The Politics of Vulnerability ed. by Estelle Ferrarese

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Vulnerability ed. by Estelle Ferrarese Sanna Karhu (bio) Estelle Ferrarese ed., The Politics of Vulnerability London & New York: Routledge, 2018; 131 pp. The concept of “vulnerability” has become an academic buzzword over the last few decades in the fields of social theory, political philosophy, and feminist scholarship. The concept is used in multiple ways to address different contemporary political problems ranging from social and economic marginalization and violence to global wars. One of the most well-known theoretical contributions to the concept of “vulnerability” is Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) famous account of bodily vulnerability as a generalized state of bodily life. While for Butler vulnerability operates as a physical and affective condition for the ethics of nonviolence, for critics of vulnerability, such as Alan Badiou (2001), Bonnie Honig (2010), and Jacques Rancière (1999), the concept risks substituting politics with ethics due to its emphasis on emotions and care. Challenging the idea that vulnerability belongs solely to the ethical sphere, The Politics of Vulnerability seeks to foreground vulnerability as a political question. As Estelle Ferrarese asks in the introduction of the volume: “How could an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertaining to human nature become the object of a critique, or be the wellspring of emancipation? How does the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for socially produced or configured forms of vulnerability?” (5). Answering these questions is one of the central tasks of the book, which consists of seven essays that were originally published in Critical Horizons (2016). Throughout the anthology, [End Page 280] understandings of and meanings given to vulnerability vary, refusing any clear-cut definition of the concept. For some scholars, it is associated with the question of everyday life, such as practices of care (Laugier, Ferrarese). For others, it refers to the politics of concepts: to injurious speech acts that govern racialized bodies (Michel), or to the urgency of re-politicizing the concept of “victimhood” (Cole). One of the main strengths of the volume lies in the scope of the essays: the question of vulnerability permits a broad range of topics and problems to be discussed under one heading. However, the first three essays, although otherwise important contributions, do not concentrate on the concept of vulnerability or the politics of vulnerability and thus do not directly respond to the main questions of the volume. These essays discuss vulnerability in a more implicit manner, highlighting forms of economic precarity (Castel) and the everyday practices that make some lives more susceptible to violence and death than others (Das and Deutscher). In his essay “The Rise of Uncertainties,” which provides a summary of the main theses of his book of the same name, Robert Castel discusses new forms of economic insecurity related to precarization by analyzing the negative impacts of global finance capitalism on workers (specifically in France). Castel focuses particularly on the emergence of a new class, the “precariat” who work atypical and temporary jobs, and demonstrates how it has become a permanent stratum of the division of labor. With the weakening of worker protection laws and social benefits, the precarization of work has led to the peculiar situation wherein the same individual can be both an underpaid worker and a welfare recipient. As Castel concludes, the degradation of the wage-earner system can marginalize certain populations by making it impossible for them to achieve the status of a “responsible individual”—a normative requirement of modern liberal states. Although Castel does not use the term “vulnerability,” his analysis of precarization powerfully shows that addressing the economic dynamics of the neoliberal state is necessary for any theory of vulnerability. Veena Das’s article provides an insightful reading of J.M. Coetzee’s novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year in light of the Wittgensteinian notion of “forms of life,” interpreted through Stanley Cavell’s work. Whereas for Cavell the meaning of words and concepts depends on particular cultural contexts and shared customs, rules, and habits, that is, on shared forms of life, Das puts more emphasis on the ways in which practices of violence can disrupt the assumption of shared meanings, and thus turn forms of life...