Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?

Vulnerability is not new to theology or political theory. In the present age of terror and threat of extinction, however, this omnipresent condition has taken on new, arguably acutely subversive significance. Across disciplines, from psychology to ethics, critical theory to law, a conventional view of vulnerability is being refuted. It is not simply weakness, characterizing some unfortunate groups or people assigned as ‘the vulnerable.’ Neither can nor should vulnerability be reduced or eliminated through neoliberal or neocolonial paternalistic acts of protection.

On the contrary, such conventional construals of human vulnerability reproduce and aggravate precarity for millions through legitimizing brutal biopolitical regimes of control. Hence, a different conceptualization of vulnerability is urgently called for. This is also a task for political theology.

No doubt, vulnerability spells out the risk of being hurt, harmed, crushed, or killed. And yet, it is also a site of reception, relationality, and resistance. In fact, vulnerability not only pertains to all living, but it also constitutes life in community.

The fiction of the independent, self-sufficient subject is decisively deconstructed and rejected by critical, feminist, and postcolonial thinkers. In fact, it is a deadly fabrication. The illusion of attainable invulnerability pursued by sovereigns of all times and tendencies has legitimized states of exception, torture, borderization, and normalized lethal violence. It has, as Judith Butler discovered in the aftermath of 9/11, created and consolidated the globally uneven distribution of grievability: Some lives are considered worthy of mourning. Many more lives are cynically and systematically disregarded; they are already framed as lost before their elimination and hence not seen as ‘grievable‘

They are the migrants pushed back into the open sea, left alone to drown. They are the old women still residing in war zones or the collateral victims of terrorist or anti-terrorist strikes.    

This denunciation of the reigning biopolitics of grievability leads Butler to an essential distinction in her reflection on vulnerability as a potent concept in critical theory and practice. The dual character of vulnerability that I pointed to above is elaborated by Butler as the distinction between precariousness and precarity.

All living is precarious. This fundamental and shared precariousness, emerging in our social relatedness from birth to death, is a condition of life. In fact, it founds the flourishing life. It makes our life livable, and the loss of life, any life, grievable.

On the other hand, the unequal distribution of grievability reveals the many ways the condition of precarity – a situational vulnerability in which life is not protected or sustained – falls upon some much more than others. This is an intolerable and resistible situation. It is systematically and politically created. The common ground, or perhaps rather source, for resisting this unjust and life-threatening dispersal of precarity, however, is precisely the shared vulnerability of all the living: “From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered,” Butler asks in Precarious Life, “if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability” (p.30)?

Thus, vulnerability comes through as the inherent potential for resistance. It gains political value, not as a call for paternalistic intervention on behalf of so-called vulnerable groups or populations, but as the demand and defiance of people who assemble to resist.     In this way, vulnerability can constitute political agency in precarious situations. Often it is expressed as what James Scott  has called ‘infrapolitics,’ small and seemingly insignificant acts of everyday resistance. To Scott, this foundational form of politics is a precondition for more institutionalized political action. Other times, vulnerability as political agency may erupt to the public surface as courageous common acts of confrontation.

Some clarifications are due here:

This critical and affirmative revaluation of vulnerability relevant for critical theory and political theology is not only far removed from the biopolitical calls for the protection of ‘the vulnerable. ‘It is also very different from the many calls in airport-friendly self-help literature to “embrace” your vulnerability to regain self-confidence and well-being in a stressful consumer society.

Feminist philosopher Ewa Polowska Ziarek  rightly points out that these two dominant discourses on vulnerability—”the risk management of populations and the self-management of the liberal subject” —complement and reinforce one another.  Theologian Linn Tonstad critically observes that requiring a transformative relation to vulnerability presupposes the very project of mastery vulnerability intends to undo.

Her critique is relevant to this trendy call to individual self-management. Tonstad, however, rejects off-handedly any affirmative approach to vulnerability. In my view, she thus misses crucial differences between, say, Brené Brown’s and Judith Butler’s or Ewa Ziarek’s positions.

To Ziarek, building on Arendt and Levinas, “the political and ethical vulnerability of action enables rather than impairs its transformative possibilities.” Thus, to her, far from being a weakness to be eliminated or managed in the name of security or self-assertion, vulnerability becomes “a paradoxical condition of political transformation” (p. 81).

Vulnerability is not primarily an individual, corporeal condition. It is part and parcel of the social embeddedness of all living. Hence, I suggest we see vulnerability also at the core of political community. Rather than Aristotelian friendship or Hobbesian fear what makes us assemble – factually or imaginatively – in political togetherness, is our common relational precariousness.

Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito  has shed light on the etymological origins of community and uncovered that the ‘munus’ around which we come together (‘com’) is not a thing nor a property. Very much to the contrary, the community begins where property ends, he claims. ‘Munus‘ means a burden or a debt. What we have in common in community is an obligation or a duty, a fundamental openness towards the other, the outsider, the stranger. Could not this openness, I ask, be seen as the basic vulnerability we share? It emerges in and through a constant oscillation between receptivity and responsibility, gift and debt, and passivity and agency. In this way, vulnerability is woven into the fabric of political life, encompassing communal action against ungrievability and precarity as its ground and aim. Resisting precarity is a way to safeguard precious life in mutual, albeit always asymmetrical, precariousness.

