Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to Dwelling in Ethical Community

In Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann Murphy is critical of a trend in recent feminist and political theory, including that of Judith Butler, of positing an ontology of shared vulnerability as the normative basis for an ethics of non-violence.¹ While supportive of an ideal of non-violence, Murphy argues that there is no way that the appeal to vulnerability can “yield a prescriptive ethics” of non-violence, given that awareness of vulnerability in oneself or others can just as easily provoke violence (75). There is also a concern that emphasizing vulnerability and its link to non-violence actually involves a drift toward protectionism that itself is a form of violence. While it may be illegitimate to derive an ethics of non-violence from recognition of shared vulnerability and interdependence, Murphy rightly supports the kind of ontology that this emphasis on vulnerability comes from: an ontology of human existence emerging from existential phenomenology that gives primacy to the body and to interrelatedness. Here I would like to follow up Murphy’s concern by revisiting that ontology, to examine more fully what kind of ethics it implies. Rather than emphasizing shared vulnerability, it is important to acknowledge the ambiguity of this intercorporeality, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty does. The intercorporeal foundation of human existence means that we are vulnerable to loss and violence for sure, but, on the other side of the ambiguity, it also renders us open to new possibilities for existence. It is this dynamism of existence inherent in intercorporeality that is overlooked and actually put at risk in some accounts of corporeal interdependence. If not unequivocal non-violence, which is arguably an empty ideal, what kind of ethics then is suggested by this ambiguity of corporeal intertwining?

In returning to this ontology of corporeal interdependence, I will emphasize two of its features that the theorists Murphy criticizes tend to leave out of account. First, the aspect of intercorporeality that is its strength: when understood as a process of “dwelling” rather than precarious “life,” intercorporeality can be seen to involve what Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the “event” of dwelling and what Jean-Luc Nancy refers to as the sharing of “singularity.” In ways I will elaborate, this feature of intercorporeality provides the basis of a revised notion not only of community, but also of ethics, in that it points to an aspect of our relations with others and a world that is most at risk, not just in obvious physical violence but also through political determinism (or totalizing government): our existence as “uniqueness” or “potentiality” open to a world and to ongoing transformation and renewal.

The second neglected aspect of an ontology of corporeal interdependence that I will highlight is the central role that things and other non-human elements of built and living environments play in human dwelling. This consideration seems crucial to an account of human vulnerability in the context of dealing with the death and destruction wreaked by large-scale “natural” disasters, a kind of ruin for which an ethics of non-violence is of little help. Together, these two features of this ontology reveal, not just the side of intercorporeality suggested in the emphasis on shared vulnerability and the precariousness of life, but something more general: the fragility and dynamism or ongoing transformation of human-non-human worlds and then, when something goes wrong, the “plight of dwelling.” This shift of emphasis away from just vulnerability and an ethics of non-violence allows focus on the plight of dwelling, to ask what may tip existence from dynamic corporeal interdependence into ruin. The analysis also reveals a more complicated kind of responsibility than protecting others from physical harm, a responsibility that works toward collective engagement with human, non-human, and built environments and bottom-up decision-making that fosters multiple dynamic modes of living together. In drawing this out I emphasize instances of ruin brought about by so-called natural disasters. But, since dwelling with “natural” and built environments will be revealed to be thoroughly saturated by socio-political context, the ethics of recovery from natural disasters turns...