ABSTRACT
Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. Noemi Michel, for her part, appeals to us to consider the way in which our constitutive vulnerability materializes in differentiated vulnerable states, in bodies that are more affectable since already affected, and whose particularity results from a history that is collective. A problem of compatibility between grammars remains, as both weakness and exposure suffer from an essential inaudibility in political language. Via all these aspects – questioning our hegemonic anthropology; reinventing the categories of freedom, equality and being-in-common based on the body; overthrowing the legitimate grammar of political discourse; and the complex exercise of redefining the political subject – the fact remains that the category of vulnerability, far from being conservative or apolitical, works to undo the world such as it is.
