Corporeal Vulnerability and

the New Humanism

ANN V. MURPHY

‘‘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 rea-
son, 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 vulnerabil-
ity of the human body to suffering and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology
that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and ‘‘precarious-
ness,’’ 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.

Judith Butler engages Adriana Cavarero’s work at length in Giving an Account

of Oneself (2005), a text that thematizes the challenges of elaborating an ethics
and an account of responsibility, given the subject’s lack of transparency
to itself. On this account, one is always already given over to others,
and to the norms that structure one’s recognition, such that there is a funda-
mental opacity at the heart of the self. Rather than read this opacity as a
frustration, in Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler instead asks how one might
‘‘affirm what is incoherent and contingent in oneself ’’ as the basis for an ethics
(Butler 2005, 41). It is in this context that Butler turns to Cavarero’s work in
Relating Narratives (2000). Of interest to Butler is Cavarero’s elaboration of an
‘‘altruistic ethics of relation,’’ where the relationship between self and other is
characterized by reciprocal exposure and vulnerability. Whereas both Giving an
Account of Oneself and Relating Narratives are texts concerned with the frustra-
tions of self narration—and what this might imply in the realm of ethics—more

Hypatia vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer, 2011) r by Hypatia, Inc.

576 Hypatia

recent work by both Butler and Cavarero explores the constitutive exposure of
an incarnate subject who is vulnerable to others as a body. Both philosophers
have recently shifted their focus from the consideration of ethical address to
the consideration of corporeal vulnerability, particularly in the context of con-
temporary political violence. This essay will explore their most recent work in
this regard: Cavarero’s Horrorism (2007) and Butler’s Frames of War (2009).
I situate this recent work by Butler and Cavarero within and against a
philosophical canon where a strong association exists between violence and
corporeality. Indeed, I suggest that the heightening of interest in the motif of
corporeal vulnerability in feminist theory is bound to the ubiquity of images
of violence in philosophical work on the body, to the degree that metaphors
and images of violence also signal sites of exposure and violability.1 In this es-
say, I want to take seriously what it means to be a feminist who works with
resources bequeathed from a canon with a longstanding association between
violence and embodiment, one that is on occasion theorized explicitly, but as
often as not is simply assumed. Particularly for those feminists who resist this
association, a tension persists: is our capacity to resist or to critique the rela-
tionship between violence and the body undercut by the fact that we work
within and against a canon that seems to disproportionately privilege images
and metaphors of violence in its descriptions of the body? Violence is now
commonly understood to be a requisite moment in both the genesis and rec-
ognition of embodied identity. As evidence for this claim, one might cite
Levinasian descriptions of the vulnerable body that import the language of
persecution, exposure, wounding, and trauma (Levinas 1998), Foucauldian de-
scriptions of the body as an entity that emerges only through a ‘‘hazardous play
of dominations’’ (Foucault 1984, 149), or Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the
‘‘amputation’’ and ‘‘dislocation’’ of Black bodies under the gaze of a racist col-
onizer (Fanon 1967, 113). On the terrain of feminist theory, the preoccupation
with the motif of violence is no less prevalent. Here, one might reference Sim-
one de Beauvoir’s and Sandra Bartky’s analyses of the alienation and shame
that might accompany women’s embodied experience under patriarchy (Bartky
1990; Beauvoir 2010), Butler’s critique of the normative violence at play in the
emergence of intelligibly gendered bodies (Butler 1990), or bell hooks’s anal-
ysis of the violent commodification of racially embodied difference within
white culture (hooks 1992). Indeed, many contemporary descriptions of the
body import a vocabulary that is rife with images of violence: corporeality is
rendered in terms of ‘‘persecution,’’ ‘‘disintegration,’’ ‘‘domination,’’ ‘‘subjec-
tion,’’ and ‘‘alienation.’’ I am not invoking these examples in an attempt to
condemn philosophy’s apparent fascination with images of violence when it
comes to discourse on the body. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate that these
images signal a preoccupation with the relationship between violence and cor-
poreality that is both assumed and subject to criticism in contemporary writings
 Ann V. Murphy 577

