Reimagining Vulnerability: Within More-than-Human World

• In Event: The Zhuangzi: Efficacy, Vulnerability, Negative Politics, and Anarchy

Abstract

Conceptions of vulnerability have been mobilized by feminist thinkers to supplant an ideal of liberal individualism (deemed unrealistic) with an ethics of interdependence, relationality, and care. Building on the ethics of vulnerability, authors such as Judith Butler have further extended the conception of vulnerability to a politics of precarity. These latter attempts have been criticized for slipping from an individual to a collective sense of the subject, and for problematic derivations of ethico-political propositions from ontological accounts of vulnerability. Such criticisms, I will argue, circle around problems of subjectivation and recognition; these problems are not unique to feminist and Butlerian conceptions of vulnerability. By extrapolating from the Zhuangzi, I further explore how the problems of subjectivation and recognition stem from not pushing the ontological arguments far enough. The Zhuangzi presents alternative ways to imagine vulnerability by firmly situating varieties of human vulnerability within nonhuman and always more-than-human worlds.

Author

• Dorothy H. B. Kwek, Cardiff University