Monday, February 12th, 2024, at 5:30 PM, at the Circolo della Rosa, Via Santa Felicita 13, the book “WOMEN WHO BREASTFEED WOLF PUPS. Icons of Hyper-motherhood” by Adriana Cavarero, Castelvecchi, 2023, will be presented.

Anna Maria Piussi will introduce, and Olivia Guaraldo will converse with the author.

What does it mean to be mothers? What does it mean to think of the body as living matter that, during 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 (Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector), Greek philosophical and tragic thought starting with Euripides, with forays into anthropology, biology, and feminist critical theory, Cavarero rejects any reassuring discourse to reveal the dark and “tremendous” side of pregnancy, an essential truth of the human condition.

The presentation of the book will be an opportunity for philosophical and political reflection on motherhood, a theme also brought to light by the current debate on declining birth rates, and an experience both singular and shared, not without its dark sides and contradictions. A generative feminine power that has never ceased to challenge women.