by Cavarero and Butler. Although they both import images of violence in their
rendering of the body, their mutual concern of late is the articulation of a re-
lational ontology—what Butler terms a ‘‘new bodily ontology’’—that is as
attuned to the nonviolent realization of mutual dependence and exposure as it
is to those instances in which this availability is abused.
Any critical querying of the images of violence in contemporary discourse
on the body must thus contend with what is an entirely legitimate investment
in thinking through the myriad forms that violence can assume, particularly
those instances of violence that are rendered invisible within certain econo-
mies of representation. But the idea that there is something redemptive in
violence being thought in different domains does not at all exclude the possi-
bility that there are some venues in which scenes of violence may have run
amok to such a degree that violence becomes naturalized in ways that justifiably
provoke worry. It is in this context that contemporary feminist theorists have
been motivated to explore the possibilities of non-appropriative or nonviolent
relationships. These projects have been accomplished along two different crit-
ical axes: either as attempts to critique violence in its various instantiations, or
as more descriptive accounts of passivity, vulnerability, and relationality that
emphasize a dimension of availability to the other that is not necessarily vio-
lent. It is this latter effort that most aptly characterizes recent work by Butler
and Cavarero.
In what follows, I argue that Butler and Cavarero both figure the body as an
entity that is—above all else—vulnerable to injury and suffering. The language
that they employ in their descriptions of corporeality evinces a concern with
notions of injurability, vulnerability, and dispossession, figures that, in their
own turn, betray an omnipresent awareness of the relationship between corpo-
reality and violence. Second, I argue that the ‘‘new bodily ontologies’’ in Butler
and Cavarero announce an intertwining of ethics and ontology that refuses the
priority of either. A human body is by definition vulnerable, and this ontolog-
ical fact cannot be parsed from the ethical obligations that it suggests. At
first blush, it may seem that there is little new in this; feminists have long
been attuned to what Butler has most recently described as the ‘‘normative
production of ontology’’ (Butler 2009, 3). What is novel here is not
the claim that ontology is always already normatively constrained so much
as the claim that ontological facts about the human body—particularly its
vulnerability and exposure to violence—might be read as indicating certain
ethical obligations. The vulnerability of a human body may be an ontological
truism, but recent feminist scholarship suggests that it is also much more than
that. The vulnerable human body is also the provocation for an ethics insofar
as it elicits a response.
Though the ‘‘ethical ontologies’’ in Butler and Cavarero are not prescriptive
(at least not in the orthodox sense), they are productive to the degree that they
578 Hypatia

highlight the fact that the perception of bodies is an ethical practice. In light
of this fact, I foreground a dimension of both accounts that relates to the
question of humanism. Although Butler and Cavarero are both popularly
conceived as critics of liberal individualism (and the types of violence that
this paradigm inspires), in their recent work, they are also both equally critical
of identity politics. Increasingly, they both orient their discussions of vulner-
ability around the idea of the human. Although the resulting humanism
is neither transparent nor absolute, it deserves critical scrutiny. I argue here
that although both Butler and Cavarero fall short of suggesting a theory of
human rights, their ‘‘ethical ontologies’’ gesture toward the possibility of a
humanistic ethic that finds its provocation in an ‘‘anonymous’’ state of corpo-
real vulnerability that is evinced by each unique human body. Hence despite
the fact that this humanism is grounded in the reality that all human bodies are
vulnerable to both violence and care, it is also one that recognizes that each
unique body will live its vulnerabilities differently. When understood in this
way, vulnerability becomes a figure that is capable of grounding a humanistic
ethic that resists a closed or hermetic understanding of what it means to be
human. This resistance to closure is vital given the fact that humanistic ideol-
ogy is susceptible to being bent in the service of some but not all. Butler and
Cavarero are aligned in their understanding that vulnerability opens to a wide
spectrum of response, from violence and disavowal to care and nurture. Hence
the new humanism honors the enormous range of responses that corporeal
vulnerability may elicit.
Although Butler and Cavarero are aligned in their commitment to a rela-
tional ontology that recognizes, and honors, the dependence of self on other,
their approaches differ in a significant way. This difference relates to the fact
that Butler’s descriptions of a ‘‘new bodily ontology’’ foreground an anonymous
and general vulnerability that every human body evinces; in contrast,
Cavarero’s ‘‘altruistic ontology of relation’’ privileges the uniqueness and sin-
gularity of each human body. In other words, whereas Butler’s recent discourse
on precariousness describes a ‘‘generalized’’ and ‘‘anonymous’’ human condi-
tion, Cavarero’s discourse on ontological altruism appears to be concerned with
the converse. However, this difference in the way that the two frame their dis-
cussions of vulnerability does not render them incompatible. For, as Butler has
argued in Giving an Account of Oneself, if singularity is constituted in and
through our exposure to others, then the vulnerabilities that attend each body
are both unique and anonymous—unique to the degree that no body is vul-
nerable in exactly the same way as any another, general and anonymous to the
degree that vulnerability and exposure condition and constitute the emergence
of every singular body (Butler 2005, 35). It is the recognition of the vulnera-
bility that every unique body evinces that grounds the humanistic ethic of
each of these thinkers. Thus the difference in approach between Butler and
 Ann V. Murphy 579

Cavarero is a productive one insofar as it gestures toward the possibility of a

humanism whose scope is broad, but not blind to embodied difference.

