Adriana Cavarero, “Donne che allattano cuccioli di lupo” (2023)
Castelvecchi Editore
What does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to think of the body as living matter that, in childbirth, opens and tears apart? Bringing the concept of “life” back to its visceral dimension, Adriana Cavarero challenges philosophy’s indifference to the maternal body and explores its dark and unsettling sides, marginalized by a tradition that favors idyllic and luminous representations. The “sphere of birth” seals the complicity of women with nature: it is the “strange power” of procreation, passed down from mother to daughter, that makes the continuous regeneration of life possible. Thus emerges—in the exclusively feminine intertwining of birth and physis, between procreation and zoe—an excessive motherhood, a “hyper-motherhood” depicted by the extraordinary generative power of Niobe and the exuberant, violent vitality of the Bacchae. Traversing contemporary literature and Greek philosophical and tragic thought, with forays into anthropology, biology, and feminist critical theory, Cavarero rejects any reassuring discourse to reveal the dark and “tremendous” side of pregnancy as an essential truth of the human condition.