Adriana Cavarero

Adriana Cavarero (born 1947 in Bra, Italy) is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, at the New York University and Harvard. Cavarero is widely recognized in Italy, Europe and the English-speaking world for her writings on feminism and theories of sexual difference, on Plato, on Hannah Arendt, on theories of narration and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature.

Cavarero was educated at the University of Padua, where she wrote a thesis on philosophy and poetry, in 1971, and spent the first years of her Academic career. In 1983 she left Padua for the University of Verona, where she was co-founder of Diotima – a group dedicated to feminist philosophy as political engagement. Trained in ancient philosophy – with a special focus on the writings of Plato – and inspired by feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, Cavarero first drew wide attention with her book, In Spite of Plato, which pursues two interwoven themes: it engages in a deconstruction of ancient philosophical texts, primarily of Plato, but also of Homer and Parmenides, in order to free four Greek female figures (a Thracian servant, Penelope, Demeter and Diotima) from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a domestic role. Secondly, it attempts to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. By contaminating the theory of sexual difference with Arendtian issues, Cavarero shows that, while death is the central category on which the whole edifice of traditional philosophy has been based, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking.