International audienceVulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, " mutilatable " and killable bodies, especially after Septem-ber 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking 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. In Europe, and particularly in France, current reflection on vulnerability has emerged from a thematics of precarity and exclusion. The term evokes, in the first place, lives that are dispensable, evictable and deportable, and the abandoning of individuals to naked forces of the market. It is probably to the sociology of Robert Castel, who died in 2013 – one of whose last papers we have had translated here – that we primarily owe the popularization of French scientific uses of the term vulnerability which occurred in the 1990s. For him, vulnerability consists of a " space of instability and of turbulences populated with individuals insecure in their relation to work and fragile in their relational integration
Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition-Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the tradition to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other.
Even before 'economic precarity' became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and materiality more generally. This shift is evident across disciplines, from the expanding field of 'critical economics, ' to the popularity of 'capitalism studies, ' the emergence of 'neomaterialism, ' and the revived interest in Frankfurt school thinkers and even Karl Marx himself, to the push back against the so-called 'linguistic turn' and Foucauldian analyses of power. Despite this renewed attention, the question remains: 'the economy' in what sense? The idea that capitalism is more than an economic system, and instead, as Marx first framed it, a 'definite mode of life' that shapes our relationships with others, our sense of ourselves and our capacities, practices, and actions in the material world, should be rather obvious. Yet efforts-whether through criticism or policy remedies-to redress the vast inequalities, inherent exploitation, reification and alienation, to say nothing of the manifold destructive effects of capitalism on the environment, typically proceed without grappling fully with the entwinement of the economic with the social and cultural, much less the political, ethical, ontological, and phenomenological. It seems, therefore, that we require new heuristics to comprehend capitalism broadly and deeply, to investigate and further define the work of capital on these multiple registers simultaneously. In this special issue of the Journal of Culture Research, we propose 'form of life' as a possible heuristic. Rather than replace one emphasis (e.g. the discursive) with another (e.g. the material), the concept of a 'form of life' presumes all facets of life are inherently interwoven, bypassing distinctions between discourse, bodies, language, and materiality. It thus enables scholars to incorporate the diverse aspects of life in their analysis, to investigate the effects of capitalism holistically and at a range of scales. While the contributions in this volume vary in their focus and align with different theoretical approaches and methodologies, all provide meditations on the scope, contours, and content of capitalism as a form of life. The concept 'form of life' comes from the German 'Lebensform. ' In the German language, there is another semantically similar word that conjures a rather different meaning, 'Lebensweise, ' often translated as a 'way of life' or a 'lifestyle. ' Unlike a lifestyle (Lebensweise), about which we presume we make purposeful choices, a 'form of life' (Lebensform), as Ludwig Wittgenstein clarifies, is part of 'natural history … which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes' (1968, p. 415). Hanna
International audienceThis paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerabilitycan only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality.I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a largenumber of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political.Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considersit as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret caretheories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the politicalfrom the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movementof reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted
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