Apprehending Care in the Flesh: Reading Cavarero with Spillers

In this article I stage an encounter between Adriana Cavarero's account of uniqueness and Hortense Spillers's the flesh. Doing so is valuable for two reasons: First, it forces thought to consider not only exclusion women from Western tradition, but also anti-Blackness foundational tradition. This both expands contorts thought, affirming her key claims while altering them in process. Second, reading Cavarero Spillers together allows me explore way forms life that evade representation can be known. Both flesh are evasive representation; by together—supplementing consideration embodied character with distinction body flesh—I develop apprehension emphasizes touch as a knowing apart representation. Apprehension takes seriously ambivalence flesh, whereby revealed through violence well practices care, which, Saidiya Hartman has made clear, often proximate relation ongoing legacies transatlantic slavery.