What could be takeaways for political theology here?

This framing of vulnerability as resistance and flourishing can be implicitly or explicitly religious. It can express itself as a religious performance or emerge from within and be interpreted by resources of faith.

It should come as no surprise that there is some affinity between religious practices and experiences of life’s fragility and contingency. Interestingly, in his post-secular turn, Habermas noted that “Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life”.  Political scientists Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart  have argued that there is a statistical correlation between religiosity and the experienced lack of human security. As Graham Ward  has critically noted, such theories and statements may sound — and sometimes be — denigrating and arrogant, treating religion as merely epiphenomenal on human suffering. 

Nonetheless, this link between precarious life and religious practice may be construed otherwise. Religious practice in its many forms may inform resistance in and from vulnerability. In fact, what is perceived as religiosity may sometimes come across as the infrapolitics, the ‘arts of resistance,’ that Scott detected. Practices expressed as religiosity belong to the infrapolitical repertoire of people in precarity. Religiosity, I wish to propose, can be a way of ‘acting vulnerably’ that can transform into precarious politics.

Such recasting of vulnerability as a site for life-sustaining and even liberating agency is, of course, evident in liberationist theologies of various kinds. Take the ‘theology of the crucified people‘ initially formulated by the martyred Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría (d. 1989) and further developed by his colleague Jon Sobrino. Or consider the similar approaches found in James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree or in the work of womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland. They all see a paradoxical salvific presence in the community of those who suffer and struggle for life. In her work in theological anthropology, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, feminist theologian Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo points out that communities of shared vulnerability enable ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ practices of solidarity Her German colleague Heike Springhart similarly claims that a revised and affirmative view of vulnerability is a counter-cultural force that is necessary for a realistic view of the human condition  .    

Recent developments in trauma theology are relevant here too. Trauma signifies wounds that will not heal. Rereading in a ‘post-traumatic climate’ the Gospel narrative of Thomas touching the wounds of the resurrected Jesus, Shelly Rambo sees a site “where shame, grief, and anger are released.” To her, the exposed and enduring vulnerability revealed in this resurrection scene “directly speaks to the affective formation of a community struggling with death and loss.” We are in a liberating moment of “attunement to truths that rarely come to the surface” (p. 153).

Lastly, a theopolitical reflection on vulnerability can be relevant for critical theory, too. This comes to the fore in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. He detects the operation of a negative messianism in our day, a ‘casino-messianism’ flourishing in the fusion of prosperity theologies and neoliberal capitalism. It is, according to Mbembe, a perverse messianism expressing a “crude belief in the expiatory power of sacrificial death.” Denouncing and disarming such messianisms is a task for critical theory and political theology. Where necropower, according to Mbembe, wages a war against relations, I suggest that a political theology of vulnerability  should make the constitutive relatedness of all living the very point of departure for understanding political agency and community. As Mbembe pointedly asks: “If ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we find a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude”? (p.3).

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Annotated bibliography

Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious life : the powers of mourning and violence. London ; New York: Verso.

__________ 2009. Frames of war : when is life grievable? London ; New York: Verso.

__________2020. “The force of nonviolence : an ethico-political bind.” In. London,Brooklyn, New York: Verso.

In these books, Butler breaks new ground, letting herself be moved from queer to political theory by the disastrous events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Her reflections on mourning, grievability, vulnerability, (non-)violence and resistance are indebted to i.a. Levinas and Arendt, opening up new avenues for exploration of great relevance to political theology.  

Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos : biopolitics and philosophy, Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

__________. 2010. Communitas : the origin and destiny of community, Cultural memory in the present. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

__________. 2011. Immunitas : the protection and negation of life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. English ed. Cambridge: Polity.

Esposito’s trilogy develops an ‘affirmative biopolitics’ that critically addresses the present political concern with immunity and its inherent link to community even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Addressing similar questions of biopolitics as i.a., Agamben, Esposito’s analysis of the immunitary logic of modern societies is highly original. He claims that the preservation of life depends on a ‘wound that cannot heal’, because the wound is created by life itself. The protection of life in society is thus dependent on a fundamental openness, I would say vulnerability, towards that which is other.

Ellacuría, Ignacio, and Jon Sobrino, eds. 1991. Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación. Vols. I. II San Salvador: UCA Editores.

English edition:

__________, eds. 1993. Mysterium Liberationis. Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.

This is arguably the most thorough and broad presentation of Latin American liberation theology. Ignacio Ellacuría’s groundbreaking essay “The Crucified People” is posthumously published here, later developed further in Jon Sobrino’s 2 vols Christology: 

Sobrino, Jon. 1994. Jesus the Liberator. A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Translated by Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates.

__________. 2001. Christ the liberator: A view from the victims. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.

Gandolfo, Elizabeth O’Donnell 2015. The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

From what she calls “the maternal standpoint, especially the standpoint of maternal suffering” (20-21), Gandolfo thoughtfully addresses root causes of suffering located deep in the human condition itself.