Cohabition, Violence and Difference
Abstracts
Silvia Benso (Rochester Institute of Technology, NY)
Love without Fear: On Friendship and Sisterhood with Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and bell hooks
Abstract—We are currently living in a period of “dark times,” according to Hannah Arendt’s expression. It is a period in which people disengage from the world to retreat into the intimacy of their own self or the privacy of inner circles (of kins, friends, those who are most alike), thereby causing an erosion of the in-between that ties individuals to one another in the shared world of polis. Like Aristotle, Arendt thinks that it is friendship, not fraternity—the virtue extolled by the Enlightenment world which frames modernity—that exemplifies the humanity of human beings. Friendship, for Arendt, has to do with the political coming into proximity of differences, not with personal relations or with sacrificing human beings to any abstract or restrictive ideal. The recent anti-gender, homophobic, transphobic sentiments that have started to spread in various contexts and threaten the lives of transgender people, the freedoms of gays and lesbians, and even the rights of women have Judith Butler plea for a political “alliance” or solidarity between diverse people who, despite gendered and sexed differences, form bonds over shared precarity and work for a “livable world” in which we are constantly “undone by each other.” This presentation explores bell hooks’ notion of sisterhood as a powerful concept to embrace differential friendship while avoiding the limitations of tribalistic kinships and its exclusionary, xenophobic, suprematist familisms so that we can engage in the political action—invoked by both Arendt and Butler—of “produc[ing] a world in which we can move and breathe and love without fear of violence.”
Pantaleone Condello (University of Messina)
Vulnerability and Power: Nadežda Mandelstam’s Ethical-Political Experience
This talk, drawing on the work of Nadežda Mandelstam, aims to reflect on the relationship between vulnerability and power. Through her literary activity, Nadežda Mandelstam attempted to transform her condition of extreme vulnerability, determined by the exposure to the arbitrary and totalitarian power of the Stalinist regime. This condition affected an entire generation of poets and intellectuals, including her husband Osip and Anna Akhmatova. Vulnerability thus becomes a creative ethical-political experience, capable not of redeeming the lives of the victims of the Great Terror, but rather of becoming a vehicle for values such as resistance and bearing witness. This experience of vulnerability can be compared with that of power, which, as Stalin’s case shows, transforms its own vulnerability into destructive force, functional to a paranoid drive toward security. On this basis, the coexistence of creative passion and devastating force within vulnerability raises crucial questions about the very nature of power.
Rita Fulco (University of Messina)
Vulnerability, Discourse, and Politics: Judith Butler and Simone Weil
This essay examines the relationship between vulnerability, subjectivity, and politics through a comparison between Judith Butler and Simone Weil, in order to highlight the complementarity of their approaches. The first section, dedicated to Butler, shows how vulnerability is a relational condition mediated by discourse and differentially distributed through power structures that determine which lives are recognized as “grievable” and which remain invisible. Vulnerability emerges as an eminently political and performative category, capable of generating forms of solidarity and non‑violent collective action through bodily presence in public space, grounded in reciprocal dependence and structural interdependence.
The second section, focused on Weil, investigates the ontological dimension of human exposure through the notions of affliction (malheur), “life without form,” and obligation. Weil identifies vulnerability as a constitutive feature of the human condition, revealed by extreme affliction that reduces life to mere survival. From this perspective arises the need for an education of attention and for an ethics of obligation toward every human being, independent of recognition or reciprocity. Such an outlook implies that politics must assume as its primary task the prevention of the reduction to bare life and the repair of situations in which affliction is already evident.
The comparison between Butler and Weil reveals a crucial point of convergence: vulnerability must be acknowledged as the foundation of being‑with‑others and translated into institutions capable of sustaining livable lives, reducing precarization, and promoting non‑violent coexistence. Vulnerability thus appears not as a deficit but as the normative principle required to rethink contemporary ethics and politics.
Dominic Harkin (Queen’s University Belfast) Mourning the Unrecovered: Islekel, Alareer, and Necrosovereignty
This paper brings Ege Selin Islekel’s new work, Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies
of Disappearance, into dialogue with the position of the unrecovered dead in Palestine, reading this disaster
alongside If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer. Islekel theorises ‘necrosovereignty’ as a mode of power that
governs death’s afterlives, shaping the epistemic conditions under which loss can be known and mourned
with legitimacy. I argue in this paper that the systematic destruction, withholding, or inaccessibility of
bodies in Palestine produces a form of death that is certain yet unrecoverable, foreclosing juridical
recognition and relocating the work of mourning outside legal frameworks. Reading Alareer’s poetry as a
practice of counter-juridical mourning, the paper shows how literature may function as a mode of
recognition that does not depend on forensic closure. Poetry here operates as a form of what Islekel
terms “nightmare knowledge,” upholding memory and political intelligibility where law fails to recognise
the dead.
