Fifty Years of Situated Thought: Sarance Journal and the Power of the Vulnerable

Abstract

Dossier number 54 focuses on vulnerability, not as a synonym for temporary weakness nor as a merely assistance-oriented category, but as a constitutive condition of all that is alive. The planet, memory, institutions, the future, ideas, and the collective forms that sustain us are vulnerable. This notion, which is key in contemporary legal, political, and philosophical thought, compels us to reconsider our position in the world and the ways in which we relate to each other.

From a philosophical perspective, vulnerability refers us to an ethics of interdependence, which stands in radical contrast to the false autonomy of liberal individualism. It involves understanding subjectivity not as an isolated entity but as a relation: we exist insofar as we are susceptible to being affected, insofar as we are exposed to the other and to the world. Vulnerability is not just an empirical or anthropological fact; it is a fundamental ontological condition. To be human means, at once, to be at risk and to be open to connection, to the possibility of being affected.

As Thomas Casadei (2018) points out, this condition is tied to notions such as fragility, dependency, precariousness, and discrimination, and makes it possible to reconfigure our institutions from a relational perspective — one that is not extractive nor instrumental. In this sense, its critical potential lies not only in making visible what is injured or exposed, but in calling into question the forms of social organization that produce and unevenly distribute the very possibility of being protected, recognized, or sustained.