I. ANONYMITY AND PRECARIOUS LIFE

Although a preoccupation with vulnerability has informed Butler’s work from

the start, she begins to tarry at greater length with the themes of vulnerability
and dispossession in both Undoing Gender (2004b) and Precarious Life (2004a).
In these texts, Butler stresses the difficulties, and the necessity, of appealing to
embodied vulnerability as the provocation for an ethics and a politics. She also
insists that such an appeal is ambiguous by virtue of the fact that there is noth-
ing in the acknowledgment that we are dispossessed, vulnerable, and exposed
that is necessarily ethically prescriptive. The realization of vulnerability may
surely inspire care, love, and generosity, but it may equally inspire abuse, in-
timidation, and violence. This ambiguity, which is a permanent, constitutive
feature of corporeal vulnerability, prevents the appeal to embodied disposses-
sion from yielding a normative ethics:
Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims
for non-militaristic political solutions, just as denial of this vul-
nerability through a fantasy of mastery . . . can fuel instruments
of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We
must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about
what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of
corporeal vulnerability itself. (Butler 2004a, 29)
In suggesting that we ‘‘attend to’’ and ‘‘abide by’’ corporeal vulnerability, Butler
is not arguing for a normative ethics, much less one that is categorically non-
violent.2 In spite of this, the aspiration for a less violent world is one
that has informed Butler’s engagement with the theme of vulnerability over
the last decade. Consequently, a tension marks Butler’s recent work: on the one
hand, Butler frequently reads as though she would marshal the image of the
vulnerable body in the service of an ethics of nonviolence; on the other hand,
she recognizes that attending to vulnerability can incite violence and/or hos-
pitality in equal measure. In both Undoing Gender and Precarious Life, Butler
honors this ambiguity: as vulnerable bodies, we are always available to both
care and injury, and are similarly capable of offering care to, or inflicting injury
on, others.
Butler begins Frames of War on familiar terrain, with a call for a ‘‘new bodily
ontology’’ that is grounded in the figure of corporeal vulnerability. One of But-
ler’s guiding aims in this text is the elaboration of an ontology that would
expose the brutality of various forms of state-centered political violence that
have justified themselves via the abuse and/or outright denial of the fact
580 Hypatia

that ‘‘the body is constitutively social and interdependent’’ (Butler 2009, 31).
To the degree that fantasies of mastery, autonomy, and independence have fu-
eled contemporary violence, Butler urges a refiguring of the realities of
vulnerability, passivity, and exposure in response:

And yet, I want to argue that if we are to make broader social

and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements
to persistence and flourishing, we will first have to be supported
by a new bodily ontology, one that implies the rethinking of
precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency,
exposure, bodily persistence, desire, work, and the claims of
language and social belonging. (2)

The new bodily ontology to which Butler directs our attention is one grounded
in her consideration of precariousness, a theme that was first introduced in
Precarious Life. In this text, precariousness is rendered as ‘‘a primary vulnerabil-
ity to others, one which we cannot will away without ceasing to be human’’
(Butler 2004a, xiv). Her concern in this earlier work—one that is maintained
in Frames of War—is that ‘‘contemporary forms of national sovereignty consti-
tute efforts to overcome an impressionability and violability that are
ineradicable dimensions of human dependency and sociality’’ (xiv). These
efforts to overcome violability are frequently announced in scenes of violence,
and it is in the context of these scenes that Butler turns to precariousness as a
figure that heralds the ways that we are both constituted and dispossessed as
corporeally vulnerable subjects. She develops an ethics and politics that honors
this constitutive dispossession in contrast to those political projects whose aim
has been its denigration, abuse, or outright denial.
In contrast to earlier discussions of precarious life, Butler’s discussion in
Frames of War is more assertive in its attempt to delineate the shape that this
ethics or politics might take. Indeed, in several places, Butler claims that pre-
cariousness implies certain obligations:
Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s
life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies
exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know, a
dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at
all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the ex-
posure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anon-
ymous. These are not necessarily relations of love or even of
care, but constitutive obligations toward others, most of whom
we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not
bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who ‘‘we’’ are.
(Butler 2009, 14)
 Ann V. Murphy 581

