Vulnerability: genealogies
In recent years the paradigm of vulnerability has become the leading contemporary framework within which to rethink violence, whether structural or contingent, and the human condition. At the same time, the term vulnerability has become ubiquitous for the first time, particularly with the acceleration of the so-called “turn to vulnerability” stemming from the pandemic.
In its broadest sense, vulnerability refers to exposure to situations putting the existence of someone or something at risk, and the difficulties that this subject/object has in dealing with these situations. This basic meaning shows the traditional social concept of vulnerability, but due to the 21st-century philosophical development of the concept, new ontological, anthropological and political perspectives have emerged giving the term a positive connotation it did not previously have in common usage, the social sciences, or the social imaginary at the close of the 20th century. Thus currently vulnerability has a very wide range of different and even contradictory meanings, related to ideas such as exposure, dependence, frailty, humiliation, passivity, alienation and isolation, but also resistance, resilience, interdependency and empowerment. Vulnerability is the site of both passivity and activity; it is the site of both precarious conditions and the capacity to recognize, oppose, resist and transform those conditions through concerted action.
The aim here is to trace a summary historical cartography of the theorical contexts in which the main threads of this concept has been built.
The original field in which the concept of vulnerability emerged was the social sciences, from the 1970s onwards. In this first genealogical thread, it was used to call into question the idea that disaster risk was merely a question of hazard and to address the need for analyses of structures and processes of inequality. Vulnerability was an innovative tool of relational and social analysis that took into account not only the economy but also social ties, the specific context, individual agency and the effects of poverty. Being vulnerable consisted, then, in a reduced capacity, in relative terms and due to various factors, for foreseeing, dealing with and/or resisting the effects of a social or natural threat (Blaikie, Cannon et al., 1994).
In the last decades of the 20th century, two philosophical lines of thought emerged which came together to produce new philosophical genealogies of the complex concept of vulnerability:
(1) A pre-existing tendency linked violence to life itself, as the roots of modernity resurfaced in biopolitics, which poses as its central concern the more or less violent administration of life and the condition of the individual as an organism regulated by biopower. While not highlighting the concept of vulnerability, this current presupposes it (Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito).
(2) Feminist activists and theorists, whether deploying the concept of vulnerability or not, (a) give special prominence to the concept and experience of care in maintaining life, with the intention of challenging prevailing approaches to ethics and politics (Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto’s ethics of care); and (b) bring to light the surveillance and violence to which women’s bodies and lives are subject in law, science and ideology (Françoise Collin, Gene Corea, Iris Marion Young, Elisabeth List, Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, among others). Thus a range of feminist perspectives shed light both on the conditions that distribute vulnerability unequally according to gender and on newly arising violations of women’s rights.
The hypothesis, however, is that there exists a further genealogical thread that is less visible than those mentioned above. The origins of the philosophical revolution in our understanding of the human condition in terms of vulnerability are to be found long before the 1970s, in the women thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. The work of female philosophers born at the beginning of the century, such as Hannah Arendt, María Zambrano, Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, among others, reflects on the fragility of the human condition and the precariousness of the world against the background of the violent events that occurred while capitalist industrialism began to impose a hitherto unforeseen pace of exploitation on society: the two world wars, totalitarianism, the Spanish Civil War, etc.
These different philosophical genealogies come together in the key texts of the 21st-century turn towards vulnerability, such as those of Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. In their works vulnerability is recognised in as a trait common to all human beings, thus it becomes the condition both of humanisation and of resistance to dehumanising violence. Cavarero, however, is much more aware from the beginning of the importance of the early 20th-century women philosophers’ legacy in the articulation of the theory of interdependency than Butler, for whom the main reference was Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and also the biopolitical thread.
À. Lorena Fuster
Vulnerability and the philosophy of birth
The current debate on vulnerability goes back to Judith Butler, who advocates a politics of community and an ethics of living together on the basis of the interdependence of all human beings. To the sovereignty and autonomy of the subject in liberal thought, Butler (2015) counterposes relationship as our constitutive dimension: we are “dependent on a world of others”, and “however distinct, also bound to one another and to living processes that exceed human form”.
