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The Politics of Vulnerability ed. by Estelle Ferrarese (review)

The concept of “vulnerability” has become an academic buzzword over the last few decades in the fields of social theory, political philosophy, and feminist scholarship. The concept is used in multiple ways to address different contemporary political problems ranging from social and economic marginalization and violence to global wars. One of the most well-known theoretical contributions to the concept of “vulnerability” is Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) famous account of bodily vulnerability as a generalized state of bodily life. While for Butler vulnerability operates as a physical and affective condition for the ethics of nonviolence, for critics of vulnerability, such as Alan Badiou (2001), Bonnie Honig (2010), and Jacques Rancière (1999), the concept risks substituting politics with ethics due to its emphasis on emotions and care. Challenging the idea that vulnerability belongs solely to the ethical sphere, The Politics of Vulnerability seeks to foreground vulnerability as a political question. As Estelle Ferrarese asks in the introduction of the volume: “How could an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertaining to human nature become the object of a critique, or be the wellspring of emancipation? How does the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for socially produced or configured forms of vulnerability?” (5). Answering these questions is one of the central tasks of the book, which consists of seven essays that were originally published in Critical Horizons (2016). Throughout the anthology,