Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, ISBN 978-1-5179-0065-6 (original) (raw)
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Digithum- The Politics of Social Suffering, 2019
The article addresses Judith Butler's thought on ethics of vulnerability. The main goal of the article is to approach the concepts of vulnerability, recognition and representation considering the way each of them engage in the process of subject formation Butler presents in different phases of her work. This comparison will function as a guide to locate and interpret Butler's theoretical inflections along her trajectory; and it will also work to ground a feminist critical analysis of her ethics. Keywords Feminism, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, critical theory ¿Qué pasa con la humanidad? Una crítica feminista de la ética de la vulnerabilidad de Judith Butler Resumen El presente artículo aborda el pensamiento de Judith Butler sobre la ética de la vulnerabilidad. El objetivo principal del artículo es aproximarse a los conceptos de vulnerabilidad, reconocimiento y representación, teniendo en cuenta la forma en que cada uno de ellos participa en el proceso de formación de los sujetos que Butler presenta en las diferentes fases de su trabajo. Esta comparación servirá como guía para ubicar e interpretar las inflexiones teóricas de Butler a lo largo de su trayectoria. De igual manera, servirá para fundamentar un análisis crítico feminista de su ética.
Review of "Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy"
Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy is arguably the first collection of philosophical essays to be published on the topic. As such, it invites a moment of reflection on the state of scholarly discourse surrounding vulnerability and its analogues, such as care, dependency, and need. To begin with a series of expansive questions to foster deeper consideration: How has the discourse on vulnerability and associated concepts transformed the philosophical terrain? To what extent has this discourse risen to the level of significance and visibility enjoyed by other leading concepts in moral and political philosophy, such as justice, equality, independence, and autonomy? Does vulnerability have a fitting place alongside these concepts? And finally, and perhaps the boldest question of the group: Are we experiencing a pivotal moment in the discipline, in which the centrality of vulnerability to the human condition will finally receive appropriate philosophical attention? The twelve new essays in Vulnerability start us well on the path to answering these and related pressing questions.
Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action
SubStance, 2013
The central question I want to explore here is whether there can be a different discourse of vulnerability outside the hold of biopolitics, security, and self-management. Can vulnerability signify a different intersection between politics and ethics apart from risk management on a global or individual scale? Can it be mobilized by feminist politics and ethics? On the level of politics, vulnerability, I would like to propose, has two contradictory meanings, which are nonetheless connected. In feminist and anti-racist struggles, vulnerability is intertwined first of all with subjection to racist and sexist violence, with bodily injury and extreme destitution. In other words, it signifies the damaging and indeed disastrous effects of domination and power. Yet vulnerability also has a positive meaning: it can be reclaimed as a condition of intersubjective freedom, action, and political engagement. Consequently, what is opposed to violence and disaster is not personal or national security or risk management. On the contrary, the commitment to security perpetuates biopower, and thus compromises the conditions on which the practice of freedom itself depends. Thus, what I propose as an alternative to risk management is the struggle for more expansive notions of freedom and justice.
The Political Aesthetics of Vulnerability and the Feminist Revolt
Critical Times
Contemporary transnational times are characterized by renewed struggles over the meaning of democracy. In this postdemocratic moment, political and cultural practices and popular mobilizations and demands have exceeded, and ultimately questioned, some of representative democracy's core conventions, from the mass feminist demonstrations and strikes, to the rise of populist politics both in Europe and the Americas. Importantly, these struggles attest to the tension between failing democratic institutions and the heightening of increasingly authoritarian and cruel forms of social precarization and exclusion. Against these murderous trends, which this article characterizes as marked by an aesthetics of cruelty, some of these struggles foreground the vulnerable character of life and the embodied dimension of politics and its affective domains. This article focuses on the social movement Ni Una Menos to examine the ways in which vulnerability has been mobilized by some contemporary fe...
2020
In this article I explore the use of the term vulnerability in the work of two leading feminist theorists, Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. Approaching their work with the ‘politics of philosophy’ method I show how Cavarero’s and Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability in relation to other terms in their texts testifies for differences in their relation to the academic tradition of philosophy. I argue that Cavarero’s usage of the term shows that she engages with the basic questions of the phenomenological-existential tradition of Husserl and Heidegger through the notion of the human, while arguing for the view of singular human existent as vulnerable and relational. In contrast, Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability expresses distancing from the basic questions of the same tradition of the abstracted and transcendentalized human. Instead, Butler’s systematic connecting of vulnerability to social norms and infrastructures which are contingent and historically changing points t...
Politics, Justice and the Vulnerable Subject: The Contribution of Feminist Thought
Gênero & Direito, 2016
The present article argues that the main contribution of contemporary feminist theory on vulnerability stems from the distinction of two possible kinds of vulnerability: an ontological vulnerability and a vulnerability linked to various processes (social, cultural, economic and juridical) of vulnerabilisation. This contribution is not limited to the critical and deconstructive level. As a positive proposal, it advances in the direction of an individual which, recovering its own relational, embodied, "fleshy" and situated dimension, abandons the illusion of its own sovereignty, accepts its vulnerability like an opening up to others, and thus also accepts the responsibility for an open and democratic dialogue and the need for institutions inspired by an "enabling" conception of justice (cf. Young 1990).
Title: Ethics and Political Imagination in Feminist Theory
Feminist theory, 2020
This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the 'external consciousness' of the political, and as destabilizing political discourse by confronting it with singularity and 'radical' difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualized account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she-while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualized dimension-tends to psychologize and individualize ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxian vein, could be called a 'materialist ethics' or an 'ethics of socialism' and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton's theory relates to-but also differs from-arguments made by Butler. One advantage of
The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has exposed a shared condition of vulnerability on a global scale. How can we use vulnerability as an effective paradigm in order to foster collective political initiatives? This essay claims that the idea of care is key to understand the vulnerability framework as being both an epistemic and a political resource to address ethical issues. The first half of the essay recollects several arguments in Adriana Cavarero's and Judith Butler's most recent works, insofar as both theorists have insisted on the notion of vulnerability in order to interpret contemporary political mobilizations. The second part of the essay retraces a constellation of practices of care in the works of several Black and decolonial feminist thinkers situated in different socio-political contexts. Whereas for Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman the focus is on the matter of Blackness and Black lives in their constitutive vulnerability, both Cristina Rivera Garza's and Sayak Valencia's works remarkably insist on the specific socio-political context of today's Mexico. These authors urge the readers to adopt a critical posture when encountering official narratives, also because in their texts they exhibit their own vulnerability. For them, writing, their writing is an ethical demand to imagine alternatives and to foster new entanglements between bodies persisting on the margins, at the limits of the norms that regulate legibility.