Vulnerability: a beginning. The ethical and political potential of the blush and embarrassment

Abstract

This thesis is motivated by my resistance to the view that vulnerability lacks the normative force to be at the heart of an ethico-political ideal. My intuition is that vulnerability is a necessary pre-condition for those conditions that produce moral consciousness; a consciousness that expresses itself by way of the blush and embarrassment. As such, I am arguing that if it is a moral world we are interested in, then we are compelled to promote the ethico-political conditions that best support these expressions of our vulnerability, defined now by our moral exposure to the other. With Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas as my principal guides, and to a lesser but no less important extent, Judith Butler, I hope to address this view by appealing to a projection account of vulnerability, as opposed to a protection account. This language comes from a Derridean reading of the Greek problēma; insofar as it might be said of vulnerability that it presents us with a problem, then this ‘denotes as much the task of projection as the edge of protection’ (Derrida, Aporias, 1993, 11-12, 40). Regarding the former, I am interested in exploring vulnerability as an attitude, a posture informed by the body that implies a mental state, itself indicative of an idea or emotion. As such, vulnerability, I am arguing, calls on us, by expression of our ideas and emotions, to project at the very edge of that which cries out for protection. By this I mean (mindful still of Derrida), that while my instinct is to hide from that which may impinge upon me; I may even go so far as to hide my vulnerability altogether by disavowing it; in the face of such, the projection account of vulnerability compels me nonetheless towards an attitude, a posture, informed by the vulnerable body. Such an account requires that vulnerability’s voice be heard, which is to say that the body be allowed to Speak. In order to gain a clearer understanding of what the body is Saying, I will utilise social/psychology research, including the work of Raymond Crozier and Zygmunt Bauman, to support my argument that the blush communicates our genius as morally ambivalent animals. This genius further expresses itself by way of embarrassment; as both the aporia of a knowledge emotion, such as confusion, and a self-conscious emotion, like shame for example. To the extent that philosophy has anything to say about the blush, it is invariably witnessed as the pink blush (of shame). To this end, I will explore Jean Paul Sartre’s, as well as Levinas’ accounts of shame, alongside Aristotelean aidos and Norbert Elias’s genealogy of embarrassment, if only to demonstrate that perhaps there is more to be gained from blurring the distinction, in order that we might hear what the body is Saying. Regarding embarrassment, as something like the aporia of confusion, I will turn to the story of the student from Bologna, as told by Robert Antelme, in order to rehabilitate the blush and embarrassment such that they might reveal their ethical and political potential. I trust that by listening to what the body is Saying, I might go some way towards reconciling the body that knows Openness with the body of knowing that endeavours towards (thinking) openness, and in so doing reveal something of the normative potential for an ethico-political ideal that takes for its name, vulnerability.