Precariousness is meant to designate the vulnerability that all humans evince

by virtue of their injurability, interdependency, and exposure to one another.
For my purposes here, what is of most interest is Butler’s postulation of
‘‘constitutive obligations’’ that follow upon the apprehension of the precari-
ousness of life. No longer content to settle with the ambiguity that inheres in
the figures of dispossession or vulnerability, Butler has more recently honed her
analysis of precariousness such that it imposes stronger ethical obligations: ‘‘But
an obligation does emerge from the fact that we are, as it were, social beings
from the start, dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on institu-
tions, and on sustained and sustainable environments, and so are, in this sense,
precarious’’ (23). But what, exactly, does an ontology that foregrounds figures
of dispossession, exposure, and vulnerability commit one to ethically? Butler’s
response to this question makes it clear that her interest lies in cultivating a
global politics where the distribution and realization of precariousness is not
marked by violent inequity:
Normatively construed, I am arguing that there ought to be a
more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precarious-
ness, and that this should take the form of concrete social policy
regarding issues such as shelter, work, food, medical care, and
legal status. (13)
Butler claims that an obligation emerges from the fact that we are dependent
from the start on that which is beyond us and outside of us, and that where the
conditions for flourishing have been foreclosed, an obligation surfaces to ame-
liorate suffering and to work toward a situation where life is more readily
sustained. The normative charge that inheres in precariousness is thus not at-
tributable to a thinking of exposure or interdependency itself, but to the wildly
differential, selective, and violent ways that this exposure to others is realized in
experience. Butler calls for greater attentiveness to this differential allocation
of vulnerability, and the mechanisms that both produce and veil these inequi-
ties, inequities that are concretely realized in the disproportionate availability
to violence, suffering, and poverty that is endured by certain populations and
not others. In the face of these injustices, Butler argues that the fragility of life
imposes positive obligations to work for a more egalitarian distribution of pre-
cariousness (21). Hence Butler’s ‘‘new bodily ontology’’ would concretely
imply an ethics that demanded that the grave inequities that currently mark
access to education, shelter, and medical care be altered in favor of a more even
realization of vulnerability. Of particular concern for Butler is the fact that the
recognition and relative security that is afforded to some is clearly enabled by
the abuse of others’ precarious lives. A more authentic apprehension of precar-
ious life would commit us to a less abusive realization of precarity: ‘‘It cannot be
that the other is destructible while I am not, nor vice versa. It can only be that
582 Hypatia

life, as precarious life, is a generalized condition, and that under certain

political conditions it becomes radically exacerbated and radically
disavowed’’ (48).
Further still, and more substantively, Butler argues that the nature of these
‘‘constitutive obligations’’ springs from the fact that precariousness is not an
attribute of individuals, but is rather a generalized condition. ‘‘And the injunc-
tion to think precariousness in terms of equality emerges precisely from the
irrefutable generalizability of this condition. On this basis, one objects to
the differential allocation of precariousness and grievability’’ (Butler 2009, 22).
Following this description of precariousness as a generalized condition is a fur-
ther claim regarding our ‘‘radical substitutability’’ and ‘‘anonymity’’ in relation
to each other:
Over and against the existential concept of finitude that sin-
gularizes our relation to death and to life, precariousness
underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in rela-
tion both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and
death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and
flourishing. (14)
What remains vague is the exact mechanism of ‘‘substitution’’ that Butler evokes
here.3 It could be that this conception of substitutability is meant to promote
empathy and understanding that would in turn inspire a politics and ethics that
allowed for a more equal distribution of precariousness. No one would deny
that the current distribution of precariousness on a global political scale is wildly
out of balance, so much so that to even think the ‘‘equal distribution of precarity’’
involves an almost impossible exercise of imagination. Still, there is work to be
done in terms of elaborating the exercises of imagination that would make an
appeal to ‘‘radical substitutability’’ or anonymity a provocation for broadening
one’s ethical sensibilities instead of narrowing them.
Nonetheless, Butler calls for a reconsideration of human rights based on this
conception of precariousness: ‘‘The recognition of shared precariousness intro-
duces strong normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust
universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs for food, shel-
ter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing’’ (2009, 29). Yet even as
Butler argues for the obligation imposed by the precariousness of life—and ex-
plicitly links this claim to a call for a more robust conception of rights—she
continues to recognize that the apprehension of others’ precarious lives will not
always be realized in scenes of tolerance or generosity: ‘‘Of course, it does
not follow that if one apprehends a life as precarious one will resolve to protect
that life or secure the conditions for its persistence and flourishing’’ (2). Hence
a tension remains in Butler’s account to the degree that the obligation imposed
by precariousness is one that cries for a more equal and even realization of cor-
 Ann V. Murphy 583

