Vulnerability and Critical Theory

critical theory 1.
2 (2016) 1–88
brill.com/brp
Vulnerability and Critical Theory

Estelle Ferrarese
Abstract
In Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary devel-

opments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to
reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and
demonstrates how it is socially produced. Philosophies that take vulnerability as a moral
object contribute to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action,
foreign to vulnerability and the notion of recognition offered by critical theory does
not correct this deficit. Instead, Ferrarese argues that vulnerability, as susceptibility to
a harmful event, is above all a breach of normative expectations. She demonstrates that
these expectations are not mental phenomena but are situated between subjects and
must even be conceived as institutions. On this basis she argues that the link between
the political and vulnerability cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation
of moral principles. Rather she seeks to rethink the political by taking vulnerability as
the starting point and thereby understands the political as simultaneously referring
to the advent of a world, the emergence of a relation, and the appearance of a political
subject.
Keywords
precarity – political (the) – risk – intersubjectivity – normative expectations – critical

theory – Adorno – Habermas – Honneth – care ethics – Butler – Nussbaum – Fraser
Introduction
A vulnerability only ever arises as the hollow side of a power to act. It material-
izes only vis-à-vis a power that either threatens to act or, on the contrary, fails
to do so. To speak of vulnerability is to speak of another’s (or of a pronounce-
ment’s or a structure’s) power to act, and clearly does not exclude finding a
power to act on the side of the vulnerable subject too. What effectively illumi-
nates the notion of vulnerability is thus the idea of ‘being-at-another’s-mercy’.
© estelle ferrarese, 2018 | doi 10.1163/24519529-12340002

2 Ferrarese
Vulnerability, as I understand it in the present work, is thus not a synonym

for the always uncertain maintaining of life, for the unassured attempt to ward
off the host of negative occurrences to which one may succumb. This aspect of
life also leads onto an ethical and political field, but such I prefer to refer to as
fragility instead of vulnerability. Threat, as I take it in this work, is never endog-
enous, but instead necessarily issues from some other. While vulnerability to
illness and accidents is undeniably an inherent part of ageing or the degenera-
tion of the organic apparatus, I consider this sort of vulnerability only insofar
as it may re-emerge as vulnerability to an absence of care.
Condensing only vis-à-vis a power to act; liable, in response, to call for a
form of protection, which, as Max Horkheimer writes, is the “archetype of
domination,”1 – vulnerability is always laden with possible political conse-
quences. I read the abundant literature that has recently developed on the top-
ics of vulnerability and precarity through this prism.
Sociological, ethical, geographical, philosophical, and economic reflection
on human, animal and environmental vulnerability, and indeed on the vulner-
ability of life forms, has blossomed spectacularly over the last fifteen years.
Nonetheless, the issue’s topicality does not always involve the same concerns
in all places.
In the United States, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicos-
ity, we witnessed a reflection emerge on killable, mutilatable and torturable
bodies, as exemplified by Judith Butler’s work. Thanks to the centrality that she
confers on the possibility of bodily destruction, she frames the unequal redis-
tribution of vulnerability by contrasting lives that are and lives that are not
worth mourning. From an entirely different perspective, which emerges from
ethnographic surveys into mass violence and collective rapes in India after the
Partition,2 Veena Das sets out to think through the way in which forms of life
are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix
of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence,
torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations.
Current reflection on vulnerability in Europe emerged in the 1990s in con-
junction with issues of precarity and exclusion. In this context, the term alludes
in particular to lives that are dispensable, to the abandoning of individuals to
the naked power of market forces.3 Vulnerability here also bears on other forms
1 German original: “Schütz ist das Ürphänomen von Herrschaft” in M. Horkheimer, Vernunft
und Selbsterhaltung, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970, p. 28.
2 V. Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007.
3 See, for example, R. Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, Paris: Fayard, 1995.
critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

Vulnerability and Critical Theory 3
of nudity faced with the political disinterest of states, on the condition of bod-
ies that can be delivered to technology and its experimentations, turned over
to the interests and strategies of smugglers, left to the amusements of camp
guards, or else subjected to private security companies and their imperative
for results, as they wage war in lieu of western armies; the archetypical figure
of all this is the refugee.4
In order to establish a prehistory of this – already polyform – ‘vulnerable
turn’, we would have to investigate a number of diverse theoretical currents
with political conclusions that are sometimes radically opposite: feminism,
Christian thought and Hobbesian contractualism, among others.
In feminism, the topic of vulnerability has received detailed attention
within a critique of patriarchy as grounded in a control over women’s bod-
ies, which are thus left at the mercy of blows, rapes and imposed pregnan-
cies. On this view, the foundation of masculine domination involves ensuring
unlimited access to women’s bodies, whether such access is regulated through
a contract such as marriage or else is guaranteed through violence inflicted
with impunity. The condition of women here is analysed primarily through the
prism of a particular vulnerability.
The theme of vulnerability also runs through all the reflections on ‘repro-
ductive labour’, the labour of caring for human needs. Materialist feminists
of the 1970s sought to underscore that the condition of possibility of the mar-
ket resides in social relations that remain foreign to it, relations structured or
created by human vulnerability. Not only does the market feed off resources,
notably moral resources, that maintain both social ties and the production and
care of embodied and necessitous human beings – resources that it draws from
its environment, but it discards waste in this same environment: industrial
waste in the natural environment, but also the ‘human waste’ of ill, handicapped
and aged persons in the family. In all cases, it is women who are assigned the
invisible work of compensation, soothing and care that vulnerability necessi-
tates. On this basis, materialist feminists have denounced the confining of the
hegemonic definition of labour to the sole sphere of production,5 highlight-
ing how reproductive labour underpins the creation of exchange value. Later,
the theoreticians of care then continued and extended reflections – using a
different vocabulary and taking a more directly ethical perspective – on the
4 G. Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti
and C. Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
5 See, for example, S. Federici, “Wages Against Housework” (1975), in Revolution at Point Zero:
Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, New York: PM Press/Common Notions, 2012.

4 Ferrarese
gendered distribution of care work for vulnerabilities and the moral disposi-
tions that ensure it.6
The figure of a merciful God who becomes man, that is to say who assumes
a vulnerable flesh sensitive to suffering; the Gospels that present the human
body as essentially characterized by finitude, and worked from within by weak-
nesses that continually ruin its pretentions; and lastly, the place conferred on
charity as an essential virtue of the believer – all this makes vulnerability a
central motif of Christian thought. Authors and scholars marked by their faith
have long lent it a plural theoretical fecundity. Charles Péguy, for example, sees
vulnerability as the condition of possibility of the social link as well as of moral
action:
Because they are not wounded, they [honest people] are not vulnerable.
Because they lack nothing, no one brings them anything. Because they
lack nothing, no one brings them that which is whole. Even God’s charity
does not bandage one who has no wounds. It was because a man was on
the ground that the Samaritan picked him up. It was because Jesus’ face
was dirty that Veronica wiped it with a veil. Now, whoever has not fallen
will never be picked up; and one who is not dirty will not be wiped dry.7
Johann Peter Süssmilch, who in the eighteenth century undertook the first
works of demography in Germany, was a pastor; his exercise at measuring
populations was also an attempt to delimit vulnerable groups. He brought to
light the way in which some accrue forms of distress, in which poverty renders
people fragile, by placing them at the mercy of the least economic accident,
famine or epidemic. Faced with the slightest incident:
someone who before had no more than water, bread and a few veg-
etables; someone who had spent his income to procure wood and the
necessary clothing for winter, all of a sudden finds himself thrown into
a great quandary and in great distress. If, in addition, he has a wife and
several children to keep up, his misery from this situation is increased.
[…] The food was already bad enough and scarcely sufficient to give to an
exhausted body the strength required for work. It is now even more insuf-
ficient. Added to this are destitution and the cold; thus weakness hastens,
6 Opening the way was Carol Gilligan’s book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women’s Development, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
7 C. Péguy, Note conjointe sur M. Descartes et la philosophie cartésienne, in Œuvres en prose
(1909–1914), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. II, 1961, p. 1392.

making the terrain propitious for illnesses among children and adults.
A small blow immediately knocks the person down.8
Concerning political theory in the modern era, the first apprehension of the
corporeal vulnerability of human beings is of course to be found in Hobbes.
His starting postulate is that what humans have in common, more than any
other property, is the fact of being mutually destructible. By relegating vulner-
ability as a condition of exposure of some to others, to a ‘before’, presents the
only possibility for society’s self-constitution, and for that of the political along
with it. The first political act, the act of the political’s self-institution, consists
in removing the possibility of that exposure once and for all. In both On the
Citizen and Leviathan, he imputes the birth of a political society to the concern
to ‘avoid death’ (an expression that he prefers, as Leo Strauss notes, to that of
‘conserve life’), thus sketching a resolutely negative approach to the condition
of vulnerability. More precisely, it is not death itself that gets erected as the
worst of ills, but violent and/or painful death.9 This fear permits calculation,
which enables the ensuing contract after a meeting of well-understood inter-
ests: “look at a full-grown man and see how fragile is the structure of his human
body (and if it fails, all his forces, strength and Wisdom fail with it); see how
easy it is for even the weakest individual to kill someone stronger than him-
self. Whatever confidence you have in your own strength, you simply cannot
believe that you have been made superior to others by nature.”10 Exposure is
all the less evadable as in the state of nature, in the absence of law, each per-
son possesses a natural right over all others. As is well known, the Hobbesian
contract thus comprises a reciprocal agreement to transfer natural rights. In
the famous chapter 13 of Leviathan, Hobbes states that the submission of all
subjects to a sovereign power is the only possibility to reconcile each individ-
ual’s interests (in survival). He assigns the state the task of neutralizing the
ever-threatening conflict, of putting an end to the peril of violent death, and
political order is born and persists in that task.
8 J. P. Süssmilch, Gedancken von den epidemischen Kranckheiten und dem grösseren Sterben
des 1757ten Jahres, in einem Sendschreiben an die Herren Verfasser der Göttinglichen
Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen und auf derselben Verlangen entworffen von Johann Peter
Süssmilch, Königl. Preussl. Ober-Consistorial-Rathe, Probste in Cölln, und Pastor Primarius
zu St. Petri, wie auch Mitgliede der Königl. Preussl. Akademie dre Wissenschaften, Berlin,
1758, cited by Patrice Bourdelais “Qu’est-ce que la vulnerabilité? ‘Un petit coup renverse
aussitôt la personne’ (Süssmilch),” Annales de démographie historique, 110, 2005, p. 5.
9 See, for example, T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1996,
p. 84.
10 T. Hobbes, On the Citizen, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988, I.3. p. 26 (my emphasis).

6 Ferrarese
It ought to be mentioned here that Hobbes does not see corporeal vulner-
ability as pertaining to some physiological purity; the envelope with which the
body is adorned is just as exposing. As an attentive reading of the Leviathan
reveals, if humans constitute a civil society, survival is not the only goal. The
being whose persistence is to be enabled cannot be reduced to brute biological
existence; it includes desire and its indefinite reproduction. Hobbes expresses
this view notably in the fact that inalienable elements feature in the sphere
of law, at once the right not to be physically injured, or the right not to be put
to death, but also elements such as the right not to be obliged to accuse those
whose condemnation would be prejudicial to us. Moreover, as chapter 15 of
Leviathan announces, “it is necessary for man’s life, to retain some [liberty]; as
right to govern their own bodies; enjoy air, water, motion, ways to go from place
to place; and all things else, without which a man cannot live, or not live well.”11
The fact remains that, as political subjects, individuals are sacrificed in the
perpetuating of their vulnerable bodies. Indeed, from the moment when all
have relinquished their power, delegating it to the sovereign, no individual
is able to go back on that delegation, regardless of the number of other sub-
jects that might share one’s project.12 The protection of the physical integrity
of members of the body politic is not subject to a mandate, in the sense of
an imperative political goal confided to a single one of its members. The con-
tract certainly entails duties for the sovereign, including the guarantee of civil
peace, but the citizens are not able to enforce them; the sovereign is answer-
able to reason alone. Correlatively, while some inalienable rights exist, such
as to physical integrity, they cannot be opposed to the sovereign. Hobbes sees
clearly that, by contracting, a person cannot be supposed to renounce the
right to self-defence, but he continues by ordering this case among the circum-
stances in which one is “right to refuse to do them [dishonourable commands]
without prejudice to the absolute right given to the ruler. For in no case is his
rights of killing those who refuse obedience excluded.”13
In this way, it would be a mistake to reduce the work of Hobbes’ political
society to a simple rationalisation and mastery over vulnerability, in the sense
that the monopoly over inflicting injury and violent death is entrusted to the
sovereign in order to prevent the war of all against all. It is not a matter of
making both banes tolerable by making them scarce and giving them mean-
ing. Vulnerability, to the extent that, being erected as the motive of the institu-
tion of the political, is then decoupled from the latter’s maintenance, is simply
11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 102 (my emphasis).

12 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 98.
13 Ibid., 83.

removed from the political stage. Hobbes conceives of a natural equality, a

non-mediated equality before destruction and injury: “The cause of mutual
fear consists partly in the natural equality of men, partly in their mutual will
of hurting; whence it comes to pass that we can neither expect from others
nor promise to ourselves the least security. […] they who can do the greatest
things (namely kill) can do equal things. All men therefore among themselves
are by nature equal.”14 But this non-mediated equality of human bodies can-
not be interpreted as founding the political order, since it must be replaced by
another form of equality that really characterises the political – an equality in
subjection to the sovereign.
Hobbes thus inaugurates a long tradition. For political theory in general is
rather ill at ease with vulnerability and rarely tackles it. Whenever it does so, it
is to virilely place it at a distance, somewhere ‘prior to’ or ‘alongside’ the politi-
cal game, or to bury it among its silent drudgery by hastening to label it with
names less stamped with powerlessness.
A first set of theories, those most faithful to Hobbes, whether or not their
holders acknowledge it, formulate vulnerability as a problem that requires set-
tling ex ante so that the political can emerge. Here we include all those authors
who, in modern times, consider it necessary to conquer, contain and/or forget
vulnerability in order for the political to arise and unfold. This is the case, nota-
bly, with the more liberal tradition of the social contract, whose authors always
figure the neutralization of the vulnerable nature of contractors among the
elements of the original condition of which they require to justify the clauses
(attaching to the principles of justice, to concrete political organization, to the
pertinent moral contents in a society to come) of the accord on which society
is instituted. Thus, in her Frontiers of Justice, Martha Nussbaum demonstrates
that, in the quasi-totality of contract theories, the political depends on putting
at a distance all differentiated fragility, all exacerbated exposure, such as those
linked to a handicap, insofar as these theories assume that the partners must
be endowed with more or less equivalent physical and mental powers, such
that no one can dominate others.
Hannah Arendt’s political theory, for its part, makes use of the Greek model
to institute a clear division between a political sphere, in which men recog-
nise each other as citizens, situating themselves together in the horizon of a
common world, and social life proper, in which they attest to their recipro-
cal dependence and their physiological fragility.15 For Arendt, dependence
and politics are antonyms, and vulnerability is an obstacle to be overcome by
14 Ibid., p. 26.

15 H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

8 Ferrarese
constituting a political order; however, this task is never realised once and for
all but must be accomplished at each instant.
In a further inflection of the Hobbesian gesture, the political tackles vul-
nerability only to counteract it, circumscribe it or master it, in management
mode. According to Foucault, while death has long been the point at which the
absolute power of the sovereign is manifested, at the turn of the nineteenth
century it becomes the moment when the individual escapes power, as the
life of individuals has become, as simple life, precious to the state. The lives
of individuals – but also “their more than just living, (…) what at the time was
called men’s convenience (commodité), their amenity, or even felicity”16 – in all
precariousness and exposure, become objects of concern and political disposi-
tions. In line with this reflection, Roberto Esposito considers that what lies at
the heart of contemporary political practice is life’s self-preservation, an idea
he defends when developing the concept of immunitas. In other terms, the
political maintains itself and feeds upon the endless exercise of eradicating or
containing vulnerability. By ceasing to do so, the political would collapse. The
elimination of vulnerability is thus here also the condition of its articulation
with the political.
A theme that is close to but does not strictly coincide with vulnerability, need
has been through many political episodes in the history of thought. Need also
refers to a constitutive lack, like vulnerability, but is nonetheless distinguish-
able from it in many ways. It is, for example, object-oriented; as Agnes Heller
puts it, “Needs are simultaneously passions and capacities (the passion and
capacity to appropriate the object).”17 Vulnerability, as for it, is oriented toward
another subject; it immediately presupposes the existence of an other. It is an
essentially intersubjective category, but such is not true of need, as the notion
is linked to outlooks that privilege the principle of distribution of a good. In
this, the category of vulnerability enables us to shift theoretical attention from
the phenomenon – physical or psychological – toward the moral expectation
surrounding it – a point we will return to at length. The fact remains that the
theme of need has often been developed in a political direction, in particular
in early Marx and those who align with him.
Need is the term under which the condition of a threatening incomplete-
ness comes to appear in Marx. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx defines man as a
being of needs, dependent on something other than himself (that is to say, on
external objects, others, society) to conserve his existence. And he considers
16 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell, New York: Picador, 2009,
p. 327.
17 A. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, trans. G. Feltrinelli, London: Allison & Busby, 1976,
p. 41.

that the place of need in a capitalist society is ambivalent. On the one hand,
capitalism alienates man’s essential needs, which proceed from the activation
and confirmation of his essential forces; on the other, production continually
creates new needs.18 And as Agnes Heller has shown, the unstable and situated
character of need (in the sense that each society has its own system of needs)
does not by itself entail, in the Marxist constellation, any disqualification of
need on account of ‘falseness’. On the one hand, to some conscious needs, i.e.
those formed in the framework of a given society that this same society can-
not satisfy, the power belongs to ensure this society’s overcoming “the needs
which flow from [the alienated character of social relations … is] the need to
overcome alienation, to overturn the alienated social and productive relations
in a revolutionary way.”19 On the other, a need cannot be said to be manipu-
lated except insofar as its satisfaction in actual fact serves an “essentially alien
force.”20 Thence, the bearers of radical needs are the potential actors of the
overturning of a society based on subordination and hierarchy. In this sense,
Marx is the author of the theory of needs with hugely political promises.
Critical Theory, defined throughout this work as the theory of the Frankfurt
School, has joined in this reflexion on need. Indeed, Theodor W. Adorno
defended at length the idea that need is an always-already social category.
“Nature as ‘drive’ (Trieb) is contained within it. But the social and natural
moments of need cannot be split up into secondary and primary in order to
set up some sort of ranking of satisfactions.”21 He also identified the consider-
able difficulties of a theory of need, difficulties incurred by the inscrutability of
true and false needs. In one of the passages that he devotes to this problem, he
evokes a substitute question, a theoretical solution:
The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed

in terms of social and natural, primary and secondary, correct and false;
rather, it coincides with the question of the suffering of the vast majority
of all humans on the earth.22
The Frankfurt School develops its epistemological and political stance on the
basis of suffering, a stance that readily leaves room for vulnerability and sees
18 K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1988, see in particular, pp. 115–25, 136–39, 154–57.
19 Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx, p. 95.
20 Ibid., p. 51.
21 T.W. Adorno, “Theses on Need,” trans. Martin Schuster and Iain MacDonald, Adorno
Studies, vol. 1(1), 2017, pp. 102–4: 102.
22 Ibid., p. 104.

10 Ferrarese
it as particularly pertinent to thought in its political scope. On the one hand,

Adorno and Horkheimer develop a very specific concern for the suffering flesh,
for “the tiny, very fragile human body,”23 a concern they extend to the suffering
of animals. On the other hand, Critical Theory, especially its first representa-
tives, places suffering at the core of knowledge and of politics, viewing it as a
bridge between the two. Suffering draws its mediately political status from its
epistemological status.
By the expression, “micrological method,” Adorno points to an attention for
the singular, for the detail, for the distress that informs a thinking. He forges
this expression to characterise the thinking of Walter Benjamin, who “never
wavered from his conviction that the smallest cell of observed reality offsets
the rest of the world.”24 It is probably not fitting, however, to speak of these
first-generation critical theorists as having paid simple ‘attention’ to suffering.
The stance in which one adopts the role of an explainer presents a problem,
because this explanation of the wrong suffered dispenses with one’s having
to take full stock of it: “There are people who will not be disturbed about the
existence of evil because they have a theory of it. Here I am also thinking of
some Marxists who, in the face of wretchedness, quickly proceed to show why
it exists.”25 Concern might be a more suitable word to use. Max Horkheimer –
but he’s the only one in this case – does not hesitate to pronounce the word
pity: in “Materialism and Morality” he writes that pity and politics are today
“the two forms in which moral feeling finds its expression,”26 adding that the
current circumstances scarcely enable the one or the other to be reconciled in
a rational relation. For all these thinkers, critique must be grounded in the suf-
fering expressed or manifested by the vulnerable; by bringing suffering to light,
we can establish the diagnostic of an era and its pathologies.
The micrological method does not simply refer to a mode of entry; it makes
the prehension of suffering the condition of veritable knowledge. At the turn
of the 1940s, just as Horkheimer asserted that critical consciousness can no
longer be conceived as knowledge of the laws of history, but instead as experi-
ence of suffering, animals included, so too, for Adorno, “the need to lend a voice
to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs
23 W. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York:
Schocken Books, 1986, p. 84
24 T. W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1981,
pp. 235.
25 M. Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, trans. M. Shaw, New York, Seabury Press, 1978, p. 24
26 M. Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science,
trans. G. H. Hunter et al., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995, pp. 15–48.

upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively
conveyed.”27 Little present in Jürgen Habermas, the theme of suffering reap-
pears in the work of Axel Honneth in the form of psychic effects provoked
by the non-satisfaction of moral expectations, by the experience of social
disrespect. He simultaneously highlights that the way in which oppressed
groups evaluate a social order on the moral level typically takes the form of
feelings of injustice, of expressions of suffering, and that the task of a criti-
cal theory of society is to research the normative conflicts dissimulated by the
absence of access to argumentative practices.28 According to him, failing to
take into consideration the feelings of injustice and suffering that the inflicting
of some wrong provokes, one neglects moral discontent or rather involuntarily
reduces it to what simply comes to appear in the public sphere.29
From its epistemological status, suffering draws its political status because
it presses toward social transformation: “The physical moment tells our knowl-
edge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different.”30 We
can discover traces of this position even with Herbert Marcuse, who in “On
Hedonism”31 claims that a society cannot be said to be emancipated unless it
aims at eliminating the physical suffering of the least of its members.
Suffering is thus established as the psychological wellspring of political
action since one of its properties is to reveal an intolerable situation. To the
extent that it takes on cognitive properties, suffering may trigger the formu-
lation of a demand and the passage to conflict (which of course it does not
necessarily do). If the idea of vulnerability appears only fragmentarily in the
theories of the Frankfurt School, these fragments have a clear political force.
This book, while traversing the set of contemporary developments on
the theme of vulnerability, seeks to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that
enables a just articulation with the political.
Part 1 sets out to isolate that which counts as vulnerability for the social
sciences today and to establish the political and epistemological effects of
the emergent theoretical polarisation. I show that, in the social sciences, the
27 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London/New York: Routledge, 2004,
pp. 17–18.
28 A. Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination,” in The Fragmented World of
the Social, trans. C. W. Wright, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp.
205–219.
29 N. Fraser, and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical
Exchange, New York: Verso, 2003, p. 115.
30 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 203.
31 H. Marcuse “On Hedonism,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro,
London: Mayfly, 2009, pp. 119–150.

