Vulnerability, Violence and Nonviolence

Abstract

Fareld explores the connection between the concept of vulnerability and the imagery of violence in contemporary feminist philosophy. In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgent interest in the concept of vulnerability in a broad variety of research fields focusing on risk management, security and resilience. In contrast to this understanding of vulnerability as a condition that has to be reduced in human life and which is primarily equated with disempowerment and passivity, several scholars call for a reconceptualization of vulnerability as not only limiting but also enabling and activating. In their writing, the vulnerable body becomes a uniting link between an ethics of responsibility and a relational ontology of human dependence, and as such a critique of the normative independence underpinning liberal individualism (Fineman, Cavarero, Butler, Gilson, Cole, Murphy, among others). Fareld examines the place and role of violence in this reclaimed understanding of vulnerability. Scholars interested in the vulnerable body as the center of an ethics of responsibility and nonviolence diverge on the role ascribed to violence. Conceptualized as a condition of possibility for an ethics of nonviolence, vulnerability is seen by some as offering an alternative to violence, and by others as being necessarily entwined with violence. Fareld discusses the connection between different forms of violence and attempts at exploring nonviolent ways of understanding subject formation, embodied life and enabling ways of responding to human vulnerability. She concludes by following Butler in arguing for the importance of stressing the constitutive role of violence in a relational ethics of nonviolence.