poreal vulnerability, even as Butler acknowledges the challenges that persist

when it comes to enabling those modes of life that inspire the protection of
precarious life instead of its abuse.
In Frames of War, Butler acknowledges that vulnerability can be lived in
ways both promising and perilous—and so can motivate care, generosity, and
retributive violence in equal measure. It follows that precariousness itself can-
not guarantee an ethical response for reasons that were rehearsed above; there
is little in the apprehension of the fragility of the other that would ensure eth-
ical respect and not criminal abuse. Indeed, as Emmanuel Levinas has noted,
the apprehension of this fragility can lead to a heightening of violence or a
desire to inflict harm (Levinas 1998). But Butler’s language here betrays her
interest in the ‘‘rights’’ and ‘‘entitlements’’ due to a vulnerable subject and the
obligations we must assume in the face of these. What obligations are these?
And what in Butler’s description of precariousness motivates these obligations?
Butler claims that ‘‘the postulation of a generalized precariousness that calls
into question the ontology of individualism implies, although does not directly
entail, certain normative consequences’’ (2009, 33). But what does it mean to
‘‘imply’’ but not ‘‘entail’’ normative consequences? And what does the postu-
lation of precariousness imply about the possibility of a humanistic ethic? I will
return to this question at the end of the essay.

II. SINGULARITY AND ONTOLOGICAL ALTRUISM

Whereas Butler appeals to the notion of precariousness as the foundation for a

new bodily ontology, and locates its moral claim in a kind of ‘‘substitutability’’
or ‘‘anonymity’’ that subtends an ontology of mutual exposure, Cavarero, fol-
lowing Hannah Arendt, elaborates the moral weight of vulnerability when it is
instead conceived in reference to human uniqueness. Cavarero’s work is unique
in that she employs overtly moral language—she repeatedly references both
‘‘altruism’’ and ‘‘crime’’—in her descriptions of ontology. What is at stake in
the import of moral rhetoric to describe a domain of existence that is not yet
moral, at least not in the orthodox sense of that word, by Cavarero’s own ad-
mission? I suggest that Cavarero’s (deliberate) confusion of the domains of
ontology and ethics—announced in her articulation of ‘‘ontological altruism’’
and ‘‘ontological crime’’—signals an intertwining of these two domains. Al-
though it is tempting to read Cavarero’s evocation of ‘‘ontological altruism’’ as
an appeal to an ontology within which there is a latent ethics, this is in fact not
the case. I suggest that Cavarero’s rhetorical confusion of ethics and ontology
implies their co-implication, but not a co-implication that would readily yield
any sort of normative prescription. For this reason, it is important to resist a
certain seduction that is rhetorically at play when moral language is applied to
a critical ontology of the corporeal; it is easy to think, when one sees the phrase
584 Hypatia

‘‘ontological altruism’’ or ‘‘ontological crime’’ that what is being offered is an

ontology of the body that mandates an ethic of nonviolence. Still, the last sec-
tion of this essay will suggest that Cavarero’s ‘‘altruistic ontology’’ is open to the
possibility of a new humanism, and so might be read as productive, even as it
refuses to prescribe a normative ethics.
Cavarero’s understanding of vulnerability is linked to Arendt’s discussion of
‘‘uniqueness’’ in The Human Condition (1958). Arendt distinguishes distinct-
ness from otherness, where otherness is simply the quality of alterity that
inheres in all things—living and non—but distinctness is an attribute shared
only by the living, to the degree that all living beings differ from one another.
Human uniqueness is manifest in speech and action that transcend brute
bodily existence. In this sense, the uniqueness that marks the human
‘‘rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can re-
frain and still be human’’ (Arendt 1958, 176). This elaboration of human
uniqueness sets the stage for the Arendtian distinction between the ‘‘what’’
and the ‘‘who,’’ a distinction that is vital for Cavarero’s own understanding of
vulnerability:
In speaking and acting, men show who they are, reveal actively
their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance
in the human world, while their physical identities appear with-
out any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body
and sound of the voice. The disclosure of ‘‘who’’ in contradis-
tinction to ‘‘what’’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and
shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in
everything somebody says or does. (Arendt 1958, 179)
The priority for Cavarero, as for Arendt, is the question of ‘‘who’’ we are, not
‘‘what’’ we are. Indeed, for Cavarero, this is the proper question of ethics, and the
question of responsibility is illumined only in reference to the uniqueness of each
of us as it emerges in embodied speech and action. In Relating Narratives, Ca-
varero’s emphasis on uniqueness largely concerns the narratable self who enters
into ‘‘a relational ethic of contingency,’’ or an ‘‘altruistic ontology of the human
existent as finite’’ (Cavarero 2000, 87). In this text, Cavarero is preoccupied with
the ways in which human uniqueness is constituted in an ‘‘irremediable exposure
to others.’’ Even though Relating Narratives as a text concerns the ethical signifi-
cance of narration, and the unique self that emerges through this kind of
exposure, it is also the case that this exposure is inherently corporeal. Because
uniqueness is constituted in and through one’s exposure to others, and because
the body is the site of this exposure, Cavarero’s relational or altruistic ontology is
one that foregrounds the reality of incarnate vulnerability.
In her more recent text Horrorism, the bond between corporeal vulnerability
and uniqueness is rendered even more forcefully in the context of Cavarero’s
 Ann V. Murphy 585

discussions of contemporary violence. In this text, Cavarero reiterates the

association of exposure and uniqueness:
The uniqueness that characterizes the ontological status of hu-
mans is also in fact a constitutive vulnerability, especially when
understood in corporeal terms. If, as Hannah Arendt maintains,
everyone is unique because, exposing herself to others and con-
signing her singularity to this exposure, she shows herself as such,
this unique being is vulnerable by definition. (Cavarero 2007, 20)

