Chuen excerpt

We cannot talk about surveillance technology—whether it be by the state, corporations, community, or family—without talking about power. A few years ago, a dear friend sent me a link to an illustration. I can’t remember the reason why she shared it, but the text on the graphic stayed with me. It read: I don’t watch my neighbours. I see them.

I think the distinction between being seen and being watched  is powerful because it articulates a nuanced, yet enormous dichotomy—one that ultimately boils down to who is granted permission to be perceived as human.

We like to talk about the importance of visibility and representation for folks at the margins. I, myself, often write about feeling seen. There is an ongoing narrative that being visible might lead to being understood; that it will convince others that people are deserving of humanity. But for many, increased visibility does not lead to safety—only heightened surveillance and experiences of violence. We must interrogate how power shapes one’s gaze; how it can transform the act of seeing into the act of watching.

 

Surveillance uses sophisticated technologies that seemingly allow us to gain access to nature in a way that will provide the truth. Instead, surveillance provides information that is isolated, out of a larger context, and in the service of power. A 24-hour surveillance camera cannot provide embedded, interconnected knowledge. The idea that surveillance is necessary to know or understand nature rests heavily on the colonial notion that humans are separate from and superior to the ecosystems we inhabit. Birding became easier and more enjoyable for me as I learned about where I lived, hiked, and visited. As a part of this practice I learned to bird by ear: identifying species by the calls and songs they make. This also helped me to know where to look for birds based on their sounds: a chickadee would be in the trees, an ovenbird would be on the ground. I developed a landscape literacy that helped me understand the place I lived, my relationship to it and the other beings that were a part of the ecology. I could not have done that with a wildlife camera, I had to do it through developing a relationship to the land, and to the complexities of the many lives that are connected to it. In order to learn with attentiveness, as Kimmerer writes, in order to observe this way, we have to account for an ecology that humans are also a part of. It is settler science that distances humans from the ecosystems we inhabit. 

Lorraine Chuen  

hedva excerpts

I want to make a defence of “de-persons.” According to the American Psychiatric Association, I am one. That is, I have been diagnosed with depersonalization/derealization disorder (DP/DR for short), which means that I have “significant, persistent, or recurrent depersonalization (i.e., experiences of unreality or detachment from one’s mind, self, or body).” What that means is that, at various times, my body, self, environment, and the world itself do not feel real.

There are many ways to talk about “personhood,” and many of them are discourses about what isn’t personhood, or more sinisterly, who does not qualify to be part of that category. DP/DR falls into this kind of discourse on personhood: the kind that defines who is not. The suffix “–hood” as it is attached to the word “person” is important here: “–hood” means “a state of condition or being.” So, when we’re talking about personhood, by definition, the state of the condition or the being of a person can be said to be different than the person. In other words, personhood is apart from the person, personhood is not the person.

There is another way of looking at “–hood”: the Proto-Germanic etymology of “–hood” can literally be translated to mean “bright appearance.” I am moved by this at the same time that I’m antagonistic to what it arrogates—the implication that to “be” anything one must not only appear, but also be bright.

I had a dissociative panic attack for the first time in three years...in the Copenhagen aquarium called Den Blå Planet, which has been designed to make one feel as though underwater—stupid of me to forget my meds, especially because for twenty years I’ve had the recurring nightmare of being underwater in an ocean of black... 

One enters Den Blå Planet as though being submerged into a sea cave. Inside, there is only dim, blue light. Silhouetted shadows of fish, sharks, and whales are projected onto the ceiling. One can peer up at them circling overhead. The lapping, sloshing sounds of water stream from hidden speakers, but they are mostly drowned out by the voices of children running around, darting like little fishes.

In the bathroom, where I waited for the attack to pass, the only thoughts in my brain were “thing, thing, thing” (a fog, dream, or bubble). There was blue—blue paint on the wall of the stall?—which equaled “thing.” Each time the door slammed, it was with such ferocity that “my” body felt ripped—into two things, then three, then many. The sound of the hand dryer, even more ferocious and splitting—thing, thing, thing.

Language breaks down (I cannot speak, or understand what is being spoken to me, during these states) but not because it never existed, or because it is nothing, or because it seems inadequate in a postmodern way, but because it uncreates. As Simone Weil puts it, decreation is “to make something created pass into the uncreated.” Something that had been created—something that had created me—has passed into its twinned shadow state. No longer is the first-person intact, the “I” dissolves, and all the boundaries around everything that have hitherto contained them, are drained of their solidity.

Down-from-ness. Not-ness.

How many people, as I write this, have been declared—politically, legally, medically, culturally, economically, racially, socially, and gender-binarily—to be “de-persons”?

 (as if there were a veil or a glass wall between the individual and world)

How many are struggling against such declarations? And how might we ever know the answer to this question?

How many are resisting? What does that resistance look like, what does it do?