12 Ferrarese
theme of risk and its possible unequal distribution has entirely absorbed the
concept of ‘vulnerability’, setting within it an aspiration to rationality and mas-
tery, collective or individual. On the basis of this observation, I outline a pos-
sible inquiry into vulnerability that, divested of this backdrop, is understood
as socially produced, an inquiry to be jointly conducted by the social sciences
and philosophy.
In part 2, I read the contemporary philosophies that take vulnerability
as a moral object, and elucidate a curious tendency, one complementary to
that which affects the aforementioned political theories: they all put the politi-
cal at a distance. Whether by leaving it purely and simply in the background
or by reducing it to the implementation of moral principles, they contribute
to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action, foreign to
vulnerability.
Part 3 examines the contemporary propositions of Critical Theory on the
theme of vulnerability, propositions that take the name of theories of recogni-
tion. I show that this model of vulnerability, notably due to the importance
it lends to the idea of integrity, raises major difficulties. On the basis of other
theoretical elements borrowed from Critical Theory, I go on to reconstruct
the idea that vulnerability, as susceptibility to a harmful event, is above all a
breach of normative expectations. I show that these expectations are not men-
tal phenomena but are situated between subjects and must even be conceived
as institutions.
I seek, lastly, to think together the political and the vulnerable in a way that
cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation of moral principles.
Part 4 delineates a response to the question of the modalities of articulating
the political and the vulnerable thus conceived. I conclude that the political,
as observed through the prism of vulnerability, coincides with the conjoint
advent of a world, a relation and a political subject.
Part 1: The Vulnerable and the Geometer: Contemporary Uses of

the Concept of Vulnerability in the Social Sciences
Recent work on the concept of vulnerability in the social sciences has filtered
it through two main themes: first, that of ‘vulnerable populations’; second,
that of contemporary societies’ exposure to ecological crises. In the former
case, vulnerability is synonymous with the unequal distribution of risks, in the
latter, it refers to the undesirable effects of human activity, effects viewed as
frightful probabilities, and so once again as risks.

In a general fashion, contemporary uses of the word tend to evacuate the

idea of a shared, constitutive condition of ‘vulnerability’ and focus instead
on groups of ‘the vulnerable’, which are then attributed a history, a degree of
susceptibility.
Beyond the topics in which the word is fashionable, this part aims to deter-
mine what counts as vulnerability in the social sciences, in a context in which
the semantic field covered by the word is extending vertiginously, and to shed
light on the epistemological but also political effects of the emergent concep-
tual crystallisation.
The argument I put forward is that for this disciplinary field to accept, epis-
temologically and politically, a concept of vulnerability, it must seek to avoid
questioning a figure of the subject as self-engendered and self-sufficient but
must instead reaffirm such a figure and in a paradoxical way. By redefining a
weak entity’s exposure to a certain susceptibility as pertaining to a logic of risk
and its possible unequal allocation, the social sciences lodge ‘vulnerability’ in
the vocabulary and political viewpoint of rationality and mastery, individual
or collective.
I thus analyse the effects of absorbing the concept under the theme of risk
and the implications of its use in the analysis of poverty. Removing it from
the imperative of calculability and its capture against the normative backdrop
of mastery, I go on to outline a possible reflection on vulnerability as socially
produced, a reflection to be conjointly undertaken by the social sciences and
philosophy.
1.1 Vulnerable Cities, Territories, Populations and Individuals: Risk

The notion of vulnerability presumes more than the susceptibility to certain
wrongs; it implies that they can be prevented. As Robert Goodin has us note, it
would be improper to say, given the certainty tied to the execution, that some-
one sentenced to death is vulnerable to his executioner.32
It thus stands to reason that the literature on risk and risk society would
embrace the notion of vulnerability. Yet, this appropriation entails emptying
the notion of all reference to uncertainty, indeterminacy, exposure to fate, the
‘circumstances’, or the perspective of a painful dependence upon what comes
to pass.33
32 R. E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 112.
33 This was fundamental for the Greeks. See M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

14 Ferrarese
The idea of risk implies at least partial determinacy: on the one hand, a risk
is a known possible and, on the other, it can be subject to quantification (or
in any case the word refers to the ‘circumstances’ onto which the fantasy of
calculability is projected). If, in particular in environmental sociology, we also
encounter the concurrent notion of ‘hazards’, the determinacy of which is not
assured, the intention behind its use is always to avoid the possibility of events
that resist categorisation.
The notion of risk presumes the exercise of measuring, which thus trans-
forms the observer of vulnerabilities into their geometer. Undertaken upon
and in-between territories, populations, cities, individuals, states, threatened
by diseases, floods, climate change, abuse, or also terrorist actions, the measure
aims at three main effects: risk prevention, risk normalisation and overcoming
risk by redistributing its (economic) effects.
In the first case, the exercise of mastery is about fixing risk through knowl-
edge: the aim is to measure the success and lack of success of policies and
strategies employed when the dreaded event arises. Ultimately, the postulate
here is that a given vulnerability, whether it concerns a social group, a region or
a body, arises from a lack of adequate knowledge about the threat in question,
whereas neutralising this threat involves an effort of calibration, formulation
of hypotheses and administration of evidence.
The notion of risk binds us to activities not limited to the calculation of
probabilities but that also include the production of variation curves, with the
goal, as Foucault puts it, of “trying to reduce the most unfavourable, deviant
normalities in relation to the normal, general curve.”34 What is sought after
is a smoothing of the occurrences among the various groups that a harmful
event is liable to befall. In other terms, recourse to the idea of risk implies the
management of a population in its entirety and not only of potential or likely
victims; it aims at ordering a set of individuals. Correlatively, the vocabulary
of risk draws the notion of vulnerability into a rule of comparison. It seems, in
other terms, that vulnerability ‘is’ not in-itself, but is precipitated in the exer-
cise of relating entities, singular or collective, to other entities that are less
exposed to the same threat.
In the third case, the effort is to measure the damages that might arise from
the event were it to happen, while the operation of mastery bears on the effects
of the event, which, it is admitted, cannot be prevented. On the basis of this
calculus, risk is in general subject to a collective organisation, for example, in
the form of its mutualisation. The point is to attempt to master the future by
34 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 62.

guaranteeing that an accident will not alter too harshly the economic status of
the victims. On this view, the effort of rationalisation bears on the anticipated
damages by calculating the losses that might be incurred and shielding us from
them.
In this configuration, vulnerability is generally less a question of fragility
than of opacity, and the obsession with risk by which it is circumscribed works
only to register a sensation of our collective cognitive capacities being sur-
passed. As a result, the vocabulary of complexity has burgeoned, that is, the
complexity of a fallible and, for that reason, perfectible society.
As the inverted image of this scientific reflection aiming at risk prevention,
some critical currents in the social sciences take as their object the political
action generated or justified by the vulnerabilities thus defined. With frequent
reference to Foucault, they reformulate the idea of vulnerability itself as the
instrument, and even the pretext, of particular forms of government.
Some of these critiques focus on the fact that this ‘government by risk’
engenders normalising or disturbed practices of care. Grasped through the
feeling that one has of it, vulnerability gets described as a creation of multiple
public agencies that elicit a violent fear of death to ensure a form of surveil-
lance of populations.35 Such critiques further target the category of vulnerabil-
ity as a means to constrain the behaviours and attitudes of certain individuals
who are grouped by public policies.36 They show that the category of ‘vulner-
able’ mothers – vulnerable because of no fixed abode, too young or addicted to
drugs – above all involves an imperative to protect the infant to be born. At the
same time, many national and international organisations can be found put-
ting forward various concurrent descriptions of models of vulnerability that ‘do
not correspond’ to local realities, to local temporalities, or that replace one risk
with another, one vulnerability with another. One plan, for example, sought to
move vulnerable aged persons to a landslide-prone area, thus exposing these
persons to new harmful events, such as solitude; in turn, however, it also meant
exposing the rest of the population to new forms of insecurity, since these aged
persons were no longer able to carry out their traditional function of vigilance
35 F. Debrix, and A. D. Barder, “Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the Biopolitical
Production of Terror,” International Political Sociology, vol. 3(4), 2009, pp. 398–413.
36 B. Haalboom, and D. C. Natcher, “The Power and Peril of Vulnerability: Approaching
Community Labels with Caution in Climate Change Research,” Artic, vol. 65(3), 2012,
pp. 319–327; Susan Dodds, “Inclusion and Exclusion in Women’s Access to Health and
Medicine,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 1(2), 2008,
pp. 58–79.

16 Ferrarese
in areas with rampant delinquency.37 Applied to one territory or population

in comparison with others, the qualifier ‘vulnerable’ can mask internal quali-
ties linked to gender, race or age. Further, some also point out that the act of
classifying in itself is an exercise of hierarchisation, of ranking issues of seri-
ousness, of listing priorities, and thus also of classing populations. Moreover,
characterising a population as ‘vulnerable’ can have the effect of stigmatising
it, thereby justifying forms of segregation, discrimination or tutelage. In this
way, the scientific gesture amounts to constructing a paradigmatic subject
and endeavouring to identify groups that do not correspond to this paradigm
as vulnerable; to the extent that they are frequently declared such owing to a
compromised or dubious capacity to consent, it is easy to make out an effect
of subjugation.38
In short, it is the paternalism of institutions or experts that is criticised,
which is to say, the idea that the interpretation of the need of populations
identified as vulnerable is the prerogative of the state system and of a cer-
tain science. Technologies of government though risk draw in particular from
two large sets of knowledge: on the one hand, from statistics and applied
mathematics – notably as applied to the economy – and, on the other, the
behavioural sciences, both of which bear on models of knowledge that
neglect the concerned individuals’ and groups’ conceptions of the world and
demands. Moreover, criticism is also levelled at the fact that institutions or
quasi-institutions, such as NGOs, treat these risks in accordance with the aims
or imperatives specific to them, such as when taking into consideration the
particular exposure that migrant women face and linking it to a focus on regu-
lating migration,39 while the media used – e.g. legal texts, but especially the
implementation of scientific methods when making decisions in situations of
uncertainty – reinforce the reifying effects of these interventions for the indi-
viduals concerned.
In other terms, this critical reflection on vulnerability chimes with the abun-
dant literature that arose in the 1980s – in Foucault’s wake – on the absence of
neutrality of the welfare state’s means of action and social programs. Indeed,
it has frequently been shown that the transformation, or translation, of need
37 S. Revet, “De la vulnerabilité aux vulnérables. Approche critique d’une notion performa-
tive,” in S. Becerra, A. Peltier ed., Risque et environnement: recherches interdisciplinaires sur
la vulnerabilité des sociétés, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009, pp. 89–99.
38 F. Luna “Elucidating the Concept of Vulnerability: Layers, not Labels,” International
Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 2(1), 2009, pp. 121–139.
39 S. A. FitzGerald, “Biopolitics and the Regulation of Vulnerability: The Case of the Female
Trafficked Migrant”, International Journal of Law in Context, vol. 6(3), 2010, pp. 277–294.

into a potential object of intervention proceeds via an expert discourse which

turns persons into ‘cases’; that, politicized, need undergoes a ‘rewriting’ as
administrable before taking the form of a ‘social service’ addressed to clients.40
The upshot is that the notion of vulnerability, or of vulnerable populations, is
taxed with providing a foundation for the reifying effects of institutional inter-
vention into the various spheres of life.
But criticism also insists on the pure and simple creation of the ‘vulnerable
populations’ that are then subjected to state intervention and public policies.
Beyond this oft-repeated argument, according to which the target-groups of
public policies are simply the result of these same policies, Gregory Bankoff
advances the idea that, as applied to regions of the world that are continually
exposed to climatic hazards and natural disasters, the category of vulnerabil-
ity has enabled the West to establish a geography of zones that are character-
ised by powerlessness, inaction and poverty. This geography, on the one hand,
establishes an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ and, on the other, justifies an
obligation on behalf of Western nations to employ their good offices to

‘save’ these vulnerable populations from themselves and to render the
regions they inhabit safer for investment and tourism … The ‘cure’ for this
menacing condition is primarily conceived of in terms of the transfer and
application of Western expertise.41
Critical takes on the category of vulnerability in the social sciences contend

that society exposes certain members to various unfortunate events by means
of decisions that are either insufficiently informed or morally and politically
condemnable, that is to say, for the ends of normalization and indeed of sub-
jectivation in the Foucauldian sense. Despite its opposition to the risk model,
however, this discourse on vulnerability also winds up dismissing the idea of
an undetermined and powerless exposure, working instead to shore up deter-
minacy and bolster the principle of an actor (here the collective, state or peri-
state) characterized by mastery. My own aim is absolutely not to appeal, by
contrast, to a naive celebration of some condition in which we would be bereft
of all control over our destinies, but instead, by gathering a bundle of elements,
to show the normative referent that implicitly emerges from these discourses,
40 N. Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-
Capitalist Political Culture,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contempo-
rary Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 161–190.
41 G. Bankoff, “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse,” Disasters,
vol. 25(1), 2001, p. 27.

18 Ferrarese
which is that of a self-engendered, sovereign, singular or collective subject,

rendered such through the exercise of its rationality.
Some authors writing on risk occasionally do more than enframe vulner-
ability by probability, normalcy and costs, by claiming that the more we know,
the more we know that we don’t know. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the
fantasy of sovereignty established with the notion of risk does not thus van-
ish. For, on this view, far from diminishing, risk increases with the increase
in knowledge. Otherwise put, once the idea of uncertainty is accepted, once
the – at least partial – renouncement is made to transform the unknown
into the known, vulnerability is redefined with reference to decisions (made in
an uncertain universe) as the product of these decisions.
As a certain German tradition has rigorously argued, risk emerges as a prod-
uct of our actions upon the world (in contrast to danger, which is externally
produced).42 What Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ analyses is the modern worlds
own imperilling of itself. Similarly, for Niklas Luhmann,43 a primordial char-
acteristic of society’s relation to ecological risk is rooted in risk’s very self-
reproducibility, since every attempt to master a risk in turn engenders another
one – risks are therefore bound to increase endlessly. A risk is intrinsically the
outcome of an attempt at mastering the future.
From this point of view, this discourse on the vanity of calculation does not
imply overturning the way in which vulnerability is dealt with; notably, it by
no means evidences, despite the uncertainty imputed to events, a return to the
idea of Fortune. It simply states that nothing exists outside the consequences
of our own individual or collective ‘decisions’. It restores a causal primacy to
the idea of mastery.
So, admitting the principle of uncertainty does not imply a radical break
with the traditional conception of the subject and its predicates. Techniques
of risk management, notably when they appeal to economic analyses and the
sciences of behaviour, rest upon postulates stemming from rational choice
theory. According to these postulates, society is made up of individuals who
act according to a utilitarian rationale, and an action is rational if the benefit
outweighs the cost. Those authors who steer clear of the fantasy of absolute
calculability frequently effect a form of transfer of sovereignty from scientific
authority, the limits of which are held to have become obvious, onto the capa-
ble individual. Such authors thus make massive recourse to the vocabulary of
42 N. Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett, New York/Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 1993, pp. 22–24.
43 N. Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998, p. 107.

experimentation, of the profane exploration of possibilities, of reflexivity of

action, deemed key to being able to adjust properly to the risk in question. The
idea put forward is that the actor, caught within the flow of situations that she
perceives as risky, invents and implements suitable procedures of understand-
ing, evaluation or precaution. More broadly, most risk society theorists do not
question the idea of subjectivity: they persist in advancing the modern, capa-
ble, reflexive subject ̶ a subject that is born and maintains itself through its own
operations. Or, more trenchantly put, with such theorists the self-sufficient
subject gets reborn on the ruins of the project of science.
The critique that theories of care address to the dominant social sciences
is that, by assigning vulnerability alone to some persons or some populations,
they conceal the fact that no one escapes from forms of dependency. To reprise
Joan Tronto’s expression, this dichotomisation is a condition of so-called “priv-
ileged irresponsibility,”44 that is the privilege of an ‘autonomy’ able to ignore
the weight of activities that have enabled it and that exempts itself from all
responsibility vis-à-vis the vulnerability of others.
This critique requires reformulation, however. The problem, it seems to
me, resides instead in the antinomy posited, within one and the same sub-
ject, within one and the same group, between capacity and vulnerability, their
necessary distribution between a before and an after, the constitution of one
as a threat for the other. Otherwise put, the problem with the dominant con-
ception of vulnerability in the social sciences does not perhaps reside in its
making it impossible to assert that we are all vulnerable, since the motifs of
continuity, declivity, comparison, and grasping of a population in its entirety –
motifs that we highlighted in the epistemology of risk – can easily make room
for this idea. Instead, the problem resides in the inarticulation, or inarticula-
bility, of vulnerability and capacity, which is deployed in a universe in which
the normative investment of mastery, of self-engendering, remains very strong,
beyond all differences between authors.
1.2 The Risk of Poverty

Moreover, in the European social sciences, the substantivized adjective ‘the
vulnerable’ has had a remarkable fortune. Since the early 1990s, it has served,
along with the qualifiers ‘fragile’ and ‘precarious’, to apprehend particular
forms – i.e. not (yet) extreme ones – of poverty.
Far from being disconnected from the notion of risk, this usage presents
vulnerability as a state of insecurity or instability and points to the higher than
average probability of some becoming poor rather than others. Some works
44 J. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge,
1993, pp. 120–122.

20 Ferrarese
take this very risk as their topic by looking at phenomena whereby people
accumulate social handicaps, but only insofar as this risk is subject to an
unequal division. In other terms, these studies operate a twofold reduction of
the concept of vulnerability. On the one hand, they posit a susceptibility able
to be identified by its indicators. Vulnerability becomes a zone for a cartog-
raphy; it involves strong susceptibilities whose intersecting with one another
determines this ‘zone’. On the other hand, being vulnerable means exposure to
a sole risk: poverty (and even poverty tied to an unstable and devalued salary
system).
The popularization of French scientific uses of the lexicon of vulnerabil-
ity in the 1990s is no doubt attributable to the sociology of Robert Castel. His
choice of the term vulnerability means to allow for the subjective dimension,
or lived experience, that accompanies the occupying of an objective position
situated mid-way between integration and disaffiliation. Some years later, in
Great Britain, Guy Standing also argued that vulnerability is a total experi-
ence by highlighting how for some categories of individuals, labour-market
flexibility entails not only the fragilisation of their social status but a threat to
their housing, their identity and even their relation to time.45 This threat gets
expressed through the uncertainty of tomorrow, fear of the future and a feel-
ing of powerlessness; moreover, it compromises the individual’s possibility to
conduct herself as an autonomous individual, that is to say to speak and act in
her own name.46
For Castel, vulnerability is a zone of instability and turbulences in the rela-
tion to work and relational integration. We find this same idea of an inter-
mediary zone, of a declivity, in the work of another French sociologist, Serge
Paugam. For his part, however, Paugam uses the term ‘fragile’: while the cat-
egory of ‘the assisted’ refers to populations of individuals subjected to regular
intervention by institutions providing social assistance, the ‘marginal’ refers to
those suffering an absence of intervention (whether because it is impossible
or shunned by the persons concerned): between the two we find the ‘fragile’ as
targets of localised interventions.47
In other terms, what we encounter here is, as Foucault highlighted, the
grasping of a population as a whole. Moreover, the introduction of a continuity
45 G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2011.
46 R. Castel, “The Rise of Uncertainties,” trans. S. Corcoran, Critical Horizons, vol. 17(2),
Special Issue “The Politics of Vulnerability,” 2016, pp. 160–167.
47 S. Paugam, La disqualification sociale. Essai sur la nouvelle pauvreté, Paris: PUF, 1991,
pp. 17–31.

between those who are poor and those who are not, a continuity precisely
enabled by those who risk becoming so, is expressly political for the sociolo-
gist. In this vein, Castel’s preference for the terms precarity and vulnerability,
instead of poverty or marginality, is meant “to suggest that one is in the present
of processes rather than of states, and perhaps also, to endow oneself, thanks
to that dynamic perspective, with better tools for intervening lest the instabil-
ity of situations congeals into destiny.”48
Moreover, interest in these vulnerable groups has accompanied a more gen-
eral tendency in economics over the last fifteen years, one in which the con-
cept of vulnerability enables a new dimension to be established in the fight
against poverty: while this struggle long rested on an ex post analysis of situ-
ations, now it must anticipate trajectories of poverty, that is to say adopt an
ex ante view based on the idea of vulnerability itself.49 Those considered vul-
nerable are those who, over the course of time, have, for example, already expe-
rienced poverty, or are susceptible to falling below the poverty line in the near
future. Here again, the category of ‘the vulnerable’ makes it possible to think
through trajectories and processes, to observe exposure insofar as it is caught
in time, subject to cumulative phenomena, and to establish variation curves.
Moreover, it seems that appealing to the term ‘the vulnerable’ indicates a
mode of reflection about people who were not destined to end up as such. Not
only does it take account of the way in which poverty threatens new categories,
such as the victims of social and economic transformations, single mothers
with children to care for, persons who falter in their professional careers, etc.,
but it again marks ‘the vulnerable’ by the metaphor of the fall.
These reflections on vulnerability to poverty comprise a polyform constel-
lation within which multiple chains of causality are established between dif-
ferent concepts, zones and factors. Now the order of these chains is clearly
not politically neutral. In Castel’s work vulnerability originates in the meet-
ing between two threats, one weighing on work, the other on social relations.
However, some economic indicators get construed in such a way that vulner-
ability becomes the ‘cause’ of poverty, a linkage that is far more problematic
politically speaking. Vulnerability accordingly transforms into a predisposition
48 R. Castel, “‘De l’indigence à l’exclusion, la désaffiliation,’ Précarité du travail et vulnera-

bilité relationnelle,” in J. Donzelot (ed.), Face à l’exclusion: le modèle français, Paris: Esprit,
1991, pp. 167–168.
49 E. Ligon, and L. Schechter, “Measuring Vulnerability,” The Economic Journal, vol. 113(486),
2003, pp. 95–102; C. Cafiero and R. Vakis, “Risk and Vulnerability Considerations in Poverty
Analysis: Recent Advances and Future Directions,” Social Protection Discussion Paper,
No. 0610, Washington, The World Bank, 2006.

