Being Vulnerable: Contemporary Political Thought

We are living in a time of acute vulnerability. From climate change to drone warfare, terrorist attacks to mass shootings, safe spaces to trigger warnings, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, homo vulnerabilis is once again coming to terms with the fact that it can be wounded, or even killed.

Against such finitude, sovereignty is now reasserting itself as a political power that might save us from our ontological state. The irony is, of course, that such sovereignty – for example through camps, walls, police violence, or drones – is also the underlying, historical cause of many of our most intense contemporary experiences of vulnerabilization. Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the phantasmatic tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today’s experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form of sovereignty that is producing this state of affairs.

Focused on theories, paradigms, and alternative formations of sovereignty, Being Vulnerable reconsiders the tradition of thinking through a political concept in order to approach it anew.