I’d like to ask the APA: What about depersonalization when the state has made you that way, has removed your agency...has taken over the control of how you are identified and thus legitimized? What about derealization when the state has detached your environment from you, dispossessed you of your land, or turned your surroundings into something unbearable, something that cannot possibly be real?

In neoliberalism, “wellness” is a prevarication: it usually stands in for “life,” but life in terms of wealth, race, power, and, primarily, ability. Wellness in this context is paradoxically both an innate moral virtue and an individual’s own responsibility to maintain—and is soaked in ableism.

The aporia of Sick Woman Theory is that it requires a cruelly optimistic humanism: to construct and nurture a version of a human against a version of the human—and it still relies upon the master’s tools of enforcing discrete selfhood and self-possession. This universalizing move is what Ahmed would call a “melancholic universalism”: “the requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you.”

Remember, bad thinking. Messiness. Being haunted.

anxiety

 

If you told me that I’d have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, “As long I know it’ll be over in November, I can do it.” But if you said to me, “You have to have acute anxiety for the next month,” I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you. It’s a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you’re afraid of. There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour...Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.

Andrew Solomon

No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life – it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. 

      Judith Bulter 

Butler

The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics: the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency. We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.

In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life– it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

Judith Butler

Raffo

Spending time being fierce about self care or about individual or collective healing does not shift attention and responsibility from the histories and systems that have created and sustained the disconnection and violence that creates trauma. We know this which is why healing and justice go together.

While dominance starts with a kind of developmental betrayal, supremacy then orders the world around itself to make sure that nothing can ever contradict, harm, or just plain get in to the other side of that separated wall. By ordering the world, I mean using forms of violence and control and minimization and disappearance to keep those with power safe and protected from anything that might be, well, uncomfortable.

How do you hold what happens when they want to step back to let others step forward but still resent it and need some place to bring that resentment? Do we support them to just have their emotions? How do we help them shift so that they can feel connection while they are stepping back, instead of needing to be in the middle to feel alive?

Self-settling or self regulation is our birthright. It’s our ability to bring our own nervous system down when we are overwhelmed. It’s what self care supports. It’s what trauma derails. Self settling can be, like all things, both a tool and a weapon. Self-settling, in this case, is when the person you are sitting with suddenly, in the midst of pain or chaos, is ok. Not ok in a grounded connected way, like deeply with you and what is happening, but ok in their little self enclosed island. You can feel them leave you and when you reach out, attempt to connect, they act as though nothing has changed. Because for them, nothing has. Unconscious self-settling. It’s one of the ways that different forms of supremacy are conditioned into bodies: the ability to leave relationship and retreat into a separated isolated self without actually feeling a sense of disconnection. It’s that kind of moment where the person is saying, “I’m fine over here, all good, the skies are blue, why are you still so upset?” and meanwhile, the world is burning all around them and you are starting to smolder.

Susan Raffo

excerpt: Aarons (on Agamben)

In actual fact, this lawless potentiality projected by securitarian logic into the life of every citizen must be seen as the symmetrical image of that groundless violence to which the reigning order subjects us.6 To live under a permanent state of exception is to be perpetually “abandoned” to an unlocalizable authority whose jurisdiction is unlimited, yet whose demands are inscrutable. Sovereign violence hovers like an indeterminate element over its subjects, a powerfully present absence that acts upon them no longer by means of delegation and interdiction but by exposure: to be governed today is to experience a graduated spectrum of vulnerability to a non-localizable potentiality for violence suspended over us, punishment becoming a mere afterthought, and perhaps even a relief, the confession of guilt having become the only way to bring our endless trial to its conclusion.

       Kieran Aarons

agamben

"In the “politicization” of bare life — the metaphysical task par excellence — the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion".



"To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the...accomplishments of democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin".

"If life under the state of exception may be characterized as a “petrified” or “paralyzed” messianism, an “imperfect” nihilism, then this is first of all because, since the end of the First World War, Western societies have become constitutively incapable of even imagining, never mind actually working toward, a future that could look any different from the present. After its ‘pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks’, politics has been reduced to ‘simple functions of internal or international policing in the name of the triumph of the economy’, i.e. to the disordered and tautological administration of a social and economic order that has emptied itself of any positive reason for being, yet which continues anarchically to persist, ‘without why".

Arendt

 “The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human”.

     Hanna Arendt

Butler

One cannot say, ‘Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.’’ I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one ‘s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.

Judith Butler

A wider range of observation, however, including man everywhere, will show that with the vast majority of mankind, a satisfaction of the wants of nature is all that is sought; and even in those centres of selfishness spoken of, there are vast multitudes who would be thus satisfied, but that the rush and crash of the mighty machine of society compels them, in self-defence, to join in the rush for wealth. ‘Tis the old question, “whether ‘tis better to be a victim or a victimizer,” and they decide against being victims.