22 Ferrarese
influencing the likelihood that a harmful event will come about. On this view,
vulnerability is not merely fragility; it is also indexed to a person’s capacity
to contend with a given risk. Thus, as Ben Wiesner puts it, vulnerability is no
longer defined as what renders an entity fragile, but as the “characteristics of
a person or a group and their situation that influence their capacity to antici-
pate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact” of a harmful event.50 The
reports of The United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security
on vulnerability rest on this type of premise: in them, vulnerability is construed
as a predisposition of some populations to being affected by a harmful external
event, or – in an equivalence posited without equivocation – as an inability on
their part to cope with disasters that may arise.51
Accordingly, the idea of vulnerability frequently gets saddled with a double,
which varies depending upon the discipline: named coping, or resilience, the
capacity to avoid a possible wrong, withstand it or offset it, is simply construed
as another name for vulnerability. This double itself gets attributed with objec-
tive or subjective explanations, individual or collective ones, crossed with fac-
tors such as the existence of a culture of risk, the solidity of the social bond or,
further, of the faculty of adaptation. Whether attributed a natural or psycho-
logical origin, or else conceived as socially underpinned, resilience becomes
the property – or aptitude – of someone exposed to a threat.52 The solution
to the harmful event is to be sought in the individual affected by it, and the
social and political context – at best – remains in the background. On this view,
increasing the capacity of the poor and others to manage risks is regarded as
a solution to situations of chronic poverty and as ameliorating their perceived
and objective well-being.53
This view has received criticism in the social sciences, insofar as resorting
to such tools of analysis comes down to blaming the victim. The concept of
vulnerability, taken alone but especially together with the notion of resilience,
implies a field of investigation in which the victim is the point of entry and
50 B. Wisner, P. Blaikie, T. Cannon and I. Davis, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability
and Disasters, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 11.
51 J. C. Villagrán de León, “Vulnerability: A Conceptual and Methodological Review,” Source,
2006/4, pp. 1–64.
52 W. Bonß, “Karriere und sozialwissenschaftliche Potenziale des Resilienzbegriffs,” in
M. Endreß and A. Maurer, (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen, Theoretische und empirische
Analysen, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2015, pp. 15–31.
53 R. Holzmann, and S. Jorgensen, “Social Risk Management: A New Conceptual Framework
for Social Protection and Beyond,” Social Protection Discussion Paper Series, Social
Protection Unit, Human Development Network, The World Bank, 2000.

centre, and thus opens the question of the victim’s participation, passive or
even active, in what carries her away.
In a different domain to that of direct concern to us here, Alyson Cole high-
lights the way in which vulnerability, combined with the category of ‘victim
precipitation’, was pressed into service in the 1930s and 40s by American crimi-
nology, for which it served the effort to shed light on what the victims of crimes
or misdeeds have in common. It served to bolster the argument according to
which some individuals are destined, or predisposed, to become victims. In
this way, vulnerable individuals wind up finding themselves as the “co-authors”
of the crime, or at least as constituting, together with the murderer, a “penal
couple.”54
What explains the occurrence of the harmful event, it is claimed, is, if not
the lack of resistance of the persons affected, then their lack of agility, their
absence of adaptation in the face of a changing world, their inability to estab-
lish symbolic, psychological or material resources for themselves, or to make
use of them, so as to respond to this event. Otherwise put, with this couple
resilience/vulnerability, “vulnerability is figured as a shortcoming, an impend-
ing failure.”55
When it comes to the question of the possible slide into poverty, critical
thought intersects with what has constituted an important part of the dis-
course of European sociology in the last fifteen years: a denunciation of the
grammars, public policies, measures and modes of management that are built
around so many injunctions to autonomy and forms of individual accountabil-
ity, whether personal or penal. We are thereby exhorted to place ourselves at
the heart, and as the sole causal powers, of one’s life plans. Against these rising
neo-liberal waters Castel reminds us that there exists a vulnerability proper
to the capacity to act, which always depends upon the collective supports
that it finds in social organisation. To be able to conduct herself, an individual
requires ‘supports’, that is to say she depends upon a ‘social property’ compris-
ing rights, resources and sufficient protections. Failing to take this into account
or else to assign politics the task of guaranteeing these supports thus ends up
simply reinforcing the empty and culpabilising injunction to be an individual,
an injunction that today is generalized throughout all spheres of social life.
The coherence of this critique seems to have borne out; especially so as
under the name of resilience, companies have turned vulnerability into a
54 See A. M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006,
pp. 123 sq.
55 M. Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self, Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002, p. 71.

24 Ferrarese
resource for fostering reflection on new forms of management, in particular

of managing crises. Sometimes these companies are not multinationals, for
example, but instead form part of a local property regime, and as such are
granted the power to rebuild a community or a territory.56 More radically still,
Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper have shown that the notion of resilience,
in particular in its economic interpretation, owes much to the Austrian liberal
conception, above all Friedrich von Hayek’s, and interpret the recent success
of the term resilience as a result of its “intuitive ideological fit with a neoliberal
philosophy of complex adaptive systems.”57
This critique unquestionably and astutely registers a mutation in the modes
of management and government, largely demonstrated in the wake of the
work done by Ève Chiapello and Luc Boltanski,58 and notably also by Richard
Sennett,59 for whom social context has become a site of permanent testing and
evaluation with which individuals must contend – a mutation of undeniable
omnipotence and noxiousness.
The solution sometimes put forward, namely to abandon this perverse,
manipulable and always-already manipulated notion of vulnerability is more
contestable, however. This is because vulnerability is indeed a site of legiti-
mate moral expectations. It is a category that enables us to take into account
lives-at-the-mercy-of, lives dependent for their continuance on capricious or
shaky forms of protection, lives tethered to a very small number of possibili-
ties. It translates powerlessness and a feeling of abandonment. Referring to the
inflicting of a wrong that is yet, or yet fully, to take place, it harbours demands
and hopes of intervention.
For all these reasons, vulnerability does not work as a tool for governing
populations. Such representations, discourses and expectations urge us to
envisage another concept of vulnerability, one devoid of the theoretical bag-
gage of risk, freed from the obsession for mastery, and with a clarified and
proven normative content.
Overthrowing the dominant model of vulnerability in the social sciences
must, it seems to me, extend through a dialogue with philosophy, as only then
56 S. S. Kuo and B. Means, “After the Storm: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Locally
Owned Business,” in M. Fineman and A. Grear (eds.), Vulnerability. Reflections on a New
Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 95–106.
57 J. Walker and M. Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political
Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue, vol. 42(2), 2011, pp. 143–160.
58 L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott, London: Verso,
2005.
59 R. Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

will we be able to elucidate the simultaneously descriptive and normative

reach of the concept of vulnerability.
1.3 Vulnerability as Doubly Filtered by the Social Sciences and

Philosophy
Vulnerability appears only so long as responses to it have been conceptual-
ised, or their necessity proven. Moreover, it would scarcely seem possible
to distinguish a perception of vulnerability from the recognition of it: for, to
speak about vulnerability necessarily involves the prior sketch of a response
to it (and which may of course be inadequate, insufficient or even take the
form of a refusal).
Henceforth, vulnerability is defined only on the basis of its normative impli-
cations, of the perceived moral obligations that arise when faced with it, and/
or the political reasoning and arrangements connected with them. Otherwise
put, it only appears insofar as it entails a horizon of obligations (fulfilled or not,
but perceived by some and, in any case, by whoever uses the terms) and of
normative reasoning. It may be a matter of obligations that you attribute to
yourself, or that you impute to others, and that, in one or the other case, you
allocate in a principled fashion or by default. In the latter variation of imput-
ing it to others, the notion of vulnerability may carry with it an injunction for
the state to act, an imperative addressed to institutions to protect or palliate.
It is therefore necessary to explore the normative horizon that each evo-
cation of vulnerability creates, to interrogate the set of norms that underpin
it and convey the representation of a non-mutilated life, and to question its
validity. This task falls to political and moral philosophy. I illustrate this exer-
cise of clarification in the next part.
Philosophizing on vulnerability demands that we decipher all that it entails:
the horizon of duties, of moral reasoning, reasons given, accepted, asked-for
and so on. At the same time, this can only be done by isolating, thanks to the
methods proper to the social sciences, the way in which caring for vulnera-
bility is prey to structural distortions and can engender reifying effects. More
broadly, it is the remit of the social sciences to inquire into the way in which the
normative contents attached to the notion of vulnerability are implemented
in social reality, in which they transform this reality and are altered in it. For
a critical theory seeking to articulate itself normatively with immanent prac-
tices, it is necessary to interrogate the contexts in which political and moral
norms are effectively used. Without such an inquiry, it is impossible for critical
thinking to establish whether the ideals upon which it rests possess the eman-
cipatory reach that it presumes them to have. It also falls to the social sciences
to shed light on phenomena whereby certain normative contents are inverted

26 Ferrarese
into their contraries, and the modalities according to which the expectations
and obligations associated with the idea of vulnerability can mutate into forms
of subjection or can combine with certain of them. It thereby becomes pos-
sible to understand the use of vulnerability for purposes of government as a
paradox, in the sense that Critical Theory lends this word, which is to say, an
attempt to concretise an intention that produces conditions that run counter
to the initial intention.
In addition, precisely because they submit vulnerability to a rule of com-
parison, the social sciences, as we have noted, can gauge effects and manifesta-
tions specific to vulnerability. They can gauge, for example, the incapacitating
effect, upon a vulnerable person, of the perception that she has of the vulner-
ability of her acts and her body, or the manifestations of an awareness of being
exposed to ills that organisations, laws or persons may inflict upon her. For, the
suffering, humiliation and paralysis engendered by an awareness of a vulner-
ability can only proceed from a differentiating position, from a vulnerability
to which some are bound and others not, which is precisely what the social
sciences examine. It is thus possible for the social sciences to show something
that philosophy can only presuppose, which is that as soon as “such domina-
tion occurs, it will tend to be a matter of common knowledge among relevant
parties: each will know that each knows this”60 and this shared knowledge cre-
ates a vulnerability en abyme, by weakening my subjective image, but also by
recalling me constantly to the order of my objective position.
Moreover, the social sciences alone are capable of bringing out the com-
plexity of the social production of vulnerability, which is made of so many
demands, perceptions and comparisons, which the individuals concerned
undertake, as do those who are not so concerned or not from the same point
of view. The path that Veena Das, for example, has taken is to account for the
daily polyphonic production of vulnerability. Das tracks the social production
of vulnerable lives in its ordinariness, at the level of interactions, as it passes
via controversial or shared models, attentions or inattentions, acts of recogni-
tion of a pain, a life, etc., acts that come to pass or do not.61 Pascale Molinier
provides us with another example of the power of enlightenment that the
social sciences can have when not limited to a causal monism reducing vul-
nerability to an institutional fiction, by highlighting an unlikely mechanism
wherein vulnerability is generated – job culture. The job culture of nurses she
thus describes as “an art of living with defeat,” a condition of acceptance but
60 P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000, p. 168.
61 Das, Life and Words.

also of elaboration of vulnerability insofar as it comprises discrete knowledge

of caring for distress as much as strategies of collective defence that end up
distributing vulnerability among patients unequally.62
Lastly, the social sciences allow us to establish how different forms of vulner-
ability come together in a system, enabling us to see, for example, how precar-
ity at work, fragility of status in terms of papers and rights, exposure to violence
from a partner or a transient protector, all work to reinforce one another; how
powerlessness against an employer and dependence upon a spouse are mutu-
ally supporting. At issue here is not some inexorable logic of social factors, of
handicaps requiring expert assessment. At issue, very concretely, are the very
material dilemmas that some people have to arbitrate, by ‘choosing’ between
the detrimental events faced with which they submit.
Establishing a dialogue between philosophy and the social sciences is espe-
cially urgent as the existing division of labour between both domains on this
topic contains a blind spot. The difficulty that the social sciences manifest vis-
à-vis the notion of vulnerability – to the point of confining it within modali-
ties of mastery – most certainly proceeds from what Bruno Latour called the
purifying work of the modern constitution, which demands a complete and
ceaselessly reaffirmed separation between the natural world and the social
world.63 Exposure to harmful events that cannot be subsumed under the name
of risk, then get attributed, along with those who are its object, to that which is
hidden behind the visible world, in particular to ‘nature’. Vulnerability is thus
understood as ontological, whereby social vulnerability, grasped as risk, simply
works to double it. The radical extraneousness of both these vulnerabilities is
secured by a division of tasks, with the former being imparted to the philoso-
phers, the latter to the social sciences. The absence of a reflective loop between
both domains can only work to fuel these frenetic processes of separation.
Dismissing corporeal vulnerability because it is ontological in status will not
prevent it from re-emerging right throughout social mechanisms, for example
by obliging persons to enter into relations of domination – patriarchal families,
procurers or indeed employer-employee relations, unquestionably offer effec-
tive forms of caring for ‘ontological’ vulnerabilities. More broadly, the division
effected has political consequences and effects of dissimulation induced by
the distribution of properties between social and ontological vulnerability: the
62 P. Molinier, “Le care à l’épreuve du travail. Vulnerabilités croisées et savoir-faire discrets,”
in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds.), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris:
Editions de l’EHESS, 2006, pp. 312–315.
63 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993, p. 87.

28 Ferrarese
attribution to one but not to the other; of an unquestionability to one but not
to the other; of a fictiveness to one; of an ineradicability to the other of a politi-
cal pertinence, and so on.
It pertains to philosophy and the social sciences alike to call into ques-
tion the work of separation between the natural world and the social world.
The point is not to apprehend objects that are distributed in advance on each
side of a border; it is to bring to light what the perpetual erecting and bolster-
ing of that border enables, forgets and dissimulates, as much as to effect its
displacement. Nature and society can no longer constitute explanatory terms,
but in each instance presume a joint explanation. Both ‘social’ vulnerability
and ‘ontological’ vulnerability must be thought through together, whereby we
shall see that they engender and co-produce one another.
Part 2: Contemporary Moral Philosophy: Three Models of

Vulnerability and Three Accompanying Problems
Theories of recognition, Hegelian or otherwise, as well as the ethics of care;

certain neo-republican writings in a break with their tradition; Butler’s rea-
soning on the idea of precarious lives; Nussbaum’s thinking through the fra-
gility of the good life; and so on – all attest to the propagation of the theme
of vulnerability, bodily and psychological, in moral philosophy. All evoke the
vulnerability of the human being, and indeed of the living being in general, as
constitutive, primordial, common. This anthropology of vulnerability has prob-
ably been presented most radically, because it is most paradoxical, by Adriana
Cavarero. Arguing that the only figure of invulnerability – invulnerable in
the sense of being incapable of suffering and therefore no longer exposed to
affront – to be found in recent history is the ‘Muselmann’ of the extermination
camps, she concludes: “Invulnerability does not occur in nature; it has to be
produced artificially.”64
In this sense, these theories respond to the political urgency to counter the
figure of the self-engendered and self-sufficient subject, down to its recent
incarnations. A proteiform idea of empowerment; theories of identity wager-
ing on a high and mighty assertion of the subject; a paradigm, now flush right
throughout the social sciences, of the negotiation of life pathways and prefer-
ences: the decomposition of Marxist political subjectivity and the paradoxes
of postmodern structures left the field open to the evidence of a subject that,
64 A. Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. W. McCuaig, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 35.

while clearly unable to choose itself freely, can constitute itself as its own man-
ager, ensuring, if not rationally, then at least cleverly, the arithmetic sum of its
possibilities and its identity facets. The anthropology outlined by contempo-
rary reflections on vulnerability is, however, radically antithetical.
Endorsing an anthropology of vulnerability presents no a priori problems
with thinking of vulnerabilities as constructed en abyme, that is to say, some
theorists posit a universally shared vulnerability that is doubled by a strong
susceptibility to wrong. All contemporary theories of vulnerability uphold this
conviction. All admit that our constitutive vulnerability materialises in differ-
entiated vulnerable states, as, for example, in bodies that are more affectable
because they have already been affected and whose particularity results from
a collective history,65 or because human institutions always protect, in their
very arranging of circumstances, certain individuals while exposing others to
different forms of events and wrongs. No matter which life, no matter which
power of acting is able to be exploited or threatened, for example, by a system
of reimbursement for medical care, immigration policies or a dearth of access
ramps to public buildings. Some theorists thus aim to forge typologies. In their
Vulnerability: New Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Catriona MacKenzie, Wendy
Rogers and Susan Dodges distinguish three types of vulnerability: inherent
vulnerability is “intrinsic to the human condition,” situational vulnerability is
“context specific,” and pathogenic vulnerability stems from abuse, injustice, or
oppression.66 Butler’s proposal is to juxtapose precariousness, which refers to
a shared and constitutive vulnerability, against precarity, which is understood
as a politically produced condition to which some subjects are more exposed
than others.
The fact remains that the affirmation of the ontological – anthropological
or constitutive – status of vulnerability present problems of both a categorial
and political nature: how can an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertain-
ing to human nature be a wellspring for critique or a medium of emancipa-
tion? How can the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to
account for socially produced or configured vulnerabilities? How can we avoid
reproducing the viewpoint of two parallel vulnerabilities that are closed in on
themselves in their causal logic and their normative implications? How are we
to avoid transforming vulnerability into yet another abstraction?
65 See, N. Michel, “Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Toward a Critical

Black Politics of Vulnerability,” Critical Horizons, vol. 17(2), Special Issue “The Politics of
Vulnerability,” 2016, pp. 240–260.
66 C. MacKenzie, W. Rogers and S. Dodges, Vulnerability: New Ethics and Feminist Philosophy,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 7–9.

30 Ferrarese
All of the authors involved in this theoretical constellation seek, moreover,

to articulate, frequently in a polemical tone, vulnerability and power to act,
vulnerability and autonomy, or vulnerability and activity. All emphasise the
idea that vulnerability does not mean passivity, contrary to the majority of
social science researchers who draw on the category of risk. But all also under-
score that a large share of our capacities are deployed against or on the basis of
a vulnerability. Distinguishing between four figures of capacity, speaking,
acting, narrating and imputability,67 Paul Ricœur, for example, outlines four
forms of vulnerability affecting the capacity to be autonomous: forms relative
to speech, action, the capacity to conform to a symbolic order, and the possibil-
ity to hold oneself for the author of one’s own acts. And he defines autonomy
as the task engendered in each case by the trial of vulnerability. Autonomy and
vulnerability thus mutually presuppose one another.
This demonstration has been variously undertaken. Butler, for example,
conceptualises an “enabling vulnerability”:68 the address of the other being
that which constitutes us as subject, we come into being by means of a depen-
dency on the other. Similarly, Erinn Gilson develops a critique of the negative
representations of vulnerability, representations that associate it uniquely with
powerlessness, weakness, a susceptibility to wrong. She endeavours to redefine
it as a condition, an experience, ambiguous, indeterminate, bearing an “open-
ness to alteration.” Borrowing notably from Deleuze, she establishes vulner-
ability as “the necessary condition of creative, critical and novel becomings.”69
Rather than as an objective property, most philosophers of vulnerability
present capacity as a potentially existing disposition among all human beings,
whereupon the issue is one of mobilising, shaping or awakening it. This stance
gives rise to a multiform reflection on the complex relational, material and
social conditions thanks to which human subjects can become autonomous
As Jean-Louis Génard has suggested, it would seem that a disjunctive anthro-
pology, founded in mutual exclusion and autonomy, is being superseded by a
“conjunctive anthropology”70 instituting a continuum between passivity and
activity, between vulnerability and the power to act.
67 P. Ricœur, “Autonomie et vulnerabilité,” in A. Garapon, D. Salas ed., La justice et le mal,

Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997, p. 166 sq.
68 J. Butler, Excitable Speech, New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 2.
69 E. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, New
York, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 140.
70 J.-L. Génard, “Une réflexion sur l’anthropologie de la fragilité, de la vulnerabilité et de la
souffrance,” in T. Perilleux and J. Cultiaux (eds.), Destins politiques de la souffrance, Paris:
Erès, 2009, pp. 27–45.

Against the backdrop of that relative unity, it is possible to highlight three

thematic poles that structure this propagation of the idea of vulnerability in
moral philosophy, poles understood as constituted in a field of tensions and
that never exist in pure form. Meanings overlap, they slide from one theoreti-
cal constellation to another and, conversely, no single model can contain the
entirety of a theory.
It nonetheless appears possible, in my view, to distinguish between: the
model of an exposure to physical and moral injury; a current of thought that
strictly associates the idea of vulnerability with the idea of dependency; and,
lastly, a tendency to make vulnerability a synonym for the impropriety of self.
In what follows, I endeavour to map these theoretical unities before determin-
ing what unites them, namely their manner of grasping the political.
2.1 Three Competing Models of Vulnerability

A first set of theories conceives of vulnerability as an exposure to the injuring of
one’s physical or psychological integrity. Such an approach centres on the pos-
sibility of a violation enacted on an entity that gets altered, mutilated by this
violation; it alludes to an integrity that is handed over without control to the
will of others, and even to the social structures and pathologies that give shape
to the interaction. Vulnerability here is almost a synonym of destructibility. It
presumes a strong distinction between vulnerability and dependency, the first
referring to the idea of an indeterminacy, of opening onto the world, whereas
dependency always happens to be at the threshold of subordination and there-
fore of determinacy. It is possible, incidentally, to conceive of phenomena, of
strategies of transition to dependency, that permit one to escape vulnerability
thus outlined (for example, by accepting protection from a mafia).
Since the publication of Precarious Life, Butler’s reflection has centred on
the violability and affectability of the body, following Cavarero and her medi-
tations on the “irremediable exposure” of the vulnerable body to the “ontologi-
cal crimes” that consist in breaching physical integrity and to the violence that
render this body unrecognizable.71 According to Butler, corporeal integrity
materialises only as an exposure to injury. Our bodies are tied to one another,
a tie that exposes them to the risk of losing these bonds as much as to the
wounds inflicted by others, to affront, to brutality, to the meting out of pain.
Vulnerability is defined, then, by our bodies’ persistence and integrity being
entrusted to the (good) will of others, by our lives and our capacities being in a
71 A. Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. P. A. Kottman, London
and New York: Routledge, 2000; Horrorism.

32 Ferrarese
state of absolute defencelessness faced with others’ power of acting.72 Though

Butler tries also to uphold a more constructivist approach to vulnerability,
according to which ‘precarity’ is not prior to its recognition and “specific lives
cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as
living,”73 she is unable to avoid the vocabulary, or perspective, of a body that
precedes and is almost resistant in its affectability to its recognition and its
constitution as a human body worthy or not of being loved and mourned.
The model of exposure to injury is also the model to which contemporary
theories of recognition subscribe and shall be examined in detail in the next
part. At this stage, let’s simply note that these theories unambiguously outline
a moral vulnerability conceived by homology with bodily vulnerability. Just
as the human body is open to physical injury at each instant, the psyche is
constantly exposed to wrong and moral injury, that is to say, disrespect. Jürgen
Habermas and Axel Honneth both describe a kind of vulnerability stemming
from the fact that “unless the subject externalizes in interpersonal relations
through language, he is unable to form that inner center that is his personal
identity. This explains the almost constitutional insecurity and chronic fragil-
ity of personal identity.”74 Here again we come across the idea of an absence
of protection. Habermas states, for example, that in order to constitute herself
“the person is pushed ever further into an ever-denser network of reciprocal
defencelessness.”75
With this model, the ethical attitude consists in abstaining from inflicting
a lesion, correlative to the idea of a breach not to be inflicted on the integrity
of something. The anthropology of vulnerability in Butler’s work thus serves as
a basis for an ethics of non-violence. Just as with Levinas, the fact that others
find themselves in a state of absolute nudity vis-à-vis my acts founds the ethi-
cal demand not to use my power. At issue, notably, is to break with “postures
of sovereignty and persecution,”76 the former consisting in inflicting violence
in order to ensure one’s own invulnerability, the latter, qua characteristic of
subjects who define themselves as wounded and persecuted, in enabling forms
of violence that are not acknowledged as such. More broadly, the ontology of
the body described in Precarious Life or Frames of War serves her as a “point
72 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London/New York: Verso,
2006, pp. 28–9.
73 J. Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009, p. 1.
74 J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and
S. Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, 199.
75 J. Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, transl. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, p. 123 (my emphasis).
76 Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? p. 57.

of departure for a rethinking of responsibility.”77 Obligations, she argues,

attach to our constitutive vulnerability, in particular the obligation to work
towards undoing the unequal distribution of exposure to violence: “It cannot
be that the other is destructible and I am not, nor vice-versa.”78 This ethical
obligation to minimise precarity is one that imposes itself on us without our
consent. Shared vulnerability even comes to be laid down as a base that holds,
or ought to hold, people together, as founding a minimal imperative of solidar-
ity, which arises when it evokes “our collective responsibility for the physical
lives of one another.”79
A second idea of vulnerability can be distinguished that is closer to the
idea of dependency. This idea is present, notably, in theories of care, but it also
threads its way through neo-republican theories. In the ethics of care, both
concepts tend to become confounded, as is illustrated in several passages in
which there is an unmediated slippage from one to the other. Take the follow-
ing sentence from Tronto: “Throughout our lives, all of us go through varying
degrees of dependence and independence, of autonomy and vulnerability.”80
The anthropology upheld by the ethics of care rests on the fact that all of us at
some point of our existence find ourselves in an exacerbated situation of vul-
nerability, whether tied to childhood, old-age or illness, whereas our life paths,
and even our most anodyne activities, depend upon an invisible work of care
carried out by others. Here, life (or the good life) in all points depends not on
an abstention, but on an act that the person who is threatened cannot accom-
plish by herself. Survival, or the upkeep of a positive relation to self, depends
upon the settling of a positive obligation, of carrying out an act, administering
care or performing daily gestures, the importance of which shows up when
they happen to be missing. Whence the cardinal importance of the motif of
dependency, which Patricia Paperman construes as “dependency toward
care providers.”81 This expression makes it possible to conceive of the wrongs
inflicted by the inaction of others rather than by their action, something that
the metaphor of injury proscribes. The harmful event – the susceptibility to
which the term vulnerability refers – is less the image of a blow struck than
that of abandonment. The moral agent is above all an attentive and consid-
erate agent: attentiveness, which refers to a capacity to perceive a need or a
77 Ibid., p. 33.

