A Political Theology of Vulnerability (Political and Public Theologies, 3) 9004543260, 9789004543263

Citation preview

PPT 3

Diaconal Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. He has published monographs, edited compilations, and written numerous research articles in English, Norwegian and Spanish on Liberation, Political and Contextual Theology, Globalization and Religion, Politics of Faith and Belief, and Ethics and Diaconal work, including The crucified and the Crucified: A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino (Peter Lang, 2003), and the edited volumes Spirits of Globalisation: The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age (SCM Press, 2006), and Religion in a Globalised Age: Transfers and Transformations, Integration and Resistance (Novus Press, 2008).

ISBN 9789004543263

STURLA J. STÅLSETT

Taking vulnerability as starting point for constructive agency and community radically transforms political theology. The author’s powerful global experience and intellectual depth make this book essential reading for anybody concerned with theological attention to lived religion, emancipation, justice, love, and peace in the pressing conflicts of our world. – Werner G. Jeanrond, Em. Professor of Theology, University of Oslo

POLITICAL AND PUBLIC THEOLOGIES

STURLA J. STÅLSETT , Ph.D. (1998), is Professor of Religion, Society and

A POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF VULNERABILITY

Vulnerability is at the core of the political drama of our time. Countering conventional approaches, this book presents human vulnerability as a source of political community and a potential for political agency in precarity. Analyzing Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter in contexts of struggle, it shows how religious resources inspire precarious politics. Combining critical political theory, liberation theology, and lived religion, Sturla J. Stålsett sees in such celebrations a ‘political sacralization’ of vulnerability and a ‘dispossession of divinity’.

A Political Theology of Vulnerability

STURLA J. STÅLSETT 9

789004 543263

ISSN 2666-9218 BRILL.COM/PPT

A Political Theology of Vulnerability

Political and Public Theologies COMPARISONS – COALITIONS – CRITIQUES Editor-in-Chief Ulrich Schmiedel (University of Edinburgh) Editorial Board Julie Cooper (Tel Aviv University) Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) Tommy Lynch (University of Chichester) Esther McIntosh (York St John University) Sturla Stålsett (Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society) Fatima Tofighi (University of Religions) Advisory Board Seforosa Carroll (World Council of Churches) Stephan van Eerp (KU Leuven) Elaine Graham (University of Chester) Kristin Heyer (Boston College) Catherine Keller (Drew University, Madison) Brian Klug (University of Oxford) Valentina Napolitano (University of Toronto) Joshua Ralston (University of Edinburgh) Thomas Schlag (University of Zurich) Sohaira Zahid Siddiqui (Georgetown University) Robert Vosloo (University of Stellenbosch)

Volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ppt

A Political Theology of Vulnerability By

Sturla J. Stålsett

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Grafitti with the theme ‘Freedom for Children’ by the Art of Life Group on Dili, East Timor. Photo by the author, used with kind permission. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2666-9218 isbn 978-90-04-54326-3 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-54327-0 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Sturla J. Stålsett. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Preface: Fires in Paradise

1

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability 1 1 Questions 2 2 Definitions 3 3 Contribution 15 4 Procedure 21

2

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis 24 1 Precariat 25 2 Multitude 37 3 Bare life 44 4 Immunity 49 5 Necropolitics 55 6 Precarity 61

3

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability 63 1 Provocation 64 2 Grievability 68 3 Differentiation 72 4 Agency 77 5 Relationality 79 6 Responsibility 84 7 Community 86 8 Recognition 89 9 Dispossession 91 10 Resilience 94 11 Resistance 97 12 Performativity 100 13 Affirmation 102 14 Framing 104

4

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times 107 1 Secularization 109 2 Security 112 3 Deprivation 113

vii

vi

Contents

4 5 6 7

Responses 116 Ultimacy 119 Wrongness 122 ‘Handling’ 123

5

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability 127 1 Birthdays 129 2 San Jorge 132 3 Divine Dispossession 135 4 Vulnerable God 137 5 Sacralizing Vulnerability 141 6 Subversive Salvation 145 7 Community-in-Vulnerability 148 8 Infrapolitics 150

6

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion 152 1 Spirituals 153 2 Community 155 3 Strange Fruit 158 4 Recrucifixions 159 5 Wounds 163 6 Healing Sub Contrario 167 7 Amnesty 171 8 Mercy 173 9 Love 175

7

Promise: The Vulnerable Basis of Political Agency and Community 178

References 185 Index 209

Preface: Fires in Paradise There is a fire in Paradise. The situation is critical: The death toll from wildfires ravaging both ends of California [rose] to at least 31 after the remains of several more people were found Sunday … The so-called “Camp Fire” leveled nearly the entire city of Paradise, scorching thousands of homes and leaving its business district in ruins. More than 200 people were unaccounted for after the wildfire decimated the town of about 27,000 as crews stepped up search efforts for bodies and the missing.1 Reading this news and seeing the dramatic images of fires raging out of control brought to mind other memories of uncontrollable flames. In the poor barrio Colonia Carmen in Guatemala City, on a seemingly lazy, sunny afternoon, there was a sudden cry for help, and dark smoke erupted from a small shack. Perhaps someone making tortillas over an open fire had allowed the fire to spread out of control, for a woman ran out crying in despair. The situation became life-threatening in seconds for the woman and her neighbors. Together, we tried to effect a rescue, but the fire was already intense. The shacks were only centimeters apart, and electrical wiring, illegally tapping power from the nearest posts, appeared dangerously flawed. As if life in Colonia Carmen was not precarious enough. I had heard residents telling terrifying stories about what had come to be everyday events. I had seen the statistics. The violence, particularly against women and children, in this city in general, and this barrio in particular, was beyond belief. One could barely imagine the daily fears that lonely mothers, like the one who lost her home in the fire, had to endure. Now, in this critical moment, there was at least collaboration. Buckets of waters passed rapidly along a human chain until the fire department truck—surprisingly—turned up. Some destructive fires are set deliberately. In the Amazon, people and companies burn the rainforest to clear land for farming, pasture, and illegal logging. These practices, of course, destroy the unique rainforest ecosystem and contribute to the climate catastrophe.2 Under President Jair Mesias Bolsonaro, 1 https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/california-fires-camp-malibu-woolsey-evacuation -containment-evacuations-death-toll-live-updates/, accessed 12.11.18. 2 https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/5-alar ming-facts-about-amazon-forest-fires-deforestation/blog/57406/, accessed 12.11.18.

viii

Preface: Fires in Paradise

(2018–2022), this destruction accelerated, as new commercial companies were given free access to exploit the Amazon region.3 In impoverished and war-ridden Yemen, famine, deliberately used as a weapon of war, is taking thousands of lives, including those of many children. A few years ago, Yemeni women used fire to protest against the abuses: Hundreds of Yemeni women set fire to veils on Wednesday in protest at the government’s crackdown on demonstrators after overnight clashes in the capital, and another city left 25 people dead, officials said. The women spread a black cloth across a main street in Sana’a and threw their full-body veils, known as makrama, on to a pile, sprayed it with oil and set it ablaze. As the flames rose, they chanted: “Who protects Yemeni women from the crimes of the thugs?”4 The answer was ‘no one.’ Despite their brave protest, of the kind that led to Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside two Liberian women, Ellen Johnson and Leymah Gbowee, in that same year (2011), the women’s right to life and protection from violence and atrocities was not respected. The war grew worse, resulting in one of the most catastrophic present-day humanitarian crises. Causing an entirely human-generated crisis, the Saudi-led war is pushing millions to the brink of starvation, while the international community is not only passively watching, but also, to no small degree, actively participating in the atrocities against Yemeni civilians. In Europe, fires express the polarization around the issue of immigration. One of several suspected arson attacks against asylum centers in Sweden occurred at Resta Gård in February 2017. The lives of all 158 residents were endangered, but fortunately, only a few were injured.5 On September 8, 2020, flames tore through Europe’s largest refugee camp, the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, leaving more than 12,000 homeless shortly before the arrival of winter.6 In many banlieues of large cities in France, cars are almost routinely 3 See https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/deforestation-brazils-amazon-hits-record -first-half-2022-2022-07-08/, accessed 03.08.22. 4 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/yemen-women-veils-ablaze-protest, accessed 12.11.18 see also https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/26/world/middleeast /saudi-arabia-war-yemen.html, accessed 12.11.18. 5 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/injured-fire-sweden-largest-asylum -centre-norra-lvsborg-a7602676.html, accessed 12.11.18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arson _attacks_on_asylum_centres_in_Sweden. 6 See https://www.dw.com/en/lesbos-after-moria-fire-people-are-still-living-in-tents-by-the-sea, accessed 03.08.22.

Preface: Fires in Paradise 

ix

set on fire on particular festival days, as a form of unarticulated youth protest against social exclusion, unemployment, and lack of opportunity for people with immigrant background.7 Also spreading like wildfire was the COVID-19 pandemic. Its total cost in human lives, as well as in material and economic resources, is immeasurable. Although no one could completely escape the consequences of lockdowns and restrictions, the pandemic made the global inequality and unjust distribution of prevention and treatment opportunity glaringly obvious. Again, the poor suffer disproportionately, both in the short and long runs. In the midst of this new era, called ‘Anthropocene’ because of the damages caused by human intervention,8 the most unequivocal clarion call regarding the gravity of the situation came from the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2030, the world must make radical policy changes to avoid continued global warming to levels that directly threaten the lives and well-being of millions and indirectly spell crises for coming generations and all life on earth.9 Such immediate and urgent common action is presently gravely impeded by recent geopolitical events, though. At the time of writing, Ukraine is burning, following the unprovoked invasion launched by President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russian regime on the 24th of February 2022. Hospitals, schools, nuclear power plants, and the homes of millions have suddenly turned into infernos, forcing 6 million Ukrainians—so far—to become refugees overnight.10 It should be noted that these furious flames hit the global community after the world had experienced considerable improvement for a few decades. There had been a significant reduction in world poverty. According to World Bank figures, in 1990, four out of ten people were living in conditions of extreme poverty. Almost three decades later, the comparable number was 10%, meaning that 1.1 billion fewer people were suffering from extreme poverty, despite the global population growing by 2.3 billion people, from 5.3 billion to 7.6 billion, during the same period. There was also a remarkable positive trend in vaccination coverage, the child death rate, maternal health, life expectancy, education, and opportunities for girls and women. Progress was being made toward many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, despite 7 See https://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/11/europe/dunkirk-camp-fire/index.html, accessed 12.11.18. 8 See e.g. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, og John R. McNeill, “The anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007). 9 See http://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf, accessed 12.11.18. See also Naomi Klein, This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 10 https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-situation-flash-update-22-22-july-2022, accessed 03.08.22.

x

Preface: Fires in Paradise

increasing signs of ‘democratic recession’ under authoritarian and populist governments and leaders in many states, the global situation at the start of the 2020s had undeniably improved in many respects. These advances are currently in jeopardy, when not already reversed. The devastating, global consequences of the war in Ukraine and the economic crisis following sanctions imposed on Russia, together with the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic described by one commentator as a ‘raging dumpster fire,’ make the situation even more precarious for hundreds of millions.11 Different though they are in terms of the degree of emergency and consequences, all these fires are signs of precarious times. They point to burning political issues that must be dealt with urgently. Can the world community, if such a community really exists, mobilize the willingness to make drastic policy changes before it is too late? Despite the serious setbacks, the improvements experienced during the last decades are also reminders of the feasibility of common political action. Hence, political community and agency are important, and, as I shall show, interdependent. How can they be strengthened? In these precarious times, there has been renewed interest in the role of religion in public life. Is religion fueling these fires? According to many people, it is. They see religion as part of the problem, creating insurmountable differences between people and leading to violence. They claim that it is the driving force behind terrorism and civil wars. Examples supporting such interpretations are manifold. The current leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church is blessing a brutal war. Neo-Pentecostal preachers of the prosperity gospel are blessing a neoliberal economic system that excludes the poor and destroys nature. Sexual abuse scandals, homophobia, and Islamophobia are linked to churches and other religious communities across the world. Violent religious extremism is brutally threatening and taking human lives in Sahel, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and France, as well as in the US. Even in small and stable welfare societies, such as New Zealand and Norway, allegedly religiously legitimized right-wing extremist violence and attacks on religious ‘others’ have killed hundreds of civilians. However, many also claim that religion represents a positive force for change. They highlight faith-based initiatives for conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and reconciliation, concrete practices of humanitarian aid and solidarity, 11 Branswell, H. (2020, July 14). “How to fix the Covid‐19 dumpster fire in the US,” https://www .statnews.com/2020/07/14/fix-covid-19-dumpster-fire-us/, accessed 10.10.22. See also Kelly Denton‐Borhaug, “Remembering the Summer of 2020,” Dialog: A journal of theology 59, no. 4 (2020).

Preface: Fires in Paradise 

xi

and inter-religious environmental advocacy and action for saving the climate.12 The theologian William C. Cavanaugh has forcefully argued that the widespread tendency to blame religion in general for fueling modern warfare and terror represents a myth through which a Western construction of ‘religion’ as non-rational and prone to violence is used to legitimate violence against non-Western others, in particular, Muslims.13 Undoubtedly, there is truth in both interpretations. ‘Religion’—however defined—is a force for both better and worse. Hence, there is a need for a nuanced and critical analysis to not only better understand religion in troubled times, but also to explore the political role of religious traditions, practices, communities, and leaders, with the aim of influencing and strengthening the ways in which such religious resources and practices may contribute to mitigating contemporary conflicts. This calls for political theology. The central assumption driving this inquiry is that in facing the complex political challenges of our time, how we understand the phenomenon of the vulnerability of life matters. Is it simply an inevitable but regrettable fact of life? Is it a curse that we should strive to eliminate, or at least reduce to a minimum? Or could it rather be seen as constitutive of all human relationships and hence a resource, and even a value in our political endeavors to face the present? Through my investigation, an admittedly bold suggestion will be tested: Political agency and community—with their many expressions—emerge in and from fragility and precariousness. Vulnerability should not be seen as contrary to but rather constitutive of community and agency. Such a perspective on vulnerability would seem both counterintuitive and controversial, not least in times of climate catastrophe and global pandemics. It challenges the common wisdom that vulnerability threatens life and hence should be removed, or at least reduced, as much as possible. To hold, on the contrary, that there is value in vulnerability risks being accused offhandedly of blatant unrealism and dangerous naïveté in the face of severe stress for humans and nonhumans alike. Therefore, such a revaluation of vulnerability in the context of politics must be subjected to critical scrutiny. If, however, a reimagination of the relationship between precariousness and political agency and community makes sense—and vulnerability could be seen as constitutive rather than destructive—this insight should orient and 12 See, among many such contributions, the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, https://www .interfaithrainforest.org/, and other peacebuilding efforts by the worldwide organization Religions for Peace, https://www.interfaithrainforest.org/, accessed 16.09.22. 13 William T. Cavanaugh, The myth of religious violence: Secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

xii

Preface: Fires in Paradise

transform personal and political priorities. In this, it is my particular interest to investigate how lived religion in general and Christian faith practices in particular can contribute. The political theology of vulnerability I seek to develop, then, examines whether, why, and how lived religion in general, and certain Christian practices and interpretations in particular, can constructively interconnect vulnerability and political agency and community through imaginaries, performances and critical reflection. As my approach to academic work in general, and theology in particular, is informed by and committed to lived practices for justice and aims to critically improve these practices, this study is not only based on academic texts. It is also shaped by faith-based humanitarian, solidarity, and human rights work in contexts as different as Latin America, the U.S., South Africa, and northern Europe—particularly my native country, Norway. I have been motivated and guided by sermons, hymns, reports, and policy documents from diaconal and pastoral work and political commitments. Most of all, I have learnt from so many wise, knowledgeable and courageous people whom I have been privileged to meet and work with in such contexts. I hope that the reflection and arguments that I draw from this combination of academic sources, experiences with others, and multifaceted material will be sufficiently transparent to make sense and hopefully serve as an inspiration for action and further reflection beyond my own particular and always limited place and time. I am grateful to so many for sharing their wisdom, insight, inspiration, friendship, collegiality and support during the making of this book. My sincere thanks go to colleagues, staff and students at the MF School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo; staff and friends at the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University, in Washington D.C., where I spent time doing research and writing in 2018 and 2022. A very special gratitude goes to Katherine Marshall, for warm hospitality and inspiring conversations in her cordial home in D.C. I am also deeply indebted to former colleagues and friends in the Church City Mission in Oslo and in the Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), and to fellow board members of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), for reflection-in-action on precarity, precariousness and the promise and flourishing of life; to Werner G. Jeanrond, Ulrich Schmiedel, Andrew J. Thomas, Gunnar Stålsett, Jan-Olav Henriksen and the two anonymous peer reviewers for careful readings and critical and constructive feedbacks on the manuscript; and to bishop Medardo E. Gómez—to whom I dedicate this work—, Abelina Gómez and members of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church for borderless hospitality, profound friendship and faith-nurturing solidarity throughout four decades. I have learnt much over the years

Preface: Fires in Paradise 

xiii

about the themes covered in this book through inspiring discussions with friends, colleagues and family. When you read this, I hope you will recognize that you contributed. This is what it came to, so far. There is more to say. Let’s continue the search together. Last and above all, my loving gratitude goes to my nearest family, Eivor, Ådne and Anne. Sturla J. Stålsett Sagene, 11 September 2022

Chapter 1

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability One of the core questions in political theory since its origins has been why and how human beings seek the company of others to build a community. Does a community spring from a natural inclination toward friendship1 or out of fear of the other?2 In simple terms, I suggest that a better answer can be found in vulnerability. Contrary to the common supposition, I shall examine if and how the human experience of being exposed can form the basis for political agency and ­community—’basis’ here meaning both reason and conditions of possibility. Admittedly, in this world of uncontrollable wildfires, torn asunder by global lockdowns, climate catastrophe, rampant racism, and viciously violent warfare, it seems audacious to suggest that vulnerability demands and makes possible life-sustaining togetherness. However, seeing life as always dependent on a prior interweaving with other lives, and experienced reality as necessarily relational, I shall explore what it might mean politically to say that human beings, as communal beings, are constitutively vulnerable. In other words, I suggest to study the ζῷον πoλιτικόν, political animal, as homo vulnerabilis, a vulnerable human being. Considering political and theological reasons for and implications of this suggestion is the first aim of this book. The second aim is to examine whether and how religious resources in general, and Christian practices and beliefs in particular, may make visible and operationalize such a connection between vulnerability, political agency, and community. This twofold task directs my present political theology of vulnerability, which can be read as an essay on theopolitical anthropology in the post-, de-, or anti-colonial3 era of the Anthropocene.4 1 See Aristotle’s Politics. See e.g. Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 2 See Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, A critical edition by G. A. J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann. eds. (London: Continuum, 2005), see, e.g. book VI. 3 Recognizing differences, dilemmas and tensions involved in these alternative designations, I shall not here engage directly with the discussions. See, i.a. the innovative exchange on such critical issues taking place in the framework of “Theory from the Margins,” http://theory fromthemargins.com/#:~:text=Theory%20from%20the%20Margins%20creates%20 spaces%20where%20interdisciplinary,current%20humanities%20and%20social%20 science%20theory%20and%20scholarship, accessed 16.09.22. 4 Again, the terminology is debatable. Jason Moore argues that ‘Anthropocene’ covers up the unequal distribution of culpability for processes that drive the climate catastrophe, and prefers to speak of ‘capitalocene:’ Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_002

2

chapter 1

In this introductory chapter I prepare the ground, indicating the central questions driving my inquiry, how I understand the key terms, what kind of political theology I am proposing, and how I will proceed. 1 Questions I start with a deceptively simple question: does the human experience of vulnerability primarily represent a lack, a flaw, and a deficiency to be repaired, as is usually inferred, or should we rather see it as the openness, or even fullness, necessary for human flourishing and the protection of the planet? Vulnerability can be seen as an ‘ability’ to be affected corporeally, mentally, emotionally, and existentially by the presence, being, or acting of another person or entity. Etymologically, vulnerability comes from the Latin vulnerābilis and vulnerāre, meaning ‘to wound,’ and from vulnus, meaning ‘a wound.’ Conventionally, the concept has primarily negative connotations based on the inherent potential of every human being and every living organism to be hurt, wounded, disregarded, and ultimately killed. It has been defined as “the capacity of a living creature to undergo harm,”5 and as “defencelessness, insecurity and exposure to shocks and stress.”6 In this sense, it equates to violability, injurability, and mortality. However, vulnerability as ‘ability’ also necessarily implies openness, relatedness, mutability, and communicability, which could be seen as positively charged dimensions. They may represent an invitation to and a call for responsible relationships with other vulnerable beings; an expectation, or a demand that the vulnerable—human or nonhuman—is recognized, considered, cared for, respected, and protected. Thus, the question of vulnerability and how to conceptualize it necessarily goes beyond the personal and into the political sphere. So, how does vulnerability present itself as a challenge to contemporary political action and theory? What theoretical support can be found in recent political and ethical thought for reconceptualizing human vulnerability as a political value? This quest calls for a countercultural account—one that seeks to overcome the conventional idealization of the seemingly invulnerable, carrying within it fear of and contempt for that which may appear history, and the crisis of capitalism (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2016). See discussion in Thomas Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology: Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, Political theologies, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 18–20. 5 Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion. A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1990), 43. 6 Robert Chambers, “Editorial Introduction: Vulnerability, Coping and Policy,” IDS Bulletin 20, no. 2 (1989).

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

3

to be weakness.7 Such an alternative account needs to explore not only what vulnerability is, but also what it does: what difference does vulnerability make in people’s collective lives as a community? Simultaneously, it must critically show how an affirmative approach, valorizing rather than vilifying vulnerability, can avoid glossing over its real risks and dangers. My second set of questions is more explicitly placed within religious studies and theology, informed by and held together in political theology. Investigating the possible role of religious practice and reflection in the politics of precarity today, I ask: Why and how does religion matter to such political practice? What Christian resources can support an understanding of human vulnerability as constituting political agency and community? Together, then, these research questions seek to reveal possible ethical, political, and theological implications of bodily precariousness. In particular, I search for ways in which this involuntary human condition is or can become a force for good, for human and nonhuman flourishing, through politics as well as religious practice. What happens if, in vulnerability, we see the end of life not as finitude but as fulfillment? How can we imagine and practice ways of being vulnerable or acting vulnerably that work for the fullness of life—not for its limitation or termination? 2 Definitions The term ‘vulnerable’ is almost synonymous with ‘precarious’. In fact, the two words are often used interchangeably. Lexically, ‘precarious’ has been defined as “not securely held or in position; dangerously likely to fall or collapse” or “dependent on chance; uncertain.” Some of its synonyms are listed as “insecure, unreliable, unsure, unpredictable, undependable, risky, hazardous, dangerous, unsafe.”8 Precarious, then, clearly has a double meaning of both urgency and fragility: being in a precarious position implies being exposed and endangered, being handed over to, or being entirely in the hands of someone else. It is also etymologically related to ‘pray’ (Latin: precor), which links it further to key elements in what is considered uniquely religious practices, such as, e.g., preaching, liturgies, hymns and praises. With this in mind, I shall make two distinctions that are worth mentioning at the outset. First, I shall differentiate between precariousness and 7 See Harald Ofstad, Vår forakt for svakhet: En analyse av nazismens normer og vurderinger, (Oslo: Pax, 1971). 8 See: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/precarious, accessed 26.03.22.

4

chapter 1

precarity.9 Precariousness is a general term that indicates a universal or common condition of human existence. In fact, it is shared by all living creatures. Nonetheless, the form and gravity of precarious life conditions or situations certainly vary from person to person, group to group, class to class, and people to people. Precarity is unevenly and unjustly ‘distributed’ according to often violent antagonisms based on gender, race, class, age, ethnicity, or culture.10 Hence, although intimately personal, human vulnerability is also essentially political. It implies a demand for justice. Today, the interconnected struggles for gender, ecological, economic, and racial justice stand out. They must be at the forefront of discussions about vulnerability in politics from a theological perspective. Second, I propose a distinction between vulnerability and woundedness. If vulnerability could be seen as a value, being wounded, by contrast, should be seen as inescapably a destructive and potentially deadly experience. Although strength and benefits may paradoxically arise from an experience of being hurt (which may be a critical aspect of resistance and resilience), I hold that being wounded does not carry any inherent value, neither personally nor politically. What do I mean by political? I understand both ‘politics’ and ‘political’ broadly, ranging from their most direct and technical meaning of ‘government’—the structured and formal processes of decision-making and execution of power in society at various levels—to everyday performances of explicit and implicit uses of power. These less articulated processes are what political scientist James C. Scott calls ‘infrapolitics’: dynamics of everyday

9

10

As I shall discuss in more detail below, this distinction is essential to Judith Butler: “The more or less existential conception of ‘precariousness’ is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of ‘precarity’.” Judith Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2010), 3. In comparing the meaning of precarity with that of “vulnerability” and “risk” Louise Waite holds that “the term precarity encapsulates both a condition and a point of mobilization in response to that condition, whereas risk and vulnerability generally refer to just conditions. The analytical advantage of the concept of precarity, therefore, is that it more explicitly incorporates the political and institutional context in which the production of precarity occurs rather than focusing solely on individualised experiences of precarity. The potential of the term precarity over risk and vulnerability is thus in terms of what can be gained politically by adopting the term.” Louise Waite, “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?,” Geography compass 3, no. 1 (2009). As will become clear, I differ from her assessment here, by suggesting that ‘vulnerability’ does in fact contain this political potential.

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

5

resistance and negotiation of power taking place at the micro-level of community.11 This conceptualization particularly highlights subordinate groups and their “low profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name,” thus forming “a politics of disguise and anonymity.”12 Scott claimed that infrapolitics provides a cultural and structural basis for the more visible politics generally analyzed in sociopolitical science.13 These ‘small acts,’ which are often unremarkable (if not hidden), are particularly relevant to the present study in political theology since they represent a crucial means by which everyday performances of religiosity gain political weight. Religions certainly act globally through leaders such as Pope Francis, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the Dalai Lama, or ecumenical and interreligious bodies, including the World Council of Churches or Religions for Peace. However, the primary place of faith-based activity is not the ‘big scene’ where decisions are made or spectacular acts are displayed. The political agency of people of faith and religious communities is more often realized through various everyday practices, habits, words, and deeds. As the prominent sociologist of what is often named ‘lived religion’ Nancy Ammermann claimed, “To say that religion simply exists alongside all the other realities of everyday life means that we should expect everyday stories from the office or the hospital to sometimes be both sacred and secular at once.”14 Such practices may be professional, voluntary, organized, or spontaneous. They may express social engagement or everyday small-scale activism.

11

James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990), 19. See also Sturla J. Stålsett, “Globalisation and the Hidden Transcript: Religion as Everyday Resistance,” in The Power of Faiths in Global Politics, ed. Sturla J. Stålsett and Oddbjørn Leirvik (Oslo: Novus, 2004). Cf. ‘micropolitics’ in Graham Ward, The politics of discipleship: Becoming postmaterial citizens (London: SCM Press, 2009), 28–33. Concerning the Scott’s influence on liberation theologies, especially in South Africa, see Gerald West, The Academy of the Poor. Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). 12 Scott, Domination, 19. 13 Scott, Domination, 184. I shall later refer to critiques of Scott’s perspective in Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), n. 15, 135; and Louise Waite et al, “Precarious Lives: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring,” ACME an International E-journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 2 (2015), 484. 14 Nancy T. Ammerman, “2013 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture: Finding Religion in Everyday Life,” Sociology of religion 75, no. 2 (2014), 195. See also Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s distinctions between expert, governed and lived religion in her Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond religious freedom: The new global politics of religion (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2015), 8. More on this below.

6

chapter 1

In opposition to the many forms of everyday micropower, but intimately connected to them, we find structural power. As will become apparent, Michel Foucault’s (1926 to 1984) influential turn to biopouvoir (‘biopower’) and ‘governmentality’ is relevant to this study. The Foucauldian approach to power includes both movements from ‘below’ and ‘above,’ and it pays particular attention to how they interact. Governmentality, defined by Foucault as “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men”15, thus “emphasizes the connection between techniques of individual socialization (governing the self) and techniques of domination (governing others).”16 Biopower, on the other hand, entails direct political engagement in or governing of the concrete, embodied lives of citizens, in particular seeing them as populations.17 Biopolitics, in Foucault’s thinking, consists of the exercise of this power over populations to ‘make live and let die,’ as opposed to the former sovereign power to ‘put to death and let live.’18 This form of biopolitical power dominates our epoch through various techniques and strategies of governmentality. Accordingly, I suggest that political theology should critically and contextually scrutinize the biopolitical power regime by addressing human vulnerability affirmatively. I am particularly interested in two aspects of the political: agency and community. I contend that both are currently under pressure in ways that 15 16

17

18

Michel Foucault et al, The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Naissance de la biopolitique cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 186. Jocelyne Cesari, We God’s people: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the world of nations (Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press,, 2021), 12. See Michel Foucault et al, The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, vol. [8], Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983, (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Michel Foucault, “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Il faut défendre la société, (New York: Picador, 2003). Michel Foucault et al, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, Sécurité, territoire, population, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The term has become hugely influential although the term as such is not very frequent in Foucault’s work. In fact, it appears only in one of the books published in Foucault’s lifetime (the first volume of the History of Sexuality), and there it is used only a few times within the space of six pages, see G. Arnason, “Biopower (Foucault),” in Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, Vol.1, , ed. Ruth Chadwick (Cambridge: Elsevier Inc., 2012), 295. Foucault et al, “Society must be defended”, 247: “Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and somber absolute power that was the power of sovereignty, and which consisted in the power to take life, we now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this technology of power over ‘the’ population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings. It is continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make live. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.”

