Vulnerability and performative contradictions

'But perhaps there is some other way to live such that one becomes neither affectively dead nor mimetically violent, a way out of the circle of violence altogether. This possibility has to do with demanding a world in which the bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated and with insisting on the line that must be walked between the two.

By insisting on a "common" corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism. That might be true, but I am prone to consider this differently. A vulnerability must be perceived and recognised in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee that this will happen. Not only is there always a possibility that a vulnerability will not be recognised and that it will be constituted as the "unrecognisable", but when that vulnerability is recognised it has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself. In this sense, if vulnerability is one precondition of humanisation, and humanisation takes place differently through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.

So when we say that every infant is surely vulnerable, that is clearly true; but it is true, in part, precisely because our utterance enacts the very recognition of vulnerability and shows the importance of recognition itself for sustaining vulnerability [Italics mine]. We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is surely a very good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the claim, however, precisely because it is not meant to be taken for granted, precisely because it is not, in every instance, honoured. Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognised, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability. We cannot posit this vulnerability prior to recognition without performing the very thesis that we oppose (our positing is itself a form of recognition and so manifests the constitutive power of the discourse). This framework, by which norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as a precondition of the human is important precisely for this reason, namely, that we need and want those norms in place, that we struggle for their establishment, and that we value their continuing and expanded operation.'

I'm praying that Doris asks a phenomenology question in the Psychoanalysis exam, next week. Some means by which I can connect the corporeal vulnerability of the human body, that which connects us, to my three-pages-in-less-than-half-an-hour essay. She is a teacher in the school of 'go deeply into that which fascinates you', and I, merely a girl-serpent, hypnotised. :)

Epistemological distance, methodological variety, ontological pluralism (from Integral Theory, link to come) - would these but constitute the building blocks for the framework for recognition Butler so passionately describes, here?

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.