78 Ibid., p. 48.
79 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 30.
80 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, p. 135.
81 P. Paperman, “Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel,” in P. Paperman, and
S. Laugier (eds.), Le souci des autres. Ethique et politique du care, p. 289.

34 Ferrarese
suffering, whether expressed or silent, glaring or minute, is central for theories

of care. According to Tronto, its absence constitutes in itself a form of “moral
failing.”82 Attention materialises in acts or a way of doing (or of not doing) that
befits the needs of the recipient – including needs of distance or aloofness –
and is fitting since it comes at the right moment.
Lastly, there exists a heterogeneous set of theories in which constitutive vul-
nerability is defined as a form of impropriety of self.83 We find this definition,
for example, in Martha Nussbaum, Philip Pettit and also Martha Fineman. In
these authors, the fragility afflicting the human capacity to act is perceived as
problematic when it falls under one of two different aspects: either vulner-
ability derives from a subordination to contingency or it means susceptibil-
ity to subordination and domination. The first form is the one that occupies
Nussbaum, who develops the idea of an exposure to fate, to ‘circumstances’,
and who paints the picture of a blind and painful dependency on that which
may come to pass. The only mastery thus left to the human being in some sense
resides in the possibility of intensifying one’s own vulnerability: “By ascribing
value to philia in a conception of the good life we make ourselves more vulner-
able to loss.”84 Pettit, for his part, engages in a reflection on the latter form,
identifying vulnerability with the fact of having to live in a way that exposes
us to ills that others are in a position to inflict upon us arbitrarily. Vulnerability
is therefore the direct effect of domination and as such Pettit can make it
the key concept of his republicanism, which is characterised by the convic-
tion that a person is denied freedom when others have an arbitrary power of
interference over her, whether they avail themselves of it or not. Freedom is
understood here not as self-mastery but as an absence of mastery by others.
Warding off vulnerability thus entails ensuring the intersubjective and social
conditions of non-domination. While Pettit focuses on the institutional and
constitutional modalities of this non-domination, John Maynor, who in Pettit’s
wake also endeavours to suture the theme of vulnerability to neo-republican
thought, insists on the essential ‘reciprocal’ dimension of non-domination, on
the way in which it translates into interpersonal relations. According to him,

83 The contemporary uses of the term vulnerability within the social sciences studied
in the previous part pertain massively to the category of the impropriety of self, even if in
a rather particular manner, since they unite around the same aspiration to mastery and
self-engendering, something the authors discussed above do not share.
84 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 361.

an obligation weighs upon each of us to concern ourselves with the interests of

individuals upon whom our own actions may impact.85
Depending upon the philosophical model under consideration, the answer
to the question of attribution of responsibility differs. Notably, a fundamental
difference exists between the model of exposure to injury and that of vulner-
ability as dependency: in the former case, causal responsibility coincides with
the responsibility of an action, in the sense that it initially falls to the agent
able to inflict the fatal violation to hold off acting upon it. The latter model
provides us with considerations on special responsibilities that are inher-
ent to the existence of specific personal relations, to our condition of being
attached to others. The moral agent is defined by her entanglement, which is
constitutive. By setting out from this argument, the ethics of care deploys a
conception of action as a response and, consequently, as springing from a rela-
tion rather than emanating from an ego. Responsibility, however, ultimately
falls to the one who perceives the need, as is suggested by the aforementioned
and central theme of attention to the other. This model of vulnerability thus
becomes a site for reflecting upon a series of historical arrangements to which
the problem of attributing that responsibility has given rise, arrangements that
are vectors of domination. Highlighting multiple measures (ideological con-
structions, sedimentation of gender roles, biographical scripts, incorporation
of social structures, phantasmagoria of romantic love, and so on) by which the
attention to others has traditionally been imparted to feminine subjects, this
set of theories makes clear that settling a moral obligation and subordination
are frequently intimately linked.
Lastly, for the model of the impropriety of self, avoiding some frightful
event, explosion of fate, or play of the arbitrary, becomes the central focus of a
questioning in which what is at stake is the existence of an obligation and its
attributability, an obligation that is generally entrusted to an institutional third
party. To the extent that invulnerability is never presented as an alternative
(since all adopt the starting point of an anthropology of vulnerability), criti-
cal reflection first aims to discern the point at which vulnerability becomes
morally problematic and a legitimate object of collective organisation. This
is the meaning of Nussbaum’s elaboration, some years after The Fragility of
Goodness, of a list of central capabilities that, explicitly associated with the
idea of ‘threshold level’, make it possible to distinguish among the ‘circum-
stances’ with which human beings are confronted, in accordance with what
85 J. Maynor, Republicanism in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

36 Ferrarese
is affected and with the intensity of that being affected.86 Once this limit or
threshold is determined, two major types of obligations – which are attrib-
uted to institutions or the political community broadly speaking – are estab-
lished regarding vulnerability thus understood: the issue is either to ensure
collectively for each person the possibility to defend herself against a wrong,
or else to avert the threat of exploitation by thwarting those who are in a posi-
tion to take advantage of an existing vulnerability. Illustrating the first option,
Fineman develops a theory of exposure to misfortune, disaster and violence
by defending the principle of a ‘responsive state’. For her, it falls to institutions
to guarantee the accumulation of resources of which individuals have need
to cope with the social, material and practical consequences of the harmful
events that may come about. Each person accumulates and squanders these
resources over the course of her life to respond to the situations with which
she is confronted. Fineman calls such resources ‘assets’. These assets are mate-
rial, human (and thus capabilities), social (they coincide with a network of
relations), ecological and existential (they refer to belief systems and to cul-
ture in the broad sense). On this view, moral obligation mainly weighs on the
subject under threat, who is enjoined to get back up after being struck down,
and secondarily on the state, which is obliged to ensure the distribution of
these assets based on the principle of equal opportunity.87 Fineman’s model,
according to which the only responsibility not incumbent upon the vulnerable
person herself is the obligation that falls to institutions to equip her so that
she can cope, privileges social adaptation over critique or over the transforma-
tion of existing structures and social relations. Besides, though Fineman takes
into consideration inequalities of resources between individuals, she leaves
inequalities in power in the shadows. Projecting a highly voluntarist concep-
tion of the social world, she also revives, by mobilising the idea of resilience, a
quasi-Darwinian understanding of the human being, defined by its capacity to
go beyond itself thanks to the challenges with which it is confronted – a defini-
tion that contradicts the anthropology of vulnerability that she nonetheless
claims to endorse.
Pettit combines both possible responses to the impropriety of self. To recall:
one consists in guaranteeing each person the possibility to defend herself
86 M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000, p. 12.
87 M. Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism vol. 20(1), 2008;
M. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” in
M. Fineman, and A. Grear (eds.), Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for
Law and Politics, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 13–28.

against wrong; the other, in preventing the threat of exploitation. Conceiving

non-domination as a form of power – a power to prevent certain wrongs from
being done to us88 – he posits a collective obligation to ensure an ability to
challenge every act of interference, that is to say, to institutionalize the pos-
sibility of challenging and overturning others’ choices and acts to the extent
that they affect us. In the framework of the employer-employee relation, for
example, vulnerability commands reinforcing employee protections, a rein-
forcement that consists in re-balancing an initially asymmetrical relationship
and rendering possible an increase in a worker’s power of acting, which is
expressed in the mode of protest.
All three approaches to vulnerability, each distinguishable owing to its
specific set of normative implications, attribute a varying status to the body,
without ever establishing a strong boundary between psychological or moral
vulnerability, on the one hand, and bodily vulnerability, on the other.
In the case of vulnerability conceived as ‘exposure to injury’, notably as illus-
trated in theories of recognition, the homology established between bodily
vulnerability and psychological vulnerability by no means prevents us from
conceiving these different types of vulnerability as addressing each other and
mutually enabling each other. Honneth considers violations perpetrated on
bodily integrity, such as rape or torture, simultaneously as attempts at destroy-
ing psychological integrity. Butler, for her part, insists on the theme of the
capacity to act, rather than on the idea of an already existing psychological
integrity, one pre-existing the game of interaction that nonetheless ceaselessly
modifies its field. But this capacity to act is precisely made possible by the
vulnerable body: “the ‘coming-up-against’ is one modality that defines the
body. And yet this obtrusive alterity against which the body finds itself can
be, and often is, what animates responsiveness to that world.”89 The ‘enabling’
vulnerability she describes is twofold: exposure to the other is the mark, the
other name, of integrity, and responding to bodily vulnerability-integrity is an
integrity-vulnerability of the capacity to act. Each term is the matrix of the
other. This construal, then, presumes an absolute transitivity between two
manifestations of vulnerability.
In theories of dependency, ‘bodily’ vulnerability and ‘moral’ vulnerability
are placed along a continuum, one within which life, and thus the good life,
hangs not upon an abstention, but on the realisation of an act. Tronto thus
writes, rather strikingly: “we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activ-
ity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our
88 Pettit, Republicanism, p. 69.

89 Butler, Frames of War, p. 34.

38 Ferrarese
‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our
bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in
a complex, life-sustaining web.”90 In addition, the ethics of care insists on the
very material and bodily aspect of the moral act: care is defined simultaneously
as an affect and as an activity.91 Care is almost never only an attitude; it almost
always presupposes very concrete and often very hard work (hard especially
because it entails caring for the most bodily needs of others). Molinier has
notably highlighted the multiplicity of planes upon which the body imposes
itself in the care relation: the weary bodies of caregivers; the insistent or resis-
tant, deficient, heavy or repugnant bodies of care receivers; and the sexualized
bodies of the ones and the others.92 From the care perspective, the moral rela-
tion is a particular relation between two (or multiple) bodies.
Lastly, the model of the impropriety of self has vulnerability coincide with
the threat weighing on the good or the ‘interests’ of the person. Among these
‘interests’ is the integrity of the body, which nonetheless is not attributed any
particular status. According to Pettit, vulnerability means living in a way that
exposes us to the ills that others are in a position to inflict upon us arbitrarily.
This infliction covers a large range of behaviours, including, insofar as coercion
against one’s will and manipulation are concerned, “coercion of the body, as
in restraint or obstruction,”93 though Pettit does not back us this assertion. In
Nussbaum, physical vulnerability is, in the light of Greek tragedies, interpreted
in the less material and vaster terms of a powerlessness before the affronts of
war, death and betrayal.
While they differ on all other points, all three models of vulnerability share
the fact that they never present bodily vulnerability as being of another order
than moral or psychological vulnerability; each instance is only the manifesta-
tion of a broader exposure. By juxtaposing these three models we learn that
wherever vulnerability is at issue, the body is always caught, upon close inspec-
tion, in a fabric of expectations that exceed it.
There is another feature common to contemporary theories that undertake
to conceive of vulnerability as a moral object and affirm its constitutive and
shared character: a distancing of the political, either through its forgetting or
its strict limitation.

91 E. Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, New York:
Routledge, 1999, p. 30, J. Tronto, “Beyond Gender Differences to a Theory of Care,” Signs,
12(4), 1987, pp. 644–662; P. Molinier, Le travail du care, Paris, La Dispute, 2013, pp. 29–90.
92 Molinier, Le travail du care.
93 Pettit, Republicanism, p. 53.

2.2 The Problem of the Political

Among the philosophies of vulnerability, politics is sometimes simply nowhere
to be found. More frequently, however, it gets reduced to the simple institu-
tional incorporation of reasoning about justice. On the one hand, these philos-
ophies talk in terms of the realisation of an order conceived elsewhere. When
they become aware of something that resists the logic of institutionalisation,
it is limited to the force of a cultural or territorial particularity, or else to the
necessity of adjusting moral principles to conjunctural elements. On the other
hand, reasoning about politics takes the form of a descent into the everyday, of
a dive into the mediocrity of the world such as it really is.
The reasons that politics ought to take charge of existing forms of vulnera-
bility are irrefutably of a moral order, failing which a conception of vulnerabil-
ity as fiction, as the production of a particular mode of government, is bound
to emerge. However, this does not oblige us to limit politics to an ethics.
In order to avoid these pitfalls, I regard the political as more than a sim-
ple instrument or transparent medium; instead, the political possesses its
own movement and is endowed with immanent effects. Such is what the old
word of praxis, for example, sought to account for insofar as it points to the
activity of transformation of relations to others and to the social world, and
insofar as the subject of praxis is constantly transformed through the experi-
ence in which she is engaged, an experience that she forges but that also forges
her. More broadly, the normative order is not without remainder, a something
that in the political exceeds the institutional incorporation of moral princi-
ples, and a something that has to do with political action, with the power that
materialises in it.94
However, contemporary theories of vulnerability rarely discern this some-
thing. In what follows, considerations of space prevent an exhaustive review of
contemporary arguments on the question. So, for each of the above-delimited
models I will simply give an illustration of the trouble or difficulty that, in its
94 I put forward a more detailed reflection on the notion of the political in the final part.
On the semantic level, I distinguish ‘the’ political as a mode of organisation of people
among themselves, from politics, which rather refers to the ‘art of governing communi-
ties’, as Jacques Rancière would say, and to the institutional exercise of this power. It is
important to be aware of the depreciative effects that redound on politics whenever we
set out from this division, which seems to assign to it the fluctuating and the everyday,
whereas the political is imparted that which is notable and invariant. The reason for my
choice of using this division nonetheless, is that the political gathers the ‘remainder’ just
mentioned.

40 Ferrarese
diverse forms, the political as an autonomous logic generates when it comes to

thinking about vulnerability.
2.2.1 Exposure to Injury

Butler, then, does not actually succeed, despite her multiple declarations, in
educing a politics of vulnerability. The theme of vulnerability in her work car-
ries the necessity to react to the different forms of violent violations of bodily
integrity and the sort of autonomy that it renders possible, and to make it the
subject of an ethics and a politics. However, it is essentially ethics that is at
issue here.
Butler’s terminology does not exclude the language of rights, as it had when
her concern essentially bore on language and its force of conformation of
the world; for example, she now admits the principle of rights that guarantee
bodily integrity and self-determination.95 The political spirit of her remarks
on vulnerability is nonetheless to be found more in the will she manifests to
extend the spectrum of lives that are counted as lives and rendered recogniz-
able as such. She seems, in places, to open a reflection on the wellsprings of
political motivation, to which she imputes a desire for a recognition, a desire
that slips away again and again, “that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsat-
isfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of avail-
able norms.”96 But in vain does one look for a development on the means of
transforming, whether through their conscious appropriation or their reversal,
the “frameworks of recognition” that grant life – and therefore vulnerability –
to some and not to others.
In her early work, and in particular in Gender Trouble, Butler elaborates
the idea, seemingly political in aim, of ‘subversion’, unfolding it on the basis
of a reflection on gender. Butler aims to take stock of the Foucauldian idea
according to which sexuality is constructed within relations of power to the
point that “a normative sexuality that is ‘before’, ‘outside or ‘beyond’ power is
a cultural impossibility and a politically impracticable dream.”97 Butler’s use
of the idea of subversion stands opposed to the horizon of emancipation,
which is rendered vain by the perspective of a society necessarily constituted
by power through and through. Subversion refers instead to the destabilizing
of the law in its claim to be self-grounding. For, though no possibilities exist
other than to repeat the law, the law does harbour possibilities of “unexpected

96 J. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 24.
97 J. Butler, Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 42

permutations”98 that turn it back against itself. Norms, in their very repetition,
proliferate in an unforeseeable manner. In other terms, the political moment
here consists in a modification of the equilibrium of a regime of power, in
a contraction of the system. Butler transposes this same reasoning onto the
theme of vulnerability. In Frames of War, she sets out from the idea that a life
is only perceptible insofar as the “frameworks of recognition” permit it, and
concludes with the idea that “the frame” never really contains the scene that
it is supposed to determine, that something always exceeds it. The frame is
perpetually undone and this process is simply the product of its circulation,
of its large-scale reproduction. “The technical conditions of reproduction and
reproducibility themselves produce a critical shifting, if not a full deteriora-
tion of context,”99 which she undertakes to illustrate through the circulation
of photos taken in Abu Ghraib, which, being of torture machinery and tech-
niques of humiliation, have become the chronicles of a war crime through the
mere play of their dissemination. Further on in her text, we indeed come to the
idea of political coalitions, of networks linked by “forms of political opposition
to certain state and other regulatory policies that effect exclusions, abjections,
partially or fully suspended citizenship.”100 Yet the way in which the ‘objectives’
of such networks could or ought to shape the norm understood as a power dif-
ferential, and its perpetual undoing, is not specified. The exercise would prob-
ably be pointless; indeed, apropos of another process of ‘iteration of the norm’,
which is always-already a displacement of this norm, we are reminded that
“iterability evades every voluntarism.”101 Vis-à-vis vulnerability, all we find then
is the response – of an ethical order – of responsibility.
The weakness of Butler’s theory appears even more clearly in “We, ‘the
People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” a text in which she explicitly tries
to link political action and vulnerable bodies. The assembly is analysed here as
a performative political affirmation, even if it precedes all speech acts or leaves
them out. This affirmation is performed by the vulnerable body.
Reprising the idea developed by Arendt of the public sphere as a sphere
of appearing, a sphere of explicitly sought-for and obtained visibility, Butler
maintains that what essentially appear in a demonstration are bodies: “Bodies
assemble precisely to show that they are bodies.”102 More precisely, bodies
98 Ibid. p. 127.

99 Butler, Frames of War, p. 9.
100 Ibid. p. 147.
101 Ibid., p. 170.
102 J. Butler, “ ‘We the people’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in Badiou et al. What Is a
People? New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 63.

42 Ferrarese
offer themselves to be seen as vulnerable, as bodies that need the support of

other bodies in order to survive. What is more, the body’s permanent exposure
to violence and affront, she argues, is made visible by the kind of threat specific
to demonstrations, such as, for instance, police bullets. But in what way would
bringing to light a shared vulnerability – thereby exposing the human condi-
tion – convince or force in itself the majority of the need to revise a law. How
would it constrain a government to alter a policy or to resign? Butler refuses to
conceive gathered bodies in the form of a powerful multitude. In which case,
then, what is required is to conceptualise an effect specific to vulnerability,
one that borrows nothing from the logic of the number, nor from that of argu-
mentation, nor from that of the symbol. But no such conceptualisation is to be
found. How can the performative affirmation of vulnerable bodies – as vulner-
able as all others – produce anything other than a redundancy? How can it
come to anything other than a confirmation of the existing?
Under the angles both of social transformation and of the power inherent
to political action, Butler thus fails to provide the political with a materiality.
2.2.2 The Impropriety of Self

Nussbaum’s theory provides us with a clear example of politics being limited
to the simple institutional incorporation of moral principles.
Nussbaum, as we’ve noted, conceives of vulnerability as the fact that we are
exposed to that which happens, to that which simply happens to us. The mani-
festations of this that she describes are psychological (tied to the bonds that
we form), ethical (in the sense that events, in particular extreme events, are
liable to corrupt one’s character and therefore corrupt the possibility to lead a
good life) and also physical (events to which women in particular are subject:
“it is women who are raped and enslaved in wartime, while their men at least
have the chance to die bravely. It is women whose bodies are regarded as part
of the spoils of war, to be possessed”.103 Apropos of political reality, it appears
that in her work the adjective generally seems to refer to nothing other than
the absence of metaphysical element.
Additionally, in 2001, fifteen years after The Fragility of Goodness was
first published, Nussbaum wrote a new preface to the book in which she
deplores the absence of the political dimension subtending its concerns.104
By way of correction, she assigns politics the function of dealing with the
absence of protection of the ever-exposed human being, attributing to it
the task of ensuring certain capabilities. For her, capabilities provide “a basis
103 Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 413.

104 Nussbaum, “Preface to the Revised Version,” in The Fragility of Goodness, p. XIX.

for central constitutional principles that citizens have a right to demand from
their governments.”105 The very modalities of this ‘correction’, however, seem
to me problematic. Presenting her misgivings about her previous stance, she
observes that many of the vulnerable elements of human life do not result
from its structure or from a mysterious natural necessity. She merely adds,
however, that they are the product of ignorance, of the lure of profit, of callous-
ness and different forms of malevolent behaviour. She thus makes the good
life’s exposure to certain disasters depend on politics, in the sense that existing
political arrangements do not manage to ward off certain types of malevolent
actions or inactions.
On the one hand, the field of deployment of politics corresponds to the
necessity to compensate for breaches of singular or collective moral obliga-
tions. This understanding supposes that Nussbaum set aside structural logics,
notably economic ones and phenomena of reification, which are as likely or
even more likely to hinder a “truly human mode of functioning,” to reprise the
expression by which she defines the normative horizon of her list of capabili-
ties, than malevolence is. Otherwise said, left out of the picture are the objec-
tive powers that determine individual existence in its innermost. Correlatively,
we may question the idea according to which eradicating malevolence, the
lure for profit, indifference and so on, is part of the remit of the political, and
not a finality imparted to morality.
On the other hand, Nussbaum, who shares the Aristotelian faith in the
capacity of passions to motivate a virtuous act, sees the solution in educa-
tion, leading her to conceive of a sort of government of emotions. From this
viewpoint, she endorses the utilisation of emotions by the arts – and by
philosophy – for didactic ends (we must, she often states, learn to become
‘tragic spectators’ in order to understand the fragility of the good life and of
life tout court). But Nussbaum also has in mind the school system and public
education, that is, a political orientation of emotions styled to serve a moral
and political aim.106
In general fashion, she maintains that an education in weakness and in
shared human vulnerability ought to be part of all instruction,107 and that
105 M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 12.
106 M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge:
The Belknap Press, 2006, p. 91.
107 M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001,
pp. 425–432; M. Nussbaum “Compassion and Terror,” in Daedalus, Winter 2003, vol. 132(1),
p. 23 sq.