Giusy Mantarro (University of Messina)
Vulnerability, corporeality and maternity in Emmanuel Levinas
In my contribution, I intend to investigate the notion of vulnerability in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, starting from the phenomenology of exposure outlined in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Understood as constitutive exposure to affection, vulnerability is configured as the sensibility that characterises a subject “of flesh and blood”. I will therefore focus on the extreme passivity of the incarnate subject, a naked body that is hungry and whose skin is exposed to the wound of suffering. From this perspective, vulnerability is not a fragility to be overcome, but the original condition of responsibility for the Other. Finally, through the figure of maternity – understood not in a biological sense, but as an ethical figure – I will try to bring to light the paradoxical force of vulnerability. The mother, in fact, constitutes the highest expression of vulnerability as original hospitality: a giving of oneself that welcomes the Other into one’s own entrails, pushing the exposure to the point of becoming a hostage to those you host.
Noele Di Nuzzo (University of Messina)
Beyond the armor. Vulnerability and Care in male education
This article explores the link between the inability to care-for-others and the rejection of constitutive vulnerability (Butler, 2004) in models of patriarchal masculinity. Analyzing the logic behind the delegation of care to the female gender involves understanding the reasons why men are often unable to engage in dialogue with themselves and their own limits. Masculine education based on performance (Ciccone, 2011) does not, in fact, allow for the possibility of fragility, here understood as a social fragility of the gender (Ferrarese, 2020).
If there is indeed an implicit correlation between the assignment of responsibilities of care to women and being perceived as fragile or vulnerable, recognizing our shared condition of vulnerability would not only enable the emergence of a new masculine education but also set men free from the constraints of performance, opening new horizons of meaning and care.
To achieve this goal, it is therefore essential to outline applicable and concrete educational practices (Gasparrini, 2020) aimed at building a new foundation upon which to construct a different reality of care.
Annamaria Passaseo (University of Messina)
Pluralism and cultural conflicts. What kind of cohabitation is possible?
From an educational perspective, the article deals with the problem of determining the procedural and operational methods needed to enable cultural differences to coexist, starting with schools, which are training grounds for citizenship. To this end, the Author conducts a critical analysis of the proposals of “multiculturalism” and the “intercultural project”. Finally, she presents a draft procedural model – of a constructivist nature – which could potentially integrate different cultural conceptions.
Martine Prange (Tilburg University) Judith Butler’s Ethics of Vulnerabilty, Mourning and Life
Judith Butler is mainly known for their work on feminist and queer theory. However, in this paper, I consider Butler as an ethical thinker, whose work tout court focuses on egalitarianism and inclusivity. In the end, her work is about humanity or the question what it means to be ‘human’, and as such it far exceeds feminist and queer theory. As an ethical thinker, Butler inscribes herself in the tradition of Arendt and Levinas, while sticking to a postmodern or post-structuralist, non-essentialist view of humanity. They theorize the relationality between the self and other as a ‘we’ based on the shared experience of loss, vulnerability, and mourning against the modern or modernist tendency to anchor humanity as a global community in a universally shared rationality. The post-structuralist ethics that ensues from this interesting combination offers, I argue below, a welcome alternative to, and deepening of, Habermasian and Derridarian calls for dialogue to counter violence.
To make my argument, I, amongst others, critically analyze Butler’s 2003-essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” referring to Freud, Benjamin, and Sontag’s conception of ‘shock’ in relation to war and photography, to which Butler responded and from which they developed their thought on precarious and liveable lives. I do so to find out how a conception of the human rooted in experiences of loss, vulnerability, and mourning may improve or deepen calls for dialogue as alternative for violence. Violence, terror, and death acutely confront us with the fundamental philosophical questions of humanity and the value of life, i.e., what makes us human and which life is worth to be lived? Or, as Butler has it, ‘who counts as human?’ and ‘which life is worth grieving for?’ These questions are especially relevant today with authoritairianism, autocracy, and fascism on the rise, as we see in the USA, where citizens are currently violently oppressed and even killed by Trump’s special ICE forces, as in the recent Minnesota case of Renee Nicole Good sadly showed.
