Navigating the Intimate Unknown: Vulnerability as an Affective Relation

ABSTRACT

This study theorizes vulnerability as a dual affective relation between subjects and their surroundings. I argue that an account of the affective aspects of vulnerability can respond to two challenges related to theories of vulnerability. The first challenge is to offer a critique of vulnerability as an effect of harmful social formations while not assuming an account of vulnerable subjects as living lessened lives. The second challenge is to provide an improved understanding regarding how vulnerability may operate as an available affective resource for political subjects. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I assert that vulnerability is a dual affective relation. As an aspect of social precarity, vulnerability is the affective pattern that stems from affective encounters with power formations, which limit and hinder life. However, I assert that vulnerability is also an affective response that marks the micro vital connections of bodies as they allow transformation and creativity to surpass the limits of stable subject positions. This duality of vulnerability yields political significance as an affective navigating tool for political subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• affect theory
• political subjectivity
• agency
• Deleuze and Guattari

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant No. 2540/20].

Notes on contributors

Miri Rozmarin

Dr. Miri Rozmarin is a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University. She is also a senior research fellow and the head of the “Contemporary Feminist Political Subjectivity Research Lab” at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is the author of Creating Oneself: Agency, Desire, and Feminist Transformations (Peter Lang, 2011), and Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts: On Vulnerability, Temporality and Ethics (Peter Lang, 2017). She has also published numerous articles in the fields of feminist social theory, political subjectivity, maternal subjectivity, and psycho-social theory.