In her endeavour to show that relationships constitute and de-constitute us, dispossess us and detract from our wholeness, Butler interprets vulnerability mainly as exposure to death and grieving. Adriana Cavarero (2014), instead, argues that we should see it rather in connection with birth, noting that the association of vulnerability with mortality and exposure to death is at the root, in fact, of the modern principle of sovereignty, which naturalises the aggressive subject of the Hobbesian maxim, homo homini lupus. The term’s etymology, however, authorises other readings (Consolaro, 2009). ‘Vulnerability’ stems from the Latin vulnus, a wound or hurt; but vulnus, in turn, derives from the Indo-European root *vul, referring to skin without hair (vello), and thus ties vulnerability to nakedness. These two meanings can suggest associations with either death or birth; the hirsute body of the warrior or the hairless one of the newly-born; war or care; exposure to wounding or openness to being caressed.
In basing her political paradigm on birth, Cavarero follows in the footsteps of the early-20th-century women philosophers. Taking issue with a philosophical tradition obsessed with death, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and María Zambrano shifted their gaze towards birth in order to shed light on human beings’ plurality and singularity. Their thought focuses on the vulnerability of a subject that is not self-transparent: we cannot be “thought as whole beings because [we are] given over to the gaze of the other […] and we can be narrated only through the other.” (Cavarero, 2014, p. 33).
For Zambrano (1989) human birth means “presentation and offering.” It is not merely a natural process but a coming to the world that requires a response, an act of presence. “Coming to the light” (from the Spanish dar a luz, to give birth) means that we come out into the open, exposed to others’ gaze. The vulnerability of the newly-born is linked to nakedness, but this does not only involve physical fragility; it also consists in the condition of being an enigma and entirely exposed to the “circumstances”. Seeing oneself as having been born means inscribing oneself in a world and a lineage. The birth is not innocent (“we are born from the dreams of our parents”; Zambrano, 1989, p. 17), still it is an open process; it continues in the course of the person’s life, when a person reveals herself to herself and to others by confirming (apurando) the sense of her own being in the world in her relationship with the “circumstance” and with the heritage entrusted to her. This “constantly renewed” rebirth coincides with freedom, which is not absolute, but is constitutively coupled with dependence; it is the other side of necessity and bonds us to what exists. Seeing the philosophical subject as having been born, means accepting its incompleteness and contingency. Birth is manifestation, an absence of foundation and determination. Its powerful vulnerability, then, irresistibly disrupts metaphysics, compelling thought to start from its rootedness, from its condition of belonging to the world (Cavarero, 1990).
Elena Laurenzi
Vulnerability and amor mundi: Hannah Arendt
The phrase vulnerability turn has recently been coined to refer to how “vulnerability” has come into widespread use. Normally a distinction is made between (a) vulnerability as a human condition stressing our contingency and interdependence, and (b) the type of vulnerability that normatively identifies and defines “vulnerable subjects” in a situation of defencelessness (Morondo, 2016; Giolo, 2018). In the work of Hannah Arendt we can find suggestive ideas for theorising both of these concepts.
Although she only rarely uses the term “vulnerability”, Arendt locates human beings’ condition of being born at the core of her thought. Thus she stresses that we are created by others –that there are no self-sufficient subjects– and that we are tied to a world of relationships that we have not chosen and into which we are born unexpectedly, as strangers. Being born means becoming part of a world that existed prior to our arrival and that will persist when we are no longer there; it is also appearing for the first time, initiating, intruding, interrupting, making ourselves visible. In identifying natality as the frame of action and political liberty, Arendt decouples freedom from unconditionality. Although it may seem paradoxical, this fragility that Arendt finds in freedom both strengthens and intensifies it. Political liberty depends on the presence of others, requires plurality. Seeing plurality as a condition of human existence rather than a problem to be overcome means accepting that when we act we are always situated among and in relation to others: “the impossibility of remaining unique masters of what they do, of knowing its consequences and relying upon the future, is the price [human beings] pay for plurality and reality, for the joy of inhabiting together with others a world whose reality is guaranteed for each by the presence of all” (Arendt, 2018).
