Precarity’s Prayers

Taking its point of departure from the etymological relation between precarity and prayer as well as from Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on “prayer demythified,” the essay seeks to reconfigure problems of dependency, vulnerability, and abandonment in the discourse of precarity. Insisting on this etymological relation to prayer opens up the singular conditions of precarious existence, which include forms of petitioning, request, and rhetorics of belief. In this sense, the essay seeks to understand how the discourse of precarity exposes different ways of addressing forms of political speech, enunciation, and utterance.