This volume offers novel and provocative insights into vulnerability and exclusion, two concepts crucial for the understanding of contemporary political agency. In twelve critical essays, the contributors explore the dense theoretical content, complex histories and conceptual intersection of vulnerability and exclusion. A rich array of topics are covered as the volume searches for the ways that vulnerable and excluded groups relate to each other, where the boundary between the excluded and the included arises, and what the stakes of ‘invulnerability’ might be.
Drawing on the works of Hegel (via Judith Butler), Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt to situate the project in a solid historical context, the volume likewise tackles pressing and contemporary issues such as the state of human capital under neoliberalism, the flawed nature of democracy itself, and the vulnerability inherent in extreme precarity, extreme violence, and interdependence. The contributions come from philosophers with a range of backgrounds in social philosophy and critical social sciences, who use related conceptual tools to tackle the political challenges of the 21st century. Together, they present a ground-breaking overview of the main challenges which social exclusion presents to contemporary global societies.
Part I. Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion: the Historical Context.-
1. Clara Ramas San Miguel, The vulnerable subject: Butler reading Hegel .-
2.Sara Ferreiro, Privatization of the sustainability of life in Hannah
Arendts The Human Condition.- 3. Roberto Navarrete, Eccentricity and
Vulnerability: Helmuth Plessners Philosophical and Political Anthropology.-
Part II. Rethinking Vulnerability: Discussing Interdependence and Violence in
the XXIst Century.- 4. Txetxu Ausín, Vulnerability and Care as Basis for an
Environmental Ethics of Global Justice.- 5. Adriana Zaharijevi, Independent
and Invulnerable: Politics of an Individual.-
6. Igor Cveji, Feeling
Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness.- 7. Emma
Ingala, Contemporary Declinations of Violence: Thinking Extreme Violence and
Vulnerability with Étienne Balibar and Judith Butler.- Part III. Rethinking
Exclusion: the Challenges of Democratic Orders in the XXIst Century.-
8. Laura Herrero Olivera, Difference and Recognition. A Critical Lecture on
Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser.-
9. Francisco Blanco
Brotons, On the Discourse of Exclusion in a Globalizing World.- 10. Clara
Navarro, Subject and Research in Global Capitalism: Some Notes On the
Fundaments of Feminist and Marxist Theories in the Frame of
Intersectionality.- 11. Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Forms of Life and The
Transformation of Public Space: Averting Social Exclusion in Contemporary
Democratic Societies.
Blanca Rodríguez López is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Society at the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain.
Nuria Sánchez Madrid is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Society at the University Complutense of Madrid, Spain.
Adriana Zaharijevi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia.