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

7

are intrinsically connected to vulnerability. Although both are certainly rich and multilayered phenomena, I shall initially and for the purpose of this study quite straightforwardly define political agency as the ability to assess and affect what matters for life, and political community as a web of relations through which life is protected and promoted. What these admittedly normative definitions may imply and how they relate to vulnerability should become clearer as I proceed. In times of intensified experiences of precarity, religion seems to gain personal as well as political significance.19 People use the religious resources of different faith traditions and varying forms of spirituality to counter subjugation and suffering by demanding dignity and respect and seeking meaning, direction, and hope. This observation invites a practical and relational approach to religion and theology. How is religion or religiosity practiced? How are religious resources used and why do they matter in the lives of people and communities? Religions can be understood as “clusters of practices” that relate humans to “ultimacy” through various “types of representation.”20 They provide a “particular kind of orientation,”21 and consist of “kinds of skillful action.”22 This approach demands attentiveness to what in religious studies and empirical theology is named ‘lived religion,’ investigating “the material, embodied aspects of religion as they occur in everyday life, in addition to listening to how people explain themselves.”23 To Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, lived religion is “religion as practiced by everyday individuals and groups as they interact with a variety of religious authorities, rituals, texts and institutions, and seek to navigate and make sense of their lives and connections with others, and place in the world.”24 Experiences of the body and the mind are both 19

In chapter 4, I shall particularly discuss this in view of the secularization thesis presented in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 20 This is Jan-Olav Henriksen’s pragmatic approach to religion in Representation and ultimacy: Christian religion as unfinished business, vol. 5, Nordic studies in theology, (Zürich: LIT, 2020). 21 Gavin Flood, The importance of religion: Meaning and action in our strange world (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 5. 22 Flood, The importance of religion, 11. 23 Ammerman, “Finding Religion in Everyday Life,” 190. See Nancy T. Ammerman, Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nancy T. Ammerman, Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Meredith B. McGuire, Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 24 Hurd, Beyond religious freedom, 8.

8

chapter 1

significant here.25 Our bodies are inscribed by powerful discourses.26 They are marked and recognized as belonging to different genders, ‘races,’ classes, sexual orientations, and so on. In other words, any critical study of embodied sensemaking within what is known as ‘religiosity’ needs to consider the power dynamics and potential for resistance and freedom involved in such designations. This is where the liberationist strand of theological approaches is indispensable.27 In facing the challenges arising from the present conditions of global and local precarity, such a contextual, committed, and critical mode of inquiry is called for. It must always bear in mind the multilayered political power struggles involved in any human interaction. Hence this study will be thoroughly informed and inspired by liberation theology, particular in its Latin American, feminist/womanist and black/de-colonial expressions. I shall, however, also draw valuable insight here from a quite different source. One of the possible etymological roots of ‘religion’ is re-ligare, which means to relate (back). In its many personal, cultural, and historical configurations, religiosity expresses relatedness. It emanates from and responds to a feeling of belonging, of being connected to what surrounds, precedes, and surpasses every human being.28 In this sense, religiosity constitutes community, as Émile Durkheim famously claimed already at the emergence of sociology as a discipline.29 In his groundbreaking The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, first published in French in 1912, Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things

25 26

27

28

29

Ammerman, “Finding Religion in Everyday Life,” 190. See Judith Butler’s work on gender, performativity, and vulnerability, e.g., Judith Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, Thinking gender, (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The performative in the political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). See, e.g. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría, eds, Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, 2 vols. (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991), English version: Jon Sobrino, Mysterium Liberationis. Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1993); Sturla J. Stålsett, “Liberation theology,” in Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, ed. Henri Gooren (Online: Springer, 2016). In the context of his theological reflections on hope, Werner G. Jeanrond holds that given the “relational nature of God’s involvement in this universe, it makes sense to understand theology as a relational science (Relationswissenschaft).” Werner G. Jeanrond, Reasons to hope (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 16. Émile Durkheim and Mark S. Cladis, The elementary forms of religious life, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I shall return to more careful consideration of a durkheiman approach in chapter 4.

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

9

set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a church.”30 Rather than the transcendental origins of religious practices, Durkheim’s interest was in the effects of such practices on community cohesion and moral or political action, and vice versa: how such common action constitutes religion. The “true function of religion,” for Durkheim, is “to make us act, to help us live.”31 The religious practitioner “is capable of more” by feeling “more strength in himself, either to cope with the difficulties of existence or to defeat them.”32 This energizing experience does not merely arise from cognitive adherence to an idea; it depends on communal practice, such as in a religious ritual.33 Durkheim thus saw close connections between religion, community, and agency. For him, society was “the objective, universal, and eternal cause of those sui generis sensations that make up the religious experience.”34 This does not necessarily mean that religion is merely epiphenomenal in social reality, reducing its truth to its communal effects or functions. Durkheim claimed that religion is not only a product of society but that “religion generate[s] everything that is essential in society.”35 Likewise, Durkheim saw the connection between individual agency and joint social action as radically and constitutively mutual. Society “makes” human beings and makes them “rise above themselves.” However, Society can make its influence felt only if it is in action, and it is in action only if the individuals who compose it are assembled and act in common. It is through common action that it becomes conscious of itself and affirms itself; it is above all an active cooperation. … Therefore, action dominates religious life for the very reason that society is its source.

30

31 32 33 34 35

Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 46. See discussion in Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2013), 54–55. Although it may seem that the task of definition is merely being deferred here to explain the nature of the ‘sacred’, Durkheim’s approach is notable in that it does not define religions via a belief in God or a distinction between natural and supernatural. See Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 26–35. Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 311. Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 311. Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 312. Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 313. Thus, Durkheim anticipated the famous dictum of Carl Schmitt’s political theology, holding that “nearly all great social institutions are born of religion.” Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms, 314; Carl Schmitt, Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985). See below.

10

chapter 1

Durkheim’s wide-ranging assertions in Elementary Forms of Religious Life cannot be accepted without reservation and modifications today.36 Nonetheless, I find that a functional and communitarian approach to religion can be valuable for a political theology of vulnerability that searches for religious resources in the building of a political community amid precarity.37 Such a practical and relational line of examination necessarily acknowledges the political role of religion. Rather than a superficial and, ultimately, pointless discussion of whether religion and politics should or even could be ‘separated,’ our focus should be on which religious resources are mobilized for what purposes, and on the ways in which these resources are used in practice. Regarding the sometimes exaggerated claim of a ‘return of religion’ in contemporary politics, this is, in my opinion, the underlying issue.38 It does not, in fact, reduce religion to politics, but rather grounds the political and the religious in common soil as a shared life experience. If religion consists of “the processes whereby people decide on the meaning of events and determine what matters most,”39 such processes inevitably overlap and interfere with what is known as the political. The historical processes toward the 36

37

38

39

In his call for a ‘hard’ decolonization of the study of religion, Malory Nye has accentuated how Durkheim’s theory is “based on his reading of the accounts of missionaries and colonial travellers, in the context of white British settlement of central Australia in the 19th century” and hence should be seen as “racist and imperialist” even today, and removed from the canon of scholarship of religion. While sympathizing with Nye’s critical concern, I still think, like Nye, that there is “some merit in the elements of the theory that Durkheim puts together,” and that these even can be important in an anti-racist and anti-imperialist – de-colonizing – political theology today. Malory Nye, “Decolonizing the Study of Religion,” Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2019), 17–20, see note 17. As Hans Joas shows in his development of a new genealogy of human rights, a Durkheimian approach to religion and political agency can still bear fruit, see Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, see also, e.g. William Ramp, “The Elementary Forms as Political (A)theology,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (2014), and Sondra L. Hausner, Durkheim in dialogue: A centenary celebration of the elementary forms of religious life (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). See e.g. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, trans. Alan Braley (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1994 (1991)); Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is back: How the global revival of faith is changing the world (New York: Penguin, 2009); Scott M. Thomas, The global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international relations: The struggle for the soul of the twenty-first century, Culture and religion in international relations, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); José Casanova, Public religions in the modern world (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ann Taves, “2010 Presidential Address: ‘Religion’ in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 2 (2011).

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

11

secularization of politics, seen as the gradual differentiation and separation of (something called) the political from (something perceived as) the explicit religious practices that in other times and spaces accompanied and legitimized it, have not succeeded in eliminating the mutually constitutive link between religion and politics. Thus, it would clearly be a mistake to deduce from a perceived marginalization of religious practice and reflection in the political sphere that theological reflection is irrelevant to critical thought regarding the exercise of power involved in constructing (or disrupting) human communities. On the contrary, if there is some truth to what political philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt famously argued in his Political Theology (1922), that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,”40 political theory cannot fully understand itself without recourse to theology. Thomas Hobbes’ still-influential treatise, Leviathan (1651), is an obvious case in point; it is thoroughly theological, both in what it assumes and in what it criticizes.41 The concepts Hobbes applied to consider the political domain, such as the natural condition, sovereignty, and the social contract or bond, are implicitly and explicitly theological. We find more tacit theological frames of reference in the works of, for example, Rousseau, Locke, Marx,42 and Weber. Present-day critical and political theory may well believe that it has left behind or overcome the faith presuppositions initially embedded in traditional concepts, but it cannot really assess and apply insights based on this tradition adequately without a critical awareness of the theological underpinnings of its metaphors and symbols. In this sense, feminist process theologian Catherine Keller is right in stating that “politics is always already theological.”43 By implication, she holds, the opposite is also true; although it is not politics, “theology is already always political.”44 Not least because of a somewhat surprising reappropriation of the Schmittian approach, political theology has regained prominence in public debate and interdisciplinary research. However, the concept has various meanings. Colloquially, it may merely refer to the many ways in which politicians use implicit or explicit religious justifications for exercising power. Broadly, it can incorporate everything related to the interface between religion and 40 Schmitt, Political theology, 36. 41 Hobbes, Leviathan. 42 As Enrique Dussel has shown, Marx’ work is shot through with theological metaphors that often have been overlooked, see, Enrique Dussel, Las metáforas teológicas de Marx (Estella: Editorial Verbo Divino, 1993). 43 Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018), location 207. 44 Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, location 207.

12

chapter 1

politics.45 However, more precisely, political theology is both a descriptive, primarily analytical undertaking and a more propositional or normative task. The Schmittian tradition is primarily philosophical and, as we have seen, concerned with analyzing influential political concepts as secularized theological tenets and practices.46 It is a way of thinking through the political with the help of what has been conceived of as theological ideas, without making normative claims about the faith presupposed in or implied by these ideas.47 However, as Thomas Lynch notes in his Apocalyptic Political Theology, Schmitt’s approach should not be reduced to a genealogical endeavor but rather seen as part of a broader sociology of concepts.48 Moreover, Lynch rightly cautions about a (paradoxically) too neat distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘the theological’ in the Schmittian legacy.49 The other propositional task is more explicitly theological and consists of criticizing and reclaiming the political role of theological reflection and religious practice in the face of injustice and suffering.50 William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott thus define political theology as “the analysis and criticism of political arrangements (…) from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world.”51 Johann Baptist Metz forcefully underlined the primacy of praxis in political theology. Any attempt to base theology on 45

Vincent Lloyd, Race and Political Theology (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), “Introduction”, 5. 46 Schmitt, Political theology. 47 “A political theology—that is an analysis of the role of religious concepts in political theory and practice—without Christian presuppositions would not subsume religious concepts under their relationship with God by privileging the relationship of God to the world,” Vincent W. Lloyd, The problem with grace: Reconfiguring political theology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 12. 48 Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology, 7. Lynch himself prefers to define political theology as “an investigation of the intertwined history of theological and political concepts in order to utilize those concepts to critique the world.”, 9. 49 Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology, 8. 50 This form of political theology is often traced back to the tradition from, e.g. Bonhoeffer, Metz, Moltmann, and Sölle, see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, Revised and unabridged edition containing material not previously translated, (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1963); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, The enlarged edition, (London: SCM Press, 1971); Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society. Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (London: Burns & Oates, 1980); Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Lames W. Leitch (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1967); Dorothee Sölle, „Gott und das Leiden,“ Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft, no. 7 (1973). For an overview, see, e.g. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh, eds, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 51 Scott and Cavanaugh, The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology , “Introduction”, 1.

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

13

pure theory, he warned, must be regarded as uncritical.52 This approach to political theology is not exactly, as Vince Lloyd has labeled it, “sectarian”53 nor exclusively concerned with “political religion.”54 Instead, it takes seriously and responsibly the fact that, as Keller and Crockett put it, “theology has never not been ‘political’ ... even when it denies its political implications, when it refuses to explicate any socioethical good beyond that of its own temples, churches, mosques. Then the silence speaks.”55 Not disregarding the Schmittian approach but drawing more explicitly on the latter tradition, I understand political theology as a critical reflection on political agency and contemporary political challenges drawing upon and developing Christian faith resources to orient and transform praxis. Thus, seeing theology as a critical reflection on praxis in the light of Christian faith in God echoes Gustavo Gutiérrez’ classic definition of (liberation) theology.56 This liberationist turn, both contested and celebrated, has been further developed in various contemporary contextual and constructive theologies,57 and informs and inspires this study.58 I also draw insights from a pragmatist trend in recent theology.59 Seeing religion as part of the “wider system of orientation that humans employ to 52 Metz, Faith in History and Society, 50–51. 53 According to Vincent Lloyd, “Political theology in this [sectarian] sense is just the branch of theology that deals with political questions,” which “seems to have no place in the secular academy. It is an activity of believers, for believers”, Lloyd, Race and Political Theology, “Introduction”, 8. However, he adds, “Once personal belief is no longer taken as the core of religiosity, as soon as the importance of community and ritual and culture and tradition are acknowledged, what it might mean for theology to be by and for believers becomes obscure. If, for example, religion is more like a language and theology more like a grammar, the supposed distinction between secular conversations about political theology and sectarian, Christian conversations quickly recedes,” 8–9. 54 Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology. 55 Clayton Crockett and Catherine Keller, eds, Political theology on edge: Ruptures of justice and belief in the anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 4. 56 “La teología como reflexión crítica de la praxis histórica a la luz de la Palabra, no sólo no reemplaza las otras funciones de la teología, como sabiduría y como ser racional, sino que las supone y necesita” Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación. Perspectivas, 10th edition (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1984), 38. 57 Marion Grau and Jason A. Wyman, What is constructive theology? Histories, methodologies, and perspectives, vol. 3, Rethinking theologies, (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020); Sigurd Bergmann, God in Context. A Survey of Contextual Theology (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2003). 58 Sturla J. Stålsett, “Liberation theology,” in Key Theological Thinkers. From Modern to Postmodern, ed. Ståle J. Kristiansen and Svein Rise (London: Ashgate, 2013). 59 Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Everyday religion as orientation and transformation: a challenge to theology,” Nordic Journal of Society and Religion 29, no. 1 (2016), See also Jan-Olav

14

chapter 1

convert the chaos of the world into order,” theologian and philosopher of religion Jan-Olav Henriksen suggests that we examine religiosity as a pragmatic source of orientation, transformation, and legitimation.60 Along similar lines, I maintain that lived religion, critically reflected on in theology, can be seen as expressing and negotiating what Charles Taylor called ‘social imaginaries,’ which work to orient and transform both life and politics. Taylor held that such imaginaries “incorporate the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life.”61 Today, what is also called ‘public theology’ aims to interpret, interrupt, and inspire social, ethical, and political practices by providing alternative imaginaries of a livable, flourishing life.62 Far from being only worldviews, in the sense of explanations, theories, or justifications, religions also offer practical and embodied resources for transformation. This transformative element can inspire and intensify social engagement, thus generating motivations for personal and political change. However, quite often, such a change for the better may appear unachievable. Precarity seems permanent; wounds do not heal. Faced with this predicament, experiences and theories of trauma have become important in recent theological reflections. I shall also draw on some of these innovative contributions, agreeing with Serene Jones’ constructive recasting of the theological undertaking in in this “space of trauma:” ”to engage in the crucial task of reordering the collective imagination (…) and to be wise and passionate in this task.”63 Thus, as a component of political or theological theorizing—or, indeed, as a combination of the two—political theology seeks to come to terms with the distinguishable inseparability of religion and politics in life’s indispensable

60 61

62 63

Henriksen, Religion as orientation and transformation: A maximalist theory, vol. 90, Religion in philosophy and theology, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), and Jan-Olav Henriksen, Christianity as distinct practices: A complicated relationship, Rethinking theologies: Constructing alternatives in history and doctrine, (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Henriksen, “Everyday religion as orientation and transformation,” 39. Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 170, see also Modern social imaginaries, Public planet books, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), and Guido M. Vanheeswijck, “The Philosophical Genealogy of Taylor’s Social Imaginaries: A Complex History of Ideas and Predecessors,” J Hist Ideas 78, no. 3 (2017). See Kjetil Fretheim, Interruption and imagination: Public theology in times of crisis (Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2016). Serene Jones, Trauma and grace: Theology in a ruptured world, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 31. (Italics in original).

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

15

connectedness. In precarious times, I propose, this academic discipline should examine in closer detail the implications of the constitutive vulnerability of life to serve both political and social movements and faith-based communities in their struggles for survival and justice. 3 Contribution What will be the specific contribution of this study? Contemporary scholarship of political theology widely discusses many of the issues and concerns that drive my inquiry. Current crises of precarity are treated in theological works on racial injustice,64 such as, for instance, those of J. Kameron Carter and Vince Lloyd, or on ecological extermination in the ‘Anthropocene,’65 as in recent publications by Catherine Keller. The global rise of violent authoritarianism and xenophobia is critically examined in the compilation The Spirit of Populism—the first volume of the present series—which engages theologically with the contentious academic study of populism and anti-populism.66 Migration is at an all-time high and has been discussed by political theology scholars such as, among others, Peter Phan, Gemma Cruz, and Ulrich Schmiedel.67 The political theology agenda must also urgently address the 64

65

66

67

See J. Kameron Carter, Race: A theological account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Vincent W. Lloyd, Race and political theology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012). See also Malory Nye, “Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness,” Method & theory in the study of religion 31, no. 3 (2019). See, e.g. Keller, Political Theology of the Earth; Crockett and Keller, Political theology on edge. See also the work of Northcott: Michael Northcott, A political theology of climate change (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2013); Michael S. Northcott, Place, ecology, and the sacred: The moral geography of sustainable communities (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). See Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston, The spirit of populism: Political theologies in polarized times, vol. 1, Political and public theologies, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022); Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel, The Claim to Christianity. Responding to the Far Right (London: SCM Press, 2020). See, e.g. Peter C. Phan, “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration,” Theological studies (Baltimore) 77, no. 4 (2016); Gemma Cruz, An Intercultural Theology of Migration: Pilgrims in the Wilderness, (Leiden Brill, 2010); Ulrich Schmiedel and Graeme Smith, eds, Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, Religion and Global Migrations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan, Contemporary issues of migration and theology, Christianities of the world, (New York, N.Y: Palgrave, 2013); Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan, Christianities in migration: The global perspective, vol. 3, Theology and migration in world Christianity:

16

chapter 1

recent global shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; the outbreak of brutal war in Ukraine; and the tragically less noticed but devastating armed conflicts in Yemen, Sahel, Somalia, Myanmar, and Syria. Vulnerability is, of course, at the very center of all of these current concerns, although not addressed explicitly in the aforementioned important contributions. Consequently, one is left with the impression of the tacit acceptance of a conventional approach, which counts vulnerability among the problems to be solved or as something regrettably affecting only certain groups or individuals. To counter this impression, I contend that a more complex and profound approach to vulnerability is called for in political theology. Such an alternative approach is presently being developed across academic disciplines, such as, i.a., psychology,68 law,69 medicine and health care,70 disability studies,71 international relations,72 research

68

69 70

71

72

Contextual perspectives, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). See also Per Kristian Hilden and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Other by law: Migration, exclusion and naturalizing discourses of citizenships and rights,” Diaconia: Journal of Christian Social Practice 8, no. 2 (2012), and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Radical Mercy: Revitalizing a Fundamental Reformation Impulse in the Context of Exclusion and Irregular(-ized) Migration,” in Politics and Economics of Liberation, ed. Ulrich Duchrow and Martin Hoffmann (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2015). See, e.g. Giovanni Stanghellini and René Rosfort, Emotions and personhood: Exploring fragility - making sense of vulnerability, International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Brené Brown, Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead (London: Penguin Life, 2015). See, e.g. Daniel Bedford and Jonathan Herring, eds, Embracing vulnerability: The challenges and implications for law (London & New York: Routledge, 2020). See, e.g. Joseph Tham, Alberto García, and Gonzalo Miranda, Religious perspectives on human vulnerability in bioethics, vol. 2, Advancing Global Bioethics, (New York: Springer, 2014); Wendy Rogers, “Vulnerability and Bioethics “ in Vulnerability. New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Joachim Boldt, “The concept of vulnerability in medical ethics and philosophy,” Philos Ethics Humanit Med 14, no. 1 (2019). See, e.g. Nancy L. Eiesland, The disabled God: Toward a liberatory theology of disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); Jackie Leach Scully, “Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power,” in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Amos Yong, Theology and Down syndrome: Reimagining disability in late modernity (Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007); Inger Marie Lid, “Disability as a human condition discussed in a theological perspective,” Diaconia, vol. 3, , no. 2 (2012). See, e.g. Commonwealth Secretariat Consultative Group on the Special Needs of Small States, Vulnerability: Small states in the global society: Report of a Commonwealth consultative group (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1985); Gebhardt Mareike, “To Make Live and Let Die: On Sovereignty and Vulnerability in the EU Migration Regime,” Redescriptions: Yearbook of political thought, conceptual history and feminist theory 23, no. 2

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

17

on climate,73 philosophy,74 gender studies,75 feminist76 and political ethics,77 as well as in theology itself.78 The particularity of my study, then, and hence its possible, albeit modest, contribution to the field, will hopefully be, first, the way in which it connects an alternative and affirmative understanding of vulnerability to the current political crises of agency and community as they appear in some incisive recent contributions to critical political theory, and second, how it mobilizes religious, and in particular, Christian practices and imaginaries enacted in situations of precarity to overcome these crises. Thus, the primary and specific contribution of this book will be situated within the religious tradition that is most familiar to me, personally

73 74

75

76

77

78

(2020); Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and human rights (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Sturla J. Stålsett et al., Vulnerability and Security. Current Challenges in Security Policy from an Ethical and Theological Perspective, Expanded version of the Norwegian “Sårbarhet og sikkerhet” (2000), (Oslo: Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations, 2002). See, e.g. Michael S. Hogue, “Ecological emergency and elemental democracy: Vulnerability, resilience and solidarity,” in Exploring vulnerability, ed. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Díaz Javier de la Torre, “Dependence and Vulnerability in the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre,” Revista iberoamericana de bioética, no. 5 (2017); Marina Berzins McCoy, Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Anna Grear and Martha Albertson Fineman, Vulnerability: Reflections on a new ethical foundation for law and politics, Gender in law, culture, and society, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Joana Sabadell Nieto and Marta Segarra, Differences in common: Gender, vulnerability and community, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). Martha Albertson Fineman, “Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality,” Oslo Law Review 4, no. 3 (2017); Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, Studies in feminist philosophy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See for instance Boldt, “The concept of vulnerability in medical ethics and philosophy,”; Judith Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Zeynep Gambetti Judith Butler, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016); Grear and Fineman, Vulnerability: Reflections on a new ethical foundation for law and politics; Vanessa Herrick, Limits of vulnerability: Exploring a kenotic model for pastoral ministry, Grove pastoral series, (Cambridge: Grove, 1997); Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy. Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015); Nico Koopman, “Vulnerable Church in a Vulnerable World? Towards an Ecclesiology of Vulnerability,” Journal of reformed theology 2, no. 3 (2008); Charles Mathewes, “Vulnerability and political theology,” in Exploring vulnerability, ed. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen/ Bristol: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).

18

chapter 1

and professionally, by theologically exploring the possible imaginaries and sense-making strategies arising in a strand of Christianity that could be broadly characterized as ecumenical, inter-contextual,79 and liberationist. My project can be seen as an attempt to show—and to develop further—the continued relevance and potential of liberation, black, feminist and postcolonial theological approaches by applying them to an analytic of vulnerability. Although admittedly an important task, I shall not address differences between major living religions’ treatment of human precariousness. I will, however, briefly draw attention to different types of religiosities or types of religious practices that cut across these religions, that is, the various ways in which people and communities relate to distinct religious ideas and values in their everyday lives. Religiosity has been described as “the interplay of radical experience of negativity and exposure to transcendence,”80 which resonates well with my primary concern here, addressing the relationship between vulnerability, community, and agency for human flourishing and sustainable life. Although my primary interest and undertaking is decisively theological, the approach to this inquiry is necessarily interdisciplinary. It combines selected insights from present-day critical theory, political science, and the sociology of religion with contemporary theological practice and research. The sources and interlocutors that I have chosen have mainly been influenced by and engaged in postcolonial, feminist, post-structural, phenomenological, and liberationist discourses and debates. I use their texts in an eclectic way, in no way aiming to comprehensively assess their works, which would not 79

80

See Bergmann, God in Context; Sturla J. Stålsett, “Networking Contextual Theologies,” in Discovering Jesus in Our Place. Contextual Christologies in a Globalised World, ed. Sturla J. Stålsett (Delhi: ISPCK, 2003). See also de Sousa’s “dia-topical hermeneutics”: “Against globalized localisms I offer, as a methodological orientation, a diatopical hermeneutics. I mean a hermeneutical procedure based on the idea that all cultures are incomplete and that the topoi of a given culture, however strong, are as incomplete as the culture to which they belong. (…)The aim of diatopical hermeneutics is to maximize the awareness of the reciprocal incompleteness of cultures engaging in a dialogue, as it were, with one foot in one culture and the other in another – hence, its diatopical character.” Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide, Sociology/International Studies, (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), 91. “In der Religion wird Religiosität in Anspruch genommen und in intersubjektiven Lebensvollzügen geschichtlich-kulturell gestaltet. Beides ist insofern zu unterscheiden und nicht gleichzusetzen. Religiosität besteht im ‘Zusammenspiel von radikaler Negativitätserfahrung und Transcendenzverwiesenheit’. Religionen ‘gehen zurück auf Epiphanien eines Gottes oder einer göttlichen Macht’.” Reinhard Hempelmann, Panorama der neuen Religiösität: Sinnsuche und Heilsversprechen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, Vollständig überarb. Neuausg. ed. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001), 15.

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

19

only be presumptuous but would also make it difficult to achieve the goal of the inquiry: to develop a political theology of vulnerability that could be relevant for the orientation of political agency in precarious life conditions, and the construction of a more viable political community characterized by justice and solidarity. My methodology gives priority to concrete expressions of and testimonies to the practical use of Christian sources to confront precarity and sustain the value of vulnerable embodiment, agency and community. Hence, I do not follow what would be a conventional approach in systematic theology, assessing conceptualizations and interpretations of the vulnerable condition in, first, Scripture, then the confessions of the Early Church and the theologies of the Church Fathers or the Reformers, and subsequently selected academic theologies up to our day. Though such studies may still be useful—on this topic in particular—I have chosen rather to take as my methodological point of departure, my lugar teológico (‘theological location’) in Jon Sobrino’s sense,81 two cherished celebrations in any Christian Church, that of Christmas and that of Easter. As a concrete material for my discussion on the possible implied and lived interpretations of vulnerability in these celebrations, I draw on the two central Christian practices of preaching and prayer in the form of singing hymns. More precisely, looking for Christian imaginations of the interrelationship of vulnerability, agency and community in the midst of precarity, I shall engage with Archbishop Oscar Romero’s Christmas Sermon in the Cathedral of San Salvador in 1979, and I shall lend ear to selected spirituals emerging from within the struggle to endure and overcome slavery, as they address and re-enact the Gospel narratives of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. My aim in doing this is not to give a new or original interpretation of these events and practices in their historical context, but rather to engage with them as lived testimonies with the expectation that they may unleash fresh theological insights and ideas for the purpose of confronting present-day challenges of exclusion and violence. Implicit in my argument here is that how a particular religious tradition or theology interprets and negotiates the human experience of vulnerability can impact political priorities. In this regard, my approach is both similar to 81

See, e.g. Jon Sobrino, Resurrección de la verdadera Iglesia: los pobres, lugar teológico de la eclesiología, Colección Teología Latinoamericana, (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1986); Jon Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórica-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991). English translations: Jon Sobrino, The True Church and the Poor (Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987) and Jon Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator. A HistoricalTheological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh (­Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1994).

20

chapter 1

and different from other proposals in public and political theology today. For instance, the point of departure for Graham Ward, in The Politics of Discipleship, was the notion that “religious practices in a secular age are concerned with changing the cultural imaginary—that is, rereading and rewriting what appears to be the case in ways that are both critical and constructive.”82 He held that the cultural imaginary consists of many unfounded and even distorted mythologies. So, for Ward, the “politics of Christian discipleship” should unmask the theological and metaphysical sources of these current mythologies, revealing “the distortions and perversions of their current secularized forms,” and then make an effort to “reread and rewrite the Christian tradition back into contemporary culture.”83 Ward sought a Christian imaginary alternative to the present-day civic imaginary because he deemed the latter antithetical to Christian living.84 Similarly, my attempt herein is, as stated, to expose and possibly overcome what I see as a deficient view of vulnerability that perceives the vulnerable condition as a fault or a weakness that should be eradicated. Contending that this conventional view of vulnerability as a flaw causes political harm rather than providing benefits for human and nonhuman life, I explore Christian resources and practices that make plausible, and even commendable, an affirmation of vulnerability to replace the conventional view. Such an alternative interpretation not only differs from particular secular views of precariousness, as seemed to be Ward’s principal concern, but also from other religious and even Christian interpretations of this phenomenon. Diverse faith traditions and theologies explicitly and implicitly deal with vulnerability in different ways.85 Since these differences matter, a critical and constructive political theology of vulnerability is called for.

82 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 164. 83 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 165. 84 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 17. 85 Ulrich Schmiedel hence—rightly, in my view—criticizes Graham Ward for a too harmonizing and thus possibly monopolizing reading of ‘the Christian tradition’ when Ward in The politics of discipleship advocates the need to ‘reread and rewrite the Christian tradition back into contemporary culture.’ To Schmiedel, it is unclear who this ‘we’ is. Asking: “Are ‘we’ always agreed on what the Christian tradition is?” Schmiedel is wary that Ward’s position here might “run the risk of sliding down a slippery slope into hierocracies, resulting in the inequality between priestly rulers and non-priestly ruled.” Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized ecclesiology: The concept of community after Ernst Troeltsch, Pathways for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 222.

