Appreciated and discussed by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, this book, by contrasting the sovereign subject of the metaphysical tradition, confronts with the urge of rethinking politics and ethics in terms of a relational ontology, characterized by reciprocal exposure, dependence and vulnerability of an incarnated self who postulates the other as necessary.
Cavarero's next book, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, "re-think(s) the relation between speech and politics – announced in Aristotle's formula whereby man's nature as a political animal [zoon politikon] is bound up with man's characterization as that animal which has speech [zoon logon echon] – by focusing her attention on the embodied uniqueness of the speaker as it is manifested in that speaker's voice, addressed to another.
As in her earlier work, Cavarero continues to develop and deepen a number of themes foregrounded by Hannah Arendt—who asserts in The Human Condition that what matters in speech is not signification or 'communication' but rather the fact that 'in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.'.
Refining the radically phenomenological perspective that Arendt puts forth in her work, Cavarero locates the political sense of speech in the singularity of the speaker's voice, the acoustic emission that emits from mouth to ear.
[3] In her book, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Cavarero draws attention to various ways in which scenes of violence from the past century through the present (as well as what might be called ancient and early modern precursors to these scenes) cannot be adequately understood through the received categories of modern political philosophy -- 'terrorism,' 'war,' 'friend/enemy,' or 'state versus non-state sanctioned actions' -- and proposes a decisive shift in perspective.
Cavarero proposes the name "horrorism" for those forms of violence that are "crimes" which "offend the human condition at its ontological level."
Adriana Cavarero's Inclinations critiques the characterization of the human being as upright, erect—in philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropological writings, literature and artworks.