Pluralism and diversity are largely bound to a humancentric conception of difference, one which fails to consider the plurality of ontologies that constitute reality. The result has been the confinement of the subject of justice to social spaces, and hence the reinforcement of the dichotomous understanding of humanity and nature. This is in part because pluralist theories are largely concerned with one single manifestation of vulnerability: the vulnerability of minority groups. This essay begins by offering a distinctive definition of vulnerability, (...) one that is broad enough to incorporate both universal and dispositional accounts, while being narrow enough to rule out both vitalist and biocentric approaches. I use the notion to examine debates on political pluralism, and I argue that, as they currently stand, pluralist approaches are ill suited for understanding the struggles of Indigenous peoples against colonialism. I defend the view that the normative case for pluralism needs to be grounded in an ecologically aware ethics that can respond to the vulnerability of animate beings who sustain life. (shrink)

This paper discusses Butler’s theory on the possibility of precarity to serve as the nexus of ethical relations, while also exploring some of the pitfalls of her theorization to reconceptualize the pedagogical implications of a critical pedagogy for precarity. In particular, the paper asks: How can precarity—understood as an ambivalent concept, as a paradoxical nexus of both possibilities and constraints—function pedagogically in a way that challenges its moralization? How can educators engage with precarity in ways that ‘re-frame’ it so that (...) both the dangers and prospects of ethics and politics of precarity are properly acknowledged and critically interrogated in pedagogical practice? The risks and possibilities of a critical pedagogy for precarity are addressed, highlighting that there are several complexities involved as much as there are opportunities for ethical transformation and political action in school and beyond. (shrink)

Pandemics are faced with uncertain scenarios, environmental, economic and/or social crises, generating negative impacts on society, which are further aggravated in a context of social vulnerability. This text aims to present and reflect on the transformation of a pandemic into a syndemic in Brazil due to the consequences of social vulnerability. How and why can a pandemic turn into a syndemic given the consequences of social vulnerability that plague Brazil? Understanding the factors and effects of social vulnerability, as well as (...) the consequences of social vulnerability in Brazil, lead to the search for new sustainable dynamics in the face of crises and uncertainties through global action and an education aimed at dealing with the challenges of vulnerability. (shrink)

Las tecnologías de la inteligencia artificial (IA) hacen emerger con mayor fuerza una pregunta central para la filosofía contemporánea: ¿cómo se generan los desplazamientos éticos a través de la producción de nuevas formas de convivencia tecnológica? Saber en qué consisten estos desplazamientos y si contribuyen, o no, a determinados tipos de convivencia es más urgente que precipitarse a una producción de normativa que no se enfrenta a los cambios inherentes al nuevo entorno. Pero una de las consecuencias que apuntan en (...) este enfoque es que la programación, sometida a las lógicas de la anticipación, no puede resolver el problema simplemente. La programación tiende a la formación de nichos o esferas en los que los individuos se desenvuelven perdiendo visión de la complejidad; la delegación de los cálculos a las máquinas hace que disminuya no sólo la capacidad del cálculo aritmético sino la imaginación matemática, creando nichos epistémicos crecientemente reservados a las máquinas; la minería de datos borra las diferencias entre lo público y lo privado, afianzando modos de comportamiento que esquivan la autorreflexión y el escrutinio de nuestras acciones en relación al bien común. Pero ¿pueden los programas desenvolverse en un sentido contrario, fortaleciendo las destrezas epistémicas, haciendo visible la complejidad, la participación política y la diversificación de bienes comunes en un mundo tecnológicamente denso? O en otros términos, ¿podemos encontrar en ellos claves para una ética robusta de la convivencia tecnológica? Las contribuciones de este número desgranan las transformaciones en las nociones de autonomía, creatividad y precariedad en el contexto de la IA. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, Europe’s immigration regulations have raised concerns regarding human rights and divided the public opinion on transnational movement, particularly with the ever-growi...

Im neueren Denken Judith Butlers nimmt der Begriff der Vulnerabilität eine Schlüsselrolle ein. Kaum eines der vielen Themen, denen sich die US-amerikanische Autorin seit der Jahrtausendwende widmet, kann ohne Kenntnis ihrer Überlegungen zu diesem Terminus angemessen verstanden werden. Der Versuch einer Rekonstruktion ihrer Konzeption von Vulnerabilität steht allerdings vor der Schwierigkeit, dass Butlers Gedanken hierzu über zahlreiche Texte hinweg verstreut sind, wobei bisweilen unterschiedliche Aspekte betont und verschiedene Schwerpunktsetzungen vorgenommen werden. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Butlers vulnerabilitätstheoretische Ausführungen in gebündelter Weise (...) dargestellt und interpretiert. Dabei wird die Bedeutsamkeit von Butlers Überlegungen zur Vulnerabilität für ihre Vorstellung von Körperlichkeit aufgewiesen, der Zusammenhang von Vulnerabilität und Anerkennung erläutert und gezeigt, welche ethischen Erwägungen Butler ausgehend von ihrer Anerkennungskonzeption und ihrem Denken der Vulnerabilität anstellt und inwiefern Vulnerabilität und politische Handlungsfähigkeit einander nicht ausschließen. Abschließend wird Butlers Vulnerabilitätsverständnis mit einigen kritischen Rückfragen konfrontiert. (shrink)

