Towards a hopeful plurality of democracy: An interview on vocal ontology with Adriana Cavarero

Abstract

Marking the philosopher’s 70th anniversary as well as fifteen years since the original publication of For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression in 2005, this interview with Adriana Cavarero considers the ongoing resonance of her propositions on vocality for the expanding interdisciline of voice studies. Cavarero situates her work on voice within the matrix of its contemporaneous discourses as well as current critical debate. In entering a dialogue with other voice scholars, Cavarero expands on her project of dismantling the aporous, solipsistic subject of western metaphysics and foregrounds notions of responsibility as fundamental to her understanding of relationality. Cavarero further attends to vocal practices, within the remits of academic exchange as well as in contemporary art, and postulates the key tenets of her current project on contingent politics, demagogy and the necessity to reconfigure the voice of the masses as plural.

Revocalising human geography: Decolonial language geographies beyond the nation-state

“…Cavarero’s revaluation of the vocalic in For More than One Voice is not merely a theoretical exercise, but a proposal for radically rethinking the relationship between politics, space and speech (2005: 16, 200–209; Cavarero et al 2018). As she specifies, still in Paul Kottman’s translation (2005: 178–179),The point is not simply to revocalize logos.…”