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

21

4 Procedure I have now presented the project that I embark on, explaining its main aims, methods, and arguments. Before moving on, I give a brief description of the remaining text. The inquiry proper starts in chapter 2 by examining some key characteristics and dynamics of the prevalent situations of precarity. Drawing on selected recent contributions to political and critical theory, I identify and discuss some particularly ominous predicaments and impasses that tend to undermine political agency and community. I seek to identify how these relate to often implicit conceptualizations of vulnerability. In particular, I first engage at some length with Guy Standing’s theory about an emerging global ‘precariat.’ Subsequently, I connect and compare this approach with Hardt and Negri’s early envisioning of the Multitude’s resistance to globalization as an Empire. I then move on to a reading of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of states of exception as a key characteristic of the present-day world order, and ‘bare life’ as a designation of those people and groups who are being suppressed, invisibilized, and excluded in the present global, biopolitical order (or disorder). Another contemporary Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, invites us to face the challenges of precarious biopolitics differently, as he—long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic—offered a highly original reflection on the political relevance of the concept of immunity. Might the dialectics concerning immunitas and communitas, which Esposito deemed to open up a space for an ‘affirmative biopolitics,’ form a basis for orienting and transforming political agency in the face of experienced vulnerability? However, none of the above authors engage in a sufficiently critical manner with the history of colonization and the shadow it casts on the present. By bringing into the debate a leading critical voice from ‘the postcolony,’ namely Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe, we can gain a sense of how biopolitics is expressed in actuality as a politics of death—a necropolitics. The possibility of agency and community differs radically for colonizers and the colonized; hence, we must take a critically into account the perspective of enslaved people and communities if we are to properly probe the present crises in a quest for a political theology of vulnerability. Through engaging with these compelling critical analyses of the conditions for political agency and community in contemporary contexts of precarity, I detect in them a need for a different, more profound and critically affirmative account of human vulnerability and its implications. This is what I turn to in the next chapter. The inquiry continues chapter 3, then, by embarking on a critical and constructive review of the concept of vulnerability. Why and how should one

22

chapter 1

criticize and overcome the conventional view of vulnerability as a weakness to be eliminated? Through engaging with various recent contributions and debates in vulnerability studies and, in particular, the thinking of Judith Butler, I shall present a multifaceted and complex ‘anatomy’ of vulnerability. This alternative understanding seeks to preserve the tension between, on the one hand, the destructive reality of precarity that is so unjustly dispersed around the globe, unbearably wounding humans and nonhumans alike, and on the other hand, the foundational condition of a shared human vulnerability that bears within it the possibility of life-sustaining political agency and community. Many approaches to political precariousness neglect the role of religiosity in peoples’ lives, in particular in turbulent times such as the present one. The third step of my investigation, therefore, situates religion within present global precarity. How might religion matter to people under these conditions? As religious belonging and practices are gaining more, albeit ambiguous, attention in politics, I argue that the everyday challenge of tackling precarity is decisive for the impact of religiosity on politics. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have claimed, based on comprehensive quantitative empirical studies, that secularization is related not to modernization as such, but to a sense of human security. In other words, the more people are exposed to risks and hardships, the greater the significance they seem to ascribe to religion. However, why this is so, and how religiosity responds in different ways to people’s experiences of insecurity, is not addressed by Norris and Inglehart. This question must be central to a political theology of vulnerability, and I offer some possible answers based on the inquiry so far in chapter 4. Turning to lived Christian faith and constructive theology, the final part of this book explores some of the resources this particular faith tradition may offer to support and further develop the novel conceptualization of the mutually reinforcing relationship between vulnerability, political agency, and community developed in the first chapters. What resources of the Christian tradition might orient and transform Christians’ agency when confronted with precarious life situations—their own or those of others? Chapters 5 and 6 address this question by, as already indicated above, referring to two main symbols of the Christian tradition—the crib and the cross. Drawing on examples of enacted Christian faith under precarious conditions—a Christmas sermon in El Salvador at the outbreak of civil war in 1979, and spirituals emerging from black faith communities in the context of slavery and oppression—the chapters investigate how these symbols of human and divine embodiment and salvation may open up ways of orienting and transforming

Project: A Political Theology of Vulnerability

23

the human experience of vulnerability, thus inspiring and guiding political agency in a world “structured by the antagonisms of nature, capital, gender and race,” as Thomas Lynch aptly summarized.86 Discussing contributions from black, Latin American liberation, feminist, and trauma theology, the chapters portray an emerging political theology of vulnerability. This book starts with a project and ends with a promise. What I project is to contribute to potentiating political agency and constructing community amidst precarity through a committed exercise in political theology that seeks to interweave critical textual analysis with testimonies from and reflections on lived Christian practice. The promise in the end emerges from and underlines the open-ended character of any such exercise, and – in this case – testifies to the inherent vulnerability of this academic effort to make sense of our times and of Christian faith. A promise is not a conclusion; it may provide openings, and offer opportunities. I suggest that in vulnerability it is possible to glimpse such a promise to political agency and community. 86

Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology, 34; 30–35.

Chapter 2

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis Consider the case of Mariam.1 Fleeing her home country of Eritrea at the age of 22, and crossing Ethiopia and Sudan in the midst of a brutal war with a neighboring country, she finally managed to arrive in a Nordic welfare state—a safe haven for refugees from many conflict-ridden areas. In recent years, however, a stricter asylum policy has taken hold in this country. Mariam had no documents to prove her identity, and the authorities did not believe her story. Mariam’s application for asylum was rejected, and she was obliged to leave the country. However, like many of her compatriots who had fled the war and the increasingly authoritarian regime, she did not dare to return, fearing for her safety and her life. Then, the situation worsened: she became pregnant and the child’s father, who was also ‘undocumented,’ was forced to leave. Hence, she is now alone, shouldering sole responsibility for the child she is expecting. According to the national law in this Nordic country— in line with human health rights, and indeed, professional ethics of medicine going back to the Hippocratic oath—women in Mariam’s situation are entitled to give birth in hospitals. However, as one newspaper discovered almost by accident, undocumented migrants’ newborn babies were not registered in the National Register.2 These infants were typically given a temporary medical record and an emergency hospital number, which was deleted after a relatively short time. Information about such children would be sent to the Birth Registry and the National Registry, but the information would not be followed up or preserved because the children’s parents do not have legal residence. The children would thus become, like their mothers, undocumented. These new citizens of the world were, because of the legal status of their parents, only nominally registered in internal hospital catalogs. As a result, the babies disappear from sight. The national authorities officially do not know about these children, who they are, or how many there are. The lack of registration means that they are not included in the statistics. Thus, Mariam’s child was deliberately being made 1 The name is a pseudonym. The case is authentic, and described in Tor Øystein Vaaland, “De synlige og de usynlige,” Morgenbladet (March 16 2012), http://morgenbladet.no/samfunn/2012/de_synlige_og_de_usynlige, and analysed in Sturla J. Stålsett, “Asylbarn og menneskeverd: Etiske refleksjoner med utgangspunkt i erfaringer fra Helsesenteret for papirløse migranter,” Etikk i praksis. Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics 6, no. 2 (2012). 2 Vaaland, “De synlige og de usynlige.” © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_003

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

25

invisible to the authorities, by the authorities. Consequently, The National Population Registry has no overview of all children born in the country. Some, like Mariam’s child, are not officially counted. Since they are deprived of citizenship, these children do not receive a social security number and are not included in any system that is necessary for the protection of their rights. According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 7.1: “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”3 Mariam’s is not a sole case, of course. It is one among many unique stories of the present-day global precarity. In this first part of my exploration of a political theology of vulnerability, I shall draw attention to some of the prevailing predicaments and paradoxes in the politics of precarity that I find particularly incisive and urgent. The point is not to prioritize certain political challenges. Instead, I aim to discuss the interconnected crises of political agency and community. For this purpose, I will engage with recent debates in critical political theory to uncover the issues of vulnerability at the core of these crises. I shall focus on precarization and ‘imperial’ globalization processes, exclusion by inclusion through states of exception, the politics of immunization, and finally, the rule of necropolitics in the postcolonial world. Through this exploration, I shall shed critical light on divergences and lacunae in the interrelationships between political community, agency, and vulnerability. My aim is, firstly, to show how these differing but interlinked theoretical perspectives expose the shape and character of the crises in political community and agency. Secondly, I suggest that they actualize a need for reviewing and replacing a counterproductive conceptualization of human vulnerability as merely a problem to be fixed. 1 Precariat Marginalization takes different forms in time and space. Lately, new forms of social exclusion have emerged, linked to global transformation processes. While a tiny elite controls a greater portion of the world’s wealth than ever before, millions of people are pushed into precarious living conditions. This process has been called a gradual ‘precarization’ of ever-larger population

3 https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child, accessed 03.04.2022.

26

chapter 2

segments.4 The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated this situation.5 The fire in the barrio of Guatemala City, the burning cars in the banlieues in France, the arson attacks on migration centers and refugee camps in Moria and Cox’s Bazar, and the storming of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. in January 2021 are all ambiguous signs of this development. It is said that a global ‘precariat’ is on the rise. What is it, and what can it tell us about the present challenges to political agency and community? The word ‘precariat’ (combining ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’) first appeared in French sociology in the 1970s. However, its present use is largely due to Guy Standing’s work. Standing, a former long-time senior official in the International Labour Organization (ILO) and now a professor of economic security, is energetically advocating for a need to understand new configurations and transformations of work in and after the age of globalization. Following his Work After Globalization from 2009,6 Standing, in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class,7 directed critical attention to the emergence of what he saw as a new, diverse class of disenfranchised people. The precariat is a globally spreading group, or class, of people who are experiencing an increasing lack of work security.8 More concretely, the precariat refers to people with different characteristics and backgrounds who have insecure jobs inside, on the margins of, or entirely outside the formal labor market.9 It includes people “bumped out of working-class communities and families”

4 See e.g. Oliver Marchart, Die Prekarisierungsgesellschaft: Prekare Proteste. Politik und Okonomie im Zeichen der Prekarisierung, vol. 8, Gesellschaft der Unterschiede, (Transcript, 2013). 5 The Human Development Report of the UNDP 2021/2022 documents that “perceived human insecurity is increasing in most countries—even in some very high Human Development Index (HDI) countries”, and that 9 of ten countries experienced a decline in HDI during this year, see https://report.hdr.undp.org/, figures 6 and 7 on p.11 and 12, accessed 06.10.22. 6 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, Course Book. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 7 Guy Standing, The precariat: The new dangerous class (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 8 A. Kalleberg and Steven P. Vallas define precarious work as “work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses or the government) and receive limited social benefits and statutory protections,” Arne Kalleberg and Steven P. Vallas, “Probing Precarious Work: Theory, Research, and Politics,” Precarious Work 31 (2017), 1. 9 Standing lists seven different forms of labor-related security: labor market security, employment security, job security, work security, skill reproduction security, income security, and representation security, see Guy Standing, The precariat, 12.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

27

who experience relative deprivation after losing the “status skill and respect” enjoyed by their parents and grandparents in working-class occupations.10 A second group within the precariat consists of “migrants, Roma, ethnic minorities, asylum seekers in limbo, and all those with the least secure rights anywhere.”11 Like the first group, these people also experience an increasing loss of basic security. Since they have only limited rights, Standing calls them ‘denizens’ rather than ‘citizens.’ The most conspicuous representatives of this group are undocumented migrants like Mariam who lack basic rights because they do not fully belong to the polity or come under the responsibility of a state.12 They expose that human rights are both in their origins and, for all practical purposes, citizens’ rights.13 So, being denizens rather than legal citizens, these people must keep their heads down and be content with whatever survival strategy they may find efficacious, whether legal or not.14 Their space for exercising political agency seems to be strictly limited. The majority within the precariat emerges from the working class, the margins, or the bottom of society, but this is not the case for all. Somewhat surprisingly, a third group within the precariat comes from the higher end of the social hierarchy. It often comprises young, well-educated individuals who face the insecurity of the precariat despite promising potentials for professional careers. They are deprived of access to do what they are trained to do and aspire to do. This group experiences frustration and depression due to a loss of social status and prospects. The existence of, at least, these three groups reveals the complexity and diverse composition of the precariat. It raises the question of whether the precariat is (or can be seen as) a unified ‘class’ of people with common interests. This point is essential if one holds some sense of shared precarious predicament to be vital for resisting and overcoming the processes of precarization. Fragmentation, individualization and the disruption of collective solutions,

10

Guy Standing, A precariat charter: From denizens to citizens (London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 11 Standing, A precariat charter, 29. 12 See also, e.g. Hannah M. Lewis et al., “Hyper-precarious lives: Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North,” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 5 (2014). 13 See Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 19. 14 Kirkens Bymisjon, Undocumented Migration, Human Trafficking and the Roma. Manifestations of Irregular Migration and Exclusion in Norway, Shortcomings in Governance, and Implications for Health, Well-Being and Dignity, The Oslo Church City Mission (Oslo: Stiftelsen Kirkens Bymisjon Oslo, 2013).

28

chapter 2

struggles and solidarity has been seen as one of the effects of neoliberal globalization from the 1990s onward.15 The question of political community has become acute. So what could be done? Three interconnected struggles are decisive for the precariat, in Standing’s view: struggles for recognition, representation, and redistribution.16 The struggle for recognition is fundamental. Deprived of rights and violently relegated from citizens to denizens, the precariat needs to engage in joint mobilization to demand a political presence and be regarded as people who matter: “Recognition – a move from feelings of isolation, self-pity or self-loathing, to a sense of collective strength – is a precondition of political action.”17 The precariat also needs proper representation. Who may speak for the precariat? Who will fight for the recognition of its rights? Unlike the Marxist view of the organic link between the proletariat and the Communist party, or the social democrats’ relationship to labor movements, the precariat rarely has political organization or representation. This observation raises questions about the role of the precariat and the populist ‘moment’ in global politics in the early twenty-first century.18 Besides recognition and representation, the 15

The quite radical and sudden shift to global hegemony of neoliberalism not least in the 1990s has been a key driver in this process of global precarization, as noted by, e.g. Kalleberg and Vallas: “Neoliberalism, as an economic and policy doctrine that equates marketization with the furtherance of human freedom and individual choice, is obviously a central concept for students of precarious work, since it opposes all collective arrangements that might interfere with market forces,” Arne Kalleberg and Steven P. Vallas, “Probing Precarious Work,” 9. For a theological critique of neoliberalism particularly in Latin America, see Hugo Assmann and Franz J. Hinkelammert, A Idolatria do mercado. Ensaio sobre Economia e Teologia, Teologia e Libertação, (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1989); Franz J. Hinkelammert, “Liberation Theology in the Economic and Social Context of Latin America,” in Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas ed. David Batstone et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 1997); Franz J. Hinkelammert, ed, El Huracán de la Globalización (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones (DEI), 1999); Jung Mo Sung, Neoliberalismo y pobreza. Una economía sin corazón, trans. Guillermo Meléndez (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1993). See also my “Sacrificial Economy: Theological Critique of Neoliberalism in Latin America,” in Religion in a Globalised Age: Transfers and Transformations, Integration and Resistance ed. Sturla J. Stålsett (Oslo: Novus Press, 2008), and “Precious and Precarious Life: Exploring Diaconal Economics,” Diaconia 10, no. 1 (2019). 16 Standing, A precariat charter: From denizens to citizens, 138–144. 17 Standing, The precariat: The new dangerous class, x. This key term of political philosophy since Hegel, but with roots much older, has been taken up and developed critically and constructively by leading scholars such as Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Charles Taylor, and, more recently, Francis Fukuyama. See discussion and literature in chapter 3 below. 18 See, e.g. Jan-Werner Müller, What is populism? (Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Thomas Frank, The people, no: A brief history of anti-populism, (New

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

29

precariat urgently needs a political struggle for the redistribution of wealth. Rather than ownership of the means of production, the increasingly unequal distribution of income is a fundamental concern. A critical political instrument for the redistribution of income and basic security, strongly advocated by Standing, might be a universal basic income. However, the struggle for the redistribution of wealth is not only a matter of material goods or money. Other assets also need to be redistributed for the benefit of the precariat. The interconnected issues of time and space have become particularly relevant in the globalized age, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, among others, forcefully stated.19 The precariat needs access to quality time and the ability to control that time.20 It also needs access to quality common space. The precariat’s struggle for inclusion is thus a struggle for universal access to goods and services. In all of this, Standing underlines the precariat’s need for safety. Being precarious means, after all, to be insecure and at great risk. With this conceptualization of the precariat, then, Standing has managed to raise critical awareness of significant contemporary transformations that challenge societies, politics, and faith-based communities globally. His concept is not merely academic. In the sequel A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, published in 2014, Standing proposed concrete new policies.21 I see his critical and engaged focus on the struggles needed as a forceful argument for the potential political agency of people in precarious situations. This, to me, is a promising dimension of the ‘precariat’ proposal. However, this proposal needs further scrutiny. What can it tell us about political community, political agency, and experiences of vulnerability? The precariat consists of people who are ‘denizens’ rather than citizens. This observation importantly sheds a critical light on the basis from which political struggles are made (im-)possible for the precariat. Any analysis of ‘denizens’ reveals a troubling ambiguity in the liberal conception of rights, at least in how it is presently practiced (or not). The problem is not only that rights are

York: Metropolitan Books, 2020); Rogers Brubaker, “Why populism?,” Theory and Society 46 (2017); Rogers Brubaker, “Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective,” Ethnic and racial studies (2017). 19 See Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). 20 The issue of control and controllability is seen as a critical characteristic of the post-globalized world, in Hartmut Rosa, The uncontrollability of the world (Cambridge, England, Medford, Massachusetts: Polity, 2020). 21 Standing, A precariat charter.

30

chapter 2

inherently abstract and necessarily ideal, or that they may prompt fragmentation and competition between individuals and groups. Critical questions must be asked about the extent to which and in which cases the design and actual working mechanisms of dominant rights regimes also conceal and directly exclude groups, individuals, and nonhuman life. ‘Irregularized’22 or ‘unauthorized’ migrants like Mariam and her child are a prime example, since they are de facto deprived of their human rights and criminalized in the very act of attempting to exercise those rights.23 Thus, paradoxically, the promotion and exercise of rights may simultaneously and covertly undermine life and liberty for people in precarious situations. That being said, it is also true that this fundamental critique of the existing rights regimes poses an inevitable risk in itself. It may potentially contribute to the undermining the most valuable political instruments for supporting harassed and threatened people in precarious living conditions, namely the political instruments proclaiming and protecting everybody’s inalienable human rights. This seeming impasse must be politically addressed and dealt with differently in dissimilar contexts. Moreover, it is essential to critically analyze (in a way not sufficiently done in Standing’s work) the various ways in which ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, ‘race,’ religious conviction, and so on divide and antagonistically polarize denizens and the precariat. There is a need for an intersectional analysis of the complexity of the violent exclusion of otherness and concrete others.24 The precariat struggles for recognition. This importance of recognition reveals the human condition as profoundly relational. If we see political community as a ‘web of relations,’ this relationality is intimately connected to acts of recognition. We live by and for the recognition of other human beings to whom we are related remotely or closely, permanently, or transitorily. This relatedness exposes us—it makes us vulnerable. At the same time, as I shall argue,25 this vulnerability is a precondition for entering into relationships. Struggles for recognition

22 23 24

25

I prefer this terminology to “illegal” or “irregular” since it communicates better how their status depends on how the law actively perceives them. Sturla J. Stålsett, “Radical Mercy: Revitalizing a Fundamental Reformation Impulse in the Context of Exclusion and Irregular(-ized) Migration,” in Politics and Economics of Liberation, ed. Ulrich Duchrow and Martin Hoffmann (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2015). See Kimberlé Crenshaw, On intersectionality: Essential writings (New York: The New Press, 2020). See also Louisa Acciari, “Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity,” Latin American research review 56, no. 1 (2021). See chapter 3, below.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

31

are inescapably conflictual,26 and the energy unleashed through them may be either constructive or destructive. However, without them, change is unlikely to happen. Struggles for recognition, I contend, both demand and reveal an inherent power in precariousness, resting on the inalienable and paradoxical value of vulnerability. The precariat lacks representation. Is this connected to the rise of authoritarian movements such as neo-fascism and far-right populism?27 As noted, precarization is both driving and aggravating the crisis of representation, which contributes to the success of many populist movements and leaders. This topic is central to political theology,28 since it arguably confirms the Schmittian dictum that all political concepts are secularized theology. Struggles for representation run deep in Christian history and dogma in both christology and ecclesiology. However, the critical point here concerns the political agency of the precariat. The role of the precariat in a global wave of radical right-wing mobilization is ambiguous. It may be a driving force and an excluded and despised counterpart of populist movements. The ‘othering’ involved in populist interventions is directed upwards against the elite and outwards against foreigners, migrants, aliens, or exiles. However, as Rogers Brubaker has pointed out, it may also be directed downwards against those at the bottom of society who are deemed despicable, disposable, lazy, treacherous, undeserving, and unreliable. Standing calls one part of the precariat—a ‘left-over’ group—the ‘lumpen precariat.’ These are the people who are excluded from organized labor. Their position is ambiguous, existing both inside and outside society. Their role in the precariat is also unclear. Thus, we are reminded of the ambivalence of the plebs—people understood as either decent common people or a discarded and despised ‘mob.’29 26

27

28

29

See the distinction between antagonism and agonism in Mouffe’s and Laclau’s political theories, where the latter, agonism, is seen as a positive feature in democratic politics. In particular, Chantal Mouffe, On the political, Thinking in action, (London: Routledge, 2005), but also Ernesto Laclau, On populist reason (London: Verso, 2005). See e.g. Brubaker, “Why populism?”, 368–379, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser et al, The Oxford handbook of populism, Handbook of populism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and opposition (London) 39, no. 4 (2004). For a critical analysis of liberal anti-populist approaches in politics and academia, see Frank, The people, no: A brief history of anti-populism. See Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston (eds), The spirit of populism: Political theologies in polarized times, vol. 1, Political and public theologies, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022); Kristin Graff-Kallevåg, Sven Thore Kloster, and Sturla J. Stålsett, eds, Populisme og kristendom (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2021). This ambiguity is not satisfactorily dealt with in Brubaker’s work, in my view. See e.g. Brubaker, “Why populism?”, and compare Henrik Mouritsen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

32

chapter 2

While advocating for the precariat’s need for justice, Standing also labels it a ‘dangerous’ class. This is a claim that has been criticized. Argentinean sociologist Ronaldo Munck deemed the “politics of a ‘dangerous’ class discourse ... quite simply incompatible with a progressive social transformation politics.”30 Why is it inappropriate to see the precariat as ‘dangerous’? The diverse forms and sites of exploitation and exclusion that this concept addresses, and the precariat’s presumed lack of a sense of community—a common destiny transformed into a basic common cause—may rightly give cause for concern. Misrecognition and a lack of realistic opportunities for the precariat may result in resignation or infighting and fragmentation, potentially supporting the extreme, sometimes violent, political approaches adopted by neo-fascism and right-wing populist groups. This ambiguity can indeed be seen as perilous, both for the precariat and for the wider society. However, the depiction of the precariat as dangerous may also catalyze and even strengthen a sense of inevitability, fate, and hopelessness, thus failing to recognize and promote its potential political agency. More critically, as Munck points out: “The notion of a ‘dangerous class’ has a long history in the racist construction of the Southern ‘Other’.”31 “The precariat is not a dangerous, exotic, alien thing, not an incipient class to be patronized into existence,” warns Richard Seymour, another critic of Standing. Even though he has found Standing’s theorizing about the precariat “unconvincing” and “impressionistic,” he admits that it represents “an interpellation that can help in forming a new, radical majoritarian politics with an anti-capitalist core.” But using political force does not make the precariat ‘a dangerous class,’ he holds. Instead, to Seymour, the precariat “is all of us.”32 This is, however, for me to see a generalization that risks reducing the political incisiveness and clarity of the concept. At best, Standing’s point about the ‘danger’ highlights the ambiguity of the precariat’s (actual or potential) political agency. After all, it is by no means clear that the mobilization of the precariat inevitably leads to politics for more just and inclusive societies. The anger and frustration of the precariat can undoubtedly find less constructive political outlets. The precariat’s struggle for redistribution raises the issue of the bare necessities of an embodied life. Life always depends on concrete and material 30 31 32

Ronaldo Munck, “The Precariat: a view from the South,” Third world quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013). Munck, “The Precariat: a view from the South”, 759. Richard Seymour, “We are all precarious - on the concept of the ‘precariat’ and its misuses,” New Left Project (2012), 1.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

33

nourishment. Whereas a good life—life in plenitude—always requires much more than food, clothing, health care, and shelter, it can, of course, never do without these basic necessities. In his monumental Ethics of liberation: in the age of globalization and exclusion, the Argentinean-Mexican historian, philosopher, and theologian Enrique Dussel stressed ‘the concrete life of each human being as human’ as the main critical criterion.33 Another expression of this ‘material’ emphasis is Nancy Fraser, who famously criticized Axel Honneth’s and Charles Taylor’s recognition theories for not paying sufficient attention to this basic material side of personal and political life, calling for an emphasis on redistribution.34 Overall, according to Standing, the precariat needs more safety. Precarious lives are evidently deeply insecure. Risk and a lack of protection characterize every aspect of precarious situations. Yet, the most devastating acts of public violence, usually directed against precarious groups, are carried out in the name of security. Security is clearly an ambiguous concept for people living in precarity. Vulnerability is often portrayed as the opposite of safety or security.35 The two are interrelated, but as my sketch of an anatomy of vulnerability in the next chapter will aim to show, they are not simply binary opposites. It is not true that increasing security automatically reduces vulnerability. The ‘securitization’ of politics, as well as of culture and religion, can aggravate precarization and oppression. Precarious groups are regularly perceived as risks to society, leading to the implementation of biopolitical measures for so-called protection that can as a minimum, in the words of the Australian feminist philosopher and ethicist Catriona Mackenzie, “express relationships of domination and inequality among citizens or between the state and targeted groups

33

34 35

Enrique Dussel, Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (Madrid & Mexico: Editorial Trotta, UAM-I, UNAM, 1998).: “Por sobrevivencia humana o por ‘producción, reproducción y desarrollo de la vida humana de cada sujeto ético’ (...) entenderemos siempre en esta Ética enunciar el criterio material universal de la ética por excelencia: la vida humana concreta de cada ser humano como humano,” Tésis 11, 622, my translation. Nancy Fraser et al, Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange, Umverteilung oder Anerkennung?, (London: Verso, 2003). This binary was problematized even before the 9/11-attacks in 2001 in Sturla J. Stålsett et al., Vulnerability and Security. Current Challenges in Security Policy from an Ethical and Theological Perspective, Expanded version of the Norwegian “Sårbarhet og sikkerhet” (2000), (Oslo: Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations, 2002).

34

chapter 2

of citizens.”36 It is, in other words, essential to precisely define what kind of security the precariat needs and how it is constructed politically. In order to overcome the prevailing predicaments of the precariat Standing has proposed critical elements of what he called a ‘politics of paradise,’ in contrast to the dominating ‘politics of inferno.’37 However, despite this programmatic and solution-oriented approach, carried further in A Precariat Charter,38 the political potential of the precariat and those who join it in solidarity remains underdeveloped. Most importantly, at least three powerful forces of fragmentation and division need to be addressed more critically. First, the diversity of and within local cultures seen as unique contexts of domination and resistance, should be reckoned with. Second, there is the still detrimental colonial legacy. Standing’s analysis does not give sufficient attention to the critical issue of decolonization. There is certainly a need for a more profound analysis of the racist and gendered underpinnings of global precarization.39 Third, the catastrophic effects of climate change in the Anthropocene must be dealt with. Precarization and climate crisis are deeply interrelated and mutually reinforcing each other. There is no doubt, then, that precarization—an escalating production of global precarity—is a powerful and pervasive trend. It is manifold and global.. Importantly, it consists of groups or even classes characterized by internal tensions. Although people in the precariat may have similar experiences of precarious relations (or lack of relations), and need regular, secure work to sustain their daily lives and social status, they may not perceive or seek cooperative solutions to these challenges. Attention is easily diverted from engaging in common struggles for the benefit of all. The political agency of the precariat suffers from a lack of mutual understanding and a missing unanimity. The precarious predicament is not seen as shared. Of course, we could ask why they should perceive it in this way. The life situations and needs in question are undoubtedly diverse, and there are no easy fixes; no one-size-fits-all solution to precarization issues. Nevertheless, precarious lives are already thoroughly and inescapably interdependent. A critical 36

Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University PRess, 2014), 47. 37 Standing, The precariat, 155–213. Note the implicit theological framework of the metaphors here. 38 Standing, A precariat charter. 39 See Munck, “The Precariat: A view from the South.”

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

35

awareness of this mutuality can be seen as necessary, or at the very least useful, for confronting the political predicament of precarity. This awareness is particularly urgent because the struggles of the precariat are usually stalled by a lack of trust. Collaboration and a sense of solidarity are indispensable for taking action against globalized processes of precarization. When these are lacking, Standing may have a point in seeing the precariat as a potentially ‘dangerous class.’40 Under the pressure of precarization, people may withdraw totally from political action, or fall prey to authoritarian populist and neo-fascist political forces. In many cases, the precariat does not recognize that it has political agency, and people experiencing systematic and unjust precarity do not commonly see themselves as part of a functioning political community. Trust directly underpins how vulnerability is experienced and lived, and vulnerability makes trust an irreplaceable condition for life.41 Simultaneously, having to trust someone inevitably increases one’s vulnerability. In this sense, vulnerability enhances life: trust, which is inseparable from and dependent on vulnerability, may uphold and maintain just community life.42 In other words, a political agency capable of countering the forces of precarization needs to make shared experiences of vulnerability its basis for trust and solidarity. However, this is not easy to do. Zygmunt Bauman provides a stark reminder of this in his Community: Seeking Safety in an Unsecure World, when he states, “Sharing stigma and public humiliation ... does not make sufferers into brothers; it feeds mutual derision, contempt and hatred.”43 Mutual respect can be difficult to develop in precarious and marginalized groups since they have repeatedly been told how unworthy they are; hence, to side with others in the same situation can be seen as tantamount to confirming and even reinforcing the denigration.44 As in a ghetto where devaluing one’s neighborhood and 40 Standing, The precariat. 41 See further elaboration of the interconnection between vulnerability and trust in chapters 3 and 4 below. 42 This is the main content of ‘social capital’, see Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993); Social Capital and Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2000). I analyse the how social capital relates to vulnerability in Sturla J. Stålsett, “The ethics of vulnerability, social inclusion and social capital,” Forum for development studies 34, no. 1 (2007). 43 Zygmunt Bauman, Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Themes for the 21st Century, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 121. 44 Kurt Lewin, by many held to be the founder of action research, observed this tendency already in his influential 1946 article “Action research and minority problems”: “One of

36

chapter 2

the others who live in it at times is seen as the only way out, Bauman was perhaps right in saying that the precariat highlights “the impossibility of community.”45 Furthermore, as postcolonial, liberation and queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid pointed out: “Oppression is perhaps what we cannot have in common, because oppression is built in overlapping levels of multiple and contradictory elements which, according to context, produce variably dense, saturated effects.”46 How, then, can the precariat resist the dominant forces that act in the direction of “social disintegration, atomization, and anomie”?47 Here it is well advised to keep in mind that to someone like Hannah Arendt, one of the most important preconditions of political action was in fact the heterogeneity and plurality of political agents. To her, political engagement relied on the coming together of strangers.48 In other words, the sense of community necessary for political agency should not rely on a consensus or like-mindedness. A democratic politics of precarity that can resist authoritarian biopolitics must comprise and sustain diversity and dissent; it must aspire to be what sociologist Lars Laird Iversen aptly calls a ‘community of disagreement.’ 49 As we can see, then, the emergence of the precariat—a diverse, global group of people and groups experiencing precarity in the form of accelerating social and economic exclusion—raises complex questions about the the most severe obstacles in the way of improvement seems to be the notorious lack of confidence and self-esteem of most minority groups. Minority groups tend to accept the implicit judgment of those who have status even where the judgment is directed against themselves.” Kurt Lewin, “Action research and minority problems,” Journal of Social Issues, no. 2 (1946), 44. 45 Bauman, Community, 122. 46 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent theology: Theological perversions in sex, gender and politics (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2000), 168. This observation motivates the application of postcolonial theory in liberationist theologies: “postcolonial thinking has introduced us to (…) the strength which may lie in the different, not the common struggle of the people,” Althaus-Reid, Indecent theology, 168. Se also Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera, Postcolonial theologies: Divinity and empire (St. Louis, Mo: Chalice Press, 2004), 6. 47 “A ghetto is not a greenhouse of community feelings. It is, on the contrary, a laboratory of social disintegration, atomization, and anomie.” Bauman, Community, 122. 48 See Hannah Arendt, The human condition, Second edition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). I am following Ewa Ziarek’s incisive analysis in her “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action,” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013). A community open to that which is ‘other’ is also a major point in Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized ecclesiology: The concept of community after Ernst Troeltsch, Pathways for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 49 Lars Laird Iversen, “From safe spaces to communities of disagreement,” British journal of religious education 41, no. 3 (2019).

