Facing a text of Cavarero is to be told that the text, as such, is inessential, because what matters is the relationship between a unique self and the narration of a her lifestory. Philosophy has failed humanity because the question of the “who” exceeds the tried and tested concerns for “what” something is (what is reception?). What matters, and all that can be received, is you and me. Our narratives relating to each other/s. According to Cavarero “we” (as unique beings) all have a desire for narration, we desire to be told our life, and so we are exposed to another; we are (as) narratable only by another (unique and narratable, and exposed self).
Within Cavarero’s work, so bound up with receptions, and reconceptions of Classical texts (Oedipus, Plato, Eurydice Jacob, Ulysses, Echo…), texts, pasts, and processes of reception, re-reading and analysis, converge, meet and re-touch in a unique relationship between two (unique) selfs: you look at me, you tell me/stories/histories, reciprocally we make the narrative appear, together:
“Precisely because of this irremediable exposure to others, uniqueness–although it speaks the desiring language of the one—rejects, at the root, the synthesis of the all…. Fragile and exposed, the existent belongs to a world-scene where interaction with other existents is unforeseeable and potentially infinite. As in The Arabian Nights, the stories intersect with each other. Never isolated in the chimerical, total completion of its sense, one cannot be there without the other ” [Relating Narratives: 87]
Maybe Cavarero offers an approach towards a “reception” emerging as fragile, infinite, unforeseeable, and always re-making inter-actions with others; a process of relating to/with texts which gives space for uniqueness on both sides that does not deny differences, reception that re-cognises you and me…
To Receive is Never Neutral 