Vulnerability and its politics: Precarity and the woundedness of power

Abstract

This article is an attempt to unwrite our current disciplinary enamourment with power. We begin from life’s woundedness, which we argue engenders a limit condition that both precedes power (vulnerability is the origin of power) and exceeds power (no power can ever resolve the problem of woundedness). To illustrate this, we introduce the ‘politics of the wound’: a perspective on politics that begins, not from a pre-existing ontology of forces and relations, but from the condition of striving, in infinitely generous and yet fragile ways, to claim sovereignty against the incurable wound of being a living being.