This paper explores how understandings of sociality influence the way members of two different social groups discursively animate moral conflicts. It examines how moral conflicts are constructed in life-story interviews by Chinese and Latin American migrants as they reflect on patterns of sociation with co-ethnics in London. These interviews typify the kind of conflicts that emerged across a 102 interview database where a discrepancy between expectations of how contextually-situated interpersonal relations are established and how they should unfold are. The transnational (...) setting that we focus on inevitably draws our attention to the importance of the larger relational context where interpersonal relations among migrant co-ethnics are entrenched. In this context, rights and obligations towards one another are often reconfigured to adapt to the circumstances of the new environment. This paper turns the pragmatic lens on transcultural relations. (shrink)

Both Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe challenge liberal conceptions of politics based on their ontological descriptions of the political. Mouffe argues that the failure of liberalism to grasp the agonistic character of political life means that properly political conflicts get translated into moral terms. Mouffe thinks that the way to correct our “post-political” problems is to avoid translating political conflicts into a moral register. I challenge Mouffe’s separation of ethics and politics by invoking Butler’s more nuanced account of the ethical (...) sphere. I demonstrate that Mouffe does not consider that there are different orders of moral claims ; nor does Mouffe consider that there are different orders of affect, some of which cannot be simply opposed to rationality. (shrink)

This paper is to inform the recent situations of work by the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong through the lens of Covid-19. Through the interviews with seven informants — two employers and five FDWs, stories describing the changes in their working conditions, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment related to the impacts of Covid-19 were collected. They were analysed through three theoretical tools — visibility/invisibility, mobility/immobility, and work boundary. The findings show that under the Covid-19 crisis, the (...) FDWs experienced more hardships and struggles in both the home country and host country. The paradoxes of visibility/invisibility and mobility/immobility together with blurred work boundary were found in their experience of work, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment. On one hand, the employers’ power of controlling FDWs has increased, but the agency to resist by the FDWs has decreased making them to turn to more passive means of resistance which could harm the FDWs’ physical and mental health and wellbeing. (shrink)

By placing Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) in counterpoint with Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), this essay aims to shed new light on Butler’s political and ethical writing, revealing, in particular, the ways in which a politics of cohabitation is inseparable from the process of translation. Both Butler and Said articulate the difficult yet necessary task of establishing a just cohabitation through the translation between two histories of exile, Jewish and Palestinian. Firstly, (...) I examine Butler’s efforts to derive a principle of cohabitation from the Jewish history of diaspora, arguing that it should be understood as a response to Said’s reflections on Jewishness in Freud and the Non-European. I then seek to illuminate how statelessness structures the interplay of text and image in After the Last Sky, arguing that exilic tension provides the framework for Said’s rethinking of comparativism. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between critical distance and the idea of proximity. In times that are often described as ‘global’, ‘24/7’, ‘connected’, ‘networked’ and ‘immersive’, distance seems ever reduced and proximity omnipresent. The contemporary impression of ubiquitous proximity might constitute a threat to the survival of critical distance understood either as a cornerstone of enlightened and humanist critical practice or as a key metaphysical ‘technology’. The resulting ‘crisis of critical distance’ produces the question of how to position oneself with (...) regard to the ‘other’ in a time that lacks distance and privileges proximity? In tracking the ambiguity that surrounds proximity – the desire to be near and the need to maintain a distance – this article rereads some key Heideggerian and Derridean texts in order to attempt a deconstruction of the opposition of distance and proximity at work in the ‘metaphysics of presence’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability (...) is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed. (shrink)

This essay surveys the theme of solidarity in the respective works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. Recent discourses in continental political philosophy have arrived at an impasse regarding solidarity. On the one hand, solidarities are important for galvanizing historically oppressed peoples against dominant discourses. On the other hand, solidarities that impose similarities in advance run the risk of absorbing difference and becoming exclusionary. Gadamer and Arendt, each in different manners, promise a distinctive approach to discourses on solidarity through their (...) emphasis on the existential concern for human finitude. Both suggest that insofar as we are finite, we are bound together not by familiarity and sameness but rather by shared vulnerability, finding help with this vulnerability by remaining open to the difference and otherness that is always at stake in communal life. In this, Gadamer and Arendt open new paths to theorizing collectives in ways that embrace and defend difference rather than rejecting it. Moreover, both remind us of the urgency of such a notion of solidarity for responding to what, in allusion to Arendt, we may be inclined to call the dark times in which we live. (shrink)

This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, (...) vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