44 Ferrarese
such an education presupposes cultivating certain emotions, such as compas-

sion, and curbing others that present obstacles to observing the world from the
viewpoint of others, such as envy, shame and repulsion. She describes this edu-
cation of course not as a sort of coercive indoctrination, because it is endowed
with a reflexive movement: as regards compassion, the aim is to teach children
not only to perceive the suffering of others, to imagine their emotions, but also
to tackle the risks of the movement of compassion, of likening the other to
oneself. For all that, the point would be to provide an education that aims at
curbing malevolence and inattention to others.
This project is therefore far more ambitious than the conception of educa-
tion defended by Rawls, on whom Nussbaum draws considerably. According
to Rawls, the state ought to concern itself with its subjects’ acquisition of a fac-
ulty for understanding political culture and participating in its institutions: he
confines the state concern for the education of students to their role as future
citizens. For Nussbaum, by contrast, the political is attributed the function of
making morally acceptable agents.
Lastly, this attempt at politicising ‘vulnerability’ belongs to a paradigm of
distribution. Politics is assigned the task of guaranteeing capabilities, a task
that must be understood as the institutional distribution of capacities and
opportunities. The paradigm of distribution refers justice to a principle of
equivalence, and/or reduces the ‘just’ to ‘proportion’, that is to say it reformu-
lates them as a distribution of goods between individuals, as the sharing out of
a more or less finite sum of material and symbolic goods or the redistribution
of existing capital, what is more in a normative universe that is always-already
contained (by the idea of distribution, insofar as the quarrel bears merely on
the application or interpretation of this principle). The focus on institutions
is a correlate of adopting this paradigm; the political becomes the space of
agencies and public policies. Taking up a place among these distributive theo-
ries, Nussbaum treats the citizen as a subject, in the passive sense of the term,
and brings no attention to bear on the “justice that citizens owe each other
mutually.”108 Nussbaum’s reflections on vulnerability thus go via a strong con-
ception of the state, but, precisely because she reduces the political field to this
statist conception, she sees politics as the operator of moral principles that
pre-exist in a sort of pure state and that are introduced, in the second instance,
into the concreteness of the social via institutions.
108 J. Shklar, “Justice et citoyenneté,” in J. Affichard and J. B. de Foucault ed., Pluralisme et

équité, Paris: Editions Esprit, 1995, p. 91.

2.2.3 Vulnerability as Dependency

Let us turn to Robert Goodin, whose theory of vulnerability is expressly
directed against arguments that ground our moral obligations in a voluntary
act (such as a contract or promise). According to Goodin, obligations are not
such for having been deliberately contracted. On the contrary, they draw their
moral and constraining force from the vulnerability of others to our actions
and from the awareness that we have of it. Correlatively, the level of respon-
sibility increases with the capacity to affect. Our responsibilities, which are
henceforth always ‘special’, regardless of the affective proximity we maintain
with those to whom we are obliged, are constituted with regard to a vulner-
ability conceived as a thoroughly relational concept.109
In this sense, Goodin supports a conception of vulnerability as dependence.
As he understands it, vulnerability demands giving moral equivalence to acts
and omissions, negative and positive obligations. It is not to the actions of a
violent or humiliating other that you are vulnerable, but to all those who do
not come to your aid. From there, it is possible to conceptualise a vulnerability
to “rich friends,”110 in the sense of your being vulnerable to the possibility of
them not lending you assistance when in need.
A relation of vulnerability is something Goodin considers problematic
from the viewpoint of justice (i.e. it is not so necessarily), when the possibility
to remove oneself from it does not exist or is threatened. This impossibility
can pertain to two different logics. On the one hand, it can proceed from the
importance, for the subordinate party, of resources controlled by person(s) on
whom this party depends. If this party has a cruel need, or desire, the per-
son on whom she depends is conferred an undeniable power – thus exposing
the party in question to the risk of exploitation. The other aspect concerns the
existence of alternative sources from which to procure oneself the resources
in question: if the subordinate party’s necessary resource is obtainable from a
single source only, this party is far more vulnerable.111
On the basis of this understanding of vulnerability and the responsibilities
it establishes, Goodin defends the idea of a collective responsibility that exists,
in the case of A’s vulnerability to the actions of a group, to organise and imple-
ment a coordinated schema of action such that A’s interests are protected by
this group. This implies, for each of the group’s members, a responsibility at
once to ensure that a plan of action is effectively organised, and to fulfil the
109 Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable, p. 112.

110 Ibid., p. 88.
111 Ibid., pp. 197–200.

46 Ferrarese
variously allocated, specific responsibilities pertaining to that organisation.112

From the collective point of view, two different obligations are thrown up,
in accordance with the context and type of vulnerability: either a collective
responsibility exists to ensure that someone undertakes what A’s vulnerability
makes it necessary to do, or it is up to each individual to perform what needs
doing.
Such a conception of collective responsibilities means that preventing a
vulnerability from giving rise to a form of exploitation can require two types
of action: either all exert pressure on a sole (person) (or at least all have an
obligation to be attentive to her existence or good will), or all strive to actively
prevent this situation. Social justice, along with the public policies devised
to implement it, thus takes the form here of measures to establish individual
responsibilities. Correlatively, when it comes to vulnerability, we discover,
as with Nussbaum, the exact same superposition of the moral agent and the
citizen.
Goodin’s reflections also lead to a (brief) defence of the welfare-state,
wherein the state is conceived as assuming a secondary responsibility. Since
only in the absence or deficiency of the primary responsible persons does
the state become responsible. Indeed, this role does not fall to it in the first
instance. It is the moral community as such on which secondary responsibili-
ties fall, and if the state takes these responsibilities up, it is simply because it
“has the deepest pockets.”113 Institutions are only the last link of a chain formed
by moral agents and arguments in which they bear no specificity, working only
to apply precepts that likewise hold for all other agents. Institutions are by no
means to be conferred the function of instituting or promoting a normative
order, but instead simply contribute to implementing it in a default fashion.
Goodin thus escapes from the paradigm of distribution that organises
Nussbaum’s apprehension of vulnerability. However, if the focus on institu-
tions at the heart of the work of distribution is absent, we nonetheless find the
same twofold tendency, on the one hand, of a political subject envisaged only
as a moral subject and, on the other, of a politics that does not exceed a set of
principles derived from another order.
In light of these readings, it would thus seem that taking vulnerability seri-
ously only permits us to conceive of a politics that, with Butler, is ungraspable,
that, with Nussbaum, is subordinated without remainder to the moral order,
or that, with Goodin, is flattened onto this moral order. We could also note
that, for Levinas, the political is quite simply a threat to ethics. For him, the
112 Ibid., p. 136.

113 Ibid., p. 153.

existence of political institutions constitutes a mode of distribution of good

conscience, since it enables me to refuse the responsibility that the vulner-
ability of others confers upon me, or at least transforms the ethical call into a
simple duty, thus disfiguring my response. And it could further be added that
some proponents of the ethics of care only ever consider taking responsibil-
ity for vulnerability in a wholly apolitical dyadic framework. Nel Noddings,
for instance, proposes to envisage care on the model of the mother-child two-
some, the feeling that constitutes it and the ‘receptiveness’ that it presumes on
the part of the mother.114 Others present the strange tendency, one difficult to
reconcile with the very idea of a political subject, to derive the condition and
political status of the vulnerable person from that of the person who responds
to the moral obligations raised by this vulnerability, and vice versa.115 In short,
the inability to think the political and vulnerability together is recurrent.116
We must now turn to the propositions of Critical Theory and examine
whether and how it responds to the two great difficulties that we have just elu-
cidated, and that plague the current constellation surrounding vulnerability:
the impossibility of holding together both the normative and the descriptive
dimensions of vulnerability (part 3), and the (non-)political discourse upheld
about vulnerability (part 4).
Part 3: Vulnerability according to Critical Theory: Recognition and

Normative Expectations
The writings of Critical Theory have long dealt with the theme of vulnerability,
along with that of need. As I stated in the introduction, this reflection first took
shape as an examination of the vulnerability of living beings to suffering.
114 N. Noddings, Caring. A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984, pp. 30–35.
115 See, E. F. Kittay, Love’s Labor.
116 Other theories of care nevertheless offer a more promising lead – and these are the only
exceptions among the moral philosophies of vulnerability – to the extent that they point
up the always-already ‘political’ character of perceiving, and taking responsibility for,
vulnerability, in the sense of its being traversed by relations of domination, and make
it possible to conceive the political as a critique and destruction of the existing organ-
isation of vulnerability and of responses to it. For more on this point see, E. Ferrarese,
“The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Together
Vulnerability and the Political and its Consequences,” Critical Horizons, vol. 17(2), 2016,
pp. 224–240.

48 Ferrarese
We find this theme woven into a reflection on the domination of nature,

which Adorno and Horkheimer turn into the principle of the logic of reason,
into reason’s unique truth. They maintain that over the course of reason’s
unfolding, with which the history of the West coincides, the whole of infra-
rational existence, that is to say of ‘natural’ existence, progressively becomes
one of failing and privation. What remains of nature is transformed into a
mark of humiliation and calls for mastery, including when manifest in the body
itself. The human body is therefore vulnerable because nature is vulnerable –
especially as disciplining nature is the motor of history. The one and the other,
body and external nature, are both possible, necessary objects of brutalisation.
Moreover, the theme of vulnerability is condensed in the multiple evoca-
tions of the relations to self and of the lives that get mutilated in the admin-
istered world, subjugated to calculation and power; it manifests in the
description of individualities and collectives that are damaged by instrumental
rationality and the primacy of self-preservation. In a fairly characteristic move-
ment of their thinking, Adorno and Horkheimer even describe a logic of self-
preservation that returns as its contrary and that, increasingly arranging the
subject as well as society, generates the limitless insecurity of life itself. The
individual’s psychological life is gradually reduced to a mixture of realism and
relations of power, bereft of any attention to others, but this obsession for sur-
vival comes to intensify bodily vulnerability: the mechanism of adaptation of
that which is hardened is at the same time a mechanism of hardening vis-à-vis
oneself, and comes to threaten “bare life itself.”117
Among subsequent generations of critical theoreticians, this concern over
the fragility of the good life and of life in general undergoes two successive
extensions, each with more distinctly ontological accents: first, a reflection on
the human being as a Mängelwesen; and, second, the idea of a fundamental
vulnerability tied to a need for recognition. As both extensions end in dead-
locks, I shall try instead, on the basis of other theoretical elements borrowed
from the Frankfurt School, to extract a conception of vulnerability that avoids
the trap of the motif of an exposed integrity, all the while revealing vulner-
ability as always-already social, because instituted by normative expectations.
3.1 Exercise of Archaeology: The Mängelwesen

In the history of Critical Theory, the topic of vulnerability first appears as
the idea of a sort of constitutive lack. This idea, which originally referred to a
human being’s biological condition, was a conceptual stage to be surpassed;
117 T. W. Adorno, Sociology and Psychology, (Part II) New Left Review, I/47, January–February,
1968.

the imperfect matrix when an intersubjective conception of vulnerability

would be born.
Both Habermas and Honneth devote some of their early writings to German
philosophical anthropology, whose representatives posited, albeit from diver-
gent political perspectives, a human being characterised by its vulnerability.
Arnold Gehlen, for instance, describes the human being as a Mängelwesen,
a being of lack, a deficient being. Under this term Gehlen conceives of the
human being as a being abandoned by its instincts. Because the human being
is not, like the animal, endowed with a mere few, goal-adapted instincts, which
give the animal access only to the sector of the world of vital importance to
it, the human finds itself “open to the world,” the possible object of effraction
by the world, bereft of the protection that the “limited organs”118 of the animal
provide – in other terms, the human is fundamentally vulnerable.
Both Habermas and Honneth develop a critique of this idea of constitu-
tive lack, not for its own sake but because Gehlen indicates neither its real
site nor, therefore, its veritable logic. Honneth’s interest bears on the fact that,
for the author of Der Mensch, the specific capacities of the human being find
their origin in the compensation for the organic deficiency specific to it. Along
with Hans Joas, he interprets this Gehlenian argument as the basis of a theory
of action. The only way a human being can free itself from its insufficiencies,
which are in part linked to its premature birth and slow growth, is through
spontaneous actions uncoupled from instinctual mechanisms: “The human
being, therefore, frees himself in action from the dangers to his survival inher-
ent in the organic starting situation of a deficient life form.”119 The possibility
of autonomous action, defined by opposition to environmental adaptation,
stems from the lack of determinacy characterising the human being.
Honneth and Joas thus charge Gehlen with solipsism, which they attempt
to correct by reference to the works of George H. Mead. From the latter,
Honneth and Joas reprise a conception of practical intersubjectivity, accord-
ing to which the individual experiences herself in an indirect manner, by plac-
ing herself in the shoes of other social group members. Action does stem from
a form of vulnerability but this latter is to be understood as always-already
social. The capacity to communicate, the reflexivity of the human being, the
human’s practical rationality, all flow from the necessity for cooperation,
which itself proceeds from an imperative of survival, as the coordination of
behaviours is not ensured a priori by any species logic, in contrast with animals.
118 A. Gehlen, Anthropologische und sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen, p. 33.

119 A. Honneth and H. Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Mayer, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 57.

50 Ferrarese
The individual’s dependence on the group for her subsistence opens up the
possibility of learning. This dependence goes on to explain, first, an individu-
al’s orientation toward the potential reaction of her partner of interaction; by
performing an act, the human being triggers in herself the reaction that she
sought to evoke in the other. Simultaneously, the human being turns her own
behaviour into an object of consideration similar to that of which her partner
is an object; she sees herself from the perspective of the other. In Honneth’s
reading of Gehlen’s thought, what explains the constitution of the moral sub-
ject as much as of the subject tout court is thus a fundamental vulnerability.
Honneth here simply deepens the way already paved by Habermas in his
1970 political profile of Gehlen. Habermas maintains that the only possibility
of resisting the perils of universal precarity are to be found not by returning
major institutions to morality, as Gehlen had advocated, but in the perilous
means of precarious communication. In coming to this conclusion, he unfolds
a conception of constitutive human vulnerability that is not biological in
nature. In other terms, he displaces Gehlen’s arguments onto another field of
perils, one inherent to a process of socialisation carried out by means of com-
munication understandable to all. Thus, the individual’s identity is shored up
outside of her organic system in the symbolic relations between individuals
who enter into relations of interaction. “The profound vulnerability that makes
necessary an ethical regulation of behaviour as a counterpoise is rooted not in
the biological weaknesses of humans, in the newborn infant’s lack of organic
faculties, and in the risks of a proportionally overlengthy rearing period, but in
the cultural systems that are constructed as compensation.”120
And Gehlenian scoria are still evident in Habermas’ thinking today. In his
writings in the 2000s, we again find the idea of a specifically human fragility,
inherent to a dependence on the processes of individualisation that constitute
individuals. Of an intersubjective nature, this vulnerability actually appears,
contrary to what he wrote in the 1970s, to be rooted precisely in the biological
vulnerability of individuals.
Since man, biologically speaking, is born ‘unfinished’ and subject to life-

long dependency on the help, care, and respect of his social environment,
individuation by DNA sequences is revealed as incomplete as soon as the
process of social individuation sets in.121
120 J. Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. F. G. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 1983, p. 122.
121 J. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. H. Beister, M. Pensky, and W. Rehg,
Cambridge: Polity, 2003, p. 34.

Though, today, he no longer considers it necessary to remove the idea of fragil-

ity from the instinctual texture in which Gehlen inscribed it, all throughout his
work the motif of constitutive lack is always subject to the same social transla-
tion. This motif is expressed in the fact that the person is instituted as such
only via her entry into a public context of interaction within an intersubjec-
tively shared, lived world.
This conception of a constitutive and nevertheless always-always social vul-
nerability finds an extension – and thus also a displacement – in both authors
via a theory of recognition as exposure to injury.
3.2 Vulnerability to Misrecognition: An Example of Exposure to Injury

The theme of vulnerability takes a new shape in Honneth’s The Struggle for
Recognition (1992), which employs the vocabulary of injury – injury resulting
from the psychological shock brought on by the disappointment of an expec-
tation, the fulfilment of which is fundamental to my relation to myself. Even
more radically,
[b]ecause the normative self-image of each and every individual human

being (…) is dependent on the possibility of being continually backed up
by others, the experience of being disrespected carries with it the danger
of an injury that can bring the identity of the person as a whole to the
point of collapse.122
This vulnerability arises initially owing to the individual implicitly expecting

to be taken positively into account into others’ projects, which is to say that a
violation is also a breach of normative expectations – a point to which I return
later. When Honneth uses the word vulnerability, he qualifies it as moral, and
this enables him to designate the possibility of moral injuries that flow from
the form of intersubjectivity of human life:
Human beings are vulnerable in that specific manner we call moral

because they owe their identity to the construction of a practical self-
relation that is dependent upon the help and affirmation of other human
beings.”123
122 A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press,
1995, p. 131–2.
123 A. Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, trans. J. Farrell,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p. 137.

52 Ferrarese
Habermas, who makes a broader appeal to the vocabulary of vulnerability –

going so far as to qualify our constitutive vulnerability as “extreme” – also
employs the term injury. He alludes to inner or symbolic injuries, to which
we are especially cruelly exposed, since the relations as part of which they
are inflicted are essential to the unfolding of our identity; intimate relations
are thus described as particularly liable to cause injury.124
Around the thematic of recognition, as outlined in the previous part,
Habermas and Honneth conceive of moral vulnerability through a homol-
ogy with corporeal vulnerability, whereby they shift vulnerability in Gehlen’s
sense of incompletion onto that of a possible violation of some integrity. It
is Honneth himself who establishes the parallel with physical vulnerability.
Noting that the various forms of disrespect are usually described using meta-
phors associated with the deterioration of the human body, he deduces that
these metaphors provide indications about the specific nature and properties
of psychological integrity.125
This homology thus urges us to conceive of the demand for the preserva-
tion of psychological integrity analogously to that for physical integrity. The
institutions made necessary by this assumption of an exposure to injury ought,
then, to prevent the absence of protection of this human being as the always
possible object of an effraction. While this type of argument has given rise to
a reactionary tradition, it brings the theories of concern to us here to grasp
the law in its protective function, to espouse a conception of law that unam-
biguously subscribes to the liberal tradition.126
In this fashion, Honneth describes subjective rights as a necessary state
guarantee for protecting one’s self-relation and autonomy, and conceives the
juridical solidification of the normative content of recognition in each period
as an extension of negative subjective rights.127
Habermas, for his part, defends the principle of equal protection of the
integrity of the person. This protection presumes a guarantee of equal access
to models of communication, social relations, traditions and the conditions
124 Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, pp. 33–4.

125 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 135.
126 In his Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State
University, 2006) B. S. Turner similarly defends a conception of human rights as a protec-
tive shield against breaches of physical integrity.
127 A. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution or
Recognition?, p. 252. This is to be distinguished from the effect of recognition produced
by the possibility of the individual’s thinking of herself as the bearer of rights in general,
rights that may be civil, political or social.

of recognition required for the development and reproduction of personal

identity.128 Because persons acquire their identities and develop their life proj-
ects in contexts of communication and mutual recognition, the principle of
human dignity must include the guarantee of their free reproduction. This
defensive conception of the law enables us to take the question of prevent-
ing and sanctioning a wrong seriously, without ceding to the idea of a right to
recognition, of a sort of fundamental right understood as a possibility to make
demands, the social satisfaction of which is deemed justified. So, using the
bodily metaphor of vulnerability appears to make it possible to restrict oneself
to positing a threshold of violation, of the injury inflicted, without enjoining
the conferral of an active recognition.
Nevertheless, the homology creates considerable difficulties. First, it lends
importance to the idea of integrity, which has implications for inviolability that
are ambiguous as soon as something other than the body is at issue. Second,
one is constantly forced (notably with Honneth) to overstep the negative con-
ception of obligation that the homology carries.
As for the first point: conceiving of moral vulnerability through a homology
with bodily vulnerability works to hypostasize the idea of integrity and the
kinds of obligations able to be deduced from it.
Honneth derives the idea of the law’s protection of the vulnerable subject
from the model Hegel puts forward in Philosophy of Mind. He adopts the idea
that by perceiving each other reciprocally as vulnerable, subjects lay down
the social bases of a legal bond of intersubjective obligation. But upon closer
inspection, he works in a passage via the idea of integrity: each person discov-
ering the other as morally vulnerable, all participants, according to Honneth,
accept each other’s “fundamental claims to integrity.”129 More radically still, he
makes integrity nothing less than the principle of a “morality of recognition.”130
For a long time, i.e. insofar as he adhered to the architecture laid out in
The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas conceived that one experi-
ences oneself only through the intermediary of others, but posited that this
effect is reached through the use of personal pronouns in language, thereby
postulating a sort of intimate presence of communication in the subject.
Otherwise put, the theoretical framework itself proscribes the idea of integrity.
In his writings of this period, doing justice to vulnerability means not hindering
128 J. Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. C. Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press,
2008, p. 296.
129 A. Honneth, “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality based on
the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory, vol. 20(2), 1992, pp. 187–201.
130 Ibid.

54 Ferrarese
the free unfolding of communicational action, through the play through which
recognition is mechanically accorded. The only integrity thus targeted is that
of the conditions of communicative action. However, in his writings from the
1990s and 2000s onwards, Habermas has massive recourse to the vocabulary of
integrity as applied to identity and to personhood.
The problem is that the idea of integrity makes for a finite and closed psy-
chological entity, an objective reality defined by the fact that it has not yet
been violated. It conceals the fact that the mode of infliction, or more exactly
the mode of appearance of the psychological injury, is resolutely different
from the logic of inflicting a blow upon the body. In the case of physical vul-
nerability, an infliction must occur; in the other, that of ‘moral’ vulnerability,
an absence of gesture can be enough. Misrecognition can take shape as the
non-occurrence or cessation of a validation (of one’s worth). The act of recog-
nition must be carried out continually, since – in accordance with the prop-
erly intersubjective premises of theories of recognition – identity is made and
unmade ceaselessly; at each moment, identity requires the active contribution
of multiple partners of interaction to sustain itself in a non-mutilated form.
Moreover, the image of integrity reintroduces the idea of self-propriety, with
which the intersubjective axiom at the basis of the theory of recognition had
precisely strived to break. It suggests an entity that pre-exists that which can
affect it, an entity that aspires to remain in a state defined by an in-principle
inviolability.
As for the second point, the homology between psychological vulnerability
and bodily vulnerability is compromised by the fact that the theories of recog-
nition do actually contain a principle of positive rights. This problem is acutely
raised by Honneth’s work, in which we regularly see it suggested that positive
obligations of recognition exist. Honneth states that the subject’s fundamen-
tal expectations of recognition correspond to so many duties of recognition
that weigh on the persons able to respond to them.131 This entails determining,
for each of the three spheres of recognition that he conceives – those of love,
rights and social esteem – the normative principles governing the conditions
of application and breadth of these duties. Let us examine, for example, the
normativity inherent to the sphere of esteem, which turns out to be partic-
ularly problematic. If, on the one hand, Honneth admits that this principle
can, from the viewpoint of a theory of justice, only mean equal opportunity
to compete for social esteem, it is also evident that esteem is due the subject
on account of the worth of the acts she accomplishes or of the identity that
she manifests through them. The difficulty that emerges here is not limited to
131 A. Honneth, Disrespect, p. 140.

a possible theoretical tension between these two poles; rather, we must take
into consideration that, while the individual certainly seeks specific recogni-
tion from persons that she herself esteems, she also looks to benefit from gen-
eralized esteem from her most abstract sphere of interaction: society.132 In this
case, what becomes of the assertion according to which the subject’s funda-
mental expectations of recognition correspond to so many duties of recogni-
tion? Conceiving a politics of esteem is the necessary outcome. This necessity
seems confirmed by Honneth’s reflection on the fact that moral progress in this
third sphere of recognition implies a radical questioning of the existing and
very limited definition of remunerated work.133 Society as a whole and its insti-
tutions form the natural point of address for expectations around the reality of
work. The positive obligation befalls societal institutions to distribute recogni-
tion between existing forms of work in an equitable manner. Indubitably, then,
Honneth’s theory outlines a positive right, a right to esteem enforceable upon
society as a whole. The result is that a bevy of obligations emerge that are just
as removed from the requirement to abstain from producing wrongs as they
are questionable from a normative point of view.
Of course it must be admitted that the misrecognition inherent to the dis-
tinction between remunerated work and non-remunerated work, and the
sexual division that it accompanies, certainly does oblige society as such;
notwithstanding, by placing this positive right under the rubric of esteem,
Honneth seems to me to open the door to the most varied sorts of demands.
This is because esteem is traversed by antinomic logics. Esteem unquestion-
ably involves a certain egalitarianism, since it is difficult to defend the idea
that some groups or individuals ought to be completely deprived of it (above
all when it comes to public esteem134). Nevertheless, esteem must be earned.
This latter aspect requires further qualification: if esteem is made to coincide
with the recognition of a ‘contribution’ to the common good, of the social
meaning of one’s existence for a concrete community, it thus requires no more
than a yes or a no. But esteem may also involve forms of measure, evaluation
or comparison. What thereby becomes of the obligation to respond to expec-
tations? Imagining a politics of esteem in accordance with the former logic
hardly presents us with a problem; it would entail providing compensation,
132 G. Brennan and P. Pettit argue this point in The Economy of Esteem, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004, p. 31 sq.
133 A. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth, Redistribution
or Recognition? p. 188 sq.
134 See N. Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” in N. Fraser and A. Honneth,
Redistribution or Recognition? p. 99, footnote 33.

