Vulnerability and its politics: Precarity and the woundedness of power

Abstract

This article is an attempt to unwrite our current disciplinary enamourment with power. We begin from life’s woundedness, which we argue engenders a limit condition that both precedes power (vulnerability is the origin of power) and exceeds power (no power can ever resolve the problem of woundedness). To illustrate this, we introduce the ‘politics of the wound’: a perspective on politics that begins, not from a pre-existing ontology of forces and relations, but from the condition of striving, in infinitely generous and yet fragile ways, to claim sovereignty against the incurable wound of being a living being.

Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze

“…This is immediate in terms of both spatial proximity (the embodied lives of or through which we are thinking) and the temporal and historical context shaping the thinking being thought (the matter of thought has its times and is shaped by the history of events proximate to it). There is clearly a tradition now within geography that takes a phenomenological approach to the thinking of difference, one which accompanies the shift towards the micro, the personal and the individual (see Joronen and Rose, 2020; Kinkaid, 2020; Philo, 2016; Simonsen, 2012). The danger for us here is that these microgeographies are too often thought with quick assumptions towards the phenomenological, assumptions shaped by a genealogy of phenomenological ideas that we would like to question: the subjective, the inward looking, the melancholic (Deleuze, 1995: 6).…”

Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine

“…And yet, slow wounding should never be approached merely as a power that is capable of wounding, but as an inherently wounded power -as a power not only incapable of fully capturing what it aims to govern, but also constantly cracked open to counter-wounding. It is this ambiguity that is used here to further show how power is always entwined around life's incurable proneness to a wound -that is, around the wound of being a living being (see also Joronen & Rose, 2020).…”

“…It cannot give an ontological ground for life, or aims to governing it, but rather does the opposite: it exposes them to what I call the "wound of living." Such a wound, as Derrida aptly reminds, is a wound that "does not heal": it is a wound that cannot be "sutured" but only replied to (Derrida & Grossman, 2019; see also Derrida, 2002;Harrison, 2008;Joronen & Rose, 2020). Woundedness, in this regard, names the inherent fragility of living, a fundamental limit installed by the fact that life is intrinsically finite, vulnerable, and open in nature.…”

“…This un-abling relation of possibility between power and woundedness opens up several traits that I argue are pivotal for scrutinising the nature of slow wounding. First, political power should not be considered as an origin of woundedness, as something capable of defining whether or not woundedness abides (see Butler, 2015;Joronen & Rose, 2020;Rose, 2007Rose, , 2014. Power to wound is rather an epiphenomenal condition, something defined by, and so dependent on, the existential woundedness of living.…”

“…What these ambiguities of exposure thus highlight is the manifoldness in responding to woundedness: the way that those encountering wounding can mitigate, counter, cancel, inoperationalise, transform, or simply remain indifferent to different aims to wound. Perhaps more importantly, I argue, these ambiguities show how power is not merely capable of wounding life through its vulnerability to power but a wounded and limited power -a power fundamentally unable to completely subsume Palestinian life under its logics of domination (see also Joronen & Rose, 2020). It is such incapacity and vulnerability of power that helps in understanding why slowness and its mundane quasi-events are not only embodied to processes of submissive wounding, but also capable of engendering what I call "durable agencies.…”