Practices of Vulnerability: Openness, Production, and Transformation

In the contemporary ethical landscape, vulnerability has become an object of study, analysis, and discussion. The need to define its scope, alternatively considering it a constitutive experience of the human being, a transitory event, a dangerous trap hiding an attempt at stigmatisation and control, a vehicle of resistance and transformation of the existing that also passes through bodies, is accompanied by an inescapable consideration, according to which vulnerability is associated with the possibility of violence, which is exercised in the form of arbitrariness, power, and domination. This attestation goes hand in hand with the persuasion that vulnerability is the other side of the power to act, and therefore always takes the form of a relational event that happens in between. The hypothesis guiding this contribution is that the forms and experiences of vulnerability are irreducibly plural, and a distinction must be made in cases where vulnerability is used from a merely descriptive perspective, and those where it performs a normative function. It is in this second case that the ethical depth of vulnerability can be recognised. Vulnerability can either be a source for emancipatory action or can be used as an excuse for oppressive and dominating measures. A relational mode of refiguring ethical autonomy is crucial in discerning the roles of vulnerability, both as a criterion and as the content of vulnerability-related experiences.