This paper is written in response to the planetary times in which we live, marked as they are by the interwoven realities of political polarisation and environmental degradation. Looking to Hannah Arendt’s political writings for a response to this reality, in this paper I challenge the predominance of natality as a revolutionary concept and turn instead to Arendt’s discussion of love. After an initial rereading of the temporality of love at work in her concept of amor mundi, the paper develops (...) the idea of “amor terra,” or love for the pre-political and planetary constitution of politics. Taking seriously Arendt’s claim that what is required in times of crisis is a renewed conception of human dignity, I offer amor terra in precisely these terms. Developed in dialogue with Arendt’s writings on the earthly condition of responsibility, politics, and care, I ultimately argue that what amor terra offers is a renewed setting from which the integrity of the political can be reimagined. (shrink)

The death of multiculturalism has been pronounced many times. In spite of this, this political program has proven resilient and the fact of cultural diversity remains inescapable in most liberal democracies. Still, with the rise of the far right, the migrant crises in the United States and Europe and with social movements pushing the boundaries of multicultural theory, it is high time to review multiculturalism, a movement of the late 20th century, and see where it is headed in the 21st (...) century. This article has two objectives. First, after reviewing three debates—anti‐essentialists versus multiculturalism, interculturalism versus multiculturalism and multiculturalism versus the welfare state—I argue that the normative core of multiculturalism is still viable. Second, I argue that multiculturalism remains unable to contribute to some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century and point to a novel approach to the justification of multicultural policies. This justification relies on the concept of vulnerability, a concept that plays an important but undertheorized role in current multicultural theories. (shrink)

Este artículo rastrea el concepto de capacidad en la filosofía crítica, así como en la transición a la misma, de Immanuel Kant con el fin de reconstruir sus usos y los efectos que tiene para la reflexión filosófica posterior, atendiendo, en especial, a la manera en la que se ha construido al sujeto racional universal. Los efectos derivados de este análisis serán contrastados con algunas perspectivas críticas sobre la (dis)capacidad y el capacitismo con el fin de cuestionar las posturas kantianas (...) y mostrar la productividad filosófica de una aproximación anacrónica que pone en contacto la historia de la filosofía en Occidente con el presente problemático que vivimos. (shrink)

Digital technologies induce organised immaturity by generating toxic sociotechnical conditions that lead us to delegate autonomous, individual, and responsible thoughts and actions to external technological systems. Aiming to move beyond a diagnostic critical reading of the toxicity of digitalisation, we bring Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological analysis of technology into dialogue with the ethics of care to speculatively explore how the socially engaged arts—a type of artistic practice emphasising audience co-production and processual collective responses to social challenges—play a care-giving role that helps (...) counter technology-induced organised immaturity. We outline and illustrate two modes by which the socially engaged arts play this role: 1) disorganising immaturity through artivism, most notably anti-surveillance art, that imparts savoir vivre, that is, shared knowledge and meaning to counter the toxic side of technologies while enabling the imagination of alternative worlds in which humans coexist harmoniously with digital technologies, and 2) organising maturity through arts-based hacking that imparts savoir faire, that is, hands-on knowledge for experimental creation and practical enactment of better technological worlds. (shrink)

A não-violência não se reduz a uma posição moral individualista. Como luta coletiva contra a violência sistémica ou instituída configura uma forma efetiva de agência e de poder político com um compromisso ético global pela igualdade. Sob esta perspetiva, a sua análise proporciona outros entendimentos de indivíduo, da igualdade e dos fundamentos dos laços sociais, noções que se redesenham no âmbito de um mundo social cada vez mais interdependente.

In The Republic of the Living, Miguel Vatter argues that, at the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault did not convert to but criticized neoliberalism from a republican point of view. Neoliberal governmentality allegedly represses the capacity of human collectives to democratically govern themselves. The potential for republican self- government would then constitute the basis for an affirmative variant of biopolitics. I argue that this creative reformulation of Foucault’s oeuvre does not work as an interpretation of Foucault nor as a (...) valid critique of neoliberalism. Using the influ- ence of Georges Canguilhem on Foucault, I propose to locate the potential for affirmative biopolitics not in the collective capacity for self-government, but in the fragility of living beings in their interaction with their milieu. Because life is con- stitutively dependent on infrastructural conditions to flourish, we need a biopolitics that establishes institutions which support the sustenance of life. (shrink)

How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for (...) managing temporary migrant labour. First, it analyses how various management strategies, driven by globalisation and government deregulation, increase worker vulnerabilities. These strategies intensify relations of dependence, disempowerment and discrimination, which the workers may accommodate or resist in limited ways. Second, it assesses why the strategies leave the state, employers, agents and others complicit in producing the vulnerabilities. These actors enable, collaborate with, or condone the production of precarity. Their complicity is complicated by varying support or resistance to reforms. The result is a novel conceptual scheme for analysing the complicit network behind precarious work, which can be used in other sites of precarity where some are complicit in the vulnerability of others. (shrink)