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

37

interrelationship between political community and agency, and how this in turn is entrenched in the experience of vulnerability itself. We need to explore in further detail what is at stake in an awareness of the conflicting tendencies of fragmented diversity and the shared predicament in global precarization processes. How should we address this seeming impasse? 2 Multitude Could the diversity of the precariat be a strength rather than a deficiency? The hotly debated book Empire by Italian sociologist and political philosopher Antonio Negri and U.S. political philosopher and literary theorist Michael Hardt, published at the turn of the millennium, could lead in that direction.50 The counter-hegemonic political subject that emerged in their complex and original analysis was ‘the Multitude’—a pluralistic, manifold, and non-disciplinarian political force.51 Negri and Hardt argued that what they saw as the irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges that took place after Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed constituted a new global order. Globalization was not merely the spread of the global market and global circuits of production; it was a new logic and structure of rule. Standing’s analysis of precarization was, as we have seen, primarily concerned with socioeconomic trends and the transformation to people’s relation to organized labor; Hardt and Negri’s perspective in Empire is more geopolitical in financial and military terms. The basic hypothesis proposed by the authors is that although the sovereignty of nation-states may be declining in the era of globalization, the reality of sovereignty has not vanished. They see a new form of sovereignty emerging, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule.52 This new sovereignty and logic of rule is what Hardt and Negri call Empire, “the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.”53 What are the main characteristics of this global Empire? Where can we see its power at work? First, it is evident in the transition from customary international law, defined by contracts and treaties, to the constitution of a new 50 51 52 53

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2000). See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi.

38

chapter 2

sovereign supranational world power.54 This world power operates through its use of an ‘exceptional’ policing force based on what are presented as universal values. Humanitarian interventions and discussions on the relevance of ‘just war’ principles during the 1990s showed, for Hardt and Negri, that empires are not constituted by the use of force alone, but by the capacity to present force as serving rights and peace.55 Hence, Hardt and Negri offer a harshly critical interpretation of what is usually seen as global civil society (i.e. transnational bodies and institutions from news media to religious, humanitarian, and other non-governmental organizations). In their analysis, these civil society actors represent the most essential part of the Empire’s “arsenal of legitimate force for imperial intervention”.56 Worst of all, if we believe Hardt and Negri, are humanitarian non-governmental organizations. They “are in effect ... some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order.”57 They conduct ‘moral interventions’ on behalf of the Empire, thus legitimizing the Empire’s violence and repression. Moral interventions prepare the stage for military interventions. Written before September 11, 2001,58 Hardt and Negri clearly described in Empire a tendency toward an increasing U.S. hegemony. However, they critically claimed that this imperial power had no actual and localizable terrain or center. The power of the Empire was distributed through networks of mobile and articulated mechanisms of control. They saw this expressed in the relative decline of nation-states generally, which was a quite widespread perception at the peak of globalization, implying that differences between national territories were seen as becoming increasingly relative. Contrary to the case during the colonial age, they argued, these national differences in an era of globalization were no longer differences of nature but only differences of degree.59 Thus, Hardt and Negri see an empire without an emperor, without a ‘Rome,’ but (perhaps for this reason) an extremely efficacious one. The Empire exercises enormous powers of oppression and destruction causing an ever more 54 55 56 57

58 59

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 10. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 15. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 35. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 36. Hardt and Negri explicitly names Amnesty International, Oxfam and Médecins sans Frontières here. Although neither these organizations nor the NGO community or global civil society in general by no means are beyond legitimate and necessary critique, I find Hardt & Negri’s accusation without specific documentation here to be a blatant exaggeration, indeed counterproductive to a consolidated struggle against what they name the Empire. The book was written between the Gulf War and the Kosovo crisis, Hardt and Negri, Empire, xvii. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 384.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

39

extreme division between a small minority that controls massive wealth and multitudes that live in poverty and powerlessness. However, the Empire is not invincible. Hardt and Negri believe that this regime is, in a sense, a step forward from the societal systems that preceded it (imperialism and colonialism), while simultaneously carrying with it the forces and dynamics that may lead to its demise and ultimate collapse.60 Their book was not pessimistic, the authors insisted. They were not opposing the globalization of relationships in general but a “specific regime of global relations”—the Empire.61 They did in this conjecture indeed see opportunities for forces of liberation. The urgent political task was not to resist globalizing processes but rather reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. Who can do this? Who can perform the political task of constructing a counter-empire through an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges? Hardt and Negri’s hopes and expectations were, as already pointed out, directed toward what they called the Multitude.62 This political subject is presented as more pluralistic and manifold than ‘the people,’ and less organized and disciplinarian than ‘the party.’ It is, they proclaimed, the task of the multitude to construct a real alternative by inventing “new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.”63 As we can see, at the core of Hardt and Negri’s proposal were original reformulations of both political agency and the political community. Their project is bold in its attempt to take on the whole complexity of the globalized world by criticizing its inherent flaws and simultaneously offering a political manifesto for its overthrow. Their idea of ‘imperial sovereignty,’ intended to mark a paradigm shift in the globalized age,64 was novel, suggestive, and shed critical light on prominent trends in global politics at the turn of the millennium. Although quite similar in its concerns and ultimate aim to Standing’s later analysis of precarization, Hardt and Negri’s radical analysis of the structures of global domination and how to resist them differs from the Standing’s proposal in terms of tone and theoretical basis. The multitude seems to me, as a concept, to integrate more effectively than ‘the precariat’ the diversity of political actors, even seeing this diversity as a strength. In the sequel Multitude: 60 61 62 63 64

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 43. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 45–46. The term is capitalized in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.; London, Eng.: Harvard University Press, 2000), but not in Hardt and Negri, Multitude. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 8; 14.

40

chapter 2

War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), this composite character of the multitude’s unity in diversity is further concretized: The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or single identity—different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences.65 The Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees this as a key question in present-day social struggles. He contrasts “a well-defined historical subject, the working class and its allies,” with “a plurality of ill-defined collective subjects, be they all the oppressed, ‘common people, therefore rebels’ (Subcomandante Marcos), the movement of movements (WSF), or the multitude (Toni Negri and Michael Hardt).” He clearly advocates for the latter.66 While the Zapatistas as well as the World Social Forum (WSF) are laudable expressions of alternative localized and globalized resistance,67 there were shortcomings to Hardt and Negri’s proposal of how to construct the ‘counterEmpire.’ The overly abstract language used, often bordering on unintelligible, led to a disappointing end to the analysis. The concrete proposals in Empire for constructing viable alternatives were not much developed, basically boiling down to rather vague recommendations for unrestricted migration68 and world citizenship. In terms of agency, there were a potentially paralyzing confusion about whether one should wait for the Empire to collapse by itself or 65 66 67

68

Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xiv. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide, Sociology/International Studies, (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), 38. See, e.g. Amory Starr, María Elena Martínez-Torres, and Peter Rosset, “Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra,” Latin American perspectives 38, no. 1 (2011); Carlos Lucio and Barkin David, “Postcolonial and Anti-Systemic Resistance by Indigenous Movements in Mexico,” Journal of world-systems research 28, no. 2 (2022). On the role of liberation theology in these movements, see my contributions Sturla J. Stålsett, “Opprøret i Mexico: Etterlevning eller forvarsel?” Kirke og kultur, no. 1 (1994); “Liberation theology: Religious resistance to globalisation? The Chiapas uprising as a case,” in The Power of Faiths in Global Politics, ed. Sturla J. Stålsett and Oddbjørn Leirvik (Oslo: Novum Press, 2004); and “Another world is here. Notes on religion and political power” (World Forum on Theology and Liberation, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Jan 21–25, 2005). Louise Waite is sharply critical of this the ‘celebratory’ imagining of migrants in the writing of Hardt and Negri, see Louise Waite, “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?,” Geography compass 3, no. 1 (2009), 424.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

41

work for its overthrow—a common impasse in the Marxist legacy it invoked. In terms of community, one was left to wonder how this political community of the multitude were to be constituted? How could it ensure just participation? It was not difficult to detect in Hardt and Negri a certain romanticism about this imagined political subject and its inherent goodness and representative character. There was also a lurking ambiguity about the strategies for and means of constructing an alternative—a question that became more acute after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the process of overcoming the totalitarian and violent power of the Empire, Hardt and Negri foresaw a “necessary, violent passage,” in which the opposing forces must “continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life.”69 Adopting Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘positive barbarism,’ the authors came close to idealizing violent means, using terms such as “affirmative violence”: “The new barbarians destroy with an affirmative violence and trace new paths of life through their own material existence.”70 After 9/11, Michael Hardt admitted that this point needed to be reformulated.71 Consequently, in their later works, these shortcomings were addressed. The need for an inclusive and radical democracy was more emphatically developed: “never has democracy been more necessary,” they proclaim in the introduction to Multitude. “No other path will provide a way out of the fear, the insecurity, and domination that permeates our world at war; no other path will lead us to a peaceful life in common.”72 However, the critical question remains whether their overall framework permits anything other than the permanent dynamics of forces and counterforces. Hardt and Negri rejects the validity of ‘transcendental’ rights. Influenced by Machiavelli and Spinoza, they embrace a materialistic, immanent ontology. This could have opened opportunities for reflection on the interdependency and vulnerability inherent in the corporeal condition. However, their hope of overcoming the oppressive forces of the Empire through the liberating forces of the multitude seems to rely largely on a calculation of what forces may ultimately prove to be stronger. It is not based on an inherent conceptualization of what is life-sustaining, ‘just’ or ‘right’: “No transcendent power or measure will determine the values of our world. Values will be determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation.”73 69 70 71 72 73

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 214. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 215. Espen Hammer, “One Big Mac and an AK-47 to go, please!,” Samtiden, no. 1 (2002), 45. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xii. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 356.

42

chapter 2

What if Hardt’s and Negri’s expectations are wrong? What if the values and forces of the Empire, rather than the ‘innovation and creation’ of the multitude, prevail? Would that not prove the Empire right? In other words, Hardt and Negri seems ultimately to share what they uncover as the Empire’s implicit concept of right; that might is right, and power justifies itself by the fact of its survival. Since they do not address the inherent values and forces enshrined in embodied life itself, nor accept any ‘outward’ criteria or principles for judging the rightness or truth of a proposal, phenomenon, or act, they seem to be left with no effective defense against pure, self-legitimizing power, be it that of the Empire or of the multitude. Hardt and Negri’s approach helpfully and innovatively addresses the tension of irreducible diversity and yet need for common purpose among people living in precarity. Still, it is not fully convincing in its attempt to strengthen the political community or agency of the disenfranchised. Take the issue of shared responsibility: The twentieth century—a century of unforeseen atrocities—has produced a plethora of significant international conventions, institutions, and agreements for protecting fundamental civil rights and promoting a more just and sustainable world order. These were the result of lengthy and costly struggles, and although they certainly have flaws and shortcomings, it seems to me to be counter-productive as well as simply wrong to portray these attempts at collaboration in institutions and agreements as part of the (effective and dangerous) arsenal of the Empire. For the multitude, with its laudable emphasis on plurality and diversity, to become a life-sustaining and liberating political community, these contested developments toward global collaboration for the sake of human and nonhuman life should rather be valued, in my judgement. Countering the global processes of precarization and climate collapse calls for a fundamental re-foundation of a participatory and agentic political community across borders. Embodied values and the struggles for fundamental rights are not mere peripherals in such an ambition but are essential throughout the political project. Such values are not necessarily drawn from a transcendental source; they may be seen as emerging from qualities inherent in life itself—life as necessarily interwoven and exposed to, and indeed energized by, mutuality and trust. A critical step toward realizing this sort of political community is nurturing diverse and always incomplete intentions to form a plural, de-colonizing, and critical global civil society. In this, I shall argue, how one conceives of human vulnerability in political terms, is decisive. What about the vulnerability of the Empire itself? Hardt and Negri describes well the overwhelming forces at its disposal, and yet they are confident that the Empire can be conquered by the multitude in the end. In this, their analysis

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

43

has been motivational to many popular movements and opposition groups. A brief look at history tells us, of course, that empires have never been everlasting, contrary to their expectations. They have always been more vulnerable than they seemed. However, they have often been blind to their own vulnerabilities; they have failed to admit them. The fall of empires has often been caused not by external inimical forces but by internal corruption. Although battles on the borders of empires often triggered processes leading to their fall, the enemy ultimately came from within. This failure to recognize and valorize vulnerability is a decisive weak spot of empires. Perhaps it is also the central and crucial difference between an empire and anything that may count as a human community. Any political community worth struggling for—a web of just relations—rests, I will suggest, on a mutual recognition of vulnerability. The renewed attention to the basic human and political phenomenon of vulnerability that emerged after 9/11 continued to see it primarily as a weakness to be overcome. The wounded US empire struck back in a brutal and costly war on terror. The chaotic and humiliating withdrawal from Kabul in the final days of August 2021, 20 years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, certainly called for critical self-reflection. Had ‘the war on terror’ been worth it? Some voices strongly argued against this approach already in 2001, holding that it could be, as it proved to be, disastrous. Judith Butler was, as we shall see, one of them.74 Another significant voice of dissent was that of the US psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. He saw the Empire’s, or rather the superpower’s, instinctual response to rush into a counterattack as a combined denial and defense of the superpower’s vulnerability, a reaction that proved destructive for others as well as itself. He called this the “superpower syndrome”: At the heart of the superpower syndrome then is the need to eliminate a vulnerability that, as the antithesis of omnipotence, contains the basic contradiction of the syndrome. For vulnerability can never be eliminated, either by a nation or an individual. In seeking its elimination, the superpower finds itself on a psychological treadmill. The idea of vulnerability is intolerable, the fact of it irrefutable. One solution is to maintain an illusion of invulnerability. But the superpower then runs the danger of taking increasingly draconian actions to sustain that illusion. For to do otherwise would be to surrender the cherished status of superpower.75 74 75

Judith Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2006). Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nations Books, 2003), 129.

44

chapter 2

Thus, the illusion of invulnerability leads to a situation in which “both the superpower and the world it acts upon may become dangerously destabilized.”76 This observation calls for bold agency to resist the strong desire for making oneself invulnerable and rather construct a different political community, one that affirms vulnerability as a primary anthropological and ethical value. The superpower’s illusory quest for invulnerability should be replaced by a committed search for a political community in which mutual recognition of a prior precariousness is constitutive. The prevailing political forces undermine life by seeking to control and protect it. This is an operative paradox of the reigning biopolitics. What are the possibilities for precarious politics to resist, and construct viable alternatives to, this dominant biopower turned into a project of death for humans and nonhumans alike? In my reading, Hardt and Negri’s account of the political agency and community of the multitude is helpful in the way it seeks unity in diversity, and upholds the claim that Empire can be overcome from within, exploiting its inherent cracks and weaknesses. It does not, however, with its conceptualization of power, help us detect and develop inherent strengths and values enshrined in the vulnerability of embodied life itself. 3

Bare life

At the airport in Kabul in August 2021, what was abundantly revealed to the world was that not all lives matter; not every human being counts. Some are considered precious, but others are not; they are disposed of, sacrificed, or ignored. Mariam’s child will not be among the officially counted. Her life does not count. This is what Judith Butler so forcefully brings to attention through her neologism ‘grievability’: some human lives are considered worthy of public mourning when lost; others are framed as if their precarity and perishing are insignificant.77 As I shall show in the next chapter, this unjust distribution of grievability at the heart of political crises of agency and community may in fact lead to a new valorization of vulnerability. Before getting there, however, I shall turn to another influential analysis of present conditions of precarity. Can Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s thinking about vita nuda, ‘bare life’, address the conundrums of human vulnerability entailed in the crises of political agency and community? According to Agamben, in the contemporary biopolitical regime, vulnerable life, or bare life, is routinely excluded by inclusion. It is included by law in 76 Lifton, Superpower syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World, 130. 77 Judith Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009).

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

45

spheres where the law is suspended; the law does not account for this particular life. The law (i.e. the ‘sovereign’ or the authorities) makes the law invalid in this or that particular case. Bare life is thus caught in a state of exception, which may become permanent. I shall try to capture this enigmatic logic, as Agamben presents it, searching for interconnections and variations between bare life and the lives of disenfranchised people, the precariat, or the multitude—and their possible participation in political agency and community. Agamben points to an increasing application and thus normalization of various ‘states of exception’ in contemporary politics at both the global and national levels. Seeing the power to impose a state of exception as the decisive prerogative of the sovereign was Carl Schmitt’s most potent and influential contention in his Political Theology. Agamben applies this to the present-day panorama, seeing the infamous U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as perhaps the most striking example.78 The same logic is at work in, for example, the zonas francas, the free trade zones, where the usual work regulations do not apply. More importantly, states of exception rule in the many migrant detention centers in Europe and the U.S.79 These centers often resemble prisons, although the people ‘imprisoned’ within them have usually not broken any laws, and it is unlikely that they will face any legal charges or convictions.80 The human being thus excluded is what Agamben calls the vita nuda: ‘bare life’ or ‘naked life’.81 Classical Greek political thought described this as zoe but not bios—an undetermined life in and for itself rather than a specific, 78 79 80

81

“As Judith Butler has effectively shown, in the detainee at Guantánamo, bare life reaches its maximum indeterminacy.” Giorgio Agamben, State of exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 4. See Mbembe on ‘Europe of the camps’ below. For instance, in 2019, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) reported: “The use of de facto detention, leaving people in limbo without procedural guarantees, has also been reported, including in Hungary, Slovenia, Malta, France and Germany. In Portugal the Concluding Observations of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee Against Torture expressed concern about the excessive use of detention, the lack of individualised assessments, and the detention of children. While Greece showed a decrease in the overall number of people in detention, there has been an increase in the number of asylum applicants in detention.” See: https://ecre.org/asylum -in-europe-2019-human-rights-under-pressure/, accessed 16.09.22. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life, Meridian, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Agamben’s use of this term is inspired by his early work on Simone Weil’s thought, which was the topic of his doctoral dissertation. In Weil’s celebrated article on the concept of force in the Illiad, «L’Iliade ou le poème de la force» (1939), she claims that force has the power to transform a living human being into a thing, to mere flesh, or to a corpse. I am grateful to Andrew J. Thomas for pointing out this background in a personal communication.

46

chapter 2

d­ etermined, qualified (political) life. Zoe is, in a sense, a natural, organic life (cf. zoology) that does not participate in organized co-living in society—what I have framed as the ‘web of relations.’ Life as zoe is without rights. It is naked, bare life. In contrast, bios (cf. biography) refers to life as it is inscribed, named, and assigned rights and duties. It is the life of a citizen or political subject. Following Foucault’s influential turn to biopolitics, Agamben claims that modern societies increasingly use the power of the law to push people’s lives from bios to zoe—from personhood with rights and protection to bare life. Nation-states and international institutions (constituting something akin to Hardt and Negri’s Empire) do this by silently but effectively declaring a permanent state of exception under which it is possible (i.e. lawful) to declare the law invalid. In other words, in shaping political life (bios), the sovereign negates life in its indeterminacy and exposedness (zoe), thus producing ‘bare life.’ This is what happens in a state of exception, and the results are disastrous for those caught in it: “When the state of exception ... becomes the rule, then the juridicopolitical system transforms itself into a killing machine.”82 In this fundamental critique of present-day legal and political arrangements, particularly in the West, again the case of Mariam and her child is revealing. They are refugees but conceived as ‘irregular(ized)’ migrants. They are often called and treated as illegal, and yet the law does not fully apply to them; thus, they lack protection—they are exceptional. These exceptions to the rule of law, which de facto nullify human rights, are commonly justified as a means to uphold the rule of law. Undemocratic measures are used to ‘defend’ democracy and liberal rights from their perceived enemies. According to Agamben, it appears that the whole project of inclusion (regarding rights, democracy, and welfare) is based on exclusion (lawless zones, ‘camps,’ and exceptions). Agamben compares the bare life of a human caught in a permanent state of exception with the ancient, mythic figure of homo sacer. According to Roman law, homo sacer was a person rendered lawless by the law, and thus both within and outside the law simultaneously. Homo sacer was someone who was doubly expelled—excluded from the political, as well as the divine, sphere. Not being part of the divine sphere, such a person cannot be sacrificed.83 Not belonging to the political sphere either, he or she could, however, be freely killed without any sanctions or consequences. In this way, Agamben sees homo sacer as someone banned by the law by being abandoned by it. 82 Agamben, State of exception, 86. 83 John Milbank questions this particular point: “Is it so clear that the homo sacer is not offered as a sacrifice?” John Milbank, Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon, Radical orthodoxy series, (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 92. See my discussion below.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

47

The aim of Agamben’s original revival of this figure is to illustrate an operative paradox. The political disorder of our times is, as we saw, characterized by widespread and normalized declarations of states of exceptions that have fatal consequences for everyone caught within them—the homine sacri, or bare life. This paradoxical exclusion by inclusion undermines the legitimacy of present-day political power in its liberal democratic, rights-oriented form. However, according to Agamben, these dynamics are not new. The concept of rights that emerged during the French revolution, proposed citizens’ rights, not universal human rights, and rights of bios, not zoe. This is still the case, Agamben claimed, “in the contemporary system[...] The so-called inviolable and indisputable human rights are[...]stripped of any kind of protection as soon as it is no longer possible to understand them as rights of citizens of a state.”84 In the globalized context of extreme social inequality—the world of the precariat and increasing ­precarity—it appears that the protection of the rights of some citizens not only coincides with a neglect of the human rights of others (constituting bare life) but presupposes such a negation of those rights. The exclusion and invisibilization of Mariam and her child is routinely legitimized as a necessary defense of the inclusive welfare state. A biopolitical ‘need’ for limiting the influx of possible refugees and migrants trump international human rights such as The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), that explicitly demands that all ratifying states must act in the “best interests of the child.”85 Agamben’s analysis is disturbing. It seems strikingly revealing when considering the situation of Mariam and other irregularized migrants.86 They are indeed caught in a permanent state of exception, appropriately described as “a perpetual period of limbo.”87 They are ‘bare life’ in an unqualified sense— naked, vulnerable, unprotected—since they are delivered in, or abandoned to, a state of utter precarity by the force of the law. The ‘sovereign’ produces the ‘bare life’ of precarious people by not recognizing their inherent and 84 Agamben, Means Without End, 19. 85 See Article 3.1.: “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” http://www.unicef.org. uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/UNCRC_PRESS200910web.pdf, accessed 04.04.2022. 86 See further presentation and analysis of this particular case in Stålsett, “Asylbarn og menneskeverd: Etiske refleksjoner med utgangspunkt i erfaringer fra Helsesenteret for papirløse migranter”; Stålsett, “Radical mercy”; Sturla J. Stålsett, “Diaconia: ampliação da democracia? O caso da Missão Urbana da Igreja na Noruega e os imigrantes em situação irregular “ in Religião, mídia e cultura, ed. Júlio Cézar Adam and Iuri Andréas Reblin (São Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal, 2015). 87 See the Oslo Church City Mission Report: Kirkens Bymisjon, Undocumented Migration.

48

chapter 2

s­ elf-evident right to be formally acknowledged as legitimate members of the human community. Moreover, the system of rights, participation, and welfare for those who are included are framed as secure through this exclusion.88 These are elucidating examples of precarious, ‘naked life’ that is rendered unprotected—unrecognized as life that matters to the law and through the law. Many in the precariat or the multitude are caught in such situations. Agamben describes the asylum camp as a “zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide.”89 A state of exception may commonly operate without the authorities declaring it and—more importantly—without anyone noticing it, believing everything to be ‘in order.’90 However, what I find most disturbing in Agamben’s analysis is the seeming lack of agency, or potential for agency, of the homo sacer—the bare life.91 Is there no way out of the camp? Is there no visible or audible force for resistance, survival, or liberation from this captivity? Moreover, despite affecting so many people living in precarity, the homo sacer, bare life, in Agamben’s account seems totally isolated and solitary. There does not appear to be any potential for community here. Should we, then, rather discard the whole idea of solidarity, common mobilization, resistance, and even radical transformation as illusory and counterproductive? A critical reading of bare life in states of exception might see the talk of rights, justice, and the protection of vulnerable life as nothing but a cover-up, or even a ‘weapon,’ being used against precarious life in the form of zoe.92 A political theology of vulnerability must seek beyond these impasses. As noted, Agamben is clearly influenced by the tradition of Carl Schmitt, according to which the sovereign can be seen as a secularized god. A state of exception is interpreted as a secularized ‘miracle’. Homo sacer, states of exception, and sovereign power as simultaneously inside and outside the law are ideas that can be read as a direct commentary on Schmitt’s 1922 treatise.93 ­Agamben’s 88

The explicit political argument against securing the rights and welfare of undocumented migrants is that this would lead to increased immigration and hence put strains on the welfare system that, in the long run, makes it unsustainable. Exclusion is presented as necessary for the sake of the included. 89 Agamben, State of exception, 26. This, as we shall see in the next chapter, corresponds with what Butler calls “ungrievable lives (...) that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone.” Butler, Frames of war, xix. 90 This parallels the multiple and unnoticeable ways in which, as we shall see, ‘framing’ operates to make lives ‘ungrievable’ in Judith Butler’s words. Butler, Frames of war. 91 This is also Butler’s critique. Judith Butler, The force of nonviolence: The ethical in the political (London: Verso, 2020), 184. 92 Cf. Hardt and Negri’s position on humanitarian work and international conventions that I criticised above. 93 Schmitt, Political theology.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

49

entire work on states of exception and homo sacer comments, in a way, on the opening sentence of Schmitt’s treatise: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”94 By contrast, the second form of political theology, which I have defined as critical reflection on political agency and contemporary political challenges drawing on and developing Christian faith resources to orient and transform praxis, is not a concern for the political philosopher Agamben. However, his thinking lends itself to such a theological investigation as well. It can direct our attention to the political significance of human vulnerability and the ways in which religious resources can be used in that regard. What can, for instance, be said theologically about homo sacer? Is this an image of Christ? Does a Christian imagination encounter bare life in the manger or on the cross? Or can the exceptional words and reality of grace, or gospel, interrupt the death-dealing power of the law and open up the camp—as a de facto state of exception within the state of exception?95 The seemingly aporetic relation between precarious life and the constitution of an inclusive and life-affirming political community in Agamben’s work thus requires further examination. Are there alternative ways of conceiving of this connection without losing the critical edge of his analysis of states of exception that undoubtedly set their deadly mark on contemporary politics? 4 Immunity An alternative to Agamben’s approach in this regard can be found in the work of another Italian political philosopher, Roberto Esposito. Like Agamben, Esposito is influenced by Michel Foucault’s thinking, both in his genealogical approach and in his writings on biopolitics. Unlike Agamben, however, Esposito can be read as advancing an ‘affirmative biopolitics’96 seeking to overcome the death-bringing biopower, or thanatopolitics, that manifested its most visible and destructive form in Nazism. What is the main thrust of this different reading of biopolitics? Drawing on many of the same sources as his colleague Agamben, Roberto Esposito’s thinking takes on a different direction without losing sight of the exclusionary powers at work in the present. Joining the philosophical debate on community 94 Schmitt, Political theology, 36. 95 See chapter 6, below. Cf also Stålsett, “Diaconia: ampliação da democracia?”; Stålsett, “Radical mercy.” 96 See discussion in Thomas F. Tierney, “Toward an Affirmative Biopolitics,” Sociological theory 34, no. 4 (2016).

50

chapter 2

from the 1990s and onwards—an epoch in which ‘all projects of communism have collapsed while all the new individualisms create misery’, according to the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy97—Esposito was as discontent as many others of his continental companions with the neo-communitarian and nostalgic longing for a Gemeinschaft, ‘community’, instead of a modern Gesellschaft, ‘society.’ This ‘Tönnesian’ approach only makes the situation worse, they held, by feeding defensive and exclusive versions of territorial and cultural identity politics worldwide. The main problem of these approaches was the understanding of community proper, or, for Esposito, the understanding of community as a kind of property. Like Agamben, Esposito often starts his philosophical argument by reaching back to an etymological origin. In the case of communitas, it is customary to focus on the prefix ‘com-.’ Community is something around which we gather—something we have in common. This ‘thing’ we have in common is often seen as property—something proper— that we share or concede through a contract or an agreement with other community members. Thus, in this version, there is separateness, property, and individuality at the root of a community. That which is common is secondary to something proper. Understood in this way, community presupposes and reinforces separateness rather than commonality. In an alternative and innovative move, Esposito asks critically about ‘munus,’ which is at the root of community. What did it originally mean? Is it a thing, a substance, or a property that is subsequently shared? Originating from moinus or moenus, ‘munus’ characterizes something social. According to its complex semantic origins, munus can actually have three related meanings, according to Esposito. It can mean a ‘post’ (position or assignment; officium), an ‘obligation’ (onus), or a ‘gift’ (donum).98 These three slightly different meanings indicate that what is ‘in common’ in a community is a debt or obligation rather than property or belonging. The community is not created through an addition, Esposito contends. It is founded on subtraction—a debt or obligation that is common to all.99 Communitas/communis is that which is not proper but stands in opposition to it.100 Community starts where property ends.

97

Roberto Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, Nuova edizione ampliata. ed, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi Filosofia, (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 2006), vii. 98 Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, x–x1. 99 Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, xiii: “Ne risulta che communitas è l’insieme di persone unite non da una ‘proprietà’, ma, appunto, da un dovere o da un debito. Non da un ‘piu’, ma da un ‘meno’…” 100 Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, x: “Communitas/communis è quello che assume senso all’opposizione a ‘propio’. In tutte le lingue neolatine, ma non

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

51

So, if Esposito’s etymological reading is correct, the original meaning of community is something like ‘those who share a debt, a burden or a responsibility.’ How does the third meaning of munus, namely ‘gift,’ fit into this? On this point, Esposito refers to the reception of Mauss’ seminal study by authors such as, most prominently, Derrida, to argue that, in effect, the responsibility, duty, or obligation involved in the first two meanings (post, assignment, and duty/ obligation) reveals the impossibility of a ‘pure’ gift. Any gift imposes a duty on the receiver, either as gratitude or as an obligation to give something back.101 What holds a community together is not common property but non-property, a void, something owed—an obligation toward others. Community is not the result or expression of a surplus, but a deficit. Esposito summarizes his position as follows: The conclusive result of this investigation is the community’s categorical distance from any idea of property collectively owned by a group of individuals—or even from their belonging to a common identity. According to the original value of this concept, what the members of communitas share—this is precisely the complex, but pregnant meaning of munus— is rather the expropriation of their substance, which is not limited to their ‘having,’ but involves and draws on their very ‘being subjects.’ ... This point of view breaks any continuity between what is ‘common’ and what is ‘one’s own’ [proprio], linking it instead to what is not one’s own [improprio]—the figure of the other returns to center stage. If the subject of the community is no longer the ‘same,’ he will necessarily be ‘other.’ He will not be another subject, but a sequence of alterations that never coalesce into a new identity.102 As a result of his etymological investigations, then, Esposito uncovers a striking inversion, or perversion, of the concept of community in the course of history. This concept initially involved an inclusive openness toward difference and outsiders. It has over time been turned upside down and come to mean protection, property, and a defense of likeness against otherness. Interestingly, this defense mechanism is articulated in the oppositional term immunitas. As is clear from the negative prefix im–, immunity appears to be the reverse or

101 102

solo, ‘comune’ (commun, comun, common, kommun) è ciò che non è proprio; che comincia là dove il proprio finisce.” Marcel Mauss, The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (London: Routledge, 1990). Roberto Esposito, “Community and nihilism,” Cosmos and history 5, no. 1 (2009), 26.

52

chapter 2

negation of community. It implies being freed from the obligation of munus: “Those who are immune owe nothing to anyone.”103 Esposito reminds us of the remarkable degree to which the terms immunity and immunization describe key concerns in present-day politics: in medicine, law, and technology, for instance. We can think of diplomatic immunity, protection against data viruses, and political mechanisms against the possibly contagious influence of foreign cultures or religions in a global multicultural world. Immunization governs the order of the day—not least in COVID-19 pandemic times. For Esposito, then, immunization is a key term for understanding not only our political present but also the entire modern paradigm. He claims that this term and phenomenon can explain better the dynamics of modernization than other key interpretative terms, such as ‘secularization,’ ‘legitimation,’ or ‘rationalization.’ This is because “there are echoes in these models, distant with respect to the premodern past, but not of the prospective inversion and the negative power [potenza] of the negative that juxtaposes directly immunitas and communitas.”104 Years before COVID-19, Esposito described immunization as “the symbolic and material linchpin around which our social systems rotate.”105 The link to Foucauldian biopolitics is evident—society must be defended.106 The paradoxical exclusion by inclusion that Agamben described in detail is also clearly related. However, the communitas–immunitas nexus contains, as we shall see, a somewhat different and perhaps more profound ambivalence. Immunity, for Esposito, is both an exemption and a privilege.107 Moreover, it “interrupts the social circuit of reciprocal gift-giving, which is what the earliest and most binding meaning of the term communitas referred to.”108 Here, we can see that immunity, unlike community, is always someone’s property: “Compared to a generality ... immunity is a condition of particularity: whether it refers to an individual or a collective, it is always ‘proper,’ in the specific sense of ‘belonging to someone’ and therefore ‘un-common’ or ‘non-communal’.”109 ‘Immunitary dispositive’, or apparatus, is Esposito’s term for the politics of security and exclusion that Agamben analyses as states of exception. In 103 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi, English ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 5. 104 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The origin and destiny of community, Cultural memory in the present, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010), 12. 105 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 2. 106 Michel Foucault, “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Il faut défendre la société, (New York: Picador, 2003). 107 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 6. 108 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 6. 109 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 6.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

53

Esposito’s work, these mechanisms are potentially no less destructive. Like states of exception, immunization involves an operative paradox—life needs to be restricted, or even negated to be protected. Since life ultimately endangers life itself, it has to negate itself to continue flourishing: “The immunitary process can prolong life, but only by continuously giving it a taste of death.”110 However, in medicine, as well as contemporary politics, this is fraught with risk. Negation can destroy what it sets out to protect. When immunization is the key concern in politics, the measures taken often become exaggerated and turn against themselves. Like autoimmune diseases, the mechanisms and policies of anti-terror and protection of the nation, religion, or culture become more dangerous than the threats against which they are supposed to guard. The cure becomes more damaging than the disease. In such cases, the effort to bring about immunitas destroys communitas; what is supposed to protect life negates it in the very act of protection. Certainly, this is not bound to happen. Immunity can also be a force for life, protecting the community in a positive sense by keeping it open to difference and externality. One of the fundamental ways that vaccination works is that a small dose of the actual disease (or its active ‘ingredient’) is inserted into the body to activate a proper defense mechanism; antibodies can be created that protect the body without entirely excluding that which is ‘other.’ In the classic form of vaccination, exclusion works through inclusion; in other words, exclusion of a threat through the inclusion of a controllable dose of that which is threatening. Esposito finds in pregnancy a prime example of a natural immunity mechanism that accepts and protects both oneself and the other.111 The immunitarian system of the mother is different from that of the fetus, Esposito points out. It nevertheless reacts to the potentially threatening otherness of the child’s immune system in a way that preserves the lives of both the woman and the child. In this way, pregnancy is a paradigmatic case of the immunitary dialectic. Despite being ‘other’ based on all normal immunological criteria, the fetus is actually tolerated by the maternal antibodies. Esposito sees this as “an extraordinary display of autoimmunity.” The mother’s immunity mechanism is “on the one hand directed toward controlling the fetus, on the other hand, it is also controlling itself,” producing “antibodies” that “‘fool’ the self-defense system of the mother,” which thereby “immunizes itself from an excess of immunization.”112 110 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 9. 111 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 169–171. 112 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 169–171. See also A. Kiarina Kordela, “Biopolitics: From supplement to immanence in dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s trilogy: Communitas, Immunitas, Bíos,” Cultural critique 85 (2013).

54

chapter 2

Similarly, Esposito claims that immunitas can work to protect communitas. The community safeguards and affirms life through its debt—the common obligation to that which is other (munus). The immunization mechanism that defends against real threats to the community is held in check. The community is protected and remains open to otherness. Protection is the defense of openness toward others, not an enclosure of the self. This is what we can read as a sort of affirmative biopolitics. In his trilogy Communitas, Immunitas, and Bíos, then, Esposito develops an original political philosophy based on an innovative etymological inquiry into the concept of community.113 At the end of this extensive exploration, it becomes clear that community and immunity cannot be described simplistically as mere contradictions, as they might initially appear. Instead, immunity should be seen as “the internal limit which cuts across community, folding it back on itself in a form that is both constitutive and derivative: immunity constitutes or reconstitutes community precisely by negating it.”114 Esposito describes this as a “negative dialectic” between community and immunity, a “self-contradictory” or “antinomic” relation.115 In my reading, this suggestive political philosophy and its critical interpretative term immunitas present an opportunity to rethink vulnerability as it relates to political agency and community, and to frame this as political theology. What if we see the munus that separates and unites community and immunity as vulnerability? Vulnerability is, as I shall argue in the next chapter, precisely this openness toward the other, involving an offer, an obligation, and a risk. Vulnerability cannot be eliminated; one cannot attempt to eradicate or escape from it without losing something essential to the community itself, since fighting one’s own vulnerability implies turning against oneself and becoming auto-destructive. Community needs to be protected, not from vulnerability but as vulnerable. The immunitarian defense is not set up against the vulnerability or presence of otherness. On the contrary, community-in-vulnerability, through immunization, internalizes otherness in order to preserve life. In a dense passage, Esposito reflects on a wound created by living itself that cannot heal but represents ‘salvation’. This wound is a condition for life’s survival and even flourishing:

113

Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy, Posthumanities, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Esposito, Communitas: The origin and destiny of community; Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. 114 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 9. 115 Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy, 55–56.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

55

If life – which in all its form is the object of immunization – cannot be preserved except by placing something inside it that subtly contradicts it, we must infer that the preservation of life corresponds with a form of restriction that somehow separates it from itself. Its salvation thus depends on a wound that cannot heal because the wound is created by life itself. For life to remain as such, it must submit itself to an alien force that, if not entirely hostile, at least inhibits its development. It must incorporate a fragment of the nothingness that it seeks to prevent, simply by deferring it.116 This is relevant to, and may in fact blur, the distinction that I have already introduced between vulnerability and woundedness. Is there, after all, something to benefit from being wounded? It also calls for a more explicitly theological exploration: how can there be salvation in a wound? I shall have to return to these questions at a later stage of this inquiry. 5 Necropolitics Although their works in various ways reflect critical solidarity with the disenfranchised, Standing, Hardt and Negri, Agamben, and Esposito have not really addressed decolonization. This clearly is a limitation. Our precarious times cannot be analyzed or understood without this critical perspective from ‘the other side.’ It is by no means easy. As Achille Mbembe, a leading voice in the global discourse on post/decolonization, writes: “As a general rule, the experience of the Other, or the problem of the ‘I’ of others and human beings we perceive as foreign to us, has almost always posed virtually insurmountable difficulties to the Western philosophical and political tradition.”117 Mbembe is a Cameroonian scholar working out of South Africa. In his early, groundbreaking work On the Postcolony, he not only pointed out the failure to consider postcolonial realities in Africa, but also claimed that when postcolonial African reality does appear in Western thought, it is always seen as negative and lacking in itself: African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes 116 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 8. 117 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 2.

56

chapter 2

properly part of “human nature.” Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind.118 What is this ‘other side’ characterized by lack or mere nothingness, which Mbembe named ‘the postcolony’? The term identifies a particular historical process—the trajectory of societies emerging from the violent experience of colonization. The postcolonial world is “chaotically pluralistic.” In terms of political agency in the postcolony, Mbembe identifies a “distinctive style of political improvisation,” characterized by excess and a lack of proportion, and a noticeable multiplication, transformation, and circulation of identities. The space for such agency is not divided into distinct spheres of colonizers and colonized but is characterized by intertwined, simultaneous, and complex interactions.119 Mbembe sees the postcolonial as pervasively violent, consisting of a “series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitutes a distinctive regime of violence.”120 This violent exercise of power by colonizers over the colonized Mbembe calls commandement—“the authoritarian modality par excellence.” The term encapsulates images, structures, and instruments of power and coercion. Mbembe focuses on the agents who carry out these acts of domination and compulsion, exploring the relationship between those who command and those who are supposed to obey.121 In this enactment of colonial rule, which is still characteristic of most postcolonial African societies, he identifies forces and mechanisms that violently undermine agency and pervert community. As we shall see, they resemble the dynamics encountered in Agamben’s and Esposito’s works. First, commandement was based on a régime d’exception; it departed from the common law.122 The power to install a state of emergency was always the colonizers’ sovereign prerogative. From this perspective, colonization appears as a permanent state of exception. Colonies are zones of war and disorder in which the state of exception is legitimized as operating in the service of civilization. This, in effect, makes the colony the site of a state of exception par 118 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 1. 119 Mbembe finds James Scott’s approach in Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990) too simplistically dichotomic on this point, see Mbembe, On the Postcolony, note 15, 135. 120 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 102. 121 Mbembé, On the postcolony, note 8, 134. 122 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 29.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

57

excellence. Its death-bringing practices continue to reign in the postcolonial zones of abandonment or, as Butler would say, ungrievability; in the camps, prisons, war zones, or ghettos of the undesirable, or (using another of Mbembe’s expressions) the ‘disposable.’ These populations are dealt with through an effective form of biopolitics—spatial confinements that make it impossible for people to move. New ‘landscapes of incarceration’ are created: prisons, islands, and camps. This politics represents, for Mbembe, a politics of abandonment and a general abdication of responsibility for the lives and welfare of people who are considered dispensable. Today, this political regime goes further than the original colonial commandement. It is, in Mbembe’s opinion, a new version of biopolitics—the exercise of political power to decide who will live and who will be left to die (i.e. “make live and let die,” as it was initially phrased by Foucault).123 However, according to Mbembe, its concretization in postcolonial societies should rather be called necropolitics (a politics of death-dealing). Importantly, race and relationality play a vital role in this rule of lawlessness and the administration of death. The postcolonial necropolitical continuation of commandement is made possible through the “racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native.”124 Shedding the responsibility or burden of relating to the other reminds us of munus, which is central to both community and immunity. Significantly, then, the second characteristic of the exercise of commandement that Mbembe describes is “a regime of privileges and immunities.”125 The companies designated by the colonizing powers as the chosen vehicles of colonization were given vast powers through privileges and exemptions at the time.126 From the start, the immunitary logic was entangled with colonial rule in various ways. In his recent work, indebted to his reading and contemporary retrieval of Frantz Fanon’s thought, Mbembe also draws on the Platonic concept of pharmakon: 123 124

Foucault et al, “Society must be defended.” Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Politiques de l’inimitié, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 77. 125 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 30. 126 Two more dynamics in the exercise of the colonial rule highlighted by Mbembe are the lack of distinction between ruling and civilizing; and the cynical circularity of this sovereign rule: “The institutions with which it equipped itself, the procedures that it invented, the techniques that it employed, and the knowledge on which it rested were not deployed to attain any particular public good. Their primary purpose was absolute submission. The objective of this sort of sovereignty was that people obey. In this sense, and beyond ideological justifications, colonial sovereignty was circular,” Mbembé, On the postcolony, 31–32.

58

chapter 2

“The idea of a medication that acts at once as remedy and poison.”127 In particular, nowadays, this poisonous medication is an instrument of war, in its many configurations as conquest, occupation, terror, and counterinsurgency. We are reminded of Esposito’s auto-immune disease. A decolonial perspective on global precarity can help us see how the paradoxical intertwining of communitas and immunitas works in radically diverse ways for the colonizers and the colonized. It shows the constant necessity of the ‘other’ perspective, from the ‘underside of history,’128 or even more adequately, from the perspective of the enslaved person.129 The figure of the slave is covered up, rendered insignificant, and left to die once more, Mbembe points out. This perspective is essential when assessing present configurations of political agency and the political community. Hence, it will prove decisive for developing a political theology of vulnerability. We encounter a striking example of its critical importance in what Mbembe sees as ‘negative messianism’ that is operative today.130 As we have seen, Mbembe denounces the global political structures of confinement and abandonment. Strategies of “contraction, containment and enclosure” dominate. With chilling accuracy Mbembe describes borders as having become practically omnipresent, as a result of the massive investments in them, their fortifications, and technological sophistication. Walls, gates, and enclaves (“borderization”)—what is this, Mbembe asks, if not “the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces to impassable places for certain classes of populations?”131 These ‘classes of populations,’ and the human bodies deemed in excess, superfluous, disposable, unwanted, illegal, and dispensable, are subject to a “different matrix of rule.” This is the rule of biopower. Their lives are—in Agambian language—pushed from bios to zoe (bare life) and excluded through inclusion in permanent camps in which states of exception rule. Nevertheless, Mbembe remarks, these people still pose a ‘problem’; they take up 127 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2; 117–155. 128 See Gustavo Gutiérrez, La fuerza histórica de los pobres (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1982). 129 “The slave is a figure that political thought has investigated at least since Aristotle,” notes Frédéric Gros. In the beginning of Politics Aristotle defines the slave as “the property of another, a ‘living’ commodity (ktêma empsukhon), an executant,” Frédéric Gros and David Fernbach, Disobey! A guide to ethical resistance (London, New York: Verso, 2020), 28. 130 Lecture held at Virginia University 26th of September, 2017, Achille Mbembé, Negative messianism in the age of animism, University of Virginaia Guest Lectures (https://ihgc.as. virginia.edu/achille-mbembe-negative-messianism-age-animism: UVA Arts & Sciences Digital Communications, 2017). 131 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 99.

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

59

space. They are here, but they do not belong; they are not ‘us.’ So, the question is: How do ‘we’ get rid of ‘them’? “What to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our own reproduction, but whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own existence”?132 From Apartheid to Gaza, from Cox’s Bazar to Moria and a ‘Europe of camps,’ this continues to be the cynical question. It is, to Mbembe, the question of necropolitics. Implied in this concern, he sees several ‘quasi-metaphysical dispositions’ at work, preparing the way for a particular kind of messianism, which he calls a ‘casino-messianism.’133 Such a messianism is particularly prevalent in the so-called ‘prosperity theologies’ so strikingly and ironically influential in the global south at present.134 It is a negative messianism that, contrary to the original messianic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, is not interested in slaves or the abolition of slavery. At this point, Mbembe takes a step back to consider the messianic tradition. Where does the full force of this term initially come from? Its core is redemption and the possibility of deliverance. The messianic event is an event of liberation and a promise of freedom that is yet to come. The deliverance is eschatological, meaning that it situates its adherents in a state of anticipation. What is crucial to messianism, though, is that, based on its Judaic roots, it concerns the redemption of the slave. This is generally forgotten and remarkably absent in negative messianism, according to Mbembe. The slave is the figure par excellence of Messianic redemption. Even at the collective level, this holds true. When, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the chosen nation is to be redeemed, it is as a people that has been subjected to slavery. The main message in this originary messianism is that the slave is no longer the property of the master but the property of God. God gives value to the enslaved person through purchase by paying a price. According to influential versions of the Christian adoption and adaptation of messianic soteriology, this price is understood as being Christ’s blood, which is the ransom that frees the slave. For 132 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 97. See also Mbembé, Negative messianism. 133 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 105. 134 See e.g. analyses of the Brazilian neopentecostal church Igreja Universal Reino de Deus in Berge Furre, “Crossing boundaries: The ‘universal church’ and the spirit of globalization,” in Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age, ed. Sturla J. Stålsett (London: SCM Press, 2006); Anders Ruuth, Igreja Universal Reino de Deus. Gudsrikets Universella Kyrka - en brasiliansk kyrkobildning, vol. 54, Bibliotheca theologiae practicae, Kyrkovetenskapelige studier, (Stockholm: Almquist & Wicksell International, 1995), and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Offering On-Time Deliverance: The Pathos of Neo-Pentecostalism and the Spirits of Gloobalization,” in Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age, ed. Sturla J. Stålsett (London: SCM Press, 2006). See also Edir Macedo, O Perfeito Sacrifício: o significado espiritual dos dízimos e ofertas (Rio de Janeiro: Universal, 2001).

60

chapter 2

the enslaved person, however, the deliverance is gratuitous. It has a price, but it is gratuitous, because the deliverance is something Jesus does freely. Mbembe admits he may sound like a pious preacher at this point,135 and yet his interpretation is harshly critical. The paradoxical transactions that lie at the heart of the messianic tradition are for the liberation of enslaved people. Negative messianism is the exact opposite: it promises rescue from the burden of the slave through sacrificial expiation. The blood being spilled is not really the blood of Christ, but the blood of the slaves, the ‘disposable’ people. Thus, for Mbembe, when it has not forfeited the idea of redemption altogether, this form of contemporary messianism comes down to a “crude belief in the expiatory power of sacrificial death.” Such sacrificial cynicism is, he insists, a belief in necropower. It worships the saving power of bloodshed. Erecting walls or engaging in genocidal colonialism, necropower is essentially waging a war against relations. The will to sever relations subjugates the will to repair broken relations. The will to kill takes precedence over the will to care. It expresses the perverse freedom of not having to care, and of not being bound to relate to the enslaved persons, who are rendered superfluous and treated as the homine sacri of today. It is freedom from responsibility and from debt in terms of munus. It is immunization by sacrificing the other. By upholding the figure of the slave, Mbembe forcefully reestablishes the relationship between emancipation and the caring and repairing of what has been broken. He does this by asserting that the affiliation that is its very essence expresses debt, ‘munus,’ or, in my rendering, vulnerability. Negative messianism is a necropolitical theology that, according to Mbembe, is on the rise today. It is notable that this analysis of the conditions for political agency in postcolonial societies leads the Cameroonian scholar of critical theory to engage in theological reflection. The reigning negative messianism that Mbembe dissects shows the relevance of, and is a profound challenge to, political theology. Such a theology has to counter-hegemonically reclaim the messianic tradition and territory by resituating the liberation of the enslaved as its core theme and purpose. Hence, a political theology of vulnerability must adopt the perspective of the enslaved when it engages political practice and religious faith.136 135 Mbembé, Negative messianism. 136 In Race and Political Theology (2012), Vincent Lloyd notes that “there has been strikingly little discussion of race and political theology. Perhaps the reason is that race seems especially restricted to a particular historical and cultural context; theology, of course, is rather misleadingly supposed to be in some sense universal. Further, the religious ideas most often discussed in the context of political theology, God’s attributes and workings in the world, seem independent of racial considerations (with the notable exception of the religious ideas of certain new religious movements and, of course, black theology). Similarly,

Precarity: Political Agency and Community in Crisis

61

­ bembe’s prophetic critique from a postcolonial vantage point is indispensM able for such an endeavor: “If ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we find a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude?”137 6 Precarity The building of a political community for the just flourishing of life amid precarity encounters many obstacles. Struggles for recognition, representation, and redistribution of goods are crucial for the precariat. The effectiveness of such struggles is impeded by self-stigmatization and stigmatization by others, internal tensions, and a lack of mutual trust among groups that are all crushed and excluded, albeit in different ways. A solid platform for agency in and from a self-asserting vulnerability is wanting. The uncoordinated and pluriform community of the Multitude may draw strength from this very diversity to oppose the globalizing Empire. However, its political agency, according to Hardt and Negri, is diffuse, with no clear direction or aim. It is also in danger of simply reflecting the pure display of power it is confronting and thus, ultimately, failing to represent an alternative approach to power—one that acts ‘vulnerably’. In permanent states of exception, vulnerable life is trapped and stripped of dignity and autonomy through exclusion by inclusion. Agamben’s influential and astute analysis of these devastating dynamics left limited room for any effectual agency or hopeful alternative for those living in precarity—humans and nonhumans alike. Are resistance and freedom unattainable for a bare, sacred life? Is it impossible to establish a web of just relations for the protection and promotion of life in opposition to present-day sovereignty? There may be an opening, perhaps a promise, in a surprising constituent core of community—the openness and indebtedness of the ‘munus.’ Roberto Esposito’s innovative interpretation of the life-protecting nexus between community and immunity makes it possible to see political community as emerging from a shared vulnerability. Protecting vulnerable conviviality means being open to the other rather than being enclosed in and for oneself or one’s property.138 Such c­ onviviality, however, can never overlook the brutal colonizing display of it is hard to imagine a racial politics in any sort of generic sense; racial politics has to do more with political practice than political theory.” Lloyd, Race and Political Theology, 6. 137 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 3. 138 ‘Conviviality’ has become a productive concept in diaconal theory and practice, see Tony Addy, Seeking conviviality. Re-forming community diaconia in Europe, Department for mission and development., The Lutheran World Federation (Geneva: The Lutheran World Federation, 2013).

62

chapter 2

force as ‘commandement.’ A decolonizing, intersectional approach to enhancing both personal and planetary freedom in fragility is imperative. Political agency and community in the postcolony will be characterized by what Chantal Mouffe has called the ‘contingent and precarious’ identity of a multiple, contradictory oppressed subject,139 that can only affirm itself in and from ‘other’ spaces,140 exploring and exploiting cracks in the necropolitical system of colonization. These cracks, I shall argue, present an opportunity to mobilize the vulnerable force present in seemingly chaotic and surprising forms of everyday resistance. To dismantle the structures of sacrificial colonialism, its negative messianism, which performs sacrifices instead of salvations of enslaved people, must be demolished. This is a task for a political theology of vulnerability. We must therefore turn from the (im-)possibilities and impasses of present-day politics of precarity to a revaluation of human precariousness. 139 See her “Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Polities”, in J.Butler and J.W Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, (London: Routledge, 1992) 372, quoted from Althaus-Reid, Indecent theology, 169. 140 See Foucault’s application of the originally medical notion of ‘heterotopia’ in a 1967 lecture that was not published until 1984, Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Spaces of visual culture (2006); Robert J. Topinka, “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces,” Foucault studies 9, no. 9 (2010). See also Trygve Wyller (ed.), Heterotopic citizen: New research on religious work for the disadvantaged, vol. 4, Research in Contemporary Religion, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009). Kevin Hetherington, The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering (London; New York: Routledge, 1997); Gyrid Kristine Gunnes, “Our Lady of the heterotopia: An empirical theological investigation of heterotopic aspects of the Church of Our Lady, Trondheim,” Diaconia 8, no. 1 (2017).

Chapter 3

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability In precarious times, there is a need for a new take on vulnerability. Vulnerability is feared and despised in the late modern, neo- or postliberal world.1 Standard definitions focus mainly on risks and hazards, suggesting means of measuring and mitigating them across disciplines and policy areas. It is common to identify ‘vulnerable groups’ with the aim of reducing their vulnerability.2 Unsurprisingly, then, vulnerability is – often implicitly rather than openly – portrayed as an object of contempt, although this is often disguised or embellished in discourses on care and protection.3 In fact, protecting individuals, groups, and populations from their vulnerability is often used to justify the use of control, discipline, and power. This is a main ingredient of biopolitics. A different approach, at first glance opposing this conventional understanding, has emerged in the field of (more or less) psychological self-help literature. According to this literature, the solution to personal uneasiness and insecurity is to embrace vulnerability and cultivate it as an individual virtue.4 As feminist philosopher Ewa Polowska Ziarek rightly points out, however, these two dominant discourses on vulnerability—“the risk management of populations and the self-management of the liberal subject”5—actually complement and reinforce each other. Hence, a more critical and political approach is necessary. In fact, such a radical alternative to these two dominant discourses on vulnerability has been evident for some time within different fields of research and scholarly discourse. Judith Butler’s contribution has been decisive, and I shall engage with her proposals here. However, she is not the only contributor to this rethinking, nor was she the first.6 Vulnerability studies now 1 Daniel Bedford, “Introduction: Vulnerability refigured,” in Embracing vulnerability. The challenges and implications for law, ed. Daniel Bedford and Jonathan Herring (London & New York: Routledge, 2020). 2 See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerability, accessed 01.02.22. 3 Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47–48. 4 See, e.g. Brené Brown, Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead (London: Penguin Life, 2015). 5 Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action,” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013), 82; 67–8. 6 See e.g. Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Goodin’s consequentialist approach highlights © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_004

64

chapter 3

c­ onstitute an established and broadly interdisciplinary field, including medicine, psychology, anthropology, law, bioethics, political theory, philosophy, and theology. Despite differences, a common point of departure across disciplines is a critique of the standard view of vulnerability. Taking different approaches, vulnerability studies have set out to counter what has been called the ‘illusion of liberal subjectivity’ to which the ‘vulnerable other’ is a threat.7 This transition to a reappraisal of an intrinsic value of human vulnerability is, I hope to show, highly relevant to a political theology that seeks to inspire and guide political action for justice and flourishing life in present contexts of precarity, engaging with religious resources critically and constructively for that purpose. In this chapter, then, I shall present and discuss this reconceptualization of vulnerability, drawing on relevant insights from recent works in these diverse research fields. The critical nerve in my own sketch of an anatomy of vulnerability emerging through these ponderings will be to maintain the paradoxes and complexities of human experiences of vulnerability at the same time as defending the surprising simplicity and yet provocative boldness of an affirmative view: Vulnerability constitutes life—that’s how and why it matters for political agency and community. Looking into the potential of this affirmative view must avoid repeating the history of repression of negativity adopting a too harmonious concept of vulnerability. Right from the start, we must raise the most provocative question for anyone aiming to affirm something valuable in vulnerability: who wants to be vulnerable? 1 Provocation It is common to see human vulnerability as a problem.8 Being vulnerable is understood as a fault, a shortcoming, and a weakness to be reduced as much as possible. Ideally, it should be eliminated. There are many rationales for this view. Vicissitudes of vulnerability are easy to identify. Words such as fragility, precariousness, and injurability all bring to mind the limits of our self-­control the value of vulnerability for ethics but his approach does not go far enough in acknowledging the ethical resources inherent in the vulnerable condition itself. See my discussion in Sturla J. Stålsett, “Naming Vulnerability: A Diaconal Dilemma of Designation,” Diaconia 11, no. 2 (2020). 7 See Bedford. 8 See, e.g., Commonwealth Secretariat Consultative Group on the Special Needs of Small States, Vulnerability: Small states in the global society: Report of a Commonwealth consultative group (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1985); Yosef Sheffi, The resilient enterprise: Overcoming vulnerability for competitive advantage (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005).

