What's Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition, and Power

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Petherbridge
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Recognition Theory ◽  
Adriana Cavarero ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Normative Account

Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

scholarly journals Labour, Legality and shifts in the Public/Private divide

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (6) ◽  
pp. 86-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah van Walsum
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
And Shifts

Melancholia's Meerkat: A Poetic Leap

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1719-1728
Author(s):  
Jody Greene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Actual Change ◽  
First Time ◽  
President Bush ◽  
Math Problems ◽  
Rational Side

I think we learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary.—Donna HarawayThe question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?—Judith ButlerIn a New York Times editorial piece published in May 2007 about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Nicholas Kristof lamented, not for the first time, that people “aren't moved by genocide.” “The human conscience just isn't pricked by mass suffering,” Kristof continues, and yet, as both anecdotal evidence and scientific research have repeatedly shown, “an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.” He recounts a series of psychological and sociological experiments that have borne out what he calls “the limits of rationality,” including the fact that people who hear narratives or see images that “prime the emotions” by focusing on the plight of an individual suffering creature—say, a baby or “a soulful dog in peril”—respond more vigorously to that suffering than those who have had their “rational side” primed by performing math problems. Perhaps, Kristof proposes in disgust, what the Darfur situation needs in order to achieve the public recognition it deserves—let alone to effect actual change—is not statistics of mass genocide but a very photogenic, if appropriately sad-eyed, poster child, “a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.” “If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans,” he despairingly concludes, “maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.”

Reaching the Internal Tension Model

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Margit Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Decision Maker ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modes Of Operation ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
The Third ◽  
Executive Action

This chapter provides the basis of the model advanced in the book. Based on the internal tension model, governing constitutionalism-at-large, the chapter submits that the executive is best viewed as straddling the line between subjection to law and dominance beyond law. This is no ‘paradox:’ embodying one of the tensions ingrained in constitutional law, the executive draws on an irresolvable tension between its role as executor of law, under the separation of powers ideal, and its function as manager, or dominant decision-maker in the political sphere, in which it acts above and beyond the law. Under the internal tension model, normative theory can be better expounded, and the extent of required constraints over excessive power can be better addressed. The chapter discusses, and rejects, three models of the executive branch, all of which are based on hierarchical and dichotomous thinking. The subservient executive model connotes full supremacy of the constitution and legislation over the executive; the imperial executive model draws on a vision of executive supremacy; and the third, bipolar model offers a vision of alternating modes of operation. All are set aside in favour of a model that recognizes the internal tension which underlies executive action.

Cavarero, Kant, and the Arcs of Friendship

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
Christine Battersby
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
Mutual Dependence ◽  
Economic Instability ◽  
Adriana Cavarero ◽  
National Borders

This etude considers the discussion between Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig with regards to the role of Kant for a postural ethics: an engraved champagne glass is inscribed with the names of Kant and several of his English merchant and shipping friends, an English motto, and the date 30 August 1763—the time of a banking crash which economists have compared to that of September 1998. The motto emblematises an ideal of friendship across national borders, and the mutual dependence of one adult self on another in a time of crisis, panic, and military and economic instability. I will argue that, in our own dangerous times, there are merits to Kant’s ideal of relations modelled on friendship, rather than dependencies linked to maternity and vulnerability.

Neither the Purse Nor the Sword: Dynamics of Public Confidence in the Supreme Court

1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 1209-1226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Caldeira
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Cross Sections ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Presidential Popularity ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
High Bench

Systematic study of changes in support for the U.S. Supreme Court across time has not been undertaken. Armed with a time series of observations from 1966 through 1984, I provide a description of the ebb and flow of public esteem for the Court. Then I outline and test several plausible propositions about the dynamics of support. Statistical analyses compel the conclusion that apart from a relatively constant core of support, increases in judicial activism, inflation, and solicitude for the rights of the accused decreased confidence in the Court; the events surrounding Watergate and increases in presidential popularity and the public salience of the Court brought about increased popular esteem for the high bench. Previous scholars, based on cross-sections of individuals, have emphasized the public's ignorance of and disinterest in the Supreme Court and judicial policy making. The responsiveness of public support for the Court in the aggregate to political events and shifts in the behavior of the justices stands in stark contrast to the conventional image of United States citizenry as singularly out of touch with and unmoved by the Supreme Court.

Evidence of Partisan Agenda Fragmentation in the American Public, 1959–2015

2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 749-781
Author(s):  
Mike Gruszczynski
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
The State ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Long Time ◽  
And Shifts

Abstract  This research examines the extent to which partisan agenda fragmentation is occurring within the American public. Though numerous scholars of public opinion and political communication have warned of the deleterious effects of agenda fragmentation, to this point such fragmentation has been demonstrated only across a small number of issues over short periods of time. This research is the first to utilize both a large set of issues and a long time frame to assess the state of partisan agendas from 1959 to 2015 through the use of individual-level Gallup’s “Most Important Problem” polls. Findings show that the public agenda has fragmented on a large number of issues, in terms of both the level of and shifts in attention that partisans accord to issues of the day. Additionally, this research highlights the importance of recent increases in agenda diversity and carrying capacity to fragmentation, demonstrating that while the presence of large, obtrusive issues tends to be associated with correspondence in partisan agendas, the ordering of partisan issue agendas has decoupled substantially in recent decades.

Constructing Maternal Thinking

Hypatia ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean P. Rumsey
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Great Contribution ◽  
The Public ◽  
Limited Perspective ◽  
Economic Perspectives ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Normative Account

Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking represents a great contribution to moral philosophy—in particular, by bringing women's “private” virtues into the public sphere. However, there remain problems in the analysis which need to be addressed: How can one possibly generalize about the practice of mothering from one, necessarily limited, perspective, given the facts of cultural diversity? Is Ruddick's normative account of mothering congruent with the reflective judgments of others? Is her account of the transformation of parochial mothering into feminist peace work viable? After exploring these three questions, this reviewer calk, with Ruddkk, for the telling of more maternal stories, from different cultural, racial and economic perspectives.

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