Since Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler both mobilize the concept vulnerability in their feminist theorizing, several commentators who study their thought have seen this as a point of connection between the two ( Guaraldo 2012 Söderbäck 2018). My interest particularly lies within the agonistics that are created through the ways that contemporary feminist authors use charged key concepts in a manner that creates links to divergent lines of thought within the textual tradition of philosophy. Instead of focusing only on explicit arguments in the texts, with this approach I pay attention to how the authors use, and do not use, specific concepts, and how they use these concepts in specific ways with respect to other concepts, and how this use in itself creates agonistics 1 in between texts by different authors. The approach involves a specific methodology of paying attention to the use of concepts: that is, to the exact use of words while attending to them as involving complicated operations of thought. When studying the intellectual field of feminist thought, my politics of philosophy approach begins with the premise that a plurality of philosophical traditions is currently alive in the intellectual field of contemporary feminist theory and that many contemporary theorists link their work with particular philosophical traditions. I will concentrate on the use of this specific concept, as a specific word and term, and I will do it with a particular approach I have developed towards the study of intellectual fields, which I call the ‘politics of philosophy’ approach ( Pulkkinen 2018). In my contribution to this special issue I will concentrate on the work of these two authors, and will look closely at their respective mobilization of this term and the work it does in their texts. No doubt, however, Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero are among the most cited theorists within feminist discussions that involve the concept of vulnerability. Instead, Butler’s systematic connecting of vulnerability to social norms and infrastructures which are contingent and historically changing points towards the antifoundational challenge that she presents in relation to this particular tradition of philosophy.Īs a word and as a concept, vulnerability has spread through feminist theory texts in recent years and, as is the fate of popular concepts, it is inevitably used in many different meanings and for many different purposes. In contrast, Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability expresses distancing from the basic questions of the same tradition of the abstracted and transcendentalized human. I argue that Cavarero’s usage of the term shows that she engages with the basic questions of the phenomenological-existential tradition of Husserl and Heidegger through the notion of the human, while arguing for the view of singular human existent as vulnerable and relational. Approaching their work with the ‘politics of philosophy’ method I show how Cavarero’s and Butler’s usage of the term vulnerability in relation to other terms in their texts testifies for differences in their relation to the academic tradition of philosophy. In this article I explore the use of the term vulnerability in the work of two leading feminist theorists, Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler.
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