Notably, it is around this conception of corporeal vulnerability as uniqueness

that Cavarero elaborates her notions of ‘‘ontological altruism’’ as well as ‘‘on-
tological crime.’’ Her accounts of both ontological altruism and ontological
crime are grounded in an ontology that understands dignity and integrity to be
linked to singularity, and Cavarero diagnoses virtue and vice with reference to
the protection and/or violation of uniquely exposed bodies.
In Horrorism, Cavarero identifies ‘‘ontological crime’’ as violence that com-
promises the integrity of the body proper or that renders the human body
unrecognizable. Cavarero claims it is possible to imagine a kind of crime that
undoes the very integrity of the body, that eviscerates the figural unity
that renders a human body recognizable as such.4 ‘‘What is at stake is not the
end of a human life, but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the sin-
gularity of vulnerable bodies’’ (Cavarero 2007, 8). In ontological crime, our
incarnate uniqueness is undone in an ontological assault on the dignity of the
human form. It is Cavarero’s investment in the figural unity of the human form
that is of most interest here, for it clearly illuminates her investment in a
kind of integrity—at once ethical and ontological—that merits protection.
Cavarero’s account of ontological crime renders the savaging of the body as a
body a crime whose violence transcends death: ‘‘On the scene of horror, the
body placed in question is not just a singular body, as every body obviously is;
above all, it is a body in which human singularity, concentrating itself at its
most expressive point of its own flesh, exposes itself intensely’’ (15).
Cavarero’s evocation of ontological altruism and ontological crime testifies
to an intertwining of ontology and ethics that would ground a new humanism
in an appeal to both corporeal uniqueness and the figural unity that makes a
human body recognizable as such. But what is the ethical—and beyond that,
the political—provocation of uniqueness? What responsibility does an ‘‘altru-
istic ethics of relation’’ call me to assume, particularly with reference to the
material uniqueness of each of us? And if an ‘‘altruistic ethics of relation’’ is not
altruistic in the orthodox sense of that word, then what merits the employment
of the rhetoric of virtue (ontological altruism) and vice (ontological crime) in
the description of ontology?
586 Hypatia

Cavarero, like Butler, ultimately expresses some hesitation regarding what is

at stake in the movement from ontology to ethics. In Butler’s case, this was
announced in her admission that ‘‘the postulation of generalized precariousness
that calls into question the ontology of individualism implies, but does not di-
rectly entail, certain normative consequences’’ (Butler 2009, 33, emphasis
added). For her part, Cavarero is resolute in thinking that there is some eth-
ical import to be found in the appeal to uniqueness, but nonetheless insists that
an ethic cannot be ‘‘deduced’’ from this appeal (Cavarero 2000, 87). Hence
although both uniqueness and precariousness elicit a summons or an appeal to
ethics, both Butler and Cavarero evince hesitation when it comes to giving
these figures any normative or prescriptive content.

III. THE ANONYMOUS, THE SINGULAR, AND THE HUMAN

When it comes to the question of what ethical directive might be mined from
Cavarero’s rhetorical confusion of ontology and ethics, a confusion born out in
the nomenclature of ‘‘ontological altruism,’’ it seems obvious that Cavarero is
content to stay with the ambiguity that resides in any appeal to corporeal vul-
nerability. Indeed, echoing Butler, Cavarero suggests that there are ‘‘two poles’’
that are inscribed in the condition of vulnerability: wounding and caring. In-
sofar as the vulnerable body is by definition exposed to both, it remains
‘‘irremediably open to both responses’’ (Cavarero 2007, 20). This description of
vulnerability suggests that the ‘‘irremediable’’ availability to both care and
abuse that constitutes vulnerability is not something that any ethics will ever
manage to transcend. This ontological condition is one in which ethics finds its
genesis, but it is one that no ethics can subsequently undo. An ‘‘altruistic ethics
of relation’’ is hence one that paradoxically cannot promise altruism as it is
normally conceived within the purview of moral philosophy. Indeed,
Cavarero’s altruistic ethics of relation is at some remove from the more ortho-
dox terrain of moral philosophy, wherein one attends to questions of virtue. If
the altruism to which Cavarero appeals is one that finds its claim in an unin-
tentional and unchosen exposure to others, manifest in the ‘‘irremediable
exposure’’ of the vulnerable body, then it remains unclear what sort of ethical
prescription an ontology such as this might yield. Although both authors insist
on the co-implication of ethics and ontology, the move from each of these reg-
isters to the other is one marked by hesitation.
In what remains of this essay, I read this hesitation as productive. This is not
to claim that a philosophical framework that abstains from normative prescrip-
tion is superior to those that do not. Nor is it to insist that a hesitation to
prescribe an ethics is wholly felicitous. Nonetheless, the hesitation that is ex-
emplified in recent work by Cavarero and Butler marks both the necessity and
the limitations of an ethical discourse on the human, and so now more than
 Ann V. Murphy 587

