The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences

TLDR: In this paper, the authors argue that giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality, and they define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted, and interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability.

Abstract: This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted.