The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences

Abstract

This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted.

Keywords:

• vulnerability
• political (the)
• care
• ethics
• praxis

Notes

1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 198.

2 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199–200.

3 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195.

4 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2.

5 Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London/New York: Verso, 2004), 20.

6 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 70.

7 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 101.

8 Judith Butler, “Longing for Recognition,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1.3 (2000): 271–90.

9 Butler, Precarious Life, 30.

10 Butler, Precarious Life, 25.

11 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 24.

12 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 42.

13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 127.

14 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London/New York: Verso, 2010), 9.

15 Butler, Frames of War, 147.

16 Butler, Frames of War, 170.

17 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 413.

18 Martha Nussbaum, “Preface,” in The Fragility of Goodness, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001a), XIX.

19 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development. The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001c), 12.

20 Nussbaum, “Preface,” XXX.

21 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London/New York: Verso, 2005), 15.

22 Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 91.

23 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001b), 425–32; Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion and Terror,” Daedalus 132.1 (2003): 23–6.

24 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 68.

25 Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable. A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 112.

26 Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 88.

27 Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 197–200.

28 Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 136.

29 Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, 153.

30 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 89.

31 Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 105.

32 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), 157.

33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993a), 50.

34 Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass (Munich/Zurich: Piper, 1993b), 142.

35 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London/New York: Verso, 2000), 203–4.

36 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 102.

37 Rahel Jaeggi, “No Individual Can Resist: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life,” Constellations 12.1 (2005): 65–82.

38 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

39 Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 103.

40 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 121.

41 Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

42 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 70.

43 Pascale Molinier, Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, eds., “Introduction,” in Qu'est-ce que le care ? (Paris: Payot, 2010), 14.

44 Sandra Laugier, “Le sujet du care,” in Qu'est-ce que le care ?, ed. P. Molinier et al., 187.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Estelle Ferrarese

Estelle Ferrarese is full professor of political and social theory at Strasbourg University. For the period 2015–2016 she is a research fellow at the Marc Bloch Franco-German Centre of Social Science Research, in Berlin. She has been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. Her books include: Ethique et politique de l'espace public. Habermas et la discussion (Paris: Vrin, 2015); and Qu'est-ce que lutter pour la reconnaissance? (Lormont: Editions Le Bord de l'Eau, 2013). She is also the author of numerous articles on critical theory, deliberative democracy and vulnerability as a political category.