ever merits critical attention. When read together, I suggest that Butler and Ca-
varero’s recent work on the body gestures toward the possibility of a humanism
whose ethical charge lies in an understanding of the relationship between the
absolute uniqueness of each human body and an anonymous vulnerability to
which each unique body is necessarily delivered. As previously noted, Butler and
Cavarero hone different conceptions of the body in the service of ethics; Cavarero
is invested in the ethical provocation of uniqueness, Butler in the ‘‘constitutive
obligations’’ that each of us assumes by virtue of our generalized or anonymous
availability to each other. I have suggested that these two approaches are not in
conflict, but rather in synchrony. Still, what makes recent work by each of these
thinkers humanistic in spirit? What justifies the assertion that the ethical onto-
logies of Butler and Cavarero gesture toward a new humanism?
The response to these questions is best given with reference to the distance
that both Butler and Cavarero take in regard to both liberal individualism and
identity politics, and the priority that is afforded to the category of the human
in their recent work. The recognition that ‘‘the body is constitutively social
and interdependent’’ is one that clearly indicts an ‘‘ontology of discrete iden-
tity,’’ whether that identity is individual or collective (Butler 2009, 31). In this
way, Butler distances herself from the paradigm of liberal individualism and
clearly favors a relational ontology that emphasizes the dispossession of the self
in the other. Indeed, part of the appeal of precariousness, for Butler, is that it is
a figure that might frame new ideas about coalition and community, ideas that
depart from those we inherit from the identity politics of many feminist phi-
losophers of past decades. Butler’s appeal to precarity, while acknowledging its
status as a generalized condition, is conceived as one ‘‘whose focus would be less
on identity politics, or the kinds of interests and beliefs formulated on the basis
of identity claims, and more on precarity and its differential distributions, in
the hope that new coalitions might be formed’’ (32). Although Butler remains
relatively agnostic regarding the shape that these new coalitions might take,
her desire to wrest the figure of precariousness free from the terrain of identity
politics, combined with her explicit investment in thinking what she calls ‘‘the
question of the human,’’ signals a commitment to thinking through the possi-
bility of a present-day humanism that is realized in reference to corporeal
vulnerability. Crucially, Butler’s new bodily ontology, and the humanistic ethic
that it implies, provides critical resources for the interrogation of various sorts
of state-centered violence: ‘‘Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as
multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition
to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity
for the purposes of profit and territorial defense’’ (32). To be sure, the kind of
humanism that Butler gestures toward here is neither absolute nor transparent,
but her explicit attempt to distance herself from both identity politics and lib-
eral individualism is accomplished via reference to the human as the most
588 Hypatia

meaningful designation through which to engage the figure of the precarious

and vulnerable body.
This resistance to thinking in terms of identity politics is mirrored in
Cavarero’s recent work, though it is expressed in radically different language.
Indeed, Cavarero’s own aversion to identitarian ideology is manifest in her
aversion to the motif of empathy, at least as it is the object of appeal in ethical
and political discourse:
What we have called an altruistic ethics of relation does not sup-
port empathy, identification, or confusions. Rather this ethic
desires a you that is truly an other, in her uniqueness and distinc-
tion. No matter how much you are similar and consonant, says this
story, your story is never my story. No matter how much the traits
of our larger life-stories are similar, I still do not recognize myself in
you, and, even less, in a collective we. (Cavarero 2000, 92)
In language vastly different from Butler’s, Cavarero distances herself from a
kind of identitarian paradigm and insists instead on the ethical import of cor-
poreal uniqueness. Still, since it is the case that every human body is exposed in
a unique light, there is indeed a sense in which this condition of uniqueness is
itself anonymous, as Butler has suggested. Insofar as both resist the paradigms of
liberal individualism and identity politics, and insofar as both claim the human
as a meaningful analytic category, it is legitimate to claim that the relational
ontologies—or ethical ontologies—that have recently been put forward by
Butler and Cavarero are humanistic in a broad sense, even if both hesitate
when it comes to the delineation of a theory of human rights.
I suggest in reference to recent work by Butler and Cavarero that this hes-
itation is not cause for anguish or pessimism, but is rather the hesitation in
which responsibility is born. If the body marks an ambiguous intertwining of
ethics and ontology, it is not in spite of this ambiguity that we respond to the
provocation of the other, but because of it. The ‘‘new ontology of the body’’ for
which Butler calls, and the altruistic ontology that is outlined in Cavarero’s
recent work, are clearly ethical ontologies, in the sense that they are ontologies
that loosely imply an ethics that respects and does not abuse corporeal vulner-
ability. Even if these new ethical ontologies largely refrain from straightforward
normative prescription, there is something important in honoring their hesita-
tion in this regard. Indeed, what is novel in these accounts of corporeal
vulnerability is that they illumine a relationship between ontology and ethics
that differs from both a scenario wherein ethics precedes ontology, as well
as the inverse, namely a scenario in which ontology is given priority, or in
which the ‘‘ought’’ is somehow derived from the ‘‘is.’’ Together, Butler and
Cavarero manage to think the co-implication of ethics and ontology in a way
that refuses the priority of either. In other words, the new ethical ontologies
 Ann V. Murphy 589

