A plausible response is not difficult to formulate: as sustained by a certain theological tradition, woman belongs to the human species, but does not represent the human in its full and originary sense.

The thesis, part of the patriarchal symbolic order, is so well known that it will suffice to summarize it in a few words. Differently articulated in different epochs, preceding the Bible and persisting in the event of abstract art, this tradition maintains that the human genre finds its essential paradigm in man [uomo], understood as male. The human subject is then molded around him. From this point of view, Newman's paintings do not break with the patriarchal canon but indeed confirm it. They have the merit, however, of expressing that canon emphatically through the mythologeme of the vertical line. If it is true that abstract art is conceptual in nature, then the perpendicular axis that organizes Newman's canvas not only illustrates the fundamental ontology of verticality but also blatantly exposes its concept. In a certain sense, the problem of the two sexes is unresolved in his didactic schema, and remains superficial, quite simplistic, and disappointing. Setting aside the impact on the eye of the color red, Newman's painting of Eve disappoints: it appears as a void, as if the canvas were awaiting a figure the mark of which would also give form to woman. Respecting the artist's style, this could perhaps happen by drawing another line: not vertical but oblique and unbalanced, so as to mark the difference and not, as Newman has, to lose sight of it. In the coupling of humanity's fateful ancestors, man would be marked by verticality, and woman by inclination.

Stairs (1929) is a black-and-white photograph by the Russian constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) (see Figure 2). A series of oblique parallel stripes — an almost geometric grid — traverse the visual field. These are not lines painted by an abstract artist; they are precisely huge stairs photographed at an angle the perspective of which tilts them in comparison to the image's orthogonal frame. The intention of the constructivist artist is explicit: the regular alternation of the white stairs with their shadows transforms them into oblique bi-colored stripes that, at first sight, lose their three-dimensional character and instead appear flat. At the image's center, a woman goes up the stairs, hinting at the three-dimensionality of the stripes. The angle of the perspective makes her too appear inclined, oblique. The emphasis on inclination is notable, rendering this shot paradigmatic: in this photograph, there are no horizontal or vertical lines. By focusing on the opposition between the diagonal lines of the stairs and the woman, the image challenges the familiar law of gravity. In fact, because of a well-known optical illusion, the opposing inclinations are each accentuated. The oblique line thus organizes the entire space of the image, and in a very conspicuous way. The intent is clearly geometric, but it is a geometry that is antiverticalist, instead exalting inclination. It can thus even be assumed that the choice of a woman rather than a man may not be random; above all because the figure going up the stairs is a mother.

Carrying groceries with one hand, the classic index of the nourishing role destined to her by her sex, the woman in the photograph also carries a child. This is not just any man or any woman, a passerby, but, indeed, a mother, a nurturer and caretaker — an ordinary case of maternal inclination, already celebrated by tradition, who seems to remain fascinating even for the art of socialist realism. What figure could be better than this, in the end, if the image's theme is inclination? And what sign could be more appropriate, if disposed toward an oblique organization of the geometrical field? Upon closer examination, the human figures in this photograph are two, and the smaller one counts on the inclination of the other, who holds him while going up the stairs. Not at all emphasized, the stereotype of self-sacrificing maternity is barely perceptible. The emphasis is rather on the inclined lines that summarize the platitude in a simple posture.

In "Paternal Power," the sixth chapter of the Second Treatise of Government, John Locke notes that "Adam was created as a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession of their strength and reason." Eve, one may assume, was also created in the same way, but the English philosopher does not mention it. In this chapter, Locke's intent is to emphasize how, after Adam, the prototype of an immediately complete humanity, "the world is peopled with his descendants, who are all born infants, weak and helpless, without knowledge or understanding." The observation is, in many ways, obvious, but it takes on a specific meaning in the context of Locke's thought. More than representing a precarious stage of human existence — an especially precarious stage, given that Locke was writing in an age of high infant mortality rates — the philosopher considers infancy an "incomplete state": only when the infant becomes a free and rational individual has man reached his complete and perfect form. Having been created directly by God, Adam incarnates the exemplary human, all the more perfect because he was never an infant. His descendants, born of woman since the Fall, instead undergo a long period of minority, during which their lack of intellect exposes them above all to a total dependence. Based on this principle, Locke explains the natural basis of paternal power, or better of the temporary power of both parents, which consists in the obligation to "preserve, nourish, and bring up the children" until, having become adults, they acquire the status of "free and intelligent" agents. Even if he continues to call it "paternal power," he concedes that "the mother too has her share with the father." He even goes as far as to wonder if it wouldn't be more appropriate to call it "parental power." However promising it may seem, the wording "parental power" remains a mere formula, a sort of verbal hypothesis that does not change the conceptual structure of Locke's theory, which then proceeds to make the usual argument in favor of man's natural superiority, or rather, of the superiority of husband over wife. On the topic of the two sexes, despite some moments of openness to a different view, even the undisputed father of modern liberalism thus aligns himself with the traditional canon. In Locke's imaginary, Adam — not Eve — is the archetype of the human that God has preserved from infantile imperfection to produce a model of full-blown rationality. The framework is still patriarchal, as some parts of the text demonstrate. Being "the abler and the stronger of the two," it is natural that the husband prevails over the wife when it comes to a "common decision." It is natural, as well, that the father's authority provides the children with "a discipline necessary to their education." It is indeed the father who takes responsibility for the crucial process that brings the creature, still lacking intellect, to become a fully free and rational individual — or, if you will, as an I in the full sense: a subject. For Locke's political anthropology, after all, this is the only thing that really matters. United by an enterprise that God seemed to reserve only to their sex, the protagonists in this scene are the father and the son, replicas of the same sex, just like the divine Father and Son. As for the nourishment and survival of the "helpless and weak children" of both sexes — this the English philosopher leaves to the mothers. Or this at least is what one may suppose, since Locke spends only very few words on this traditionally female task. Even though, in the terms of Locke's argument, maternity is indispensable, since we are discussing children and childhood, maternal inclination nevertheless remains at the margins. Ignored at first, when the progenitors were still in Eden, and even after she became the mother of all living creatures on earth, Eve is never mentioned, not even through her sex. For Locke, it is therefore unlikely that maternal inclination could have anything to do with the process of perfecting the human whose endpoint is the free and rational individual. Even in modernity, which here announces itself in the first grammar of individual liberalism, the roles of the two sexes remain separate. As a sort of stereotypical figure frozen in a timeless tradition, the mother continues to occupy herself with vulnerable and dependent creatures, consigned by her natural inclination to care for the human pups. The father is the only protagonist of the new anthropologic turn. He educates the minors with all necessary discipline, and he invests himself in the difficult task of replicating himself in his son. In this way, he produces the autonomous I, self-sufficient and exemplarily vertical, in which the modern epoch decides to mirror itself. At a moment when modernity was still proud of itself, and not yet threatened by decline, persons, eras, and nations aligned themselves on the vertical line of this plumb-rule.