Frederick Douglass

Krause Frantzen

If the reader only takes one thing away from my text let it be this: depression has a set of causes and a concrete context that transcend any diagnostic manual, as well as the neoliberal ideology of focusing on subjects, not structures; personal responsibilities, not collective ones; chemistry, not capital. However, to understand depression through political frames does not mean that the problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary aspirations. As anyone who has been depressed — or been around someone who has — knows, it is literally hell on earth. The physical pain is unbearable, your body is inert and feels too heavy, your mind is not functioning, and you cannot escape the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present — which is hell — is all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be. It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen

dp/dr

 

live hope

dp/dr

 

 

DeCaroli

Everything hinges upon how life is divided, not upon how life is defined as such. Division is not, how-ever, merely a question of sorting pre-existing types. Rather, division is the original act of politics in which what is divided comes into being as a consequence of division. Life, therefore, is defined in terms of politics, not the other way around, and this definition is never given absolutely but appears only as the relative relationship between groups that have been separated. It is not surprising, then, that the state frequently directs its violence toward those who, through division, are excluded or disenfranchised from the proper domain of politics, for they are not the ones the state was designed to protect. Aristotle is quite clear on this point, for as we have seen, the entire first book of the Politics is devoted to establishing and then setting aside the inferior status of women and the existence of natural slaves. Likewise, Aristotle is unambiguous in stating that only a slim fraction of the community can be included in the polis, and for the rest life in the oikos is by definition their natural condition. This is why so much of the first book of the Politics is devoted to spelling out in no uncertain terms that there are human beings whose lives form a zone external to the polis. In characterizing these lives in terms of an inferior ontology, the work of legitimating their exclusion is taken care of in advance, and so, it is evident that these excluded forms of life, which are said to be excluded because of the types of being they are, are in fact fabrications of the logic of the political order itself. This is why, for Agamben, life is a thoroughly political concept having nothing at all to do with biology. 

The creation of political life, which for Aristotle is the uniquely human form of life, has always had the shadow effect of creating a distinct notion of biological life in contrast to which the political order is defined and made viable. The state was never designed to protect those whose lives remain bound to the oikos, and while societies have over time, and particularly during the last two hundred years, extended the state’s protection to more and more forms of life, the structural problem of division that characterizes the Western political order remains in place. Not only is the political order that which excludes the necessities of life from the sphere of human activity, it also divides life from within, putting life in relation with itself according to a necessity that arises from within political existence. But as Agamben sees it, it is the act of separation—an original political act—that produces the idea of a natural life in the first place, and it is on this point that Agamben parts ways with both Aristotle and Arendt, because for him zoē, or natural life, is not a pre-existing natural substrate but the product of a historical separation. From this perspective, natural life (zoē) is politicized by its being excluded, and thus, as Agamben observes, it “has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men [the polis].”13 When Agamben writes, early in the pages of Homo Sacer, that his present inquiry concerns the point of intersection between political life and bio-political life, it is the production of this politicized life that he has in mind. “It can even be said,” he writes, “that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”14 Those who are excluded by the political order, those who reside exclusively in the oikos rather than in the polis, therefore suffer a double threat. On the one hand, there are of course the requirements of nature—“necessity’s grim law”15—which all must satisfy or perish. But to be excluded from the political order is not the same as simply existing in a pre-political environment. Rather, to be excluded from the political is, as Agamben proposes with such conviction, to be politicized through one’s exclusion. The life that exists in this condition is what Agamben famously calls “bare life,” which must not be equated with simple biological life, because the survival of bare life is conditioned not only by the elemental needs of biological existence but by the juridical needs of political existence as well. In other words, the daily struggles for survival for those who remain outside the polis entail not only periodic encounters with the caprice of nature’s fury but continual encounters with the violence of the state stemming from the fact that the state, and the political life it sustains, ruthlessly pursues a survival of its own.

    Steven DeCaroli

Mbembe

No longer is the concern to eliminate, via the law and justice, murder from the books of life in common. Every occasion is now one in which the supreme stake is to be risked.

     Achille Mbembe

 

 '…justice…does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.'  

  John Rawls

Agamben

The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen.

    Gorgio Agamben

A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Martin Luther King

 

The more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Martin Luther King

To use a philosophical analogy here, racism is not based on some empirical generalization; it is based rather on an ontological affirmation. It is not the assertion that certain people are behind culturally or otherwise because of environmental conditions. It is the affirmation that the very being of a people is inferior. And this is the great tragedy of it.

           Martin Luther King

This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

 Martin Luther King

In a sense, the greatest tragedy of this other America is what it does to little children. Little children in this other America are forced to grow up with clouds of inferiority forming every day in their little mental skies. As we look at this other America, we see it as an arena of blasted hopes and shattered dreams.