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

65

and self-mastery. Vulnerability can express a fundamental passivity in our being in the world, undermining our potential or actual agency. We are exposed to others, both people and conditions. We can be forced. We can be hurt. We can get killed. Vulnerability is an opportunity for offense, providing the opening for violence. A skeptical attitude toward any affirmative talk of vulnerability is understandable. Such talk could imply the idealization of other people’s suffering. It could serve to reify some groups or individuals as permanently in an inferior position and be a way to naturalize or essentialize, and thus cover up, historical and intended power asymmetries. It can increase the stigmatization of certain groups or individuals. It can strengthen processes of victimization, according to which people ‘become’ what is done to them. For these reasons, many prefer to avoid the concept of ‘victims’ and speak instead of ‘survivors,’ thus de-emphasizing or circumscribing the phenomenon of human vulnerability.9 Human vulnerability is in itself a provocation. It is customarily associated with weakness, which is negatively charged. Few people would like to be seen as weak. Deep in the human heart, there is a fear that weakness is contagious. Resistance to bodily vulnerability, understood as weakness, can hence be a form of self-defense. At times, the exposed vulnerability of people in itself provokes inexplicable and deplorable violence. The Nobel Peace Prize 2018, awarded to Congolese medical doctor Denis Mukwege and Yezidi human rights activist Nadia Murad, targeted gender-based violence. It directed the world’s attention to abhorrent aggression targeting exposed vulnerability. In the political contexts where Mukwege and Murad have defended the dignity of life, women’s bodies are despised, harassed, and maltreated in ways that can only be described as despicable acts of sadism. It is as if the very fact of these women’s vulnerability excites the irrational aggression of young male warriors, letting loose starkly malign fear and self-contempt. A much less violent but still revealing case of how exposed vulnerability can be experienced as provocative is the anger many express toward precarious people who beg in the streets of wealthy cities in Europe. The increase in such practices caused by the economic crisis in Southern Europe and the progressive opening of European Union (EU) borders led to heated public 9 I discuss victimisation and ‘victim’ in Sturla J. Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified. A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino, vol. 127, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, (Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2003), 299-304; 579-80,suggesting that the emergence of political and liberation theologies in the late twentieth century can be seen as a ‘victimological turn’ in theology.

66

chapter 3

debates in many countries. In Norway, municipalities were given the authority to ban such practices in their territories. In the many discussions about concrete proposals for regulations and laws, the expression ‘aggressive begging’ was routinely used. This expression suggests that using the force of law against a poor person asking for help is a means to protect ‘society’ from the attack or threat of the beggar. Precarious people are thus construed as ‘violent.’ Apart from the blatant ‘blaming the victim’ aspect of this discourse, it does, I suggest, also illustrate a certain dis-ease unleashed in many secure and relatively well-off citizens when exposed to fellow human beings’ glaring vulnerability. When asymmetries of power between the underprivileged and the overprivileged become too obvious, the situation can be experienced as parodoxically provocative for those on the strong and safe side of the encounter. It is, however, not only the vulnerability of others that can be provocative. Our own precariousness is deeply disturbing, too. The way we depend on others to sustain our lives can be very disturbing. We know from experience that susceptibility to another person’s presence and caring touch is an absolute condition for life. No one can survive without it. This exposure and dependence of the body simultaneously draw our attention to the limits of our lives. It is a constant reminder of physical perishability and death, loss, and grief. Most humans fear these realities of life, and contemporary culture is building ever stronger, yet illusory, defenses against them. In this way, too, vulnerability is a provocation. It provokes our self-defense against death. The problem is, however, that this struggle against the facts and forces of death cannot succeed. We know too well that vulnerability is an inescapable fact of human life. Paradoxically, in a sense only the dead are invulnerable.10 Resistance to vulnerability struggles to preserve life, but if only death promises complete invulnerability, such resistance could ultimately express a death drive. This continuous but futile fight against the insuperable vulnerability in one’s own life and bodily existence may ultimately lead to violence and exclusion, both toward oneself and toward others. Self-contempt and contempt of others are related. Both are likely to emerge from fear of or flight from one’s own vulnerability. “We often violate the vulnerability of others and ourselves,” says feminist theologian Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, “in an attempt to scapegoat, project, and protect ourselves from our own vulnerability to suffering.”11

10 11

Even this is debatable. It could reasonably be argued that dead persons are indeed vulnerable to relational harm, such as defamation, disrespect, and oblivion. Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 37.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

67

At the collective level, in politics, the use of power to eliminate one’s own vulnerability can have even more disastrous consequences, as exemplified in what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called the ‘superpower syndrome:’ As we saw, finding the idea of vulnerability intolerable yet irrefutable, the superpower seeks to resolve the issue with an illusion of invulnerability that may demand “increasingly draconian actions” to be maintained.12 Etymologically, ‘pro vocare’ means ‘calling forth’ or being called. Provocation demands a reaction and calls for action. The provocation of vulnerability can thus be seen as a call. It summons us to respond and holds us responsible. This approach was central to Knud E. Løgstrup’s theological account of the ethical demand.13 More influentially, such a calling was at the core of Emmanuel Levinas’ reflections on perceiving the face of the Other and the personal address implied in this encounter.14 The presence of the Other, Levinas says, is in itself an appeal. Even stronger, it is something ‘irrefutable’, something close to a command, an order—a provocation—to take responsibility for the well-being of the Other.15 As we shall see, Judith Butler’s analysis of ‘precarious life’, clearly influenced by Levinas, also seeks to elucidate how the others’ bodily vulnerability expresses both an asymmetry and an interdependency that demands a response from individuals and communities alike. In human life, which is always life-withothers (‘conviviality’), no one can really escape this responsibility. Each person is bound to deal with his or her own vulnerability and that of others. Turning away and denying this responsibility would also be a response. Situating, and even radicalizing, Levinas from a non-Eurocentric, de-colonial position, Enrique Dussel underscores the historically and geo-politically situated alterity of the Other. The provocation as a call to responsibility and ethical-political action comes from what he indebted to Levinas calls the ”Exteriority of the victims”, which, to him, “subsumes (negating and assuming) and transforms Totality”, that is, the present-day ethical and political

12 13 14 15

Robert Jay Lifton, Superpower syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nations Books, 2003). K. E. Løgstrup, The Ethical demand (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). Danish original first published in 1956. See, e.g. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). It is theologically interesting that Levinas calls this responsibility ‘diaconia’, referring to the Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53. Emmanuel Lévinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), 53.

68

chapter 3

(dis-)order of exclusion and violence.16 Therefore, from this vantage point, it is an ethical task to reconsider and revaluate vulnerability so that it is neither covered up nor annihilated. Vulnerability provokes us to take responsibility and calls us to action. It inevitably involves risk, and yet this risk-taking seems in certain ways to be necessary for the flourishing of life.17 If so, I ask, could such a reconceptualization of vulnerability be seen as a first building block of the political community and a key ingredient in political agency? This could be a revolutionizing perspective, boldly refuting the conventional view that vulnerability is merely an unfortunate deficiency that should be reduced or removed. What could provoke such a radical reformulation? 2 Grievability The terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001, were also extremely provocative, of course. They produced shock, lamentation, grief, and fear. This experience prompted a new phase in Judith Butler’s work. “How should we understand and react to such appalling acts of cruelty?” she asked. What ethical responsibilities do they call for? What politics might they produce? From this ground zero, Butler began to explore the phenomena of precariousness and vulnerability as a new basis of her political philosophy. In her own rendering, this process originated in a loss that led to a heightened awareness of being vulnerable: “If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another?”18 Butler asks what we can learn from the heightened awareness of vulnerability caused by these shocking attacks. How can our politics be transformed if 16

17

18

Enrique Dussel, Etica de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (Madrid, México D.F.: Editorial Trotta, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Itztapalapa (UAM-I), Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), 1998), 412, “Desde la Exterioridad de las víctimas la Totalidad es subsumida (negada y asumida) y transformada,” my translation. Hence, it is not unrelated to but also different from Ulrich Beck’s analyses of our time as determined by risk, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Theory, culture & society, (London: Sage, 1992); Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization?, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). It also calls for something very different from the standard calls and strategies for ‘risk-management.’ Judith Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2006), 30.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

69

we make a sense of injurability point of departure for political life?19 Can loss and grief provide new alternative insights through which we might grasp vulnerability differently? Could this eventually motivate the creation of a new sense of community between people and shed light on how groups and nations are bound to one another? Thus seeking “a political reason for reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss,” 20 Butler explores new terrain. This exploration is, I contend, of great value for political theology. I have already introduced Butler’s key analytical concept for probing the shared but uneven distribution of vulnerability, her creative neologism, “grievability.” A grievable life is a life that is considered worthy of being mourned, missed, and grieved for: Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as ‘grievable.’21 Only the life recognized as a life that is worth mourning over when it is lost really counts as human life in today’s world, Butler claims. Thus, situating herself on the ashes of many global ground zeros, she poses profound anthropological, ethical and political questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? What makes for a grievable life?”22 “Grievability,” writes Ingrid Cyfer in her assessment of Butler’s work: is an ethical ideal for politics, a normative criterion that is at once epistemological, ethical, and political; epistemological, because it defines lives which are livable; ethical, because it distinguishes recognizable lives from unrecognizable ones; and political, because the exclusion from the frames of intelligibility and recognizability is political.23

19 Butler, Precarious life, xi–xii. 20 Butler, Precarious life, 20. 21 Butler, Precarious life, 32. 22 Butler, Precarious life, 20. 23 Ingrid Cyfer, “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability,” Digithum, no. 23 (2019), 8.

70

chapter 3

The unjust distribution of grievability is profoundly political. Some people and groups are marked as not worthy of mourning over. They are rendered ‘ungrievable’—like the precariat, the multitude, ‘bare life’, and the disposable people caught in post-colonial zones of abandonment. Or, like Mariam and her child. This often happens through mechanisms that work in hidden ways. Butler draws attention to how a story is told and how an incident, accident, war, or loss of human life is narrated, reported, and contextualized. Thus, a human being’s status in its precarious life condition is determined by how it is ‘framed,’ for instance, by the media. To ‘be framed’, we should recall, does not only mean to be ‘put into a frame’ (i.e. contextualized). It also describes the experience of being falsely made responsible for or guilty of something. Framing is thus about the power of the media, but even more so, the power of politics. Framing grievability is an exercise of power, for it determines what life we should care about, what lives we are summoned to take care of, and (not least) which life we are ‘permitted’ to or even admonished to neglect. Ungrievable lives are already neglected from the outset, Butler observes: Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed.24 Civilian victims on the enemy side of a war are a telling example. ‘Our’ side would present them as unavoidable losses, constructing them as already lost before they were killed. Civilian victims in Afghanistan or Iraq rarely receive memorials or obituaries in Western newspapers. In public discourse, they have neither names nor faces. In contrast, the US victims of terrorism after September 11, 2001, received great personal and profoundly emotional attention, and their names were publicly known. Butler perceives this strategic and political distribution of grievability as nothing less than a violent unmaking or elimination of the reality of the Other.25 She seeks to resist these processes by making them visible.26 To reveal these mechanisms, we must break dominant forms of representation so that

24 Judith Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), xix. 25 Butler, Precarious life, 33–34. 26 Butler, Frames of war, xix.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

71

the precarious vulnerability of life can be perceived, she maintains. This may prepare the ground for alternative ethical and political action.27 A framework determines what is ultimately perceived as real: “The frame does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality.”28 Importantly, though, framing is not destiny, and it is not static or an ‘essence.’ Frames are constructed and can be deconstructed and reconstructed. Herein lies the possibility of resistance and liberation. Reframing is both possible and necessary. Butler asks, “Do we apprehend the precariousness of life through the frames available to us, and is our task to try to install new frames that would enhance the possibility of that recognition?”29 We are, in other words, confronted with an ethical and political responsibility, but also an opportunity. Responsibility involves uncovering and rejecting the framing that constructs certain lives as unmournable, in ways that make their vulnerability neither recognized nor protected. This powerful account of how precarious lives are caught in a frame of invisibility and unrecognizability, so that they are de facto left as already dead without that being cause for mourning, resembles as we can see Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of ‘bare life.’ However, Butler faults Agamben, as I did, for portraying vulnerable people as lacking agency: “Those amassed along the borders of Europe are not precisely what political philosopher Giorgio Agamben referred to as ‘bare life’—that is to say, we do not recognize their suffering by further depriving them of all capacity.”30 The possibility of political agency in precarity is the heart of the matter. Grievability is in my assessment a powerful new concept. In a highly creative and precise way it interlinks affection, recognition, and embodiment. Thus it provides us also with an ethical criterion for upholding the dignity of each human life. Moreover, not only the human but also the nonhuman life can be, and should be mourned when lost.31 In a response to Catherine Keller’s 27 Butler, Precarious life, xviii. Similarly, Ewa Ziarek advocates the “need to diagnose and resist the systematic and politically motivated distribution of disrespect, which, as we have seen, deprives the other not only of her political status as a person, but also of her ethical significance as the source of obligation.” Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 77. 28 Butler, Frames of war, xiii. 29 Butler, Frames of war, 12. 30 Butler, Judith Butler, The force of nonviolence: The ethical in the political (London: Verso, 2020), 184. 31 There is a burgeoning literature on ‘ecological grief’, see for instance, Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, Mourning nature: Hope at the heart of ecological loss and grief (Chicago,

72

chapter 3

development of a political theology of the earth that includes the possibility of a democracy involving the nonhuman, I have in an earlier work applied Butler’s grievability-criterion to affirm the political inclusion of the nonhuman which is acutely necessary in the Anthropocene.32 Grievability makes exposed vulnerability a demand for justice. 3 Differentiation We are particularly reminded of our vulnerability when it is not protected, such as when we are confronted with a sudden terrorist attack, an unexpected accident, a global pandemic, or, as is the case for hundreds of millions around the globe, in the experience of persistent poverty and exclusion. However, vulnerability does not arise only in such instances. It is already there, prior to any impact upon us, and inherent in us before we can perceive what is being addressed to us or what surrounds us: “The body is a social phenomenon, vulnerable by definition.”33 This corporeal vulnerability is the very premise that makes us feel or grasp anything at all. Vulnerability is a prior susceptibility. Butler understands humans as fundamentally relational and performative. Our beings are always being-in-relation. We are summoned, addressed, and cared for (or not) before we act. Thus, our fundamental performativity is both passive and active. Put differently, our agency relies on and emerges from our receptivity and susceptibility. This susceptibility is the condition that makes it possible for a person to become who he or she ‘is’ through what he or she Illinois: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); Maria Ojala et al, “Anxiety, worry, and grief in a time of environmental and climate crisis: A narrative review,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46 (2021); Hannah Comtesse et al, “Ecological grief as a response to environmental change: A mental health risk or functional response?,” Int J Environ Res Public Health 18, no. 2 (2021). 32 Sturla J. Stålsett, “Non/Human: Overcoming the fatal separation, without diffusing the crucial distinction. A response to Catherine Keller,” Studia Theologica 69, no. 1 (2015), see Catherine Keller, “A democracy of fellow creatures: feminist theology and planetary entanglement,” Studia theologica (2015), and Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018). However, I do propose a distinction between the grievability of humans and that of nonhumans. Human life should never be considered ungrievable, but in the differentiation, for instance, between “pets” and “pests” there will necessarily be a gradation in the human perception of nonhuman value. The central point is that one should not accept that grievable pets are prioritized at the cost of human beings that are de facto considered ungrievable, something which is not seldom the case. 33 Butler, Frames of war, 33.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

73

receives from others and the physical environment. In other words, subjectivity emerges from interactions with others. It is thoroughly relational, and relationality is both a condition for and conditioned by vulnerability. Consequently, the subject comes after vulnerability.34 Are we all equally vulnerable, then? Butler makes an important distinction here. All people are subject to the same primary vulnerable condition, but to what degree and to whom each person is concretely vulnerable varies. Moreover, whether our lives as vulnerable people are ‘livable lives’ (to use Butler’s favored phrase) or ‘lives that matter’ is unevenly distributed throughout societies and the globe. In this sense, vulnerability is both a common phenomenon and a differentiated one: In my view, as much as “vulnerability” can be affirmed as an existential condition, since we are all subject to accidents, illness, and attacks that can expunge our lives quite quickly, it is also a socially induced condition, which accounts for the disproportionate exposure to suffering, especially among those broadly called the precariat for whom access to shelter, food, and medical care is often quite drastically limited.35 The point is this: All are vulnerable, but not everyone is a victim of violence. We do not all equally share experiences of injustice, and some lives are more endangered than others. Unbearable conditions characterize the lives of millions. This condition is what Butler generally describes as ‘precarity’. Precariousness is the bodily condition all humans share (i.e. the ‘ontological’ or ‘fundamental’ side of vulnerability),36 whereas precarity refers to concrete, particular 34

35 36

See Franz J. Hinkelammert’s original thoughts on ‘el sujeto viviente’, according to which a living subject is a ‘denied’ subject that is present as absence, and yet becoming a subject through rebelling against being negated, silenced, and sought eliminated, in e.g. Franz J. Hinkelammert, El Grito del Sujeto. Del teatro-mundo del evangelio de Juan al perro-mundo de la globalización, 3rd ed. (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1998). In Sturla J. Stålsett, “El sujeto, los fundamentalismos y la vulnerabilidad,” Pasos, no. 104 (2002), I suggest that the imprint or trace of this ‘absent presence’ of the subject is found in the phenomenon of human vulnerability, which thus can be seen as the foundation for becoming a subject. Judith Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Zeynep Gambetti Judith Butler, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 25. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 20: “This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to

74

chapter 3

instances of oppression, accidents, or violent acts that threaten to destroy people’s well-being and lives (i.e. ‘situational’ or ‘contextual’ vulnerability).37 In Butler’s account, the two dimensions are distinct. However, vulnerability as a common condition is prior in the sense that to “critically evaluate and oppose the conditions under which certain lives are more vulnerable than others,” we must start from “an apprehension of a common human vulnerability.”38 Our responsibility for alleviating the precarity of others arises from a sense of shared vulnerability: “From where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?”39 This duality is central in the new conceptualization of vulnerability. For instance, Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, in their coedited compilation Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy,40 distinguish between, on the one hand, vulnerability as fragility and susceptibility to wounding and suffering, calling this “an ontological condition of our humanity,”41 and on the other hand, the undeniable fact that some people or groups are more vulnerable to harm and exploitation than others because of “inequalities of power, dependency, capacity or need.”42 In another compilation, Exploring Vulnerability, Heike Springhart calls for an “anthropological realism” that should distinguish between vulnerability as a shared human condition (what she calls ontological or fundamental vulnerability) and “vulnerability in different levels of realization, as there are social, cultural and environmental conditions that increase or lower vulnerability,” which she calls situated or contextual vulnerability.43 In Springhart’s view, the two dimensions are complementary rather than contradictory: “it is the complementarity of ontological and situated vulnerability that makes vulnerability a value of human life”.44 Notably, the European Commission’s ethical principles for others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.” 37 See, e.g., Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 20. 38 Butler, Precarious life, 30. 39 Butler, Precarious life, 30. 40 Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, Studies in feminist philosophy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 41 Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability, 4. 42 Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability 6. 43 Heike Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability: Vulnerability in Vitality,” in Exploring Vulnerability, ed. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 17–18. 44 Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability,” 24, (italics added).

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

75

b­ ioethical research make a similar distinction between a “universal ontological vulnerability, and the idea of the especially vulnerable, those whose autonomy or dignity or integrity are capable of being threatened, who need extra care and protection.”45 How are these two dimensions of vulnerability related? In my view, Springhart’s harmonizing approach glosses over the inevitable tension between them. Butler preserves this friction through her differentiation between existential precariousness and political precarity.46 Precariousness, in this account, is a condition that we all share as embodied humans. “In a way,” Butler writes: We all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited.47 This condition, which sustains and endangers life, relates directly to the body but is socially and politically produced and reproduced. “The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency,” Butler claims; “the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence.” Indeed, we may also become “the agency and instrument of all these as well.”48 I hold that we should see vulnerability as comprising these two dimensions: the permanent, constitutive, ‘ontological’ on the one hand, and the contextual, graded, and situational on the other. Furthermore, along with Butler, I see them as being in tension, but still stress that a valuation of the shared constitutive dimension of vulnerability gives us the grounds and resources with which to deal with the situational dimensions of unacceptable precarity. Mackenzie et al. make a further refinement of the differentiation between these two dimensions of or approaches to vulnerability.49 In their ‘taxonomy of vulnerability,’ they portray the primary sources of vulnerability as 1) inherent, 2) situational, or 3) pathogenic. The third category (pathogenic vulnerability) belongs to the situational dimension, forming “a subset of situational 45

Wendy Rogers, “Vulnerability and Bioethics “ in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 75. 46 Butler, Frames of war, 3. 47 Butler, Precarious Life, 29. 48 Butler, Precarious Life, 26. 49 Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability, 7–9.

76

chapter 3

v­ ulnerabilities that are particularly ethically troubling.” It refers to “morally dysfunctional or abusive interpersonal and social relationships and socio-political oppression or injustice.”50 Interestingly, pathogenic vulnerabilities also cover the many cases where the very efforts to resist or reduce vulnerability paradoxically aggravate the experienced hardships or even create new ones— the kind of dynamics that we found were critically addressed by Robert Jay Lifton, as well as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Pathogenic vulnerability, according to Mackenzie et al., prevents autonomy and increases a sense of powerlessness. I find the concept of pathogenic vulnerability helpful because it makes it possible to point out particular, often extreme, cases in which vulnerability itself is destructive. Seeing these as exceptional cases makes it possible to forcefully argue, as I do, that the condition of vulnerability in itself is normally life-sustaining—a force for good. Mackenzie et al. also suggest distinguishing between vulnerability as either dispositional (potential) or occurrent (actual).51 By contrast, I would argue that vulnerability is always a disposition (i.e. the ‘potential’ part of their distinction), whereas ‘occurrent’ vulnerability is the experience of having one’s vulnerable body wounded. In other words, as already signaled, I suggest that the distinction should rather be drawn between vulnerability and woundedness, since I hold this can better avoid harmonizing or idealizing the experience of suffering. While to be vulnerable can be seen as life-sustaining, to be wounded, by contrast, cannot, in my opinion, be considered ‘good.’ However, this distinction is not absolute, for how can I know myself to be vulnerable if I am never wounded? Can it be granted that actual wounds—contingent and diverse in form, gravity, and permanence—may have an epistemological or hermeneutical function?52 I will add a further differentiation regarding the question of whether vulnerability is universal and belongs to all, or is contingent, diverse, and only characterizing some: There is a condition of receptivity, passivity, and being vulnerable that does belong to all. However, this condition can also form a basis for ways of mobilizing vulnerability for resistance and the affirmation of 50 51 52

Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability, 9. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability, 7. Interestingly, Martin Luther applied a kind of hermeneutics or epistemology of the wound, when he proclaimed in his in classic treatise Von weltlicher Obrigkeit (1523): “My wounds would tell me otherwise.” We also find a link between wounds and recognition in the story narrated in the Gospel of John 20, 24–29, when the apostle Thomas needs to see and touch the actual wounds of the resurrected Jesus to believe that it really is him. See discussion below in chapter 6, and the analysis in Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting wounds: Living in the afterlife of trauma (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017).

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

77

lives lived in dignity and freedom—what we might call acting vulnerably. This second dimension could be seen, I suggest, as a call and an opportunity ‘for all,’ but in general is likely to only be heeded and realized, in various instances and to varying degrees, by some. Moreover, I think, we should not lose sight of the fact that although all are vulnerable and no one is likely to go through life without being wounded, the concrete experience of being harassed or hurt is always unique and inequitably distributed according to assignments of gender, ‘race’, class, age, ableness, …— hence, the critical need for intersectional and postcolonial perspectives. Thus, for instance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore adequately defines racism as “the state sanctioned and extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to pre-mature death.”53 In sum, vulnerability is universal, situational, and—sometimes—pathogenic. This reconceptualization of vulnerability as a multidimensional and differentiated, indeed complex, phenomenon may answer concerns raised in critiques of an affirmation of vulnerability—concerns about the potential resignation vis-à-vis other people’s suffering, or even idealization or instrumentalization of their plight. 4 Agency Butler is perfectly aware that speaking affirmatively of vulnerability can be provocative. She is familiar with the resistance to vulnerability that I addressed at the beginning of this chapter. Notably, she acknowledges that this opposition comes not only from those who favor the conventional concept of vulnerability. For instance, some of her fellow feminist scholars have argued that any affirmation of vulnerability may end up robbing women of their agency. Others have worried that posing vulnerability as an ontological and constitutive condition will become a new kind of ‘foundationalism’ that will “founder on the same rocky shores as have others, such as the ethics of care or maternal thinking.” 54 Ulrich Schmiedel argues that Butler stands clear of this accusation of foundationalism because she sees vulnerability as an absence rather than

53 54

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California, 1 ed, vol. 21, acls humanities e-book, (Berkeley, Calif: Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2007), 28. Italics added. See Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 22–24.

78

chapter 3

a presence.55 In this sense, it is a negative rather than a positive ‘thing’ (i.e. it is not a ‘thing’). Vulnerability is not something that we have but something that we do not have and cannot own, he holds. It is, in a theological sense, apophatic – it is known through what it is not. Hence, what is shared between all humans is not a foundation, but a non-foundation of vulnerability.56 Nevertheless, Butler admits that an affirmative discourse on vulnerability runs the risk of strengthening paternalistic power. There are indeed dominant groups who claim to be vulnerable, such as when white people are afraid of losing their majority status or European majority populations complain that they are ‘invaded by immigrants.’57 Such often ridiculous and at times outright racist claims, do not, obviously, lead Butler to the conclusion that feminism and critical theory should abandon the vocabulary of vulnerability and precariousness. Noting with a certain irony that “any amount of opposition to vulnerability does not exactly defeat its operation in our bodily and social lives,” she makes the point that “vehement opposition to vulnerability may prove to be the very sign of its continuing operation.”58 Furthermore, she asks whether it is not the case that resistance to talking affirmatively about vulnerability actually accepts the premises of a “masculinist account of sovereignty that, as feminists, we are called on to dismantle?” In other words, opposing vulnerability in the name of agency could imply that “we prefer to see ourselves as those who are acting but not acted on.”59 In my opinion, this last point hits a central nerve in any revised, or indeed revolutionizing, concept of vulnerability. What is the link or passage between a prior constitutive passivity, in openness, susceptibility, and receptivity and a different account of subjective and common activity as resistance and life-sustaining political practice? What is the connection between being and

55

56 57 58 59

“The vulnerability which is at stake in the practices of mourning is the core concept of what could be called Butler’s deconstruction of humanism. She defines the human not by what it is, but by what it is not: vulnerability.” Ulrich Schmiedel, “Mourning the Un-mournable? Political Theology Between Refugees and Religion,” Political Theology 18, no. 7 (2017), 618. See also discussion in Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized ecclesiology: The concept of community after Ernst Troeltsch, Pathways for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). This point also relates well to Esposito’s etymological point about community, see Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The origin and destiny of community, Cultural memory in the present, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010), discussed below. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 23. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 23. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 23.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

79

performing, or between ontology and ethics? How can we cross the threshold? How can we move from being vulnerable to acting vulnerably?60 Ewa Ziarek suggests that we, in order to grasp this passage from passivity to activity, read Levinas’ ethics together with Hannah Arendt’s theory of political agency.61 This, in her view, lets us see how the political and ethical vulnerability of action enables rather than impairs its transformative possibilities. Insofar as it implies contingency, being with others, and unpredictability, vulnerability—rather than security— is a paradoxical condition of political transformation. Consequently, vulnerability is not a weakness to be eliminated or managed in the name of security because, as Arendt puts it, it is a “price” of mundane freedom. In fact, all the characteristics of vulnerability pertaining to action are also the conditions of intersubjective agency and political change.62 On this account, then, political agency is contingent, transformative and paradoxically founded in vulnerability.63 This is not least due to its profoundly relational character. In order to situate vulnerability in political agency and community, precisely this relationality merits closer scrutiny. 5 Relationality The emergent—affirmative, yet complex—account of the anatomy of vulnerability that is presented here, is based on a relational ‘ontology’ or ‘imaginary’ of human life.64 Such an approach sees reality as deeply and 60

61 62 63 64

Distinguishing differently between precarity and vulnerability than what I (in line with Butler et al.) do here, Louise Waite comments: “Subjective versus objective notions of precarity must be considered as some people find short, flexible contracts desirable at particular times and in certain contexts. This highlights the danger of stripping labourers of their agency [...] and constructing them as persistent victims of precarious environments.” Louise Waite, “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?” Geography compass 3, no. 1 (2009), 418. Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability.” Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 81. Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 77. Charles Taylor, Modern social imaginaries, Public planet books, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). See Judith Butler, The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind (London, Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2020), 16: “The description of social bonds without which life is imperilled takes place at the level of a social ontology, to be understood more as a social imaginary than as a metaphysics of the social,”

80

chapter 3

inherently relational. Human beings ‘become’ what we ‘are’ in and through relatedness. Neither entities nor subjects, things nor persons can be apprehended prior to or independently of relationships. This is certainly not a new insight. Phenomenological and feminist accounts have long prioritized a relational approach influenced by the Hegelian legacy. From this perspective, the self is always constituted in and through its relationship with other selves. There is a “prior social relatedness,” Judith Butler explains, that is expressed as “living and inter-constitutive relations” that reach beyond the sphere of the human.65 This does not simply mean that “this or that body is bound up in a network of relations.” It implies, more profoundly, that “the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps precisely by virtue of those very boundaries, is defined by the relations that make its own life and action possible.”66 Some concerns should be raised about this relational point of departure. What does this all-pervasive relationality mean for subjectivity and the self? Does the self lose itself in otherness? What about self-affirmation, self-reliance, freedom, and autonomy? The absolutization of the self as its own foundation is influential in Western thought, as in the cogito of René Descartes or the autonomous subject of Immanuel Kant. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find the absolution of the self as a merely deceptive performance or a will to power, as in the anticogito of Friedrich Nietzsche.67 As philosopher of interpretation and mediation par excellence, Paul Ricoeur sought middle ground, emphasizing that the self also relates to itself, but that this is never a purely solitary relationship. Through the presence of another or the other, the self comes into being. As Ricoeur’s hermeneutical ethics asserts, there is otherness in the self and in oneself as another.68 The ‘I’ relates to the ‘me’ through ‘another’: The selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms.[...] I become myself not by seeing myself as merely similar to another, but “by implication,” i.e., that I am myself inasmuch as I am being other.69

65 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 9. 66 Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 16. 67 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4ff. 68 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. 69 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 3.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

81

Such a radical insistence on the prior relatedness of the very being of the self raises questions about the freedom of the self and one’s autonomy. Relationality and autonomy are often seen as opposites.70 Phenomenological and feminist approaches are generally critical of Kantian ethics’ focus on autonomy. Although there is undoubtedly tension here, the two approaches are not necessarily incompatible. Feminist ethicist and political philosopher Catriona Mackenzie argues for what she calls “relational autonomy,” giving two reasons why combining relationality and autonomy should guide our understanding of vulnerability: First, it can prevent a sense of loss of agency that may be associated with vulnerability. Second, it would “counter risks of objectionable paternalism,”71 meaning the condescending attitudes and actions of people in power that individuals and groups living in precarious situations habitually experience. Commonly dressed up as “protection,” such paternalistic measures often express “relationships of domination and inequality among citizens or between the state and targeted groups of citizens,” thus disrespecting peoples’ agency.72 Alison Diduck, writing on the need for an affirmative concept of vulnerability in family law, similarly sees relationality and autonomy as necessarily connected. She claims that the importance of embodied relationality and autonomy is missed in the “unquestioned acceptance of a liberal subjectivity” 73 that she finds prevalent in the practice of law generally, but also in her own field of expertise, . She argues: Like autonomy, vulnerability is constituted by human relationality. At this conceptual level, it is not a flaw or a weakness that must be remedied; it simply is. Vulnerability is inherent in human relationality and, in this way, is also an essential element of autonomy.74 Vulnerability is both a condition for and a key ingredient of the self-affirmation and autonomy of an individual. Autonomy is relational; thus, the two concepts are not oppositional, as Mackenzie argues against Martha ­Albertson

70 71 72 73 74

See discussions in Sigurd Bergmann, ed, “Man får inte tvinga någon”: Autonomi och relationalitet i nordisk teologisk tolkning (Nora: Nya Doxa, 2001). Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy,” 45. Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy,” 47. Alison Diduck, “Family law’s instincts and the relational subject,” in Embracing vulnerability. The challenges and implications for law, ed. Daniel Bedford and Jonathan Herring (Abingdon & New York Routledge, 2020), 34. Diduck, “Family law’s instincts and the relational subject”, 35.

