Introduction

The concept of vulnerability has been an important point of reference for recent feminist interventions in ethics and political philosophy. Arguments have been made for the necessity of a concept of vulnerability in diverse fields, and there have been several recent books and collections on the concept. While different approaches have been proposed, one core aspect of this turn to vulnerability is a deep interest in the idea of a universal vulnerability that is characteristic, if not definitional, of the human. Judith Butler's reflections on the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in Precarious Life (2004a) and recent works such as Dispossession (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) provide one particularly significant and influential articulation of this idea. In these works, Butler presents a case for the ethical and political importance of recognising the vulnerability that necessarily attends subjectivity insofar as the subject is given over to others from the start. The ethical implications of this vulnerability are most clearly elaborated in Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler 2005), where she argues that it is by virtue of the fundamental opacity of the subject to itself that ethical responsibility is incurred and sustained. Whether identified as precariousness or opacity, for Butler, universal vulnerability is always tied to the corporeal interdependency or fundamental relationality that grounds subjectivity, figured in part through the status of the infant in its radical dependency on others for its survival. Thus, she simultaneously reworks the terms of bodily ontology and ethics.

What is interesting about Butler's account, then, is the way that she attempts to build an approach to ethics on the basis of a universal vulnerability that emerges in a revised bodily ontology. That the condition of vulnerability has a normative force is not in itself a new claim, as it has been of central - though not uncontested - importance to various approaches to vulnerability as a moral concept. However, other theorists have generally sought to elaborate the normative implications of vulnerability in terms of situational vulnerability or the unjust distribution of social goods. For Butler, the universal vulnerability that attends being human itself has a kind of normative force. That is, it is the primary vulnerability that arises from our relational corporeality that provides the essential motivation for an ethics.