Arendt’s categories of natality, plurality and the fragility of political freedom help to rethink notions such as precarity, limits and interdependence.
These categories arise from Arendt’s (1958) attempt to diagnose the problems of her time. She urges “a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears”. The elimination of plurality by totalitarian terror was one of these fears. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she shows that the deprivation of rights results in a loss of the world. She analyses contemporary figures –pariah, refugee, stateless people– who once excluded from the political community then become interchangeable and, under regimes of totalitarian terror, superfluous and expendable, mere specimens of the species. Thus the question arises of how we see our position as beings who are born when the world has become a wasteland and many of its inhabitants have been excluded from the political community. Arendt also sees plurality as difference, diversity, and stresses that natality only brings into the world unique and radically diverse individuals, but not species (Vatter, 2006).
Thus the Nazi genocide was a crime, perpetrated on the bodies of the Jewish people, against the human condition of diversity and plurality. Arendt obliges us to take seriously the fact that, if we focus only on the victims, without paying attention to the world that was destroyed, we relegate them to an existence without world, we set them apart from others, paradoxically repeating the exclusion effected by that very genocide. These ideas open up new space for theorising current issues, as in the work of Azoulay (2016), Butler (2014) and Di Cesare (2017), who point out that if we limit ourselves to denouncing injustice or the crimes committed against people without world, those whom we now call “vulnerable people” (Palestinians, refugees, migrants), then we undervalue the systematic framework producing the conditions that make them “vulnerable”; we take these conditions for granted, we naturalise them.
Fina Birulés
Without sexed ontological categories: the sujet interloqué
When Françoise Collin speaks of the sujet interloqué[1] she thematizes what is currently at the centre of the vulnerability turn without using the term vulnérabilité. When she reflects on defencelessness, dependency, insecurity or the constitutive destitution of subjectivity, issues which she approaches on both ontological and political levels, she uses the terms altération and aliénation.
In “Praxis de la différence. Notes sur le tragique du sujet” (1992), Collin offers an ironic account of the consequences of the death of the subject for feminist politics and theory. She reveals the aporias surrounding certain attempts to theorise the difference between the sexes –or stubborn efforts not to theorise it– in relation to philosophical thought. Collin criticizes the mutation of sexed metaphors and qualities into ontological categories by severing them from the sexed bodies that traditionally sustained them. Importantly, she is not arguing for a correspondence between the traits that characterize the feminine and embodied women, but rather, she detects a deception in this process of ontological generalization: it erases the socio-historical sexed specificity of the concepts used.
Her uses of aliénation and altération are crucial in her analysis: they help account for the fact that despite the modern subject being a myth, the “I” that is altered by an other (or by the Other) obstinately resists erasure. In this context, altération is the non-ideological form of difference at work within subjectivity: it is the movement that hinders a subject from being self-transparent, fully autonomous, or identical to itself. This ontological vulnerability is constitutive of all subjectivity; it stems from the subject’s altération and héteronomie. On the other hand, aliénation is the political form of oppression that enforces difference through ideological and often metaphysically founded definitions of subjecthood. In the political realm, vulnerability is differential and relative to each subjectivity’s material situation and discursive position: each person’s aliénation, the oppression they are forced to endure and struggle against, determines their political vulnerability. Collin later expands on the ethical and political implications of this differential in Le Différend des sexes.
How, then, to fight “contre l’aliénation pour pouvoir répondre et sans cesser de répondre à l’altération?” (Collin, 1992) How to resist assujettissement without forgetting that within the subject lies an obstinate will to live, to appear that it is not pure passivity, that it “n’est ni altération pure ni pure égoïté?” In brief, how to acknowledge ontological vulnerability while combating political vulnerability?
