Singularity in the wake of slavery: Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness and Alex Haley's Roots

Abstract

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways.

Fanon's revolutionary murmurs: Toward a critical phenomenology of listening

“…To be clear, then, the loss entailed in this universalizing and abstracting logocentric capture is the singularity and uniqueness of human beings, which, on Cavarero's account, serves as a normative ground for a relational politics. As Fanny Söderbäck puts it, commenting on Cavarero's insight, “universality commits the crime of covering over the irreparable uniqueness of the existent, in the name of the Human, the Subject, or Man” (2020, p. 2).…”