Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is? - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article dans une revue Critical Horizons Année : 2016

Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is?

Estelle Ferrarese

Résumé

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, " mutilatable " and killable bodies, especially after Septem-ber 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations. In Europe, and particularly in France, current reflection on vulnerability has emerged from a thematics of precarity and exclusion. The term evokes, in the first place, lives that are dispensable, evictable and deportable, and the abandoning of individuals to naked forces of the market. It is probably to the sociology of Robert Castel, who died in 2013 – one of whose last papers we have had translated here – that we primarily owe the popularization of French scientific uses of the term vulnerability which occurred in the 1990s. For him, vulnerability consists of a " space of instability and of turbulences populated with individuals insecure in their relation to work and fragile in their relational integration.
Loading...
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

halshs-01431474, version 1 (21-01-2017)

Identifiants

Citer

Estelle Ferrarese. Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is?. Critical Horizons, 2016, 17 (2), pp.149 - 159. ⟨10.1080/14409917.2016.1153885⟩. ⟨halshs-01431474⟩

Collections

CNRS
130 Consultations
2 Téléchargements
Dernière date de mise à jour le 07/04/2024
comment ces indicateurs sont-ils produits

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Plus