ABSTRACT
At the time of writing, Judith Butler is developing her thinking on non-violent ethics and public assembly in important and interesting directions that connect to feminist politics and campaigns for gender recognition, yet which have much wider appeal, speaking to a broad range of struggles. Butler et al. further unpack the relationship between vulnerability and precarity revisiting some of Butler’s earlier discussions, affirming precarity as a social relation induced by the ethical primacy of mutual vulnerability. The dialectical account of vulnerability and resistance that Butler et al. offer brings to the fore, for critical reflection and resistance, the ways in which encounters with vulnerability function, for dominant social groups, as an expulsion or projection of relationality. The strategies Butler et al. propose involve a rethinking of human relations and what they call ‘infrastructural mobilizations’ such as barricades, hunger strikes, improvised gatherings, modes of deliberate exposure and artistic forms of intervention, including in public spaces.
