How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms of Responsiveness

Petherbridge, Danielle

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_4

Danielle Petherbridge⁵

Part of the book series: Breaking Feminist Waves ((BFW))

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Abstract

The notion of vulnerability has become a central category through which feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have sought to examine the complexity of embodied interdependence and corporeal openness to others. In this chapter, I engage with J.M. Coetzee’s texts The Lives of Animals and Waiting for the Barbarians to explore the intricacies of embodied vulnerability and bring these texts into dialogue with the philosophical approaches of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Bernard Waldenfels. The chapter examines the relation between embodied knowledge, vulnerability and responsiveness, and raises questions about the kinds of responses we are called to make in the face of the other’s vulnerability.

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Notes

1.
This chapter builds on an earlier article entitled “What’s Critical about Vulnerability? Rethinking Interdependence, Recognition and Power”, Hypatia 31, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 589–604. Small sections of this discussion previously appeared in that paper, but here I develop an alternative analysis.
2.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London & New York: Verso, 2004), 27; xiii.
3.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life. Also see Butler’s amended accounts in Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2010); Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
4.
See also Joel Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined.” In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. eds. C. Mackenzie, W. Rogers & S. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143.
5.
See Petherbridge, “What’s Critical about Vulnerability?”, 589–604; Marie Garrau. On Corine Pelluchon’s, Éléments pour une éthique de la vulnérabilité: Les hommes, les animaux, la nature, booksandideas.net (originally in laviedesidees.fr). trans. J. Zvesper, 22 June 2012.
6.
See J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann with responses by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, Barbara Smuts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Vintage Books, 2004 (1980)). Also see: Veena Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’: Cruelty, Responsibility and Forms of Life”, Critical Horizons 17, no. 2 (2016): 168–185. Das draws on Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians to explore the notion of violence as a form of life. Although I take interest in this engagement, my own use of Coetzee’s text is oriented around an alternative interpretation.
7.
Butler, Frames of War, 61.
8.
Butler, Precarious Life, 2004; Erinn Gilson, “Vulnerability, Ignorance and Oppression.” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 332; 308.
9.
Butler, Precarious Life, xi.
10.
Butler, Precarious Life, 69.
11.
Ann Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 72.
12.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
13.
Butler, Precarious Life, 20.
14.
Butler, Precarious Life, 23–27.
15.
Butler, Precarious Life, 134; 131.
16.
Butler, Precarious Life, 22.
17.
Butler, Precarious Life, 22.
18.
Butler, Precarious Life, 27; xiii.
19.
See: Butler, Frames of War, 6.
20.
I would also note that there are important differences between the terms “vulnerability” and “precariousness .” Whereas vulnerability designates a general openness and relationality to others, precariousness seems to evoke a permanent state of contingency and is bound to a notion of finitude and mortality. As Catherine Mills notes, there is also a constant slippage between these terms in Butler’s work and the difference is not fully worked through. See Catherine Mills, “Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility.” Differences 18, no. 2, (2007): 133–56.
21.
Butler, Frames of War, 25.
22.
Butler, Frames of War, 180; 3.
23.
Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Trans. W. McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 8.
24.
Cavarero, Horrorism, 20.
25.
Cavarero, Horrorism, 20–21.
26.
Cavarero, Horrorism, 30.
27.
Cavarero, Horrorism, 31. Cavarero’s distinction between the ontological and the political dimensions (vulnerability and helplessness, respectively) are well-taken, although in Horrorism, she does not provide a full account of the way in which these dimensions might be interrelated, or the detail of how they might inform an ethical theory of responsiveness. Her account of the corporeal uniqueness of singular beings is, however, central to the development of the kind of approach being gestured at here.
28.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 15.
29.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 16.
30.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 18.
31.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 21.
32.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 21.
33.
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy”, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 1, no. 2 (June 2003), 1–26.
34.
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality”, 12–13 (my italics).
35.
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality”, 12–13.
36.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 69.
37.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 69.
38.
Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality.”
39.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 32.
40.
Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 32–3.
41.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 263; Nikolas Kompridis, “Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Narrative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are”, New Literary History 44, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 1–24; 13.
42.
Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 257.
43.
Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 264.
44.
Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 266.
45.
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Vintage Books, 2004 (1980)), 41.
46.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 27.
47.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 29.
48.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 30.
49.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 32–3.
50.
See my article “What’s Critical about Vulnerability?” for arguments against the fusion of power and violence in the context of vulnerability.
51.
C oetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 43.
52.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 88.
53.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 170.
54.
Veena Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’”, 168–9.
55.
Peter Singer in J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 86.
56.
Kompridis, “Recognition and Receptivity”, 5; 16.
57.
Kompridis, “Recognition and Receptivity”, 20–21.
58.
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 95; see also William Franke, “Acknowledging Unknowing: Stanley Cavell and the Philosophical Criticism of Literature.” Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 1 (April 2015): 248–258.
59.
Franke, “Acknowledging Unknowing”, 252.
60.
Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 109; see Franke, “Acknowledging Unknowing”, 256.
61.
Franke, “Acknowledging Unknowing”, 257.
62.
Diamond “The Difficulty of Reality”, 7–9.
63.
Bernhard Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Body and Flesh” in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. James Hatley, Janice McLane and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 91–106; 95.
64.
Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body”, 96.
65.
See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) 422–423; see Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body”, 96.
66.
Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body”, 99.
67.
Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body”, 102.
68.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 94–5.
69.
See Diane Perpich, “Moral Blind Spots and Ethical Appeals: A Response to Bernhard Waldenfels”, in Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty, eds. James Hatley, Janice McLane and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 107–131; 111.
70.
Waldenfels, “Responsivity of the Body”, 106.
71.
See Perpich, “Moral Blind Spots and Ethical Appeals”, 121. Whereas Perpich offers this as a critique of Waldenfels for oscillating between two contradictory positions: either we are always open to the other’s ethical claim or it requires recognition to have valiancy, I suggest this is a productive way to think about the ontological openness to others that vulnerability entails. However, this also explains why our openness to others is not always enough to ensure an ethical response, in the sense that it also requires an active ethical response on the part of the subject. Such ethical responsiveness is most convincingly understood in terms of Cavell’s notion of acknowledgment or Axel Honneth’s notion of recognition.
72.
Butler, Frames of War, 28–9.
73.
Although in Frames of War, Butler explains that in order to persist, normative regimes must be “reiterated,” my suggestion is that this does not fully answer the question of the basis upon which we can judge what constitutes better or worse forms of life, or better and worse forms of vulnerability.
74.
Estelle Ferrarese, Vulnerability (Boston: Brill, 2018) forthcoming.
75.
I do not have the scope to develop the detail of this alternative account within the confines of this chapter. In other work, I suggest that a modified theory of recognition as developed by Axel Honneth is the most productive way to address some of these issues. See my discussion in “When Is One Recognizable?” forthcoming.
76.
Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 5; 22; 170.

Bibliography

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School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Danielle Petherbridge

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University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Clara Fischer
University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
Luna Dolezal

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Petherbridge, D. (2018). How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms of Responsiveness. In: Fischer, C., Dolezal, L. (eds) New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_4
Published: 17 February 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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