56 Ferrarese
monetary or ritual, for forms of underestimation of certain groups. By contrast,

what political legitimacy can a form of evaluation comprise? In the name of
the principle of vulnerability, can the role of institutions be to guarantee a just
comparison or to ensure that social esteem is distributed according to criteria
that, for example, have already been publicly discussed? In this case, can we
imagine that the remit of such institutions would be to rectify a situation in
which some group benefits from too much esteem?
More broadly, the idea of evaluation works to blur the boundary between
moral violation and the injuring of self-esteem. Brennan and Pettit defend
a closely related argument, which is arguably more apt for highlighting the
illegitimacy of tying recognition and esteem together in one and the same
problematic – that of vulnerability. Defining recognition as containing “sim-
ply the presumption that the other, whoever she may be, is a moral equal,”135
Brennan and Pettit contrast it with the possible instrumental character of
the search for esteem. Since esteem can be turned into a resource, enabling
one to obtain further goods, and be instrumentalized as part of a “manage-
ment of reputation.”136 Now, if we are still wont to speak of moral expecta-
tions – exposed to disappointment – then the activity that is to be undertaken
and subject to evaluation must be motivated, at least minimally, by a non-
instrumental or intrinsic desire, such as to contribute to the common good.137
Against Honneth, it may well be argued that his introducing of esteem into a
general theory of moral expectations and obligations does not with any cer-
tainty enable his conception of recognition to meet that condition and, more
generally, that esteem makes it difficult to grasp what vulnerability means.
Because the place granted to the problematic of psychological ‘integrity’
suspends the logic of intersubjectivity; because the essential comparability
posited between absence of respect and absence of esteem makes the norma-
tive reach of the concept problematic, and with it, its moral and political impli-
cations, it seems to me that, if recognition can only be grounded in a theory of
vulnerability, the idea of vulnerability itself cannot be adequately defined in
the terms of contemporary theories of recognition, and especially not that of
Axel Honneth.
135 G. Brennan, and P. Pettit, The Economy of Esteem, p. 189.

136 See H. Kocyba, “Les paradoxes de la manifestation de reconnaissance,” in C. Lazzeri and
S. Nour (eds.), Reconnaissance, identité, intégration sociale, Nanterre: Presses Universitaires
de Paris Ouest, 2009, p. 286 sq.
137 On this point see, H. Ikäheimo and A. Laitinen “Esteem for Contributions to the Common
Good: The Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value,” in M. Seymour ed.
The Plural States of Recognition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 98–122.

So we must proceed further with the inquiry and displace, or reshape, the
definition and contours of the notion of vulnerability on the basis of differ-
ent premises, other theoretical elements, ones that Critical Theory provides in
the form of traces. One promising approach involves setting out not only from
vulnerability as exposure to the actions of an other, singular or collective, but
also from the idea that the harmful event in which vulnerability condenses is
a failure to meet normative expectations. The displacement thereby effected
enables us not only to avoid the internal difficulties that we brought to light
above, but also to conserve something of Critical Theory’s interest in vulner-
ability as ontological but nevertheless always-already social.
3.3 Outline of a Reconstructed Notion of Vulnerability

The idea of normative expectations makes it possible to envision vulnerability
as something that necessarily appears at the same time as a horizon of obliga-
tions (fulfilled or not) and of normative arguments, and as materialising right
at the level of social interactions. This movement enables us to suspend, in
circumscribing vulnerability, the question of the possible effects that breaches
of expectation may have on our psyches. More radically, it seems possible to
defend the argument according to which the scene that unites a power of act-
ing, which either threatens to exert itself or else fails to do so, and the vulner-
ability arising from it, is instituted by expectations. Exposure is permitted and
shaped by normative expectations that are situated between subjects.
To strengthen this claim, I will (a) explore the content and properties of
these expectations on the basis of what proponents of Critical Theory have
had to say about them, and (b) examine their workings as institutions.
a. What Normative Expectation Means
From the outset, the present work has presumed a distinction that it shares
with the majority of authors to whom I have hitherto referred and that ought
presently to be made explicit: vulnerability does not mean fallibility – the word
does not refer to the fact that my acts escape me, are poorly interpreted, fail,
etc. It does not refer to what threatens to go awry and derail what I strive to
bring about by exercising my power to act. It would be absurd to contest the
potential disruption that may prevent an interaction from running smoothly
given the likelihood of conversational failure or inadequate action, for example.
The vulnerability to which I refer pertains to a logic not of failure but instead
of wrong. Wrong can, of course, result from a methodically programmed lack
of success whenever exposure increases massively, or when indeterminacy
becomes social determinacy, like when my acts and statements find a context

58 Ferrarese
in which they can only fail/cannot be perceived/cannot have effects. However,

the two senses of the word vulnerability seem to me to be distinguishable
depending upon the nature – cognitive or normative – of the expectation that
may be disappointed.
Among proponents of Critical Theory, Habermas in particular has advanced
some subtle reflections on this point. He establishes the irreducibility of nor-
mative expectations to cognitive expectations on the basis of a phenomenol-
ogy of expectations and of ordinary moral phenomena, such as they occur
“within the horizon of the lifeworld.”138 Because in the context of communi-
cative action, and “thus … prior to all reflection,” a plurality of validity claims
come to light, it is possible and legitimate to differentiate truth and normative
rightness at the argumentative level. The practico-moral justification that one
gives to account for a way of acting targets something other than the neutral
evaluation of means and ends. Normative expectations are not cognitive-order
suppositions relative to another’s behaviour, any more than suppositions of
instrumental-type success. The adherence that they generate is about moral
commitment: they are apprehended as descriptions of reality to which one
must subscribe because they are legitimate. They rest upon a certainty as to
their founded character.
This makes clear that vulnerability understood as a possibility of failure, of
misunderstanding, of what can go astray, relates to the disappointment of the
first type of expectations – cognitive expectations. It simultaneously makes
clear that, when it comes to having rights and obligations met, normative
expectations are anxious convictions.
Normative expectations bear on that which is due to me, either from others
or from the community of which I am a member, a due cut from the weft of
a mutuality, a generality or even a necessary universality. Normative expec-
tations involve personal aspirations as much as expectations of a just and/
or good social arrangement. Further, they frequently take the form, when
expressed, which is to say when they fail, of feelings of injustice.139 They are
the site at which we experience the failure to live up to expectations of jus-
tice in the social order, and in light of their disappointment the person who
is the subject of this breach can elaborate a demand for justice. In a general
fashion, therefore, they point toward a normative order taken as such, in its
138 Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral

Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 108.
139 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

entirety. And the founded character that they are attributed resides in the fact
that many people, myself included, are obliged to honour them. In other terms,
they rest on the supposition, or demand, of a norm.
Habermas underscores this point very clearly. Exploring the affective ker-
nel of moral intuitions – a kernel that he argues can be observed first in the
indignation or resentment at violations of our integrity – he emphasises that
because our affective reactions toward particular individuals (those who
have committed the offense) in a determinate situation are associated with
an impersonal form of indignation at the betrayal of norms, they are endowed
with a moral character: “Yet what makes this indignation moral is not the fact
that the interaction between two concrete individuals has been disturbed but
rather that the violation of an underlying normative expectation that is valid
not only for ego and alter but also for all members of a social group or even, in
the case of moral norms in the strict sense, for all competent actors.”140
Moreover, these expectations do not reside at an infra-linguistic level,
although they are not necessarily conscious prior to struggling with a reality
that resists them. They are structured by the existing language and discourse
even prior to their enunciation. As Habermas might say, we only feel obliged,
and we only feel founded to make demands, on the basis of norms that we
believe we can, where required, explain as to why they compel assent.141
A last component ought to be mentioned: orienting oneself around the nor-
mative expectations of the other means including this other in the circle of
those to whom I owe something, in the community of persons with rights to
a moral status. Reciprocally, however, it also means demanding that I receive a
form of consideration in this other’s deliberations. Otherwise put, a normative
expectation carries a claim to a status. This is what Honneth shows using the
works of George H. Mead and his idea of a ‘Generalized Other’. According to
this idea, by learning to generalise the normative expectations of an ever larger
number of partners, to the point of erecting these expectations into norms
of social action, the subject acquires the capacity to participate in relations
of interaction with her environment, in conformity with the rules governing
these relations. By reprising the normative perspective of the Generalised
Other, partners understand which obligations they are obliged to respect as
regards concrete others.142 Conversely, they can understand themselves as
bearers of individual demands that their vis-à-vis knows herself obliged to
140 Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Activity, p. 48. (my emphasis).
141 Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” p. 110.
142 G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, p. 152 sq.

60 Ferrarese
meet. Lastly, the capacity to understand and fulfil others’ expectations justi-
fies social recognition. For Mead, to recognise someone means to ascribe this
person the qualities of a morally responsible actor: to see this person as an
identity “able to maintain itself in the community, that is recognized in the
community in so far as it recognizes the others.”143
Normative expectations carry demands relative to a status, and inscribe and
sustain an individuality in a moral and/or political community. Dealing with
the role of these expectations, or more exactly with that of their disappoint-
ment, in triggering conflicts, Honneth adds to Mead’s argument that norma-
tive expectations not only ensure the reproduction of ordinary moral life, they
are also liable to provoke its breakdown.
The fact remains that we are not dealing with two juxtaposed mental phe-
nomena that may attempt to adapt to one another, that comprise a scene of
confrontation between a power of acting and a vulnerability, a scene illumi-
nated by the notion of normative expectations. Rather, these latter have an
instituting dimension as much as an instituted one, a duality that we shall now
explore.
b. Normative Expectations and Institutions
Because normative expectations presume a form of moral commitment,

because they are the site in which a norm and breaches of it are experienced,
and because they ascribe a moral status to a subject as much as to an object,
they are, it seems to me, far more than a simple context that nuances interac-
tions: they are the conditions of the possibility of such interactions. I main-
tain that they are more aptly conceived as institutions, where such are defined
not as public agencies and their media of action, but instead, as Cornelius
Castoriadis has it, as that which are situated between subjects as much as
being the condition of constitution of these subjects (and naturally the con-
dition of their communication and their cooperation). If the subject is noth-
ing outside the historical-social field that provides it with the conditions of its
individuation, conversely the institution’s effectivity passes through the action
of subjects who are the concrete bearers of imaginary meanings that are insti-
tuted by the social field.
Summoning Castoriadis is not without its difficulties: as both Habermas
and Honneth have highlighted to different ends,144 his social theory is charac-
143 Ibid., p. 193.

144 See J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 318–335; and A. Honneth, ‘Rescuing the Revolution with an

terised by the absence of any intersubjective level, by a gap between instituted

world and individual. The notion of normative expectations precisely enables
us to reintroduce an intermediary level by bringing to light measures that are
constitutive of scenes of action, measures that are activated in interactions
and social relations and that explain the practical co-achievements of subjects.
The content that Castoriadis ascribes to the concept of institution permits
us, on the one hand, to describe the way in which expectations adhere to the
rest of society’s normative arrangement (even if they point to its failings) and,
on the other, to grasp the way in which expectations establish both the scene
of intersubjectivity and the subjects of this scene.
First, for Castoriadis, “the institution of society is in each case the institu-
tion of a magma of social imaginary significations, which we can and must
call a world of significations.”145 He goes on to differentiate between second-
order institutions and the central institutions on which the former depend.
Normative expectations seem to constitute second-order institutions in the
following sense: “second-order not in the sense that they are minor or simply
derived, but that they are always held together by the institution of signifi-
cations central to the society considered. The latter cannot exist without the
former (…) In and through the totality of these second-order institutions
the functioning of society as instituted society is assured and continued.”146
From this perspective we can understand that the reciprocal stabilisation of
expectations is not the accomplishment of institutions situated elsewhere,
but instead that the expectations themselves are institutions and are endowed
with their own agency.
Second, Castoriadis’ social theory shows that it would be misleading to
imagine relations as simply mediated by normative expectations, in a way that
figures these expectations as something added onto pre-existing subjects, as
superimposed onto an immediate relation. The function of normative expec-
tations in actions and in the production of social relations exceeds the per-
forming of a logic of roles, in the sense that to assume a role correctly would be
to act in conformity with the other’s expectations. Nor are imaginary meanings
simply social representations, collective representations; they are that thanks
to which individuals are formed as social individuals. The self’s constitution
operates via the mediation of certainties that are instituted upon obligations
Ontology: On Cornelius Castoriadis’ Theory of Society,’ in The Fragmented World of the

Social, pp. 168–183.
145 C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998,
p. 359.
146 Ibid., p. 371.

62 Ferrarese
and rights; expectations comprise part of the subject’s motivational structure.147

Only through the institution it is possible for singularities to exist.
By defining a normative expectation as an institution, it then becomes
possible to draw out several of its characteristics. As institution, a normative
expectation presupposes consistency; irremediably incorporated into a situ-
ation, it nevertheless takes shape against a set of beliefs in the stability of a
certain number of phenomena, beliefs that take the form of entire systems of
propositions.
Beyond their permanence, institutions can be defined in the manner of
Marcel Mauss as that which individuals find before them, as “a grouping of acts
and ideas already instituted which individuals find before them and which
more or less imposes itself upon them.”148 Institutions are thus characterised
by a form of unavailability. Normative expectations clearly imply the existence
of an implicit normative consensus – the magma of imaginary meanings of
which Castoriadis speaks; they are linked to already instituted, or in any case
normalised, forms of fulfilment, but such is not the limit of their unavailability.
If they are institutions, then it is on account of what they make it possible to
think and by whom (some expectations are urgent, others simply do not exist
in certain periods; they may be reserved for a group or shared among all the
members of a society, etc.) as much as it is for how they determine their own
fulfilment.
Lastly, and correlatively, institutions presuppose the activation of a regis-
ter of constraints, which are added to the moral obligations to respond to the
expectations that we perceive among others. These constraints materialise in
the fact that mediations exist on account of which some normative expecta-
tions are always-already fulfilled without even having been known. A vulner-
ability can be dealt with straightaway. A response to someone’s distress can be
carried out by structures or by systemic regulations, such as monetary or legal
ones. In other terms, as with the entire content of expectation, its fulfilment
can be imposed on all participants. In addition, vulnerable bodies and individ-
ualities exist and are visible only inasmuch as they are given shape by material
conditions and the content of interactions cannot be described independently
of these conditions. Objects and ‘facts’ are caught up in evaluative action
and normative expectations. Conversely, however, this implies that human
beings project their fragilities onto external objects (such as equipment, insti-
tutions, political forms), which in turn become sites of fragility. If normative
147 Here I leave aside the psychoanalysis backdrop to Castoriadis’ demonstration.

148 M. Mauss, with P. Fauconnet, “Sociology,” in Marcel Mauss, The Nature of Sociology, trans.
W. Jeffrey, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, p. 10.

expectations sediment in matter, they also take hold of it, by extending to

equipment, to institutions and to political forms, along the way absorbing, in
one case as in the other, something of the immobile force of this matter.
Normative expectations are the site of appropriation of norms insofar as
they concern me, insofar as I can lay claim to them. They reside at the heart
of the co-production of intersubjectivity and the subject, but also point to a
social and normative order. Lastly, they institute a regime of violations. In all
these dimensions, normative expectations comprise institutions, thus taking
on a character of unavailability, agency and constraint.
It is now possible to observe how vulnerability, institutions and normative
expectations are all linked: (1) by instituting conditions of interaction, norma-
tive expectations institute and maintain the individual in the social; (2) they
determine the individual’s status as a subject, in particular as a moral and
political subject; and (3) they institute that to which the individual is exposed.
In other terms, vulnerability is the condition of the possibility of the subject,
because seizing a subject in expectations simultaneously means exposing it to
the possibility of being let down.
Insofar as normative expectations institute that to which one is exposed,
vulnerability cannot be conceived as a state tied to one ‘plane’ of human exis-
tence, a bodily, psychological or social one. Moreover, rarely does vulnerability
even stick within the limits of a single one of these planes. In this way, Adriana
Cavarero describes the suicide-attacks that characterise the ‘horrorism’ of our
times as seeking to destroy bodies as much as to infringe their unicity by disfig-
uring them and completely dismembering them, thereby affecting the human
condition in general: “What is at stake is not the end of a human life but the
human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies.”149
In her works on collective violence in India,150 Veena Das sheds light on the
way in which some affronts against bodies effect breaks with every being-
together, and also work to threaten the very idea of everyday life, which, once
such violence is experienced, proves vulnerable in its totality. Both theorists
make visible the polymorphous expectations that institute forms of vulner-
ability, the extent and texture of which binds to these expectations.
In addition, if the reality of normative expectations is instituting as much
as instituted, the vulnerability that they comprise can be thought of only as
always-already social. Moreover, the notion of normative expectations makes
it possible to gauge the socially produced aspect of vulnerability. For, seen
through this prism, the social is irreducible to a dyadic intersubjective relation.
149 Cavarero, Horrorism, p. 8.

150 Das, Life and Words.

64 Ferrarese
The scene of intersubjectivity is constituted by many more than two bodies or

two psyches.
To the extent that they point toward an order, carry demands in terms of sta-
tus, and also relate to a social whole that includes institutions (this time in the
sense of public agencies, which are themselves repositories of expectations),
normative expectations give rise to political discourses and demands. From
this vantage point, it becomes easier to articulate vulnerability, redefined as
instituted through normative expectations, together with the political.
Part 4: Perspectives: Thinking Vulnerability and the Political

through Together
What can it mean to think together both vulnerability, as we have just rede-
fined it, and the political, insofar as it is not limited to the institutional imple-
mentation of moral principles, the political such that its ‘remainder’ is not kept
silent?
The political frequently gets defined on the basis of a certain vacuity. Claude
Lefort, for example, characterises democracy, the form par excellence of the
political, by the fact that in it the site of power is an ‘empty site’, one “that
welcomes and preserves indeterminacy.”151 Democracy is instituted and main-
tained, according to him, in the dissolution of markers of certainty. Jacques
Rancière appropriates this notion of the void, conferring upon it a ‘structural’
dimension and taking it to signify that there is no property that obliges or des-
tines one to engage in politics: the whole of the political community he thus
identifies as an “empty, supplementary part that separates the community out
from the sum of the parts of the social body.”152 A void insists and thus enables
a fundamental discontinuity, whereby politics exists “as a supplement to every
social (ac)count and in exception to every logic of domination.”153 We find a
similar idea, although rooted in rather divergent concerns, in Carl Schmitt, for
whom the essence of the ‘political’ is that it potentially affects all activities, all
relations, that human beings entertain with one another.
These authors urge a consideration of the fact that the notion of the politi-
cal does not refer to any substance but instead designates a mode. Devoid of
specific or permanent elements, the political thus comes to be apprehended as
151 C. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D. Macey, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988,
p. 16.
152 J. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics”, trans. S. Corcoran in Dissensus, London:Bloomsbury,
2015, p. 41.
153 Ibid. p. 42.

an emergent reality. On the one hand, it cannot be derived from logics, norms
or principles constituted in other spheres; on the other, it does not coincide
with any already given sphere of functionality. It certainly does not stem
from any division of tasks; the type of autonomy to which it pertains is not a
specialisation.
The political is therefore not characterised, or delimited in extent, either
by a structure or by a set of elements. It is the chain of its operations itself,
inasmuch as it is self-perpetuating. Its elements ought not to be thought of in
themselves, but instead as effects of the very ‘mode’ of the political, whereas its
origin is found only in itself.
A review of contemporary political philosophy enables us to isolate three
main approaches to this (relative) closure of the political around itself, whether
or not the syntagm ‘the’ political is explicitly brought into play in these theo-
ries or not: (1) the political is emergent because it coincides with a sphere of
deliberation; (2) the political is averred when a political subjectivity appears;
and (3) the political is the space of emergence of a particular common.154 It
is therefore necessary to establish the way in which each of these dimensions
can be articulated to vulnerability. For the first of these dimensions, the work
of articulation has largely been accomplished already, but the others require
formulation through a new hypothesis, one that I will draw from elements
of the tradition of Critical Theory. As the exercise progresses, it will quickly
become apparent that each mode requires the other two if it is to bear out.
154 I thus do not deal as such with a common understanding of the political, one with legiti-
mate claims to the emergent quality of concern to us here, namely conflict. In the tradi-
tion opened by Machiavelli, the political is grounded in a permanent conflictuality, one
co-extensive to human history. The city is altered through two fundamental humours,
the desire of Grandees to command and oppress the people, on the one hand, and the
desire of the people not to be commanded or oppressed by the Grandees, on the other.
(See, C. Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Mi. B. Smith, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2012, p. 140). Schmitt stamped a modern turn on this current of thought
by positing that the threshold of the political is crossed each time the friend/enemy
distinction arises. Upon closer examination, conflict subtends deliberation; it is liable
to provoke the appearing of a political subjectivity. Lastly, not only does it presume
an indefinite number of common things, but it engenders a common. Given this triple
redundancy vis-à-vis the aforementioned modes, I prefer to argue that each of the politi-
cal modes ‘welcome’ conflict, to reprise Lefort’s expression, that is to say, make room for
conflict and also constrain the forms it can take, rather than positing a fourth mode that
would coincide with antagonism pure and simple. (The Concept of the Political, trans. and
with an Introduction by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