The ontological subject ensures that the political subject, often reduced to its collective identity with other subjects, remains other. Reciprocally, the ontological subject requires political subjecthood if it wishes to afford its difference so that its altération is not turned into aliénation. It is for this reason that “il n’y a pas d’éthique ou de politique qui puisse contourner la reconnaissance du sujet, mais en se rappelant que ce sujet est plusieurs” (Collin, 1992). Collin argues that a political subject’s commitment to the “inconditionnalité du dialogue” prevents it from relapsing into the old dominant metaphysical subject. She sees this dialogue as an encounter with an other, one that is not without difficulties or failings, for, as she warns us, the encounters of a sujet interloqué are not un donné, but un travail: the ethical decision to remain within ontological vulnerability is tied to the political aspiration to struggle against political vulnerability. Thus Collin, in this sense following Arendt, constructs a subjectivity that admits both active and passive aspects of its constitution. Furthermore, she proposes a subjectivity that in its encounters with an other strives to not prejudge any identity or elude its effective reality: “car il appartient à chacun de se présenter sans devoir pour autant se nommer” (Collin, 1992).
Teresa Hoogeveen
October 2020
To cite this notice
Fuster, À. Lorena; Laurenzi, Elena; Birulés, Fina; Hoogeveen, Teresa : “Fragments of vulnerability in women’s philosophy”. Dictionnaire du genre en traduction / Dictionary of Gender in Translation / Diccionario del género en traducción. ISSN: 2967-3623. Published on 25 May 2021: https://worldgender.cnrs.fr/en/entries/fragments-of-vulnerability-in-womens-philosophy/.
References
Arendt, Hannah (2004), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Schocken Books.
Arendt, Hannah (2018), The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Azoulay, Ariella et Bonnie Honig (2016), “Between Nuremberg and Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt’s Tikkun Olam”, differences, vol. 27, no. 1, p. 48-93.
Blaikie, Piers, Terry Cannon, Ian Davis & Ben Wisner (1994), At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, London, Routledge.
Butler, Judith (2014), “Vida precaria, vulnerabilidad y ética de la cohabitación”, in Begonya Saez Tajafuerce (ed.), Cuerpo, memoria y representación, Barcelona, Icaria, p. 47-79.
Butler, Judith (2015), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge–London, Harvard University Press.
Cavarero, Adriana (1990), “Dire la nascita”, in Diotima, Mettere al mondo il mondo, Milan, La Tartaruga.
Cavarero, Adriana (2014), “Inclinaciones desequilibradas”, in Begonya Saez Tajafuerce (ed.), Cuerpo, memoria y representación, Barcelona, Icaria, p. 17-38.
Collin, Françoise (1992), “Praxis de la différence. Notes sur le tragique du sujet”, Les Cahiers du GRIF, nº 46, p. 125-141:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/grif_0770-6081_1992_num_46_1_1865.
Consolaro, Francesca (2009), “Il ‘vulnerabile’ come chiave del ‘mondo che viene:’ considerazioni etimologiche”, Filosofia politica, nº 1, p. 45-50.
Di Cesare, Donatella (2017), Stranieri residenti. Una filosofia della migrazione, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri.
Giolo, Orsetta (2018), “La vulnerabilità neoliberale”, in Vulnerabilità. Analisi multidisciplinare di un concetto, Roma, Carocci, p. 253-274.
Morondo Taramundi, Dolores (2016), “¿Un nuevo paradigma para la igualdad? La vulnerabilidad entre condición humana y situación de indefensión”, Cuadernos Electrónicos de Filosofía del Derecho, nº 34, p. 205-221.
Vatter, Miguel (2006), “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt”, Revista de Ciencia Política, vol. 26, no. 2, p. 137-159.
Zambrano, María (1989), Delirio y destino, Madrid, Mondadori.
NOTES
[1] Translated to English as “dislocuted” subject and to Spanish as “sujeto interlocuado”. Collin takes this expression from Jean-Luc Marion’s “L’interloqué”, Cahiers confrontation, nº 20, 1989, translated into Spanish as “El interpelado”, Taula, nº 13-14, 1990. Originally published in English, “L’Interloqué”, Topoi, nº 7, 1988, p. 175-180.