Woman as Witness, Beginner, Philosopher

In “Regarding the Cave” the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero offers a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave that expands on an interpretation of that same narrative by Hannah Arendt. Cavarero is perhaps the first to notice how Arendt’s remarks in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “What is Authority?,” and The Human Condition connect, how together they form a spirited critique of Western philosophy, and how indispensable they are for a feminist reckoning with what might be called masculinist ontology. This last project is further developed by Cavarero in her monograph In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995), which presents Arendtian natality alongside the philosophy of sexual difference to bend ancient myths toward their slighted female heroines. In her discussion, the question whether Hannah Arendt was a feminist is immaterial to Cavarero, and yet in reading Cavarero and Arendt together I am left with the sense that any feminism worth arguing for would centrally be concerned with the possibility of women-as-philosophers, and with their dialogue. In this spirit, I want to follow feminist readers of Arendt in engaging her in a dialogue with two female philosophers — Cavarero and the French philosopher Catherine Malabou — as all three of them wrestle with the legacy of the philosophical universal.

“No doubt woman will never become…