Truth

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the shared vulnerability that binds people to one another. People must keep two things in mind. First, the universality of people's vulnerability, however inescapable in a globalized world, is infinitely variable. It is, stated otherwise, unequally distributed. Judith Butler evoked this inequality following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when she pressed her fellow citizens, justifiably traumatized by the aggression, not to be blinded to the multiple forms of insecurity that beleaguer other populations and other peoples around the world. Second, there is in this sense a geography of vulnerability, a mapping of which overlaps that of famine, misery, war, epidemics, political violence, or oppression. There can be no disputing that the inscription of frontiers that separate wealth from poverty, hunger from opulence, access to care from scarcity of care, instruction from illiteracy, and “democracy” from dictatorship and authoritarianism ground the “reality” of the world. They fracture and partition it. Thus, the question of truth comes up forcefully in those recurring situations in which there is a distortion between, on the one hand, the unequal globalization of vulnerability and, on the other hand, the calculations, pretensions, and partial and partisan interpretations of inequality, in the name of some or other prerogative or in defense of sovereign interests.