82

chapter 3

Fineman (herself an influential contributor to what I call a new take on vulnerability).75 Both vulnerability and autonomy must, in Mackenzie’s view, be reconceptualized since “there is no inconsistency between acknowledging and recognizing our normative obligations to respond to vulnerability, on one hand, and upholding the importance of autonomy, understood relationally, on the other.”76 Perhaps the tension is not easily solved. Philosopher Joel Anderson is undoubtedly correct in saying that “vulnerability can be simply awful for people and can erode their agency in subtle and profound ways.”77 This is because “vulnerability exposes individuals to domination and exploitation.”78 We have to take seriously, Anderson insists, that “being at the mercy of others or dependent on their goodwill can erode a person’s autonomous agency.”79 Against this background, Anderson discusses how vulnerability to some degree and in some situations is a precondition for autonomy but in other circumstances limits independence and sound self-affirmation. He sees autonomy as intersubjective. Recognition by others can positively facilitate agency through what he calls a “recognitionally secured agency.” It can also be expressed as “participation-affording competence-ascribing:” In various activities, others must first approve of your competence for you to be allowed to participate in ‘the game.’ So, when is vulnerability a hindrance to autonomy? The answer, according to Anderson, is when there is too much of it; that is, when there is a “surplus vulnerability,” meaning “the level of vulnerability being greater than is actually necessary to secure the related enrichment of autonomy.”80 This, Anderson notes, differs from pathogenic vulnerability81 but is still a kind of “unwanted and avoidable vulnerability.”82 Overall, Anderson suggests seeing autonomy and vulnerability as “entwined:”83 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

See Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008). Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy,” 45. Joel Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 151. Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 135. Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 135. Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 154. Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 154, n.28. Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 155. “What I have tried to do here is to show how, given a certain intersubjective conception of autonomy, vulnerability and autonomy are not necessarily opposed but are sometimes actually entwined. Although many forms of vulnerability do threaten people’s lives as their own, the development of autonomy involves being exposed to the possibility of

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

83

There is yet another reason for why and how relational autonomy should be seen as an essential resource in the struggle against precarity, or to use Anderson’s phrase, ‘unwanted and avoidable vulnerability.’ As the influential Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire famously underlined, liberation from domination and slavery demands the power and freedom to name oneself and one’s world. Here, we are reminded that relationality and recognition are also, always, linguistic. “Human existence cannot be silent,” Freire stated in his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We exist and transform our world through speaking true words, and this speaking is both an action and a common act. It cannot be done in solitude and should not be the exclusive privilege of only a few. For Freire, To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Men (sic) are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.84 This liberating action-reflection on the world to transform it is a right for all and must be shared in practice. True speech must be dialogue: “Consequently, no one can say a true word alone – nor can he say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.”85 Self-expression is an act of power and a method of liberation. Freire saw the liberating power of naming oneself and one’s world as becoming real in dialogical relations. For him, autonomy is always embedded in practical and political relationality. They are held together in fruitful interdependence since pure relationality without a sense of selfhood may become a passivity-inducing dependency. Naming oneself and the world in dialogue with others is, then, an expression of relational autonomy.86

84 85

86

misrecognition and of not securing uptake in autonomy-related social practices.” Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined.”, 157. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (London: Harmondsworth, 1972). Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 60–61. See also: “In the theory of antidialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic) involves a Subject who conquers another person and transforms him into a ‘thing .’ In the dialogical theory of action, Subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world. (…) The (sic) dialogical theory of action does not involve a Subject, who dominates by virtue of conquest, and a dominated object. Instead, there are Subjects who meet to name the world in order to transform it,” 135. See also my “Naming Vulnerability,” 134–135.

84

chapter 3

6 Responsibility Relationality is both embodied and linguistic. We are constituted by each other’s gestures and touches, as well as by signs and words. Therefore, there is an inevitable emotional and sensual aspect of how our personal and political subjectivities are constituted, which has often been neglected or denied. Vulnerability implies openness to the impact, influence, and presence of otherness, whether in the environment or the living other. This openness is an embodied receptivity. Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo underlines the negative side of this receptivity. Everybody is vulnerable, she points out, because: Part of the nature of embodiment is receptivity. Nobody is an island. All bodies – and here I include molecular, chemical, cellular, biological, animal, and human bodies – are naturally and necessarily receptive to other bodies in some way, shape or form.87 This “makes all bodies vulnerable to harm or even destruction by other bodies,” she concludes.88 The point is valid, although I would call attention to the fact that Gandolfo—in this context, at least89—leaves out the ‘upside,’90 that receptivity also engenders joy and well-being. Receptivity evidently makes possible fellowship, friendship, and love. It builds community. It enables each of us to take in and respond to the presence of the other. This is done through the senses. Vulnerability, as receptivity, is a form of sensitivity. Notably, through our 87 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 45. 88 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 45. 89 Elsewhere, Gandolfo does also recognize the positive dimension: “Vulnerability not only exposes human beings to harm, it is also the condition for the possibility of healing, health, and wholeness.” Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 3. Nevertheless, despite her thorough and original interpretation of vulnerability in the perspective of theological anthropology, her concept of vulnerability itself remains negative, seeing it above all as “the ever-present possibility of harm, pain, and suffering.” Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 37. See my discussion in Chapter 5 below. 90 See, in a quite different context, Karin Hägglund et al, “Is there an upside of vulnerability in sport?: A mindfulness approach applied in the pursuit of psychological strength,” Journal Of Sport Psychology In Action 10, no. 4 (2019), and Kristin Graff-Kallevåg and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Vulnerability in the arena of strength: An analysis of Christian sermons in the context of international sporting events,” Studia theologica (2021). See also Kristin Graff-Kallevåg and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Holy marathon – ‘running religion’? Religious interpretations of Body Vulnerability in the context of marathons,” in Training the Body. Perspectives from Religion, Physical Culture, and Sport, ed. David Torevell, Clive Palmer, and Paul Rowan, Routledge Research in Sports, Culture and Society (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022).

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

85

senses, we are active and passive simultaneously.91 Vulnerability as relationality and receptivity fosters human responsivity. I can respond to the presence of others. In fact, I cannot avoid reacting to otherness as long as I am alive. Responsivity becomes an obligation and a responsibility. In Butler’s words, “ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.”92 Insofar as we cannot choose not to receive or live without receiving from others, relationality as receptivity is life-sustaining.93 This life-sustaining receptivity is mutual; hence, there is an inevitable bridge from receptivity via responsivity to responsibility. It should be noted though, that the mutuality is asymmetric and can be disruptive. As Ewa Ziarek underscores in her incisive interpretation of vulnerability in light of Levinas, the ethical relation is not a relation in the usual sense of the word.94 Far from interconnecting and mutually constituting each other’s identities, according to Ziarek, an ethical encounter calls these identities into question. It is a “rupture” and an “event”, which serves as a “disturbance of both identifications and discursive power relations.” By exposing us and disrupting our identity, this ethical encounter “makes us vulnerable and at the same time responsible for the vulnerability of others.”95 Receiving from others means simultaneously receiving others’ claims on me to respond. My dependence on others evokes their inescapable responsibility for me, in the same way as those who depend on me constitute

91

In his ‘philosophy of vulnerability’ Gianfrancesco Zanetti distinguishes between vulnerability as ‘given’ and ‘constructed’ and claims that both are intimately linked to the constitutive role of emotions: “Los cinco sentidos como figuras de la vulnerabilidad situada constituyen entonces una narrativa de percepción no neutral, es decir, relacionada con emociones (miedo, disgusto, pudor, vergüenza etc.) que influyen en las reelaboraciones racionales con las que se argumenta la discriminación o la inclusividad, el supremacismo o la igualdad.” Gianfrancesco Zanetti, Alessandro Di Rosa, and Irene Vicente Echevarría, Filosofía de la vulnerabilidad: Percepción, discriminación, derecho (Madrid: Dykinson, 2019), 178. 92 Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence, 142. 93 Vulnerability as the condition for the possibility of our responding, of our being ethical, “precedes our decision,” notes James A. Keenan in James F. Keenan, “The World at Risk: Vulnerability, Precarity, and Connectedness,” Theological studies 81, no. 1 (2020), 139–140, in which he builds on Butler as well as the works of, i.a. Erinn C. Gilson, The ethics of vulnerability: A feminist analysis of social life and practice, vol. 26, Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory, (New York: Routledge, 2014), and Enda McDonagh, Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith, Morality and Art (Dublin: Columbia, 2005). 94 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability.” 95 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 69.

86

chapter 3

my ethical responsibility.96 When this responsibility reaches the community level, it becomes political. My political responsibility is to heal, not harm, or to care for, not kill, the one who depends on my responsivity. Thus, my vulnerability makes it possible for me both to become the responsibility of others and to become aware of my responsibility to others. In this way, vulnerability becomes an asymmetric but common foundation for ethics and politics.97 7 Community Relationality is at the core of any political philosophy.98 In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates says, “My notion is, said I, that a state comes into existence because no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs.”99 For Aristotle, the decisive relationship in politics was what he called ‘civic friendship.’ The ζῷον πoλιτικόν, political animal, is, no doubt, a profoundly social being. Nevertheless, as most prominently in Hobbes’ Leviathan, foundational contract theories presuppose a solitary subject that may or may not choose to enter into relationships with others. It is not that Hobbes did not recognize that human beings need to relate to others, but rather that in his understanding, we are not naturally disposed to it. We do not, by nature, seek society, for “every man regards not his fellow, but his business,” and there is more jealousy than love to be found. Instead of an inclination to do good Hobbes observed only fear and self-interest in his fellow human beings, with no capacity to act disinterestedly whatsoever. People are not by nature social beings, but have to be made social by education. According to Hobbes, societies come together and stay together, not in mutual goodwill, but out of mutual fear. And there is certainly reason to be scared in Hobbes’ world, which is characterized by a perpetual, natural “war of every man against every man.”100 Every person is motivated solely 96

This is the leading line of thought in K.E. Løgstrup’s, Den etiske fordring, 12. opplag ed. (København: Gyldendal, 1989 (1956)), English translation: Løgstrup, The Ethical demand, that has been influential in Scandinavian (practical and theological) ethics. It is also the most valid point in Goodin’s early study on the significance of vulnerability to (consequentialist) ethics Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Other aspects of Goodin’s analysis are problematic, as I argue in Stålsett, “Naming Vulnerability,” 132–134. 97 See Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, e.g., chapter 6. 98 Plato and Francis Macdonald Cornford, The republic of Plato (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). 99 Chapter VI, ii. 369, Plato and Cornford, The republic of Plato, 55. 100 Hobbes, Rogers, and Schuhmann, Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, XIII 9. The famous paragraph reads: “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

87

by ­self-­interest, born with an unquenchable desire and will to hurt: “I put for a general inclination of all Mankind a Perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death.”101 In a sense, this makes all the unfortunate inhabitants of Hobbes’ natural condition equally vulnerable, since even the weakest man will still have the capacity to kill. For Hobbes, it was this common destiny of fear arising out of awareness of vulnerability that formed the social contract. It is not civic friendship but natural enmity that is the starting point for political community. Surprisingly, considering its grim view of human nature, Hobbes’ account has been, and continues to be, immensely influential in political thought and practice. Butler offers a scathing critique of the Hobbesian view. According to the powerful fiction of the ‘state of nature’ in liberal political thought, “we are already, for some reason, individuals, and we conflict with one another,” she notes.102 This primary individual is portrayed as a self-loving, self-sufficient, and utterly independent being with no need for other people. He is also a man, and his gender has already been decided since “the primary and founding figure of the human is masculine.” 103 Moreover, this first human is already an adult, and he “is posited as if he was never a child; as if he was never provided for, never depended upon parents or kinship relations, or upon social institutions, in order to survive and grow and (presumably) learn.”104 So, this individual must be presupposed to feed himself and care for himself in every critical respect.105 Nonetheless, this fabulously strong and capable man without relations is in “the imaginations of liberal theorists ... equipped with anger and desire.”106 So, “when others enter the scene, conflict begins,”107 and the horrific and permanent “war of every man against every man” becomes a fact. In this fictional narrative, which is violent to the core, women are rendered unrepresentable. Were there no mothers, no siblings, and no companions in to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” 102. 101 Hobbes, Rogers, and Schuhmann, Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, XI 2. 102 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 30. 103 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 37. 104 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 37. 105 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 37. 106 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 38. 107 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 32.

88

chapter 3

this original state? How come? Perhaps, Butler suggests, we are expected to think that annihilation has taken place prior to this narrated scene through inaugural violence and a murder that has left no trace.108 That might make us wonder who else is wiped out from the start? Whose stories are not told, and whose lives are not counted? The indigenous, the ‘ungrievable,’ the poor—all the ill-named ‘vulnerable groups’?109 In the deadly shadow of the autonomous, self-sufficient, and resilient subject presupposed in liberal and realist Western myths of political subjectivity and social contract theory Butler imagines a colonial subject, invisibilized—or violently eliminated—from the very beginning. We stumble into what the theorist of the postcolony Achille Mbembe powerfully describes as “the ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being,’ of identity and difference, of negativeness—in short, of nothingness.”110 As is obvious, fear is the founding human experience to Hobbes. This should be seen on the background of his own historical and biographical context. Interestingly, he is reported to have seen as important the fact and circumstances of his own mother giving birth to him on Good Friday in Westport, England, in 1588. At that time, there were rumors of the Spanish Armada preparing to invade England. Hobbes’ mother was so upset by the prospect of imminent war that she apparently gave birth prematurely, out of fear; hence, Hobbes remarked, “Fear and I were born twins.” This self-identification with fear may serve to explain the general thrust of Hobbesian anthropological and political theory.111 By contrast, as briefly noted, Socrates in the Republic presupposed that states originated in the awareness of human needs, not fear, and that this led to cooperation, not war: “O, having all these needs, we call in one another’s help to satisfy our various requirements; and when we have collected a number of helpers and associates to live together in one place, we call that settlement a state.”112 Human needs express vulnerability. So should we not rather consider the experience of human vulnerability to be the raison d’etre of political community? If we do, this fundamental need for the other, for each other, will have to be recognized.

108 Butler, The force of nonviolence, 38. 109 See Stålsett, “Naming Vulnerability: A Diaconal Dilemma of Designation”. 110 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 4. 111 Roberto Esposito, see chapter 1, comments on this anecdote, initially told by Hobbes’ biographer, in his Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, 4. 112 Plato and Cornford, The republic of Plato, 56. Chapter VI, ii. 369.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

89

8 Recognition One of the ways in which relationality sustains the self is through recognition of and by the other. Since at least Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), this topic has been central to philosophical politics and ethical debates. Besides Butler, leading political theorists such as Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, Paul Ricoeur, and Nancy Fraser have contributed to making it a key concept in the interpretation of individual and collective processes in contemporary society—which is highly relevant to my search for the feasibility of political agency and community in precarious times.113 Honneth’s influential approach in The Struggle for Recognition (1995) developed Hegel’s thinking, particularly in the early Jena manuscripts, to spell out a “moral grammar” embedded in the relational dynamics of human beings constructing society.114 The Hobbesian presumption of a social contract between fearful, isolated, and atomistic individuals who act out of self-interest is untenable to Honneth. Instead, he sees human beings as socially and politically interdependent. Every person needs the recognition of others to become a self. Hegel stated: “Self­consciousness exists in and for itself by virtue of the fact that it is in and for itself for another. That is, it exists only in being recognized.”115 Honneth, likewise, holds that the human being needs recognition in order to be a human being. In a way, we need others to become ourselves. We can only acquire and maintain our subjectivity through the recognition granted by people we also recognize. This recognition, Honneth explicates, may occur on three interconnected levels.116 At the most basic, intimate, and corporeal individual level, recognition is expressed as love and intimate friendship. This kind of recognition is necessary to ensure an individual’s self-confidence. At the second level (the level of rights), people need legally institutionalized recognition for self-respect. When given and received, this recognition results 113

For an incisive analysis of the role of recognition and vulnerability in the process of accompaniment in contexts of disability, see Gerard J. Ryan, Mutual accompaniment as faith-filled living. Recognition of the vulnerable other (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). For classic theological account of recognition, see Risto Saarinen, Recognition and religion: A historical and systematic study, (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016). 114 Honneth, The struggle for recognition. 115 Phänomenologie des Geistes, “Independence and Dependence of Self­-Consciousness: Mastery and Slavery,” [13], Leo Rauch, David Sherman, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness: Text and Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 20. 116 Honneth, The struggle for recognition.

90

chapter 3

in self-respect. At the third and more collective level, there are networks of solidarity and shared values through which the particular worth of each member of a community can be acknowledged, thus developing self-esteem. In summary, then, Honneth sees love as the basis for self-confidence, with rights forming the foundation for self-respect, and solidarity providing the grounds for self-esteem. Notably, it is through social struggles that these relationships are established and expanded. They cannot simply be taken for granted. Indeed, recognition is not always given. On all three levels, experiences of misrecognition or disrespect are normal. Such experiences of misrecognition trigger counter-reactions in us. This is politically and ethically a crucial point: not only do human beings need to be recognized, we strongly aspire to and desire it. This desire provokes our agency. We seek recognition, and when this desire is neglected or faces direct opposition, we struggle. Honneth sees this struggle as constructive; it may correct wrongs and improve the state of affairs. From these struggles societies may develop toward the horizon of more just communities, inclusive of all. We should take due notice of the conflictual side of any recognition process. It is, in my view, vital in reconfiguring the concept of vulnerability based on the relationality of human existence. Hegel perceived recognition as a life and death struggle: Thus the relation between the two self-consciousnesses is such that they prove themselves in a life-and-death struggle ... They must engage in this struggle, since each must have his self-certainty, his being-for-self, raised to the level of truth—for the other as well as for himself. And it is only in staking one’s life that one’s freedom is established.117 Likewise, as noted, Honneth claims that this struggle is not only inevitable but also valuable. It uncovers core ‘pathologies’ in society and unleashes— in response to the very experience of misrecognition—latent energies and resources that are crucial for healing these social and political pathologies. As we can see, this emphasis on the necessity of political and personal struggles for recognition runs counter to any superficially idealized and romanticized idea of vulnerability. Vulnerable agency is strongly associated with, indeed involved in, the struggle for recognition. 117

Phänomenologie des Geistes, “Independence and Dependence of Self­-Consciousness: Mastery and Slavery,” [22], Rauch, Sherman, and Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Self-­ Consciousness: Text and Commentary, 23.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

91

The relationality between the self and the political community is in other words ambiguous. It is not simply harmonious. Relations can be “as destructive as they can be sustaining.”118 In this sense, one could ask if not making vulnerability the basis for political community would actually lead back to the adoption of something akin to Hobbesian contract theory. However, the necessary, and ultimately liberative, struggle for recognition in Honneth’s approach is far from Hobbes’ “war of every man against every man.” Hobbes parted from seeing fear as a misrecognition of every other, deeply embedded in the natural condition of the human heart, while Honneth perceives the affirmative bonds between people as constituting community.119 Therefore, tension and struggles are unleashed whenever and wherever these affirmative bonds are lacking, or broken through concrete, historical expressions of misrecognition. This makes it reasonable, in my view, to see vulnerability as the ‘site’ for recognition as well as misrecognition. Thus, it is not only the basis for receiving; it is also a platform for responding, for resisting misrecognition and for providing recognition to self and others. It forms a two-way ‘bridge’ between community and agency. So, we cannot live in relationality without being vulnerable to those we are related to. However, since relationality is constitutive of life and cannot be separated from vulnerability, it suggests that vulnerability is also life-constituting. This ambiguity is key to relationality as the core of vulnerability. Vulnerability is relational human existence in the tension between harm and healing. We need to ponder the forms of this tension further. How can vulnerability as responsivity and responsibility lead to activity, agency, resistance, and flourishing life? 9 Dispossession Another naming of this contradictory site, involving the simultaneous occurrence of and permanent transition from passivity to activity, from being acted on to acting oneself,120 and from vulnerability to performativity, can be found in what Butler and anthropologist and gender theorist Athena Athanasiou call 118 Butler, The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind, 9. 119 Although many similarities, there are also differences between Honneth’s and Butler’s understanding on this point. See Butler’s critique in Axel Honneth and Martin Jay, Reification: A new look at an old idea, The Berkeley Tanner lextures, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 97–119. 120 See also Jessica Benjamin, Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third (London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018).

92

chapter 3

dispossession. In her celebrated and influential Gender Trouble, now one of the classics of queer theory, Judith Butler took performance theory as her point of departure for critically exploring how gender is assigned and constructed in relational interplay.121 Some read this approach as advocating a radically volitional and self-affirming position, as if one is, or is supposed to be, totally free to ‘choose’ one’s gender. Butler disagrees with this reading of her early work. She clarifies that the attribution of gender is, like any aspect of our identity, assigned as much as it is auto-constructed. Language, and the power of discourse, expectations, and norms act upon us before designating who we are or want to be. We do not wholly ‘possess’ ourselves. There is a moment of dispossession, which means a sense of ‘losing oneself’ in the other, or even being already-handed-over-to another. This moment offers the possibility of an action or response from our side. Butler claims, “Nobody can sustain itself on its own … The body is given over to others in order to persist; it is given over to some other set of hands before it can make use of its own.”122 Every time a child is born, this happens; someone gives the child over to someone else. It was this moment of passivity or receptivity prior to and as a precondition for our ethical and political agency that moved into the forefront of Butler’s thinking after the shock and trauma of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, 2001.123 We are taken back to Butler’s way of distinguishing between the two forms of vulnerability: shared precariousness and unjustly distributed precarity.124 Both 121 Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. 122 Butler, The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind, 49. 123 It has been argued that Butler’s concept of vulnerability changed between Gender Trouble and her post-9/11 work. Ingrid Cyfer points out: “In her earlier work, Butler relates vulnerability to the instability of social recognition and our narcissistic need to be acknowledged as intelligible beings. Since Butler’s ethical turn, though, “vulnerability” operates in a different way. When she reaches a Levinasian approach to vulnerability, it is now related to something that is precisely the opposite of narcissism: the primacy of the Other,” Cyfer, “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability,” 12. 124 Butler’s language is not fully consistent here, though, see, e.g.: “…understand the difference between precarity as an existential category that is presumed to be equally shared, and precarity as a condition of induced inequality and destitution. The latter is a way of exploiting an existential condition, since precarity, understood as vulnerability to injury and loss, can never be reversed (this I tend to call precariousness), and yet the differential ways of allocating precarity, of assigning disposability, are clearly aims an effects of neoliberal forms of social and economic life,” Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The performative in the political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 20–21. See also this critical comment by Ingrid Cyfer, “…neither the link nor the definition of precariousness and precarity are sharply defined. As Mills notes, in Frames of War, Butler conflates these concepts when she refers to a ‘differential distribution of precariousness’,”

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

93

kinds of vulnerability (the ontological and the situational) are as we recall a direct consequence of our relationality. Our constitutive interrelationality follows from an openness to alterity that defines the body itself—the body is a threshold. This, to Butler, undermines the idea of the body as a closed unit, instead perceiving it as “the site of passage and porosity.”125 In other words, we can genuinely relate to other human beings only by exposing ourselves and thus making ourselves vulnerable. As the very condition for life-preserving relationships, vulnerability precedes and constitutes life. Our fundamental relatedness is expressed as vulnerability. Importantly, this takes us beyond ourselves. We are not only constituted by our relationships but also lose ourselves in them; we are dispossessed by them.126 This, then, is what Butler further discusses in depth with Athanasiou in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political.127 In this dialogical work, the two thinkers explore how the two dimensions of vulnerability—one affirmative (constitutive) and one negative (situational)—are reflected in two equally contradictory forms of dispossession. Exposing, or losing, oneself in the other in dependence, vulnerability, and responsivity is a precondition for performative resistance and a shared struggle for freedom and dignity, they contend. By contrast, losing one’s possession of oneself and that which one holds dear is a dramatically harrowing experience as the history of colonization, land occupation, and sexual harassment testifies.128 “In the first sense, dispossession stands as a heteronomic condition for autonomy … In the second sense, dispossession implies imposed injuries, painful interpellations, occlusions, foreclosures, and models of subjugation that need to be addressed and redressed”.129 Butler and Athanasiou see in the “heteronomic condition for autonomy” the potential for recognizing vulnerability as a foundation for agency. I read this as vulnerability becoming resistance and agency, based not on a particular capacity, consciousness, or intention, but simply on openness and exposure. Through this inescapable, sensible and porous embodiment, always open to Cyfer, “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability,” 12. 125 Butler, The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind, 16. 126 Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence, 24. 127 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession. 128 “Surely colonial violence can work both ways, by depriving an indigenous population of their land, and yet restricting the mobility of that population to the very land they no longer own. Certainly occupied Palestine is a case in point, but so, too, are any number of refugee camps that detain and immobilize at the same time as they dispossess a population.” Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 23. 129 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 2.

94

chapter 3

what is beyond us, we are made, or make ourselves, present to the other, in an undetermined position of simultaneous call and response, responsibility and resistance. It is precisely at this point we may identify the movement, or transition, from being vulnerable to acting vulnerably. Here, I believe, we can detect and affirm a value of vulnerability for political agency. 10 Resilience Could we understand acting vulnerably as an expression of resilience? The meaning of resilience, from the Latin re-silere, is “​the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it has been bent, stretched or pressed,” mostly used to refer to “the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, and so on.”130 In common usage, resilience is indeed seen as the opposite of vulnerability. When vulnerability is a problem, resilience has the power to overcome the adversities that arise from it. Likewise, in psychology and psychiatry, resilience can be defined as “the manifestation of positive adaptation despite significant life adversity” and is clearly contrasted with vulnerability.131 One study about ‘sons of alcoholics’132 simply distinguished “resilient children” from their “less well-functioning vulnerable peers”133 and spoke about “troubled and vulnerable groups.”134 However, interdisciplinary ecological and social studies have asked whether these two terms, vulnerability and resilience, rather should be seen as complementary.135 Distinguishing between simple and complex resilience, Michael C. Hogue sees the former as “bouncing back from change” (i.e. as “regenerative or reparative” but not creating anything new): “Complex resilience, on the other hand, is a characteristic of systems that are reflexively aware of their risk exposure

130 131 132 133 134 135

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/resilience?q=resilience, accessed, 09.09.21. Suniya S. Luthar, Resilience and Vulnerability: Adaptation in the Context of Childhood Adversities (Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xxix. Robert A. Zucker et al, “Resilience and Vulnerability among Sons of Alcoholics: Relationship to Developmental Outcomes between Early Childhood and Adolescence,” in S.S. Luthar (ed.) Resilience and Vulnerability, 76–103. Zucker et al, “Resilience and Vulnerability among Sons of Alcoholics,” 95. Zucker et al, “Resilience and Vulnerability among Sons of Alcoholics,” 96. Cf., again, my critique of naming particular groups ‘vulnerable’ in Stålsett, “Naming Vulnerability.” Fiona Miller et al, “Resilience and Vulnerability: Complementary or Conflicting Concepts?,” Ecology and society 15, no. 3 (2010), , see also, e.g. G. E. Frerks, J. F. Warner, and B. Weijs, “The politics of vulnerability and resilience,” Ambiente & sociedade 14, no. 2 (2011).

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

95

and creatively learn to adapt to change.”136 In this complex kind of resilience, adaptation can include creative renewal. Hogue relates this nuanced understanding of resilience to issues concerning the power of the precariat: “Thus the political effectiveness of the diverse movements of the precariat is contingent on their resilience, and their resilience is contingent, at least minimally, on their connectedness.”137 In so doing, he still basically sees vulnerability and resilience as opposites: “The diverse and dispersed nature of precarious power could become a source of movement strength and resilience, or vulnerability and demise.”138 Hogue’s point is clearly relevant to this discussion and reflects the question raised in the previous chapter on the (missing) unity of the precariat. But is it wise to accept resilience, even in this nuanced form, as a positive goal for precarious struggles? From what we have seen so far, it seems logical to respond affirmatively and perceive vulnerability as a power to resist adversity and embrace and promote life. Contrary to the more common understanding contrasting the two phenomena, vulnerability could thus be described as a form of, or at least implied in, resilience. However, in an incisive essay sociologist Sarah Bracke argues against such an approach.139 Noting the recent popularity of the term ‘resilience’ in politics of security and economic policy, development programs, and poverty-reduction strategies, she portrays it as part of a neoliberal government mindset,140 which has become key to the dominant version of contemporary biopolitics. To Bracke, the resilience discourse is part of a new security apparatus that sets out to individualize responsibility for survival and protection. Facing the multiple threats of terror, natural disasters, pandemics, and economic crises, people are encouraged and expected to ‘bounce back’ on their own: “In precarious times, resilience is the new security.”141 Flexibility is the norm, and, notes Bracke, this shows how strongly the politics of resilience are gendered. Elasticity, persistence, and adaptability are often portrayed as ‘feminine’ virtues, while simultaneously, in subtle ways, the traditional expectation that women are ‘the weaker sex’ is seemingly replaced by a stronger ideal holding that women can make it on their own, whatever life throws at them,142 whether 136 137 138 139 140 141 142

Hogue, “Ecological emergency and elemental democracy,” 126. Hogue, “Ecological emergency and elemental democracy,” 132. Hogue, “Ecological emergency and elemental democracy,” 132. See Sarah Bracke, “Bouncing back. Vulnerability and resistance in times of resilience,” in Vulnerability in resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016). Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 53. Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 57. Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 65.