66 Ferrarese
4.1 The Political as Sphere of Deliberation

According to this viewpoint, the political is to be found wherever we see
emerge public deliberations, controversies in the public sphere, and claims
made in some capacity or other by the individuals concerned and/or by their
spokespeople. ‘Deliberation’ here should not be understood simply as inhab-
iting the strict limits that Habermas attributes to the concept by mooring it
within a universalist pragmatics.
This model suggests that no theme is political in itself; the political is
defined by a set of themes that pass from a particular sphere of activity or
value into the public sphere, or better, by a set of themes that appear in this
latter, that condense in it. Approaching the political in this fashion requires
an analysis of the mechanisms, rules and instances that convert a theme into
a political theme, the successive stages through which a set of controversial
contents passes. This may presuppose that the procedures for this passage are
already in place and regarded as legitimate; that a minimal agreement exists
about how to handle disagreements. But the political also includes the pos-
sibility of contesting these procedures, their regime of legitimacy, as well as
the existing minimal agreements over the way in which ordinary conflicts are
to be played out.
In the first case, grasping the political entails questioning a theme’s admis-
sibility. Making a statement political means making it visible, and doing so
in conformity with the specific constraints of the political, that is to say, by
rendering it public. It is a matter of generating a proposition that one knows
in advance is bound up in a mesh of required justifications and reasons given.
In its conflictual variant, a theme’s entry into the sphere of politics pre-
sumes that the established rules and borders are challenged. A performative
force thus gets conferred upon the proposition, well-illustrated by the feminist
slogan ‘the private is political’. Establishing such a proposition in the public
sphere is about proving it to be political, or at least that is the goal. In this case,
a theme’s becoming political frequently means conferring upon it a nobler sta-
tus, making it the subject of discussions in the political community, and there-
fore either expunging it of an unsavoury, inglorious status or wresting it from
the regime of shared evidence.
In Critical Theory, the articulation of vulnerability and this deliberative
conception of the political seems to me to have been accomplished already:
Nancy Fraser does it via the thematic of needs, and Habermas, too, though
from a different viewpoint. Certainly, as I explained in the introduction, we
cannot go from the idea of vulnerability to the concept of needs without sim-
plifying issues somewhat. Be that as it may, need has often been construed as
political in the history of thought, so that the concept lends itself well to the

undertaking before us here. However, if the argument is to be taken to its end,

need must be placed in an intersubjective weft, it must be considered as pro-
ceeding from exposure to a power that either threatens to exercise itself or else
fails to do so, an exposure that is instituted by normative expectations.
If Habermas set out by attributing the public sphere with the function
of “transmitting the needs” of society to political institutions,155 he quickly
came to reformulate this idea so as to shed light on the fact that needs are
constructed. From the 1970s on, the topic of the interpretation of needs is recur-
rent in his writings, mainly in the form of the observation that what prevails in
advanced capitalist societies is a “process of need interpretation, which until
then depended on an uncontrolled cultural tradition.”156
Later, in his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas conceptualises
reification as the subjection of the interpretation of needs to the system’s
imperatives, which takes on Foucauldian overtones when he denounces the
reifying effects of welfare state measures, as part of which caring for needs
originates a “placing under tutelage.”157 As a response, he has recourse to the
idea of a necessary “struggle for the interpretation of needs”; this expression
is borrowed from Fraser, who, in an article titled “Struggle over Needs” (1989),
suggests shifting the emphasis, common in political theories, from “needs
[themselves] onto discourses about needs … [from] a distribution of satis-
factions [of needs] onto the politics of need interpretation.”158 Since need fre-
quently operates as an argument in itself in the public sphere,159 it is essential
to clarify and to transform the mechanisms that effect the qualifying of needs.
Fraser thus puts forward a highly political approach toward lack, toward the
condition of dependence. She sees need as a political instrument that is metic-
ulously prepared, evaluated and utilised. As many feminists have underscored,
155 J. Habermas, “Öffentlichkeit,” in Fischer Lexikon Staat und Politik, Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1964, p. 224.
156 J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1979, p. 83.
157 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. William Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p. 443.
158 Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-
Capitalist Political Culture,” pp. 162–3.
159 A strict use of the work requires the accompanying claim to a right to satisfaction. Agnes
Heller has demonstrated this constraint. For her, since it is impossible to establish a dif-
ference between needs on the basis of their reality, all needs must be recognised, and all
of them, with the exception of those whose satisfaction makes of people a simple means,
must be met. (A. Heller, “Can ‘True’ and ‘False’ Needs be Posited”, in The Power of Shame:
A Rational Perspective. London: Routledge & Kegan)

68 Ferrarese
in contrast with basic goods, needs fluctuate; need is particular, has an histori-
cal dimension (in which collective and individual history intersect) and can
be or must be formulated by those who seek to assert it in an argument about
justice.
On the basis of such considerations, Fraser considers vulnerability to be
always-already an object of political preoccupations, insofar as it is at the core
of multiple administrative arrangements; however, it never appears as a politi-
cal object in itself: public agencies manage and eliminate certain exposures
that affect the population, whereas needs assume an objectivity making all
deliberation superfluous and allows for technical solutions. It is important,
then, that public spheres are spheres of struggle, spheres that undertake a
de-naturalisation of institutionalised interpretations of needs, for example
by inventing a new vocabulary. In this way, by coming up with terms such as
‘sexual harassment’, ‘conjugal rape’ or ‘battered women’, feminist groups have
managed to reinterpret as needs social givens that were not seen as needs.160
What makes a new theme political is the process of deliberation and decision-
making, which involves a struggle for recognition as much as a procedure of
justification.
As for Habermas, while he borrows the concept of struggle for the interpre-
tation of needs, he advances an articulation of the political and experience of
deficiency that is narrower than Fraser’s.
Despite having often been taxed with reducing politics to morality,
Habermas’s definition of political discussion unquestionably contains a voli-
tional moment and this moment is articulated to the motif of needs. The fac-
tualness of existing contexts and particularity of exposures that they generate
cannot be expunged from the conception of public sphere that he defends.
Juridical norms are valid not only because they respond to the constraints of
moral argumentation, but also because they result from the participation in
discussion of all the persons affected by the problem that they undertake to
resolve. He accepts the idea that attitudes and motives change in the course of
a rational formation of the collective will and affect the arguments presented
on each occasion. As he writes in Between Facts and Norms, “On account of
this relation to the de facto substratum of a legal community’s will, a volitional
moment enters into the normative validity dimension – and not just into the
socially binding character – of legal norms.”161 The appearing in the public
sphere of a political rationale that is distinct from a moral one therefore results
160 Fraser, “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-
Capitalist Political Culture,” p. 177.
161 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 156.

from the concreteness of life forms, the interests at play and the experiences of
lack. In other terms, on each occasion the particularity of needs (and of circum-
stances) constitutes the raison d’être of the discussion (and not its imperfec-
tion), giving shape and consistency to a communicative power. This political
moment thus proceeds directly from the logic of vulnerability.162
In each of these theories an emergent ‘political’ can be glimpsed; the politi-
cal as a space of deliberation in them is a mode of being of themes which
can assume other modes. The political here, especially with Habermas, only
exists through the engendering of its own limits, through the themes with
which it provides itself. In order to translate these arguments about needs into
the vocabulary of vulnerability, we must, as I mentioned earlier, view lack and
threat as constituted by normative expectations. Since expectations are what
institute that to which one is exposed on each occasion, the political gets mate-
rialised in the discussion about what the social perceptions of vulnerability
are, about what counts as exposure and what, by contrast, appears to belong
to fate. From this point of view, Fraser’s and Linda Gordon’s reflections on the
US uses of a neighbouring concept, dependence, is illuminating. Describing
the emergence, at the end of the twentieth century, of a new register of the idea
of ‘dependence’, of a moral and psychological register, one of the correlates of
which is the invisibility of the relation of subordination between employer and
employee,163 they highlight an historical transformation of what gets collec-
tively apprehended as a wrong, of what is considered the appropriate object of
political attention and social concern.
More precisely, the political perseveres by establishing the threshold, or
boundary, between the normative expectations that behove public reason –
and that therefore, will likely in a second phase be the subject of a political
or juridical arrangement – and those that will continue to escape public rea-
son. Doing justice to the problematic of vulnerability in politics is not about
taking up all of its manifestations. Some expectations are sayable publicly, oth-
ers are not, and some responses have to efface themselves as such in order
to reach their goal. As Molinier has shown, care work must sometimes be
discrete to be successful; “attention to the needs of others effaces its own
traces.”164 Deliberation thus involves justifying the collective organisation of
162 For more details, I take the liberty of referring the reader to my work Ethique et politique
de l’espace public. Habermas et la discussion, Paris, Vrin, 2015.
163 N. Fraser and L. Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S.
Welfare State,” in Signs, vol. 19(2), 1994, 309–336.
164 P. Molinier, S. Laugier and P. Paperman, “Introduction,” in P. Molinier, S. Laugier,
P. Paperman ed., Qu’est-ce que le care? Paris: Payot, 2010, p. 18.

70 Ferrarese
vulnerability as much as keeping some of its forms from all prehension by

public texts and policies.
Otherwise said, the deliberative mode distributes political concern and dis-
interest in the forms and severities of, but also responses to, vulnerabilities.
And with this distribution of public sayability, of the political pertinence of
certain expectations, of the qualification ‘vulnerability’ and, lastly, of obliga-
tions to respond to it, the force of publicness is distributed such as it is inher-
ent to the grasping of a problem by the political. Notably, the particular power
that the political enjoys affects the ‘common knowledge of existence’ of a vul-
nerability which impacts an individual or group of individuals, to reprise one
of Pettit’s expressions,165 and more broadly, brings certain categories, certain
perils, to another level of phenomenality.
Finally, let’s note that a stake of the struggle for the interpretation of needs
is also situated in the constitution of self. The process of denaturalisation and
of discursive re-elaboration of needs is simultaneously a process of re-elabo-
ration of the identity of whoever challenges the commonplace interpretation
of those needs. In this way, Fraser defends the idea that public spheres are
sites in which social identities are not only expressed but formed. According to
her, subaltern public spheres in particular provide members of different domi-
nated groups the enabling framework by which they can understand their
experiences and their exposures to certain harmful events as shared,166 and
therefore constitute themselves as collective political subjects.
From this point of view, the second ‘mode’ of the political that I examine in
what follows proclaims its irreducible ties to the first.
4.2 The Political and Political Subjectivity

According to this mode, the political is constituted as the site of appearance of
a political subjectivity, which may be singular or collective.
Illustrating this latter variant is Claude Lefort, who, during the times of
Socialisme ou barbarie, claimed that the proletariat is subjective in the sense
that its conduct is not a simple consequence of its conditions of existence,
but that these conditions require of it a permanent struggle with a view to
transforming them, thus undertaking “a constant freeing from its immediate
lot.”167 And the movement of struggle and elaboration of ideological content
165 Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 70–1.

166 N. Fraser, “Struggle over Needs,” p. 104 sq.
167 C. Lefort, “Proletarian Experience,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 26, 2013 (French
original, 1952), https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/26/proletarian-experience [Accessed:
March 1, 2017].

that this extrication permits, forms an experience through which the working
class emerges as such. Human beings placed in shared objective conditions
acquire a common experience, through which they constitute themselves as a
political subject that is endowed with its own identity and maintains a specific
reflexivity over its own history.
Rancière’s Dis-agreement provides a particularly radical identification of
the political with the precipitation of a political subjectivity. For Rancière,
politics is, or reduces to, “a conflict over the existence of a common stage and
over the existence and status of those present on it.”168 The parties do not pre-
exist the conflict in which they come to be counted as parties. For him, strug-
gle and the process of subjectivation coincide so exactly that the subject only
persists for the time of the struggle; political conflicts are understood as so
many affirmations, that is, as sporadic manifestations, and necessarily limited
ones, of equality. This is what delimits politics. All the rest, which is to say the
processes by which laws and consent are formed, powers are organized, and
places and functions are distributed, as well as the systems of legitimation of
this distribution, is simply gathered under the name ‘police’.
It seems possible to introduce vulnerability into this mode of being of the
political at a minimum by tying the experience of lack and exposure to the
phenomenon of appearance of a voice (which differs from the previous argu-
ment, according to which what appears concomitantly with the political is a
theme). Political subjectivity is evidently defined by a form of autonomy; one
finds this idea clearly stated in Marx’s original formulation of socialism as the
work of producers to determine their conditions of life, in their refusal that
these conditions be determined by the market unknown to them. More reso-
lutely still, Castoriadis places autonomy at the heart of his conception of poli-
tics by defining praxis as an other-directed action that concerns this other as
an autonomous subject and enables her to give full scope to her autonomy.169
In his work, the notion of autonomy is elaborated on the basis of the Freudian
meaning, which is to say a faculty to bring forth a reflected thinking instead of
the unconscious drives of which the subject is the pawn. Autonomy, for him,
extends to the project of making the imaginary institution of society explicit
and reasoned. The realisation of the political project of autonomy therefore
presupposes not only a transformation of social institutions, but also one of
the relation between society and its institutions. Castoriadis thus comes to
define the political as the site of an activity of express self-institution.
168 J. Rancière, Dis-agreement, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.
26–7.
169 Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 75.

72 Ferrarese
If the idea of transforming the relation of a society, or an individual, to its

own institutions or conditions of existence is key for autonomy in its politi-
cal aspect, thinking together political subjectivation and vulnerability implies
that a vulnerability cannot become a legitimate object of government unless
its definition, its contours and the means of its care undergo an elaboration
and a discussion by subjects who are affected, or have been affected, by this
form of exposure. This is not an argument that can simply be brushed aside
by countering that it contains an intolerable injunction. For this condition is
precisely what enables us to avoid reducing political subjects to moral agents
whose interactions and cooperation are circumscribed to the (non-)realisation
of moral obligations, and/or to subjects of the political, motifs that we so fre-
quently encounter in contemporary moral philosophy.
In other terms, from a political perspective, the fulfilment of a need can
arise only from the fulfilment of a demand (whose claim to validity will have
been recognised after a process wherein validity requirements are satisfied
after the relevant reasons are provided, or at least on the shared assumption
that this could happen). The sign that a vulnerability has been responded to
(and not simply the condition under which an adequate response is found for
it) is that justice is done to a voice.
Faced with what might then seem an arrogant demand addressed to indi-
viduals exposed to harmful events, suffice it to recall the work I have attempted
herein to de-solidify the concept of vulnerability, to reformulate it not as a
state but instead as a situation: a person is not first vulnerable because she is
bereft of the means to make heard the wrongs to which she is exposed. Neither
incompetence nor incapacity, vulnerability is an exposure to the disappoint-
ment of normative expectations which have an instituting force and an insti-
tuted form. It is the wellspring from which a political subjectivity emerges
when it sparks an attempt to (re-)define institutions – normative expectations
or public agencies and their policies – that expose, protect or fail to do so.
However, political subjectivation is not limited to the concordance between
the theme that is condensed in public sphere and the voice bearing it; it also
presumes a process of self-transformation of the subject concerned, a process
that occurs through a reorganisation of the experiential field.
As the history of political philosophy lacks examples of fully elaborated
connections between the concepts of political subjectivation and vulner-
ability, I propose instead to set out from theoretical arguments – but which
as arguments remain incomplete – about subjects whose rationality and self-
understanding are affected by an awareness of some vulnerability, an aware-
ness that would have effects on the content, and indeed the form, of political
deliberations.

In Honneth’s work, the subject can discover herself the bearer of normative
expectations (limited to expectations of recognition) by experiencing the way
that structures of interactions breach them. The experience of vulnerability
is what thus brings about the subject’s cognisance of the moral stakes sub-
tending her action, and this experience determines her possible passage to a
struggle. The lived experience of injustice thus has a specific cognitive content,
which extends to its ability to shed a different light on the underlying prin-
ciples. In Honneth, then, the process of political subjectivation coincides with
a reconfiguration of the subject-concerned’s knowledge.
At the collective level, the form of self-transformation that Honneth’s the-
ory allows us to envisage is even weaker still. Naturally, for Honneth there can
be no question of the constitution and assertion of a macro-subject, no ref-
erence to a social totality, a notion that Habermas denounces in favour of a
higher-order intersubjectivity.170 But even the simple idea of a collective logic
is absent from his work. He describes well the process of eruption of a conflict
in its shared dimension, but he ignores the nature of the collective that thus
takes shape as well as its reason. Honneth makes clear that if the subject is able
to formulate her feelings within a framework of intersubjective interpretation
that identifies them as typical of an entire group, then and only then is the
transition to struggle enabled.171 In other words, the confrontation depends
upon the existence of collective semantics. He thus explains the constitution
of a collective entity in terms of the availability of grammatical or cognitive
resources, which make certain formulations, as well as the articulation of
certain demands, possible. But nothing is said about the process of the trans-
formation of the collective subject in the very materiality of the struggle. By
thus postulating a consciousness, or even a collective identity, that precedes
conflict, struggle cannot be understood – contrary to the approach taken by
George Sorel, whom Honneth nonetheless cites – as modifying, and less still as
generating, this collective.172
In Nussbaum’s philosophy we find a very different interpretation of the link
between expectations, emotions and political actions. But the link she forges
proves just as incomplete. In her work, the disappointment of moral expec-
tations opens somewhat oddly onto an invitation to revise them. Emotions,
which for her are phenomena triggered by the ordeal of a lack of mastery, by
the experience of the impossibility of self-sufficiency, by the exposing effect
170 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 228.

171 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 171.
172 G. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.

74 Ferrarese
of certain ‘circumstances’, oblige one to change oneself. She thus seems, at first
glance, to be arguing for a process of political subjectivation that is set off by
the experience of vulnerability. The problem, however, is simply not the same
as the one Honneth deals with. Through emotion, the affected subject is led to
accept a proposition, one relative to external things and events that are prone
to being absent, or else to showing up unexpectedly, and are impossible to con-
trol. This acceptance involves realising the full meaning of that proposition in
its being, taking it up and being changed by it. Emotion is the necessary condi-
tion of that acceptance; whereas, absence of emotion is the sign that the real
acceptance of the proposition has not (yet) taken place.
The individual thus finds herself grappling with a phenomenon which
reveals to her emotions that she herself and her welfare depend upon things
and circumstances over which she has no mastery. But this revelation is a
consent; Nussbaum speaks of the ‘consent to an apparition.”173 The emo-
tions triggered by the experience of vulnerability thus redouble the passiv-
ity imputed to human life. Vulnerability arises in public space as a revelation
made unto oneself, not as the motor of discussions or confrontations that take
place in it, nor as the wellspring of a transformation of the institutions that
organise intersubjectivity and social relations.
Faced with this intersection of two politically limited figures of the experi-
ence of exposure and lack, an experience that one theorist conceives in terms
of the availability of cognitive resources, the other as a vain phenomenon of
self-transformation, it is instructive to return briefly to the model of vulner-
ability espoused in theories of recognition. This model takes account of the
fact that wresting the capacity to modify the state of the world is always the
very object of a struggle for recognition, even if it is so only mediately, i.e. by
accompanying a more circumscribed or precise claim. Every struggle for rec-
ognition bears, upon closer inspection, partly on the named object (the iden-
tity, mode of life, contribution to the common project, status, etc., regarding
which respect or consideration is demanded) and partly on a power of con-
struction or, to put it differently, on what one could name a status as ‘world
changer’. This twofold sense provides an explanation of the silently necessary
motif in all theories of recognition, beyond those of Habermas or Honneth, of
struggle,174 and of the striking silence maintained by their proponents about
173 M. Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgements of Value and Importance,” in R. C. Solomon ed.,

Thinking about Feeling, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 191.
174 The theme is important even among authors who do not fall within the Hegelian model.
See, for example, the motive of the moral dissensions coupled with the theme of recog-
nition in S. Cavell (The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy,

forms of recognition that unfold without any antagonism. Indeed, acquiring

a status as a ‘world changer’ can only come from struggling with an authority
that resists this combat; for if an authority can anticipate the demand for, or
even expectation of, recognition, it can maintain its monopoly over this status.
Wresting the capacity to modify the state of the world thus presupposes
a decentering or affecting of the other, what is more inasmuch the other is
bound up with a world. On this view, the process of political subjectivation
does not coincide with the becoming-conscious and speaking out of an entity
that would pre-exist this confrontation, but is effectuated through a series of
operations involving the production of a new field of experience, operations
with which it remains coextensive.
This is the reality of the effect on the world that transforms the subject,
through changing its status. The subject thus stands among those who create
the world, its imaginary, its expectations-institutions and who allocate respon-
sibilities. Just as vulnerability is not a property inherent to a person but is situ-
ated between an individual and a power of acting, so too is the political in act
not the exercise of an aptitude, but a possibility wrested from the state of the
world by the irruption onto the scene of those who create it.
Conceiving the emergence of a political subjectivity from out of the expe-
rience of vulnerability can take several forms. Since, by pointing out that
political subjectivity precipitates in the course, or following, an experience of
vulnerability, we have not yet said anything about what happens to this vulner-
ability once a subjectivation takes shape.
It is certainly possible to see vulnerability as comprising an ephemeral phe-
nomenon, as a stage to be gone beyond. This returns us, albeit under new con-
ditions, to the fleeting political subjectivation of Hobbes’ contracting parties,
which are limited to the pure moment of the contract; both exposure as well
as the status of political subject are abolished by the signing of this contract.
It is also possible to see vulnerability as the instrument of this subjectiva-
tion. Such is Honneth’s suggestion. Access to the principles of justice only ever
occurs negatively. It is therefore only because they are infringed, only because
expectations are disappointed, only because vulnerability is averred, that
something approaching a political subjectivation is realised. Vulnerability is
thus instituted as a cognitive operator.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), or the phenomenology of struggles in multicul-

tural societies, struggles conducted by groups attempting to obtain a political and juridi-
cal arrangement that does justice to their expectations (J. Tully, Strange Multiplicity:
Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995,
p. 13 et seq.).

76 Ferrarese
Lastly, it is possible – and this is what I am proposing – to conceive of a

vulnerability that continues on through the process of subjectivation and sim-
ply gets transposed onto a different level. Vulnerability, I contend, triggers the
constitution of a voice, the formation of measures and the implementation
of prescriptive arrangements, without being consumed in the course of the
operation. It therefore persists as a constitutive phenomenon – and neverthe-
less a thoroughly social one – after the appearance of the subject and the world
that emerges with it, and is normalised by history and its arrangements. This
sort of theoretical movement avoids reducing subjectivity to the moment of
undertaking an act and avoids limiting the political subject to the process
of subjectivation.
4.3 The Political as Common

In this mode, the political is the site of the emergence of a regime of specific
social relations, of a particular link between humans, one not derivable from
any other logic of association, whether cultural, economic or even juridical.
Being-in-common results mechanistically from the functioning of the politi-
cal; its appearing is not conditioned by the existence or vivacity of forms of
virtue. It does not presuppose any voluntarism of living-together, nor affects,
nor active sharing that would double or precede the political. In the history of
political philosophy, the properly political ‘common’ is generally characterised
by properties relating to its density, to the distance that it enables between
individuals. Theories on the matter include everything from the Marxist col-
lective subject to a conception of public sphere, discernible in Arendt and
Habermas alike, that relates individuals to one another while placing them in
a regime of mutual impropriety.
Even more so than the other modes of the political, which do unequal
justice to vulnerability, this aspect is still at a draft stage. Many authors have
postulated an incompatibility between a situation of vulnerability and the
appearance or maintenance of a common. They tend to consider, to put it in
Esposito’s terms, that “in the vertical exchange of protection-obedience,” to
which, according to him, vulnerability enjoins us, “What is sacrificed is noth-
ing other than the cum, the relation among men”;175 because the relation gets
recognised as destructive, as bearing threats, “the only way to escape is to sup-
press relations through the institution of a Third with whom all relate without
any further need of relating among them.”176 Such that if, by means of such a
175 R. Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. T. Campbell,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 14.
176 Ibid. p. 29.

measure, human beings manage to ‘hold’ together anew in and to the commu-
nity, it would occur essentially by refusing to constitute a being-in-common.
When it is presented, the couple common-vulnerability seems to get rel-
egated somewhere between the pitfall of the common established by “our col-
lective responsibility for the physical lives of one another,”177 which exclusively
goes to making up a moral community, and the obstacle of the undifferenti-
ated and undifferentiating social, that is to say, of a constraining given, which
we see in Arendt.178 According to Arendt, the public sphere has the property of
plurality, in the sense of a juxtaposition of multiple singularities; now, between
lives that have their vulnerability in common, only uniformity is to be found.
The appearance or presence of injuriable and destructible bodies in the public
sphere presents a problem here because it proscribes the building of political
equality: Arendt defines equality in the public domain as an equality between
unequal individuals, who are ‘equalised’ with a view to specific ends, in par-
ticular that of speaking in the public space. This is the outcome of a specifically
human organisation, and thus has nothing to do with equality before death or
suffering, which for her simply means conformity.
It is therefore necessary to start from scratch if we are to articulate this
mode of the political together with vulnerability.
The common proper to the political as envisaged in much contemporary
political theory, can be grasped, it seems to me, on the basis of two processes, or
more exactly at the intersection of both of them: its emergence is held to pro-
ceed from a phenomenon of learning and/or the experience of disagreement.
The view according to which the political is not only the site but also the
product of a specific learning process most certainly finds one of its sources in
the work of John Dewey. Dewey’s definition of politics as experimentation does
not subordinate this experimentation to any ultimate end or concrete form.
This indubitably sets Dewey and those who lay claim to his thinking among
the proponents of a conception of the political that rests upon a form of vacu-
ity. Now, for Dewey, to the extent that democracy commits one to consultation
and discussion, it enables the unveiling of needs and social problems, and it
thereby “forces a recognition that there are common interests, even though the
recognition of what they are is confused.”179 Disagreement thus remains in
the background, whereas the need for discussion and publicity that the discov-
ery of common interests obliges, leads to a clarification of what these interests

178 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 274.
179 J. Dewey, “The Public and Its Problems,” in John Dewey: The Political Writings, eds.
D. Morris and I. Shapiro, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, p. 187.

