Il canto delle sirene

by Adriana Cavarero

Ulysses plugs his companions’ ears with soft wax and has himself tied to the ship’s mast so that he can enjoy the Sirens’ song without dying. However, the Sirens do not sing for him, nor do they want to seduce him: they sing for their own pleasure, “one to the other”. In a compelling comparison with Plato, Kafka, Brecht, Blanchot, Adorno and Eliot, Adriana Cavarero questions the traditional representation of the Sirens as primordial, bewitching and dangerous beings, rethinking these mythical figures as free subjects, women who sing for themselves, enjoying their own voices and music as a shared experience that escapes the rigidity of logos. Opposing the Homeric paradigm of the cunning and victorious hero – who, according to some 20th-century interpretations, has become a ridiculous little man – with a vision in which the female voice is harmonious and plural, Cavarero offers a novel and subversive interpretation of a millennial myth, capable of restoring to the Sirens the still unsolved mystery of their singing power.

112 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2025

About the author

Adriana Cavarero teaches philosophy of politics at the University of Verona, Italy, and is a visiting professor at New York University. Her field of research includes classical, modern and contemporary thought, with a special focus on the political significance of philosophy. Two main concerns shape her approach to the Western philosophical tradition. First, the 'thought of sexual difference', a theoretical perspective that enables the deconstruction of Western textuality from a feminist standpoint. Second, the thought of Hannah Arendt, reinterpreted in its most innovative categories: birth, uniqueness, action and narration. The result is an inquiry that foregrounds the individual and unique existence of the human being, as related to body and gender. Cavarero resists both the solitary abstraction of the philosophical Subject, and the volatile fragmentation of the postmodern subject, in the name of the living uniqueness of a self being generated through plural relationships with other human beings, and the acceptance of the constraints of individuality and the body.