CHAPTER 2

Kant and the Newborn

"To yourself, to yourself alone! That's the whole of 'my idea,' Kraft!" I said ecstatically.

He looked at me somehow curiously. "And you have this place: 'to yourself'?" "I do."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Adolescent

What great philosopher hitherto has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer — they were not; more, one cannot even imagine them married.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

IN THE MODERN ERA, the most rigorous theorist of the free, rational, and autonomous self is Immanuel Kant, whose prototype of the human is not far from Locke's. In one of his minor works, "Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History" (1786), we read that "if we are not to indulge in wild conjectures we must begin with something which human reason cannot deduce from prior natural causes — that is, with the existence of human beings. These human beings must also be fully developed for they have no mother to support them." The influence of Locke's Adam is evident here. Being a "more or less selfish old bachelor," Kant does not like children. He laments the fact that, because children still lack reason and intellect, they "disturb the thinking section of the community" — which is to say, him. Their mothers and nannies are also at fault: the child's "mangling of words ... inclines them to hug and kiss him constantly," instead of rapping his knuckles. A good educator, of course, would not reward the lack of rationality expressed by the young child's babbling. Thinking that this deficiency makes a child even cuter, mothers and nannies instead reward the child with a warm embrace so that, in the end, this dynamic "must also be credited to the natural inclination of the nurses to comfort a creature that ingratiatingly entrusts himself entirely to the will of another." Above all, therefore, what worries the philosopher of Königsberg, this most noble father of liberalism, is the relationship between the mother's inclination and the infant's dependence. This reveals that, underneath Kant's understandable annoyance at the noise of children, there lurks a philosophical problem. Infancy, understood as a state of immaturity [minorità] and dependency, is measured and, so to speak, crushed by the Kantian paradigm of a self who is autonomous, free, and rational — who controls his own inclinations and does not need others to incline lovingly toward him. This framework allows us to understand Kant's anguish over the maternal complacency that risks slowing down the self's development toward the adult state of rationality and autonomy. This same framework allows for the denunciation of the natural inclination, typically female, for a human creature who is in need of care and remains in a state of dependency. In essence, Kant condemns children not only because they are not yet adults, but also because they do not seem to be in any hurry to grow up. He blames women, meanwhile, because they are naturally inclined to appreciate and nurture this creature who depends on the care of others, and more precisely, on the care of woman. Between mother and child, here understood as a larval self who is not yet autonomous, a worrisome complicity therefore emerges. For those who are able to notice it, this is symptomatic of a question of geometrical order — or, more exactly, of the oblique line prevailing over the vertical. The claim here, in effect, is that maternal inclination for the infant ends up retarding the process that will free the self from dependence and culminate in the figure of the autonomous self — the self, that is to say, who will function as his own moral legislator, and who, once he assumes a typically erect posture, will be balanced on the internal axis of his own "authentic self." The scene of the mother with the child evokes a relational model that is mostly asymmetrical and unbalanced. The Kantian self is instead like Adam: self-enclosed, it stands up on its own with no need for external support.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Inclinations by Adriana Cavarero, Amanda Minervini, Adam Sitze. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
Introduction,
1. Barnett Newman: Adam's Line,
2. Kant and the Newborn,
3. Virginia Woolf and the Shadow of the "I",
4. Plato Erectus Sed,
5. Men and Trees,
6. We Are Not Monkeys: On Erect Posture,
7. Hobbes and the Macroanthropos,
8. Elias Canetti: Upright Before the Dead,
9. Artemisia: The Allegory of Inclination,
10. Leonardo and Maternal Inclination,
11. Hannah Arendt: "A Child Has Been Born unto Us",
12. Schemata for a Postural Ethics,
Coda: Adieu to Lévinas,
Notes,

Editorial Reviews

"Inclinations bears all the marks of Cavarero's work more generally: rigorous argumentation, a style at once direct and playful, a wide-ranging command of the philosophical tradition, combined with trenchant feminist critique." —Barbara Spackman, University of California at Berkeley

From the Publisher

"Inclinations bears all the marks of Cavarero's work more generally: rigorous argumentation, a style at once direct and playful, a wide-ranging command of the philosophical tradition, combined with trenchant feminist critique."

Universityof California at Berkeley - Barbara Spackman