Righting Precarious Lives : Violence, Vulnerability and Responsibility for the Other

Abstract

As we live in the world today, as we experience our life in our global connectedness, we very much come witness a more vulnerable and uncertain world structured by violence (both material and ideological) across the matrix of race, class, sex, colour, nation and other identitarian and differential categories leading to the precariousness of life. In context of the governance of everyday life and in such differential arrangement certain lives are recognized as livable lives (and, so, valuable lives) while others are not in the normative frame of the “human” owing to the devaluation and dehumanization of these lives who have always been branded as (human) Others and, as a result, subjected to violence, vulnerability and precarity. The critical implication of such a state of life is profound in the sense that it imposes ethical obligation upon the global community to respond and redress with collective responsibility the specters of injustice and suffering. At the center of this (in)human state of affairs lies a certain idea and operation of the “human” or “Humanism” premised on the Enlightenment and its legacy that has come under scrutiny in recent critical humanistic scholarship. This presses the need for rethinking and remaking of the human through an alternative scheme of thought, knowledge and subject-production toward an ethically grounded collective mode of living through the acknowledgement of interdependency and relationality. Informed by this theoretical optic and drawing on the ethical scholarship of Derrida, Butler and Levinas, specifically their critical take on violence and responsibility, this paper argues that to resist and redress violence it is critically imperative to work toward a relational social ontology by reworking the human subjectivity for the collective wellbeing of all (precarious) lives.