ABSTRACT
Common experiences of vulnerability such as being in a foreign country, speaking in class, or being in love—just a few of the examples offered by my students—highlight one of the central challenges of vulnerability: that it is an experience born of discomfort with the unfamiliar, the uncontrolled, or the unpredictable and yet only through muddling about in this experience do we learn, change, and extend ourselves beyond our current limits. These examples neatly indicate why vulnerability presents us with such difficulty and generates such ambivalent responses: vulnerability is not, essentially, about suffering as MacIntyre’s otherwise astute work suggests, nor is it, as I have taken pains to emphasize, merely a way of being susceptible to harm. The association of vulnerability with ideas of dispossession and exposure, however, indicates something vital about its meaning and significance: vulnerability is defined by openness and affectivity, and such openness entails the inability to predict, control, and fully know that to which we are open and how it will affect us. That kernel of the unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unknown can prompt in us alteration that is likewise unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unknown. In the previous chapters, I maintained that entrepreneurial subjectivity and the ideal of invulnerability effectively function as a facade, covering over the reality of vulnerability. The view of vulnerability that I have called a reductively negative understanding does likewise: by conceiving vulnerability as susceptibility to harm, weakness, passivity, and incapacity, we mask the ambiguous core of vulnerability and the potential it presents. Understanding vulnerability in this way has clear implications: we make it an object of fear and aversion, and in so doing, eschew not only affinity with those we socially stigmatize as ‘vulnerable’ but also the ways being vulnerable might affect us.
