vulnerability

Are vulnerability and resistance mutually oppositional or should we reconsider their relation, as well as their political, ethical and ontological status? This is the central question that structures a collective volume on Vulnerability in Resistance that Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay edited in 2016. In doing so they have tried to criticize and deconstruct conceptions of vulnerability revolving around entanglements of victimization and passivity. What they have suggested instead is re-imagining vulnerability as the condition of possibility for resistance. In this light political subjectivity, as well as the figuration of the political subject, also need to be rethought outside the resistance/vulnerability binarism.