78 Ferrarese
are. The strictly political ‘common’ is born of a regulated collective exploration

of the problems to which a collection of individuals finds itself exposed, and of
a process of learning by experimenting with possible solutions.
Moreover, frequent analyses have been undertaken – notably among recent
theoreticians of deliberative democracy, broadly understood, from Benjamin
Barber to Iris Marion Young – of the development of a different way of relating
to others in the political sphere via the prism of the process of transformation
of individual preferences as it occurs in the course of deliberation itself. The
general argument sets out from the idea that deliberation is also a procedure
for gathering information about the other, and about all aspects of what is at
stake in the decision or opinion being formed. In addition, and here the fig-
ure of disagreement is reinforced, the conscious confrontation of my point of
view with the opposed point of view, or with the multiplicity of points of view,
produces reflexive preferences. Encountering different perspectives teaches
me about the partiality of my own, and even develops my ability to orient
myself toward the ground of the other. The reflexivity inherent to the politi-
cal mode operates at the collective as well as the individual level: on the one
side, it enables the elaboration of a self-awareness of the political community,
of a collective consciousness that returns to itself. On the other, discussion in
the public sphere is the moment of a reinterpretation of my own preferences,
needs and definitions of myself, thanks to the decentering force of the argu-
mentation’s logic. Both movements contribute to the elaboration of a specific
being-together.
Lastly, at the opposite end of the spectrum to the one that Dewey occu-
pied, Arendt dealt with the emergence of a political being-together by giv-
ing priority to disagreement, the irreducibility of which is the condition of
upholding a veritably common world, whereas the figure of learning recedes
into the background. According to Arendt, the political domain, which is born
of the community of action, of putting in common words and acts, at the
same time presumes the aforementioned presence of different perspectives.
Arendt entrusts the space of deliberation with the stringent function of con-
stituting the political community, and not because it would simply be the
space of settling disagreements. For her, the world only exists as a common
world to the extent that it is exposure to the positions of others. It constrains
one to “exchange the standpoint given us by nature for that of someone else,
with whom we share the same world.”180 And it is important that the plural-
ity and therefore disagreement be maintained at all instants, that they not
180 H. Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, edited and with an introduction by Jerome
Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 12–16.

simply figure as the original condition of a being-together: the world is not

common because dialegesthai ensures a convergence of points of view, but
instead because dialegesthai exists.181 The political obliges us to see the world
in its complexity and via this mechanism forges a link that does not entail unity
but is constituted as a link of disagreement.
Working further through the thread of the common that is proper to the
political, we are compelled to consider the following: political being-together
produces its own epistemic conditions, which have practical effects, bringing
the individuals that they affect to relate to one another in a particular way.
Articulating the political with vulnerability thus involves confronting these
conditions with the experience of exposure and lack, and with the cognitive
significance of this experience.
Honneth, you will recall, endows the disappointment of our moral expecta-
tions with a cognitive importance, on account of which conflict is made pos-
sible. In doing this, he superposes two different premises: on the one hand,
struggle is motivated by experiences of a moral order – as it so happens expe-
riences of injustice that under certain conditions compel one to engage into
action; on the other, the emotions aroused by the experience of disrespect
teach us something about the wrong committed against us and/or the world
in which it took place. In places, Honneth concedes that the representation
of a world fraught with suffering does not yet provide any description of its
contrary, and further that the way in which oppressed groups morally evalu-
ate a social order generally takes the form of feelings of injustice, not of prin-
ciples able to be formulated and formulated positively.182 But while he notes
the tenuous character of the birth of a knowledge aroused by the experience of
vulnerability, he does not question its discernment.
Now, there is something that the theories of intersectionality have recently
made clear, at least through the voice of bell hooks: the intertwinement of the
different axes of injustice and exposure to wrongs, not all of which necessarily
affect me. Gender, race and class – to reiterate the forms of nudity to harm-
ful events and types of exploitation of vulnerabilities in which her thought
is rooted – are not endogenous realities able to influence each other mutu-
ally in a second phase; they are bound up in processes of co-construction.
Notwithstanding, if some persons are exposed to all these wrongs conjointly,
then the persons who only experience a single vulnerability, or a small number
of them, tend to be more numerous. bell hooks agrees with Honneth that most
181 Ibid., p. 168.

182 See A. Honneth, “Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in the
Analysis of Hidden Morality,” The Fragmented World of the Social, p. 205–219.

80 Ferrarese
human beings only feel summoned to political action insofar as they seek to
put an end to that which injures them; but, according to her, precisely herein
lies the problem. For it means that aspiration for change in general aims only
at what affects us, and thereby misses the reality of domination (and along
with domination, the mechanisms for distributing expectations, responsibili-
ties and responses), which is necessarily complex and necessarily entangled
with other axes of injustice that do not directly concern us. In other terms,
what bell hooks tends to demonstrate is that what motivates political action is
not that which sheds light on it.183 Now, political struggles can only, must only,
aim at destroying all axes of domination and exposure at the same time, as
each one will disappear only because all others have been defeated. The type of
knowledge stemming from the experience of vulnerability to which Honneth
draws our attention is therefore not only partial but proves misleading when
seen from a collective perspective.
Taking this sort of aspect into consideration returns us to the critique of
immediacy characteristic of Adorno’s writings. As is well known, Adorno
provides a lengthy critique of the ‘ideology of immediacy’, which consists in
forgetting that all the givens that we apprehend are mediated by society: the
given, which is to say, the facts that we believe we “come up against” as though
they are some ultimate thing, is in actual fact conditioned. In particular,
though needs do emerge during an exercise of self-interpretation, this exercise
is nonetheless socially mediated;184 thus no ‘revelation’ of needs can take place
in it, and no social and political action can render a subject fully conscious of
herself in a single blow.
To articulate the political and vulnerability in this way thus means that only
in the light of an ordeal that is specific to the political, can the experience of
vulnerability be the site of learning and thereby of construction of a common.
The cognitive effects of the experience of vulnerability only have real practical
consequences insofar as they are the subject of a disagreement and of con-
testation ‘welcomed’ by the political. More radically, it is possible to defend
the idea that the common proper to the political results from the constraint
to let go of something of one’s experience of vulnerability, thanks to the resis-
tance that others oppose to one’s own interpretation of it. The experience
183 According to her, only love, with its unveiling capacity, permits the simultaneously bring-
ing down of the different axes of domination, and therefore, since they co-constitute
each other, each of them because all of them. (bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting
Representations, New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 289–298.)
184 See, Adorno, “Theses on Need.”

of vulnerability has no political purchase, or efficacy, on the world unless it

effects a decentering, which is to say the (partial) abandoning of a posture
and a claim, a decentering carried out via the test of a disagreement and that
enforces a learning process. This argument brings to light anew, and from the
opposite side, another mode of the political, political subjectivation and the
mode of self-transformation that it entails. Once again, one mode of the politi-
cal presupposes another.
So, far from being irreconcilable with the political, the idea of vulnerability
sheds new light on it. Thinking of the political through the prism of vulner-
ability defined as an exposure to another’s power to act, an exposure organised
by normative expectations with as much instituting force as instituted form,
implies its coinciding with the conjoint advent of a world, a relation and a
political subject. Our reflection has demonstrated a world (arising from delib-
eration), a (political) subjectivity, and a relation (between political subjects),
the emergence of which depends upon the experience of living at the other’s
mercy.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W., Sociology and Psychology, (Part II) New Left Review, I/47, January–
February, 1968.
Adorno, T. W., Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Aston, London: Bloomsbury Academic,
1981.
Adorno, T. W., Prisms, trans. S. W. Nicholson and S. Weber, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1983.
Adorno, T. W., “Theses on Need,” trans. M. Schuster and I. MacDonald, Adorno Studies,
vol. 1(1), 2017, pp. 102–4.
Agamben, G., Means without Ends: Notes on politics, trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Arendt, H., Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, Munich: Piper, 2003.
Arendt, H., “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, edited and with an introduction by
Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 12–16.
Bankoff, G., “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse,” Disas-
ters, vol. 25(1), 2001, pp. 19–35.
Beck, U., Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter, Los Angeles/London:
Sage Publications, 1992.
Benjamin, W., “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, trans. H. B. Jovanovich, New York:
Schocken Books, 1986.

82 Ferrarese
Boltanski, L., and E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott, London:
Verso, 2005.
Bonß, W., “Karriere und sozialwissenschaftliche Potenziale des Resilienzbegriffs”, in
M. Endreß, A. Maurer (eds.), Resilienz im Sozialen, Theoretische und empirische
Analysen, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2015, pp. 15–31.
Brennan, G., and P. Pettit, The Economy of Esteem, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Butler, J., Excitable Speech, New York: Routledge, 1997.
Butler, J., Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009.
Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York/London:
Routledge, 1990.
Butler, J., Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2015.
Butler, J., Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London/New York:
Verso, 2006.
Butler, J. “‘We the people’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in Badiou et al. What Is
a People? New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 63.
Cafiero, C., and V. Renos, “Risk and Vulnerability Considerations in Poverty Analy-
sis: Recent Advances and Future Directions,” Social Protection Discussion Paper,
No. 0610, Washington: The World Bank, 2006.
Castel, R., “De l’indigence à l’exclusion, la désaffiliation. Précarité du travail et vulnera-
bilité relationnelle,” in J. Donzelot (ed.), Face à l’exclusion: le modèle français, Paris:
Esprit, 1991, pp. 137–168.
Castel, R., Les métamorphoses de la question sociale, Paris: Fayard, 1995.
Castel, R., “The Rise of Uncertainties,” trans. S. Corcoran, Critical Horizons, vol. 17(2),
Special Issue “The Politics of Vulnerability,” 2016, pp. 160–167.
Castoriadis, C., The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blarney, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
Castoriadis, C., World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and
the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997.
Cavarero, A., Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. W. McCuaig, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007.
Cavarero, A., Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. P. A. Kottman,
London/New York: Routledge, 2000.
Cavell, S., The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979.
Cole, A., The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Das, V., Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley University
of California Press, 2007.
Das, V., A. Kleinman, M. Ramphele and P. Reynolds, Violence and Subjectivity, Berkeley/
Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2000.
Debrix, F. and A. D. Barder, “Nothing to Fear but Fear: Governmentality and the
Biopolitical Production of Terror,” International Political Sociology, vol. 3(4), 2009,
pp. 398–413.
Dewey, J., “The Public and Its Problems,” in John Dewey: The Political Writings, eds.
D. Morris and I. Shapiro, Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
Dodds, S., “Inclusion and Exclusion in Women’s Access to Health and Medicine,” Inter-
national Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 1(2), 2008, pp. 58–79.
Esposito, R., Communitas: Origin and Destiny of the Community, trans. T. Campbell,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Esposito, R., Immunitas. Biopolitics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008.
Federici, S., “Wages Against Housework,” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Repro-
duction and Feminist Struggle, New York: PM Press/Common Notions, 2012.
Ferrarese, E., Ethique et politique de l’espace public. Habermas et la discussion, Paris:
Vrin, 2015.
Ferrarese, E., “The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Think-
ing Together Vulnerability and the Political and its Consequences,” Critical Horizons,
vol. 17(2), 2016, pp. 224–240.
Fineman, M., “Equality, Autonomy and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” in
M. Fineman and A. Grear (eds.), Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Founda-
tion for Law and Politics, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 13–28.
Fineman, M., “The Vulnerable Subject. Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,”
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism vol. 20(1), 2008, pp. 1–23.
FitzGerald, S. A., “Biopolitics and the Regulation of Vulnerability: The Case of the
Female Trafficked Migrant,” International Journal of Law in Context, vol. 6(3), 2010,
pp. 277–294.
Foucault, M., Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, trans.
G. Burchell, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell, New York: Picador, 2009.
Fraser, N. and Gordon, L., “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S.
Welfare State,” in Signs, vol. 19(2), 1994, 309–336.
Fraser, N., “Struggle over Needs,” trans. E. Ferrarese, Paris: La Découverte, 2005.
Fraser, N. and A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical
Exchange, New York: Verso, 2003.
Gehlen, A., Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1995.

84 Ferrarese
Gehlen, A., Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie. Soziologische Texte, vol. 17. 1971.
Gehlen, A., Anthropologische und sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen, p. 33.
Génard, J.-L., “Une réflexion sur l’anthropologie de la fragilité, de la vulnerabilité et de
la souffrance,” in T. Perilleux et J. Cultiaux (eds.), Destins politiques de la souffrance,
Paris: Erès, 2009, pp. 27–45.
Gilligan, C., In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gilson, E., The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice,
New York, London: Routledge, 2014.
Goodin, R., Protecting the Vulnerable, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Habermas, J., Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Habermas, J., Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2008.
Habermas, J., Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1979.
Habermas, J., The Future of Human Nature, trans. H. Beister, M. Pensky, and W. Rehg,
Cambridge: Polity, 2003.
Habermas, J., Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans.
C. P. Cronin, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993.
Habermas, J., Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and
S. W. Nicholsen, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
Habermas, J., “Öffentlichkeit,” in Fischer Lexikon Staat und Politik, Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1964, pp. 220–226.
Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. G. Lawrence, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
Habermas, J., Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. F. G. Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1983.
Habermas, J., Theory of Communicative Action, 2 volumes, trans. T. A. McCarthy,
Boston,: Beacon Press, 1984.
Habermas, J., Theory and Practice, trans. J. Viertel, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
Haalboom, B. and D. C. Natcher, “The Power and Peril of Vulnerability. Approaching
Community Labels with Caution in Climate Change Research,” Arctic, vol. 65(3),
2012, pp. 319–327.
Heller, A., “Can ‘True’ and ‘False’ Needs be Posited?” in Agnes Heller, The Power of
Shame: A Rational Perspective, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Heller, A., The Theory of Need in Marx, trans. G. Feltrinelli, New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1976.
Hobbes, T., Leviathan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988.
Hobbes, T., On the Citizen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Holzmann, R., and S. Jorgensen, “Social Risk Management: A New Conceptual Frame-
work for Social Protection and Beyond,” Social Protection Discussion Paper Series,
Social Protection Unit, Human Development Network, The World Bank, 2000.
Honneth, A., Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie, Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000.
Honneth, A., Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, trans. J. Farrell,
Cambridge: Polity, 2007.
Honneth, A., The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philoso-
phy, trans. C. W. Wright, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
Honneth, A., “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality based
on the Theory of Recognition,” Political Theory, vol. 20(2), 1992, pp. 187–201.
Honneth, A., The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans.
J. Anderson, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Honneth, A. and J. Hans, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Mayer, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
hooks, b., Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, New York: Routledge, 1994.
Horkheimer, M.,Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970, p. 28.
Horkheimer, M., Critical Theory, London: Continuum, 1975.
Horkheimer, M., Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. M. Shaw,
New York: Seabury Press, 1978.
Horkheimer, M., Eclipse of Reason, London: Continuum, 2004.
Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming,
London: Verso, 1979.
Horkheimer, M., “Materialism and Morality,” in Between Philosophy and Social Science,
trans. G. H. Hunter et al., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995, pp. 15–48.
Ikäheimo, H. and A. Laitinen, “Esteem for Contributions to the Common Good: The
Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value,” in M. Seymour (ed.),
The Plural States of Recognition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 98–122.
Kittay, E. F., Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, New York: Rout-
ledge, 1999.
Kocyba Hermann, “Les paradoxes de la manifestation de reconnaissance,” in Christian
L. and S. Nour (eds.), Reconnaissance, identité, intégration sociale, Nanterre: Presses
Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2009, pp. 277–293.
Kuo, S. S. and B. Means, “After the Storm: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Locally
Owned Business,” in M. Fineman and A. Grear (eds.), Vulnerability. Reflections on
a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 95–106.
Latour, B., We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Lefort, C., Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey, London: Polity Press,
1988.

86 Ferrarese
Lefort, C., Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

Lefort, C., Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith, Evanston. Ill.: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2012.
Lefort, C., “Proletarian Experience,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 26, 2013
(French original, 1952), https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/26/proletarian-experience
[Accessed: March 1, 2017].
Levinas, E., Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, Pittsburgh
Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Ligon, E., and L. Schechter, “Measuring Vulnerability,” The Economic Journal,
vol. 113 (486), 2003, pp. 95–102.
Luhmann, N., Observations on Modernity, trans. W. Whobrey, Stanford: Stanford
Luhmann, N., Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. R. Barrett, Berlin: Walter de Grutyer,
1993.
Luna, F., “Elucidating the Concept of Vulnerability: Layers, not Labels,” International
Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, vol. 2,(1), 2009, pp. 121–139.
MacKenzie, C., W. Rogers, and S. Dodges, Vulnerability: New Ethics and Feminist Philoso-
phy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Marcuse, H., Kultur und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999.
Marcuse, H., “On Hedonism,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. J. Shapiro,
London: Mayfly, 2009, pp. 119–150.
Marx, K., Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan, Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.
Mauss, M., Œuvres, Paris: éditions de Minuit, 1969, 3 vol.
Mauss, M. and Fauconnet, P., “Sociology,” in Marcel Mauss, The Nature of Sociology,
trans. W. Jeffrey, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, p. 10.
Maynor, J., Republicanism in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Mead, G. H., Mind, Self, and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Michel, N., “Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Toward a Critical Black
Politics of Vulnerability,” Critical Horizons, vol. 17(2), Special Issue “The Politics of
Vulnerability,” 2016, pp. 240–260.
Molinier, P., S. Laugier, and P. Paperman, Qu’est-ce que le care?, Paris: Payot, 2010.
Molinier, P., Le travail du care, Paris: La Dispute, 2013.
Noddings, N., Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984.
Nussbaum, M., “Compassion and Terror,” in Daedalus, Winter 2003, vol. 132(1),
pp. 10–26.
Nussbaum, M., “Emotions as Judgements of Value and Importance,” in R. C. Solomon
ed., Thinking about Feeling, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 183–199.

Nussbaum, M., The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Nussbaum, M., Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership,
Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006.
Nussbaum, M., Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton, NJ.:
Princeton University Press, 2016.
Nussbaum, M., Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001.
Nussbaum, M., Woman and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Offe, C., Herausforderungen der Demokratie. Zur Integrations- und Leistungsfaehig-
keiten politischer Institutionen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003.
Paperman, P., and S. Laugier (eds.), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care,
Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2006.
Paugam, S., La disqualification sociale. Essai sur la nouvelle pauvreté, Paris: PUF, 1991.
Péguy, C., Œuvres en prose (1909–1914), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
vol. II, 1961.
Pettit, P., Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Rancière, J., Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis: Min-
nesota University Press, 2004.
Rancière, J., On the Shores of Politics, trans. L. Heron, London: Verso, 2006.
Rancière, J., “Ten Theses on Politics”, trans. S. Corcoran in Dissensus, London: Blooms-
bury, 2015, p. 41.
Rawls, J., Political liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Revet, S., “De la vulnerabilité aux vulnérables. Approche critique d’une notion perfor-
mative,” in Becerra, S., and A. Peltier (eds.), Risque et environnement: recherches inter-
disciplinaires sur la vulnerabilité des sociétés, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009, pp. 89–99.
Ricœur, P., “Autonomie et vulnerabilité,” in A. Garapon and D. Salas (eds.), La justice et
le mal, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997, pp. 163–184.
Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.
Sennett, R., The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006.
Shildrick, M., Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self, Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002.
Shklar, J., “Justice et citoyenneté,” in J. Affichard & J.-B. de Foucault (eds.), Pluralisme et
équité, Paris: Editions Esprit, 1995, pp. 85–103.
Sorel, G., Sorel: Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999.

88 Ferrarese
Standing, G., The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2011.
Süssmilch, J. P., Gedancken von den epidemischen Kranckheiten und dem grösseren
Sterben des 1757ten Jahres, in einem Sendschreiben an die Herren Verfasser der
Göttinglichen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen und auf derselben Verlangen entworffen
von Johann Peter Süssmilch, Königl. Preussl. Ober-Consistorial-Rathe, Probste in Cölln,
und Pastor Primarius zu St. Petri, wie auch Mitgliede der Königl. Preussl. Akademie dre
Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1758.
Tronto, J., “Beyond Gender Differences to a Theory of Care,” Signs, vol. 12(4), 1987,
pp. 644–662.
Tronto, J., Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993.
Tully, J., Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995.
Turner, B. S., Vulnerability and Human Rights, University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania
State University, 2006.
Villagrán De León, J. C., “Vulnerability. A Conceptual and Methodological Review,” in
Source, 2006/4, pp. 1–64.
Walker, J. and M. Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Polit-
ical Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue, vol. 42,(2), 2011, pp. 143–160.
Wisner, B., P. Blaikie, T. Cannon and I. Ian, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulner-
ability and Disasters, London: Routledge, 2004.

Vulnerability and Critical Theory - Estelle Ferrarese

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Vulnerability and Critical Theory - Estelle Ferrarese

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

critical theory 1.

In Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary devel-

precarity – political (the) – risk – intersubjectivity – normative expectations – critical

© estelle ferrarese, 2018 | doi 10.1163/24519529-12340002

Vulnerability, as I understand it in the present work, is thus not a synonym

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 102 (my emphasis).

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

removed from the political stage. Hobbes conceives of a natural equality, a

14 Ibid., p. 26.

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

it as particularly pertinent to thought in its political scope. On the one hand,

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

Part 1: The Vulnerable and the Geometer: Contemporary Uses of

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

In a general fashion, contemporary uses of the word tend to evacuate the

1.1 Vulnerable Cities, Territories, Populations and Individuals: Risk

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

34 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 62.

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

in areas with rampant delinquency.37 Applied to one territory or population

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

into a potential object of intervention proceeds via an expert discourse which

obligation on behalf of Western nations to employ their good offices to

Critical takes on the category of vulnerability in the social sciences contend

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

which is that of a self-engendered, sovereign, singular or collective subject,

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

experimentation, of the profane exploration of possibilities, of reflexivity of

1.2 The Risk of Poverty

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

48 R. Castel, “‘De l’indigence à l’exclusion, la désaffiliation,’ Précarité du travail et vulnera-

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

resource for fostering reflection on new forms of management, in particular

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

will we be able to elucidate the simultaneously descriptive and normative

1.3 Vulnerability as Doubly Filtered by the Social Sciences and

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

also of elaboration of vulnerability insofar as it comprises discrete knowledge

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

Part 2: Contemporary Moral Philosophy: Three Models of

Theories of recognition, Hegelian or otherwise, as well as the ethics of care;

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

65 See, N. Michel, “Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Toward a Critical

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

All of the authors involved in this theoretical constellation seek, moreover,

67 P. Ricœur, “Autonomie et vulnerabilité,” in A. Garapon, D. Salas ed., La justice et le mal,

critical theory 1.2 (2016) 1–88

Against the backdrop of that relative unity, it is possible to highlight three

2.1 Three Competing Models of Vulnerability