       Martin Luther King

We were the dreamers of a dream – that dark yesterdays of mans inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape, the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered. The promise of a Great Society was ship wrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, black and white, are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness. 

 Martin Luther King

Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. 

      Martin Luther King

Yes the hour is dark, evil comes fourth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance. We cry out against welfare hand outs to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy. 

       Martin Luther King

"For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see...that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

       Martin Luther King

All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I it’ relationship for an ‘I thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence, segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.

Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?

         Martin Luther King

Solomon

 

Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, “Why do I feel like this? I must have depression.” And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn’t occur to you to think, “Maybe this is treatable.” And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that’s not being picked up and that’s not being treated and that’s not being addressed, and it’s a tragedy of a grand order.

Andrew Solomon

 "…He wouldn't say that this movement or this philosophy makes him comfortable, I think it arouses a sense of shame within him often, I think it does something to touch the conscience and establish a sense of guilt. Now, so often people respond to guilt by engaging more in guilt evoking acts in an attempt to drown the sense of guilt. But it certainly doesn’t make the white man feel comfortable; it disturbs his conscience and it disturbs his sense of contentment."

Martin Luther King

excerpt Butler

 We cannot talk about a body without knowing what supports that body, and what its relation to that support – or lack of support – might be.  In this way, the body is less an entity than a relation, and it cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living.  In this way the dependency on human and other creatures and on infrastructural support exposes a specific vulnerability that we have when we are unsupported, when those infrastructural conditions start to decompose, or when we find ourselves radically unsupported in conditions of precarity. Both performance studies and disability studies have offered the crucial insight that all action requires support, and that even the most punctual and seemingly spontaneous act implicitly depends upon an infrastructural condition that quite literally supports the acting body.  This idea of “support” is quite important not only for the re-theorization of the acting body, but for the broader politics of mobility – what architectural supports have to be in place for each of us to exercise a certain freedom of movement, one that is necessary in order to exercise  the right to public assembly.

In many of the public assemblies that draw people who understand themselves to be in precarious positions, the demand to end precarity is enacted publicly by those who expose their vulnerability to failing infrastructural conditions; there is plural and performative bodily resistance at work that shows how bodies are being acted on by social and economic policies that are decimating livelihoods. But these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting these very powers; they enact a form of resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and opposes precarity. What is the conception of the body here, and how do we understand this form of resistance?

What I am suggesting is that it is not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, is defined by the relations that make its own life and action possible. As I will hope to show, we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside of this conception of relations.

For the body to move, it must usually have a surface of some kind, and it must have at its disposal whatever technical supports allow for movement to take place. So the pavement and the street are already to be understood as requirements of the body as it exercises its rights of mobility. No one moves without a supportive environment and set of technologies. And we could certainly make a list of how this idea of a body, supported and agentic, is at work implicitly or explicitly in any number of political movements.

Does vulnerability not implicate us as social creatures who are vulnerable in relation to one another and vulnerable also by virtue of the social structures and institutions, ecological networks, and biopolitical regulations on which we depend for our persistence and well-being?

 

Does the discourse of vulnerability discount the political agency of the subjugated? One question that emerges from any such discussion is whether the discourse on vulnerability shores up paternalistic power, relegating the condition of vulnerability to those who suffer discrimination, exploitation, or violence. What about the power of those who are oppressed? And what about the vulnerability of paternalistic institutions themselves? After all, if they can be contested, brought down, or rebuilt on egalitarian grounds, then paternalism is vulnerable to a dismantling of its power.

Does the opposition to vulnerability also imperil a host of related terms of responsiveness, including impressionability, susceptibility, injurability, openness, indignation, outrage, and even resistance? If nothing acts upon me against my will or without my advanced knowledge, then there is only sovereignty, the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am, a seemingly sturdy and self-centered form of the thinking I that cloaks those fault lines in the self that cannot be overcome. What form of politics is supported by this adamant disavowal?

Quite apart from the psychological resistance to vulnerability, there are legitimate political criticisms of some of the appropriations of vulnerability, most notably, (a) paternalism and the reification of certain populations as definitionally “vulnerable”—a move that risks making lack of power into an enduring condition for those populations and (b) the cynical inversion of relations of power, such that those who are dominant claim to be unacceptably vulnerable to those who seek equality, democracy, the end of colonialism, or reparation for past injuries.

In my view, it will not do to embrace vulnerability or get in touch with our feelings or bare our fault lines as if that would launch a new mode of authenticity or inaugurate a new order of moral values. I am not in favor of such a move, since it would continue to locate vulnerability as the opposite of agency and to identify agency with sovereign modes of defensiveness. It ratifies the logic that understands the two as mutually exclusive and restrictively defined within that binary frame. Rather, I am proposing that once we see how vulnerability enters into agency, then our understanding of both terms can change.

 Judith Butler