who are you?
Following Hannah Arendt's philosophy, Adriana Cavarero has argued that the act of narration is immanently political, relational and embodied. (Relating Narratives) To the Arendtian line that human beings as unique existents live together and are constitutively exposed to each other through the bodily senses (The Human Condition, 178), Cavarero adds the narratability of the self, its constitution by the desire of listening to her story being narrated. Being primarily an embodied practice, narration opens up a political sphere wherein human beings as narratable selves expose their vulnerability and dependence on each other, creating conditions of possibility for the crucial question of who one is to get registered and deployed in unforeseen directions:
We could define it as the confrontation between two discursive registers, which manifest opposite characteristics. One, that of philosophy, has the form of a definite knowledge which regards the universality of Man. The other, that of narration, has the form of a biographical knowledge which regards the unrepeatable identity of someone. The questions which sustain the two discursive styles are equally diverse. The first asks ‘what is Man?’ The second asks instead of someone ‘who he or she is.
(Cavarero RN, 13).