Key Concepts: ‘Egalitarian Ethics of Mourning’; ‘Politics of Redistribution of Humanizing Effects’; Violence;
Politics of Life and Death; Shock
Aisling Reid (Queens University Belfast) If He May Be Called a Man: Framing the Monstrous Irish from Gerald of Wales to Judith Butler
ABSTRACT: Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica (c. 1188) portrays Ireland as a land filled with monstrous hybrids: an ox-man who cannot speak, a bearded woman with a mane like a horse, and women engaging in bestiality. These figures are not mere curiosities but are central to Gerald’s ethnographic efforts. By depicting Irish bodies as ambiguously human, Gerald’s narrative creates a population whose full humanity is continually in doubt. Using Judith Butler’s concepts of grievable and ungrievable lives, I suggest that the classification anxieties in the Topographia justify the Norman invasion of Ireland. When a life is not recognised as fully human, violence against it does not count as violence. The differing treatment of the Irish, compared to the Scots, who were integrated into Norman society through treaties and intermarriage, highlights how representational frameworks lead to tangible outcomes. As Butler argues, the framing of a community precedes and enables violence.
Key Terms: Framing; Grievable Lives; Vulnerability; Monstrosity; Dehumanisation; Norman Invasion of Ireland
Caterina Resta (University of Messina)
Sui generis. Universal Vulnerability
Through a critical reading of the contemporary debate on “gender,” I intend to remove it from the polemical and ideological simplifications that have fueled the so-called “gender theory.” From a genealogical reconstruction of the concept of “gender,” which first emerged in the field of sexology, I intend to establish the unnecessary correspondence between biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. I pay particular attention to Judith Butler’s contribution, with her notions of “gender performativity” and her critique of heteronormativity. Gender is thus understood as a psycho-socio-cultural construct, devoid of essential foundations, but not arbitrary. Based on a different way of conceiving the normal-abnormal relationship, it is necessary to rethink the boundaries of the human, which sees in vulnerability and the desire for recognition the possibility of keeping open the universal notion of the human, so that no singularity is excluded. In this sense, every existence is irreducibly sui generis.
Elvira Roncalli (Caroll College, Montana)
Living in Dark Times: Lessons on Politics from Arendt, Weil and Other Less Known Women
Arendt and Weil lived during a time of great social unrest and political upheaval, a time of two horrific world wars, and unprecedented genocides. Both were Jewish, forced to migrate, their life upended. Both see politics as it has come to be, the root cause of the colossal devastation of the first half of the 20th century and both devote their work to radically rethink politics. In the first part of the paper I focus on their respective critiques, the relationship between power and violence for Arendt, and the examination of “force” for Weil, which are crucial for re-envisioning politics. In the latter part of the paper, I consider the different kind of politics they both write about, one that is grounded in affirming and sustaining the living together of people and will briefly consider some concrete examples of political engagement exemplifying it.
Valetina Surace (University of Messina)
Injurable Lives. Judith Butler’s reflections on violence and war
I aim to reconstruct Judith Butler’s reflections on vulnerability, violence, war, and solidarity, advancing an ecstatic‑relational ontology of the body. The body is not an autonomous substance but an exposed existence formed through dependence on networks of social relations; it is thus vulnerable, though not reducible to mere injurability. Vulnerability—common yet asymmetrical—precedes the formation of the “I” and grounds an ethico‑political responsibility toward others. In this framework, violence exploits our primary relational tie and operates both materially and through the performative power of language and norms, producing differentially distributed precarity. Frames of intelligibility determine which lives count as livable and grievable, making grievability a precondition for the value of life. War functions to minimize precariousness for some and maximize it for others, normalizing the destruction of “ungrievable” lives while sustaining a sovereign that disavows its own injurability. Against this logic, Butler proposes a fallible practice of nonviolence that requires confronting one’s capacity for violence and leveraging the iterability of norms for democratic transformation. Shared exposure to injury catalyzes networks of solidarity: pain does not isolate but mobilizes bodies into collective action, enabling forms of dis‑identification and “unrealistic” insurgent solidarities that open spaces of recognition and impose positive obligations toward the sustaining conditions of life.