emphasize the intertwining of ethics and ontology, but collectively refuse the
temptation to situate either of these two domains of philosophical inquiry in a
relation of causation, hierarchy, or primacy with regard to each other. Indeed,
recent work by Butler and Cavarero makes it possible to imagine the vulnerable
body as the contestation of this kind of hierarchy. Corporeal vulnerability is at
once an ontological truism and an ethical provocation.
No less significant is the fact that contemporary feminist engagements with
the motif of vulnerability have had the effect of reopening the question of hu-
manism. In feminist and race theory, ‘‘humanism’’ is a word that continues to
be used with extreme caution due to the fact that for many, humanistic ideol-
ogy is still understood to be responsible for the dehumanization of women and
the racialized violence of colonialism. The new corporeal humanism, grounded
in the ontological fact of vulnerability, dispossession, and exposure, offers a
more expansive and inclusive paradigm, one that is still attentive to the differ-
ences that mark bodies, and respectful of the radically different ways that
vulnerability and dispossession are lived. Whereas Butler’s humanistic claims
are currently articulated in terms of a generalized or anonymous vulnerability,
Cavarero privileges uniqueness and singularity in her own elaboration of an
‘‘ethics of relation.’’ The humanism that emerges when these thinkers are
brought together powerfully grounds claims for rights, protections, and equity
in a language that can still account for the uniqueness of each human body,
even as these bodies are understood as part of a global community in which
each is vulnerable to the other. Further still, because humanistic ideology has
in the past demonstrated its own vulnerability to being corrupted and co-opted,
bent in the service of some groups and not others, it is right that the prescrip-
tive sway of the new corporeal humanism be marked by hesitation. For in the
end, this hesitation marks the movement of a humanism that does not aspire to
be absolute and immalleable, but that instead honors the contingency and im-
perfection that mark any attempt to think the human.

NOTES
1. Corporeal vulnerability is currently a popular motif in feminist theory. Al-
though this essay will focus on the work of Judith Butler and the Italian feminist Adriana
Cavarero in particular, part of what is interesting about the current resurgence of inter-
est in vulnerability is the significant number of feminist thinkers who are currently
engaging this theme, a list that would include not only Butler and Cavarero, but Debra
Bergoffen (2001), Kelly Oliver (2001; 2008), and Rosalyn Diprose (2002), among oth-
ers. Although this essay’s scope forbids appeal to each of these projects in detail, much of
what I say here has been inspired by my interest in the ubiquity of references to the twin
motifs of violence and vulnerability across the landscape of contemporary feminist the-
ory. Collectively, this feminist work interrogates the priority that violence has been
afforded in discourse on the body through a consideration of figures such as ‘‘ontological
590 Hypatia

altruism’’ (Cavarero 2000), ‘‘corporeal generosity’’ (Diprose 2002), ‘‘precariousness’’

(Butler 2004a) and vulnerability.
2. See Mills 2007.
3. The language of ‘‘substitution’’ is evocative of the later Levinas, particularly the
account of substitution in Otherwise than Being, but Butler seems to be working here with
a more mundane sense of that word. Indeed, she expresses reservations regarding Levin-
as toward the end of Frames of War: ‘‘It is not enough to say, in a Levinasian vein, that
the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of my
coming to being. That may be formally true, but its truth is of no use to me if I lack the
conditions for responsiveness that allow me to apprehend it in the midst of social and
political life’’ (Butler 2009, 179).
4. Cavarero’s paradigmatic example of ontological crime is the dismemberment of
the human body in the instance of suicide bombing.

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