Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-d5ftd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-19T21:31:13.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Ann V. Murphy
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

“Humanism” is a term that has designated a remarkably disparate set of ideologies. Nonetheless, strains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedom. This essay examines the emergence of a new humanistic discourse in feminist theory, one that instead finds its provocation in the unwilled passivity and vulnerability of the human body, and in the vulnerability of the human body to suffering and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and “precariousness,” this new humanism is a corporeal humanism. This essay probes both the promise and the limitations of this emergent humanism with particular reference to recent work by feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero.

Information

Type
Freedom, Dependency, and Vulnerability
Information
Hypatia , Volume 26 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Ethics of Embodiment , Summer 2011 , pp. 575 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1990. Femininity and domination. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Beauvoir, Simone de. 2010. The second sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany‐Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Bergoffen, Debra. 2001. The politics of the vulnerable body. Hypatia 18 (1): 116–34.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004a. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2004b. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.10.5422/fso/9780823225033.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso.Google Scholar
Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. Trans. Paul Kottman. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cavarero, Adriana. 2007. Horrorism: Naming contemporary violence. Trans. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2002. Corporeal generosity: On giving with Nietzsche, Merleau‐Ponty, and Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, Franz. 1967. Blacks skin white masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1984. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In The Foucault reader, ed. Rabinow, Jason. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 1992. Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nihoff.Google Scholar
Mills, Catherine. 2007. Normative violence, vulnerability, and responsibility. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18 (2): 133–56.10.1215/10407391-2007-005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2008. Women as weapons of war. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar