Valentina Moro

In this article I argue that Hannah Arendt’s agonistic reading of the Greek experience of the political can be complicated and enriched by looking at tragic agonism. I use this concept in a broader sense to identify the agonistic aesthetic of tragic theatricality, encompassing all the linguistic, stylistic, and dramaturgical strategies through which each play presents a plurality of viewpoints. Its agonistic character manifests as a tension that never resolves into a dialectical process of sense-making, but instead sustains a polyphonic configuration of relating and competing voices. In order to explore tragic agonism, this article reads Arendt’s work along with Sophocles’ Women of Trachis. In this play, the multiperspectival narrative of the series of events leading to the death of an epic hero—Heracles—unfolds entirely through the affairs of his oikos. My reading of the play focuses on two scenes: the prologue, pronounced by Deianeira, Heracles’ wife (lines 1–47), and another scene where she secretly discusses with the female chorus after discovering her husband’s erotic desire for another woman (lines 531–549).

Judith Butler and Marxism invites leading scholars to discuss the absences in both Butler and Marxism, and the ways in which each satisfies the other. The unique contributions of this collection critique Butler from a Marxist position and propose Butler as necessary to the contemporary project of Marxism. Judith Butler and Marxism offers a practical politics of Butlerian performativity, vulnerability, and care, while giving the first full theoretical account of the critical intersections binding Butler and Marxism.

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has exposed a shared condition of vulnerability on a global scale. How can we use vulnerability as an effective paradigm in order to foster collective political initiatives? This essay claims that the idea of care is key to understand the vulnerability framework as being both an epistemic and a political resource to address ethical issues. The first half of the essay recollects several arguments in Adriana Cavarero’s and Judith Butler’s most recent works, insofar as both theorists have insisted on the notion of vulnerability in order to interpret contemporary political mobilizations. The second part of the essay retraces a constellation of practices of care in the works of several Black and decolonial feminist thinkers situated in different socio-political contexts. Whereas for Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman the focus is on the matter of Blackness and Black lives in their constitutive vulnerability, both Cristina Rivera Garza’s and Sayak Valencia’s works remarkably insist on the specific socio-political context of today’s Mexico. These authors urge the readers to adopt a critical posture when encountering official narratives, also because in their texts they exhibit their own vulnerability. For them, writing, their writing is an ethical demand to imagine alternatives and to foster new entanglements between bodies persisting on the margins, at the limits of the norms that regulate legibility.