Reading Antigone with Adriana Cavarero: From the Irony of Philosophy to the Hypermaternal

This contribution examines Adriana Cavarero’s philosophical itinerary through her hermeneutic engagement with the figure of Antigone, mapping her departure from the Diotima Community toward a re-reading of the Western political canon. By exposing how the patriarchal subject relies on the symbolic expulsion of the sexed body, Cavarero reveals how the polis conceals its violent foundations through the progressive rationalization of war and death. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of natality and Maria Zambrano's poetic thought, she shifts the theoretical paradigm from mortality to birth, thereby reclaiming kinship through maternal lineage. Ultimately, through the contemporary formulation of the "hypermaternal" and the concept of zoé, the Italian thinker posits the maternal body as a site of positive biological subjectivation. Antigone thus emerges as an eccentric anomaly, offering an alternative space where corporeality is conceptually redefined.