96

chapter 3

this means “cuts to benefits, wage freezes or global economic meltdown.” Thus, Bracke observes a “specific biopolitical power at work in and through resilience as a keyword” that “produces a new regime of subjectivity; that is, new resilient subjects.”143 This has become “a mode of subjectification”144—a new technology of the self in a Foucauldian sense through which people strive to attain the necessary flexibility: “In a neoliberal political economy, resilience has become part of the ‘moral code’: the ‘good subjects’ of neoliberal times are the ones who are able to act, to exercise their agency, in resilient ways.”145 What is even worse, she points out, is that these politics partly aim to shape people’s desires in ways that portray transformation and political alternatives as nonexistent and not worth fighting for because “there is no alternative.”146 This amounts to a colonization of the imaginative capacity, undermining “skills and capacities of imagining other possible worlds, as well as the agential modalities to pursue those imaginations.”147 In this way, Bracke claims that resilience actually undercuts our capacity to resist and should therefore itself be resisted and rejected.148 Bracke’s sharp and critical analysis of how resilience shapes and drives a still-dominant neoliberal government mindset is perhaps not the whole story about the possible validity/invalidity of seeing resilience as emerging in and from vulnerability. In their study on the “interplay between vulnerability, resistance and agency for forced migrants,”149 Louise Waite, Hannah Lewis, Peter James Dwyer, and Stuart Hodkinson make constructive use of resilience as one kind or level of resistance. In their empirical work with refugees and asylum seekers in the UK living in what they call ‘hyper-precarious situations’, they found resilience expressed in “innumerable small acts that [could] serve to recover or assert dignity” for the migrants “or to inflict subtle harm on employers.”150 According to the researchers, these acts amount to “pure survival within 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 65. Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 61. Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 62. This was often referred to as “TINA”, the implicit ‘refrain’ of a neoliberalist world order, infamously expressed in the title of and triumphant introduction to Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (London: Penguin, 1992). Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 65. Bracke, “Bouncing back,” 70. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives,” 479. Such small acts of resistance could be compared to what Scott calls ‘infrapolitics’ and everyday resistance, see James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990); James C. Scott, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

97

subjugated labor relations,” sometimes expressing a ‘purpose’ within coercive relationships.151 Building on Katz’s terminological distinction between resilience, reworking, and resistance as differing degrees of what I define as ‘acting vulnerably’ or precarious agency, Waite et al. see such acts as a low-profile form of agentic resistance—the first step on Katz’s ladder toward more open and explicit forms of mobilization and activism. Interestingly, they propose to expand Katz’s terminological taxonomy to describe even more discrete forms of resistance. Sometimes, they argue, even remaining, coping, and staying on in severely exploitative working relations should be perceived as a form of resilience or resistance, “steeped in a determination for livelihood survival and/or to access limited funds to meet remittance obligations.”152 Thus, Waite et al. find that the “vulnerability inherent in the life-worlds of many migrants” is at times transformed into a “springboard for agentic resistance,” and hence should not be seen solely as victimhood.153 Resilience, then, is ambiguously situated in relation to vulnerability. It can express vulnerable agency, but also be misused as an ideological instrument to aggravate and legitimize precarity by covering up its causes. 11 Resistance What kinds of resistance are viable for people living in precarity? What could be the counterforces arising from the condition of vulnerability? How could vulnerability possibly bolster political agency understood as assessing and affecting what matters to life? How can vulnerability in itself be, or become, agency, performativity, and resistance? To be or to become: if what I have said so far is sustainable, then there is not exactly a progression from being vulnerable to acting vulnerably. It is not that

151 152 153

Foucault’s description of contre-conduite, counter-conduct, as opposed to what he calls ‘pastoral power’, see e.g. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982). Note, however, that Waite et al. refer to Katz’ critical comment on Scott’s approach: “Katz (2004:241) is concerned about the voyeuristic practice of seeing every, ‘autonomous act to be an instance of resistance.’ She urges caution regarding the slippage between agentic acts and those more transformative types which really are capable of changing social relations of oppression and exploitation,” Waite et al, “Precarious Lives,” 484. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives,” 485. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives,” 487–88. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives,” 479–80.

98

chapter 3

the body is vulnerable and subsequently becomes or can be made into a site for or an instrument of opposition to obligation or coercion. The emergence of resistance can be seen as part of the vulnerable condition itself. Moreover, there seem to be many expressions, forms, acts, or performances of this resistance in vulnerability. In his incisive Disobey! A guide to ethical resistance, Fréderic Gros examines a variety of forms and degrees of resistance in a highly diverse field between submission and rebellion. Submission can be subordination, conformity, consent or obligation. Resistance can be expressed as open rebellion, but also transgression, civil disobedience and civic dissidence.154 What role could we give vulnerability in such instances of opposition? The compilation Vulnerability in Resistance presents a variety of conundrums, contradictions, and proposals for seeing resistance in vulnerability.155 The contributors—a group of prominent feminist scholars, including Butler—seek to develop new modes of collective agency beyond the conventional contradiction constructed between vulnerability and resistance.156 Butler sets the stage by arguing affirmatively that “vulnerability, understood as a deliberate exposure to power, is part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment.”157 She examines what happens when bodies come together in assembly, especially when people living in precarious conditions gather to demonstrate.158 Here, too, the connection is twofold: the precarious condition and concrete exposure to dispossession, poverty, insecurity, and harm lead to resistance in multiple forms—manifestations, occupations, strikes, and marches. These performances of protest testify to a commonly shared vulnerability as well as to particular situations of unjust precarity, thus responsibilizing the ‘duty-bearers’: corresponding power-holders and authorities. Simultaneously, these gatherings, as concrete and embodied expressions of resistance, display—and may even increase—the degree of precarity. Open protest in the context of asymmetries of power is often met with force, and at times, it prompts violent repercussions.159 “Vulnerability”, then, “is not exactly overcome by resistance, but becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force in political mobilizations.”160 Those who gather to protest are concrete and embodied expressions of resistance, but they are 154 Gros and Fernbach, Disobey! A guide to ethical resistance, 26. 155 Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds, Vulnerability in resistance (Durham &London: Duke University PREss, 2016). 156 Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay, Vulnerability in resistance, 7. 157 Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 22. 158 Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 12. 159 Cf. Scott, Domination. 160 Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 14.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

99

also a presence testifying to an absence, representing those who are not there since they have been detained at borders, held in prisons, occupied, expelled, or otherwise deprived of their freedom of movement. Although this exposure of vulnerability may appear weak and powerless in terms of performance, it has its own force. Leticia Sabsay insists that it should be seen as a counter-hegemonic force.161 Power is never absent in the demonstration of resistance in precarity; power is rather transformed and redirected. We should not believe that resistance can end power, Sabsay maintains. In fact, power is also necessary and valuable for the sake of justice and freedom. Combining insights from Foucault’s approach to power, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, and Mouffe’s concept of agonistic politics, Sabsay believes we can be optimistic about the prospects for resistance in vulnerability. Resistance is one of the forms and possible effects of power, but it does not—and should not—necessarily reflect the power it confronts.162 We should not, however, expect to reach complete radical autonomy, self-transparency, or total social harmony. Political struggles are always contingent and unpredictable. This inherent unpredictability is not necessarily problematic to Sabsay, since “a radical vision of democracy, after all, seems to be less concerned with the realization of an ultimate ideal than with the ceaseless mobilization of permeable alliances that may question its own limits.”163 Ewa Ziarek too, reading Levinas and Arendt in combination in order to grasp vulnerability as an ethical and political force, points to this unpredictability of politics as a possibility for agency and responsibility in a democracy that is open to strangers.164 This reveals a certain vulnerability in democratic politics itself, she holds, especially when it resists authoritarian and oppressive systems of power.165 Vulnerability, then, is not absence of resistance. To the contrary, there is reason to see vulnerability as not just the cause but furthermore the very basis for resisting the abuse of power in domination and violation.

161 162 163 164 165

Leticia Sabsay, “Permeable Bodies Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016), 289. Cf. my critique of Hardt and Negri, Empire, above. Sabsay, “Permeable Bodies Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony,” 297. Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” see also, in a different context, Rosa, The uncontrollability of the world. I shall return to this in the last chapter of this book.

100

chapter 3

12 Performativity Is performative resistance in and through vulnerability a conscious act or merely a fact as it happens? A crucial balance must be struck between determinism (no agency) and voluntarism (free agency) in conceptualizing agency.166 My definition of political agency as the ‘ability to assess and affect what matters for life’ presupposes some degree of intentionality, but not necessarily based on critical theoretical consciousness or developed strategic thinking and action. Butler is right, I think, in countering “moves toward authenticity as a way of doing politics,” holding that they tend to “locate vulnerability as the opposite of agency, to identify agency with sovereign modes of defensiveness, and to fail to recognize the ways in which vulnerability can be an incipient and enduring moment of resistance.”167 Although it would certainly not be effective politics to only embrace vulnerability,168 we should not assume that “vulnerability is disjoined from resistance, mobilization, and other forms of deliberate and agentic politics.”169 Butler defends a dual conception of performativity that reflects the double dimension of vulnerability. We act and are acted upon.170 Vulnerability, as we have seen, involves relating to others through both receiving and responding. Neglect of or opposition to vulnerability as a concern for critical political theory thus risks losing sight of dimensions of the human condition that are crucial to everyday politics, such as responsiveness, susceptibility, injurability, openness, indignation, outrage, and even resistance.171 One feminist critique of Butler’s ethics of vulnerability claims that her account of agency is weak because of her Levinasian intertwining of passivity and responsibility. Furthermore, Butler is charged with being too abstract and lacking a normative criterion that could sustain a situated feminist critique.172 Although the cogency of this critique is debatable, Butler’s work seems to have developed in this regard. Focusing on grievability and equality after 9/11, Butler’s thinking has arguably become more explicitly normative, and her 166 167 168 169 170 171 172

Cyfer, “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability,” 3–4. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 25. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 25. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 22. Cf., again, Benjamin, Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 24. Cyfer, “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability,” 13.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

101

account of agency seems to have become stronger in her more recent reflections on performativity. This can be appreciated in a dense but illuminating comment in her dialogue with Athanasiou: Yes, performativity does take place when the counted prove to be reflexive and start to count them - not only enumerating who they are, but appearing in some way, exercising in that way a “right” (extralegal, to be sure) to existence. They start to matter. We can understand this more broadly as a way of producing a political subject, such that the subject is a political effect of this very exercise. The exercise of the right is something that happens within the context of precarity and takes form as a precarious exercise that seeks to overcome its own precarity. And even if it is not supported by existing law (laws that deny citizenship, for instance), it is still supported by extralegal cultural, political, and discursive conditions, translations from other struggles, and modes of organizing that are neither state-supported nor state-centered. In this way performativity works within precarity and against its differential allocation. Or, rather, performativity names that unauthorized exercise of a right to existence that propels the precarious into political life.173 Therefore, ‘propelling the precarious into political life’ is the aim and outcome of conceptualizing vulnerability as resistance. We see here how the distinction between differential precarity and shared precariousness or vulnerability is maintained and may become a dynamizing force, since ‘performativity works within precarity and against its differential allocation.’ To see it in this way, we must decouple vulnerability from the paternalistic power of protection and, more importantly, victimization. In its embeddedness in a web of relations, the open, porous, embodied self emerges as something irremovable and irrefutable. It can ‘get in the way’ of oppressive power, even in cases of overwhelming force being used to eliminate it. These moments of oppositional and self-affirming agency may at times be almost invisible and seemingly futile. Other times they may be surprisingly efficient acts of more “strident resistance”.174 Whether successful or not, such concrete manifestations of performing vulnerability as resistance are highly contextual and contingent, belonging to the sphere of politics proper. More accurately, they occur within the chaotic and 173 174

Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 101. Italics added. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring,” 487.

102

chapter 3

repressive field of bio/necropolitics. Hence, becoming aware of the presence of this incipient resistance,175 its actuality as potentiality, and its irrefutability is, as I see it, a significant first step to a politics of vulnerability that can resist exclusion and elimination and affirm the dignity of life. This could, as I see it, be an expression of ‘affirmative biopolitics’ from below and a promising start for the development of a political theology of vulnerability. 13 Affirmation I have now sketched an ‘anatomy of vulnerability’ that provocatively seeks to establish its value for political agency and community. Building on recent interdisciplinary contributions, especially within feminist and political ethics and Judith Butler’s work, I have made the case for a complex but decidedly affirmative account of vulnerability that finds within it resources for recognition, resistance, and the promotion of life in dignity. This affirmative account recognizes the intricacies and multifaceted character of unique experiences of being vulnerable, while arguing for the protection of the shared vulnerability that is common to all. Such affirmation has been, as noted earlier, criticized. In a thought-provoking piece entitled “On Vulnerability” theologian Linn Tonstad takes issue with “theologians and cultural theorists” who invite us “to affirm vulnerability.”176 She claims such an affirmative view has become “very nearly a theological and theoretical truism, insistently prescribed as a remedy for any number of contemporary ills.”177 Although Tonstad does not explicitly refer to any scholars in particular, she elaborates on what she holds to be their typical argumentative strategies: To denounce the modern fiction of a sovereign, autonomous, rational, self-determining, self-transparent subject, these theories claim— according to Tonstad—that vulnerability must be ‘brought back.’ This can be done through various mechanisms, such as demonstrating the de facto dependency and hence vulnerability of such a presumed autonomous subject, or by 175

176 177

Again, Foucault’s concept ‘counter-conduct’ comes to mind here, see Foucault et al, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, 204, see also Daniele Lorenzini, “From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much,” Foucault studies 21, no. 21 (2016), and Inger Marie Lid et al, Makt, motmakt og praksis: Bidrag til kritisk refleksjon innen diakoni og velferd (Oslo: Cappelen Damm akademisk, 2022). Linn Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” in Suffering and the Christian life, ed. Karen Kilby and Rachel Davies (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 246. Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” 246.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

103

­ ositively portraying vulnerability in human existence as not only inevitable p but also “a positive good, requiring active affirmation.”178 This latter version, which proclaims the inherent goodness of vulnerability, is what Tonstad sees as the ‘maximalist’ theory or theology of vulnerability. Her compelling critique of such positions is that an active affirmation of vulnerability actually presupposes the kind of subjectivity it sets out to dismantle. She asks: “Does, in other words, requiring a transformative relation to vulnerability require or engender something much like the very project of mastery vulnerability intends to undo?”179 If I can produce a more authentic self by knowingly and intentionally affirming my vulnerability, then I was always, from the start, the sovereign master. Vulnerability was not really threatening my own self. As Tonstad sees it, “the ‘maximalist’ affirmation of vulnerability can, as a strategy for negotiating life, be transformed into a management strategy of the very vulnerability by which one sought to be undone.” However, this does not exactly lead Tonstad to a conventional rejection of the significance of vulnerability. Her conclusion is more moderate than her initial, quite sweeping, critique: Vulnerability built into our lives, she says, “ought rather to be acknowledged, recognized, than affirmed.”180 If Tonstad’s main quarrel were with the abundant airport-friendly self-help literature about embracing one’s vulnerability as a strategy to become a more resilient, successful, and happy subject in a neoliberal consumer s­ociety— what Ziarek called “self-management of the liberal subject”—I would be quick to support her insistence that a subject that can affirm its vulnerability to control it, is actually denying the reality of vulnerability, not to say its value. However, Tonstad directs her critique at unidentified theories and theologies of vulnerability in general. If she by that thinks of contributors like the ones discussed in this chapter—Butler in particular—her criticism seems misplaced. They do certainly not propose a self-managerial ‘embrace’ of one’s vulnerability. Their affirmative revaluation of the human phenomenon of precariousness is, as I have tried to show, much more nuanced, complex, and sophisticated. Tonstad’s very broad and ambitious critique of ‘theologies and cultural theories’ of vulnerability seems to boil down to a problem with what she understands by the affirmation of vulnerability. In her opinion, vulnerability should be acknowledged or recognized rather than affirmed. It is not entirely clear what precisely the difference would be. In fact, Tonstad herself

178 179 180

Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” 248. Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” 251. Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” 251.

104

chapter 3

asks that question, rhetorically.181 It could be argued that recognition is, at least in the Hegelian or Honnethian version, stronger than affirmation. More importantly, though, it seems to me that Tonstad in her critique does not consider the revised understanding of vulnerability that is the very point of the theories she seems to be criticizing. The vulnerability that they recognize affirmatively is not a vulnerability that is mere passivity, weakness, or risk of harm. It is more complex. It contains resources for resistance. It is not necessarily contrary to security, sovereignty or strength. For this reason, I contend, we should continue to seek out, and affirm, its contribution to constituting political agency as well as community. 14 Framing In summary, then, the central argument in this chapter has been that multiple and contradictory forms of political agency and community depend on ­vulnerability—one’s own and that of others. We have seen that understanding life as fundamentally relational is the basis for an individual’s susceptibility to the vulnerability of others; thus, the awareness and interpretation of experiences of vulnerability conditions and shapes a person’s and a community’s ways of perceiving and responding to the political challenge of precarity. Conceptualizing the body as socially constituted in and through its relatedness to other bodies implies that people become subjects and agents through each other. Thus, we may perceive what is at stake in the struggle to recognize and protect the vulnerable lives of others: By defending the lives of others so that they are recognized as lives that count—grievable, livable lives—we participate in the affirmation of the priceless worth of everybody’s life, including our own. In this way, vulnerability can be seen as testifying to the interdependent and inalienable dignity of every human being. According to this reasoning, then, vulnerability is not a weakness to be eliminated but a value to be protected. If life in itself is always inescapably and constitutively vulnerable, it should be defended as exactly that—precarious life. Butler rightly advocates for “a world in which bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated ... insisting on the line that must be walked between the two.”182 The implications of this view are far-reaching; it infers that without being and experiencing oneself as vulnerable, true empathy, ethical action, and solidarity are impossible. However, this does not detract from the distinct and 181 Tonstad, “On vulnerability,” 253. 182 Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence, 42.

Precarious: Reconsidering Vulnerability

105

unique particularity of each experience of precarity. This tension between commonality and differentiation in vulnerability—between precariousness and precarity—is decisive. Butler underlines as we have seen the distinction between the existential precariousness that everybody experiences and the politically and socially unjustly distributed precarity that strikes some (definitely ‘ungrievable’) bodies more than others: “The more or less existential conception of ‘precariousness’ is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of ‘precarity’.”183 This distinction facilitates a better understanding of the causes of, and the feasible and relevant responses to, precarization. Moreover, it opens up the possibility of seeing vulnerability as active in resistance to this precarization. It is in this sense, that “vulnerability also has a positive meaning: it can be reclaimed as a condition of intersubjective freedom, action, and political engagement.”184 The concept of recognition has proved to be significant for this new understanding. Recognition takes shape as a respectful acknowledgement of the vulnerable body of the other that depends on an awareness of one’s own body’s primary vulnerability. This recognition, which is truly a mirroring, reflective movement—a re-cognition—nonetheless allows for potential agency. As we have seen, people tend to react to a lack of recognition and respect by demanding such recognition. That demand unleashes a force for struggles of resistance and liberation. Hence, surfacing here is a connection between, on the one hand, vulnerability as passivity or receptivity, and, on the other hand, resistance or struggle for freedom as agency. Inherent in vulnerability are decisive resources for resisting and repelling that which intrudes on human vulnerability by causing actual wounds or enforcing captivity. However, unleashing this kind of energy for liberating resistance emerging in and from vulnerability seems to require, using Butler’s vocabulary, a framing of vulnerability and precariousness that is decisively different from biopolitical schemes of control and security or neoliberal prescriptions for self-management.185 Political theology may contribute to such a different framing. Significantly, this framing is not limited to intellectual or theoretical concepts; it needs to be operationalized or performed through repetition and ruptures186 in practical and political terms. Likewise, it needs to include the affective dimensions 183 Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable?, 3. 184 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 68. 185 Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable; Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability.” 186 Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, see also Ulrich Schmiedel’s constructive use of Butler’s political theory of performance in his proposal for an ‘elasticized ecclesiology”, Schmiedel, Elasticized ecclesiology.

106

chapter 3

of human living and fellowship.187 This follows from the multidimensionality of vulnerability, which involves sensing and emotion. It materializes in a gaze, taste, or touch and cannot be reduced to pure thought or discourse. Above all, it implies an openness to otherness that oscillates between receptivity and productivity. Hence, at this point, it is pertinent to direct our attention to the multifaceted and fascinating field of everyday religiosity. 187

On the political significance of emotions, see e.g. Martha Craven Nussbaum, Political emotions: Why love matters for justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Dominique Moïsi, The geopolitics of emotion: How cultures of fear, humiliation and hope are reshaping the world (London: Bodley Head, 2009); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Siècle du populisme. Histoire, théorie, critique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2020), and, further, how this relates to vulnerability, see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Zanetti, Di Rosa, and Vicente Echevarría, Filosofía de la vulnerabilidad: percepción, discriminación, derecho.

Chapter 4

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times Are religiosity and the experience of vulnerability interconnected? If so, why and how would this be the case? These are the guiding questions in the present chapter. Observing that religion is held to be especially valuable by many people in lived precarity, I shall suggest that religious practices can be seen as ways of ‘handling’ vulnerability. More importantly, I shall argue that such practices can be expressions of an ‘acting vulnerably’ that may sustain political agency and community. Religion has been conspicuously missing in the politics of precarity and the revaluation of precariousness that I have analyzed so far. For instance, neither Standing nor his critics address the role of religious resources and practices in precarious life situations.1 They do not ask how religiosity might contribute to supporting resistance and resilience in and through the vulnerability that is common to the precariat. Except through a metaphorical reference to an absolute and foundational dichotomy between ‘paradise’ and ‘hell’, religious resources and imaginaries are absent from this political theory. It does not seriously engage with the diversity of culturally mediated tools and techniques that disenfranchised groups and colonized people apply to resist precarization, of which lived religiosity is one. Explicit and implicit references to religion and theology are more evident in the works of Agamben, Esposito, and Mbembe, as we have seen, whereas the religious dimension is—again— practically absent in Butler’s profound reflections on vulnerability.2 Still, her performative and relational approach certainly invites theological reflection. Two trends are often referred to in the empirical study of contemporary global religion. First, there is the much-debated ‘return of religion’, from the late 1970’s and onwards.3 Second, there is Christianity migrating ‘South’ 1 Sturla J. Stålsett, “Prayers of the Precariat? The Political Role of Religion in Precarious Times” Estudos teológicos 58, no. 2 (2018). 2 Note, however, her contribution in Judith Butler, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, The power of religion in the public sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 70–91, entitled “Is Judaism Zionism?” 3 See, i.a. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, trans. Alan Braley (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1994 (1991)); Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God is back: How the global revival of faith is changing the world (New York: Penguin, 2009); © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_005

108

chapter 4

to become a ‘world Christianity’.4 Religion is understood to have a greater political impact than before, and Christianity is becoming more diversified and perhaps even decolonized to a certain extent.5 Both these trends increase the relevance of examining more closely the possible interrelationship of religiosity and precarity. In what ways might such religious dynamics and transformations be connected to, or have an impact on, the present-day political impasses regarding political agency and community that I addressed above? To what degree could religion be a ‘missing dimension’6 in understanding and potentiating strategies of resistance of the precariat or the multitude faced with the framing of ungrievable lives, the permanent and pervasive application of states of exception, the excessive measures taken to immunize communities; or not least—the ruling necropolitics in the global postcolony? As I have pointed out, a practical and relational approach to religion asks not only what religion is, but also what it does, and what people do with Douglas Johnston, ed, Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds, Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Of course, Samuel P. Huntington’s redrawing of the global geopolitical map after the end of the Cold War, had a huge impact on this renewed focus on the role of religion, see Samuel P. Huntington, “The clash of civilizations?” Foreign affairs, summer (1993); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, First published by Simon & Schuster 1996 (New Dehli: Viking, 1997). See also the works of Jeff Haynes: Religion in Global Politics (London and New York: Longman, 1998); and An introduction to international relations and religion, (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007). 4 See, i.a. Philip Jenkins, The next Christendom: The coming of global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of all nations: Pillars of world Christianity, Oxford studies in world Christianity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Lamin Sanneh and Akintunde E. Akinade, A new day: Essays on world Christianity in honor of Lamin Sanneh (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Lamin Sanneh and Michael James McClymond, The Wiley Blackwell companion to world Christianity, Companion to world Christianity, (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016); Dyron B. Daughrity, To whom does Christianity belong? Critical issues in world Christianity, Understanding world Christianity, (Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2015); Sang-Bok David Kim, “Changes and Trends in World Christianity,” Transformation (Exeter) 30, no. 4 (2013); J. Asamoah-Gyadu, “Migration, Diaspora Mission, and Religious Others in World Christianity: An African Perspective,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39, no. 4 (2015). 5 “Today, another global hybridity, with both its wounds and its potentiality, is again redefining Christianity. The old European and American denominations, if they are growing at all, are most likely and most vividly growing in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. And within North American cities, immigrant churches have altered the religious landscape,” Keller, Nausner, and Rivera, Postcolonial theologies: Divinity and empire, 4. See also Marion Grau, Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011). 6 Compare Johnston and Sampson, Religion, The Missing Dimension.

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

109

it. Religiosity is performance. So what difference does religiosity make for people living in precarious situations? Why does it matter? How can it contribute to a different framing so that vulnerability can be recognized as a premise for and power within human flourishing? In this chapter I suggest that what we call ‘religiosity’ could be seen as human ways of handling vulnerable life. In fact, to many people struggling against precarity, religion is precious. Religiosity seems to correlate with experiences of vulnerability and its violations. Its communal and personal significance apparently increases in adversity. This observation is contentious. It is important to try to understand why this might be so. Furthermore, it is clear that diverse types of religiosity deal with human vulnerability in varying, internally conflicting ways. ‘Religion’ can in itself not contribute anything in particular to handling precarity, everything depends on what kind of religiosity we are talking about, how it is interpreted and understood –lived—in particular contexts by unique human beings and communities. So, in what follows, I am developing an argument for seeing the potential of religiosity for strengthening human agency and political community as reflected in the ways in which it may offer opportunities to handle vulnerability in ways that sustain good living. Religion’s key contribution to politics centers on how to deal with the lived experience of vulnerability. In order to better understand how religiosity thus relates to precarity, I shall start by discussing a recent theory on the relationship between precarity, religiosity and secularization, put forward by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. 1 Secularization Is there any particular interrelation between religion and vulnerability? In some ways, it is common sense to relate religiosity to a sense of stress, anxiety, or need. This has been a reason for the disavowal of either religion itself, as in Marx’s often superficially quoted dictum ‘“religion is the opium of the poor,” or of particular forms of religion or religiosity, such as the proliferation of different versions of ‘prosperity theology,’ often related to Neo-Pentecostalism.7 At this point, it may be helpful to search for a more precise and nuanced theory of the relationship between precariousness and religiosity/secularity. One such 7 See e.g. Ricardo Bitun, “O neopentecostalismo e sua inserção no mercado moderno” (Mestrado, Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior, 1996); Ricardo Mariano, “Neopentecostalismo: os pentecostais estão mudando” (Mestrado em Sociologia, Universidade de São Paulo, 1995).

110

chapter 4

theory has been developed by Norris and Inglehart in their book Sacred and Secular.8 Norris and Inglehart set out to empirically examine the proclaimed failure of secularization. Was Peter Berger right when he, self-critically but with enthusiasm, discarded his former celebrated secularization thesis, claiming that the world was now desecularizing?9 Or is secularization still very much in progress, as argued by, for instance, Steve Bruce?10 In defending the secularization thesis, Bruce regrets that it has often been caricatured. In his account, the decreasing popularity and importance of religion in the modern world does not mean that evident truths replace false superstition as people become better educated. Nor does it mean that modern people become almost automatically and self-consciously convinced of an atheistic or materialistic view of themselves or the world. We have not all been convinced by rationalists, Bruce claims, but have become “religiously tone-deaf,” as Max Weber alleged.11 Perhaps the more complex thesis of the modes and processes of secularization, presented by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, is more to the point.12 The magisterial Canadian thinker claims that the secularization of our times—notably emphasizing in the introduction that ‘our’ refers to ‘we in the West’13—is primarily reflected in faith in God today no longer being the default belief for many people; it is only one possibility among many. Western society tends to expect people today to be nonbelievers; there is a prevailing “presumption of unbelief.”14 Norris and Inglehart take the middle road between secularization and persisting sacralization by shifting the focus from modernization to precarization. They claim that the secularization thesis was not wholly wrong: “Talk

8

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9 Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics; Peter L. Berger, Secularization and de-secularization, 13, (2001); Peter L. Berger, “Max Weber is alive and well, and living in Guatemala: The protestant ethic today,” Review of Faith and International Affairs 8, no. 4 (2010). 10 Steve Bruce, Secularization: In defence of an unfashionable theory (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11 Steve Bruce, Religion in the modern world: From cathedrals to cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 234. 12 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 13 Taylor, A Secular Age, 1. 14 Taylor, A Secular Age, 13.

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

111

of burying the secularization theory is premature;”15 however, it was imprecise and needs revision. Secularization, defined by Norris and Inglehart as a systemic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs,16 is continuing in the parts of the world characterized by prosperity and security, but not among peoples and populations experiencing precarity. On the contrary, the experience of vulnerability to physical, social, and personal risks strengthens religiosity.17 This is their principal claim: “We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks.”18 To sustain this claim, they use a systematic quantitative approach to compare statistics from the World Values Surveys with the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI shows the degree to which nations differ in guaranteeing material, and basic security. Although economic growth has been high in recent decades, they note, inequalities have increased.19 In poor countries, many people’s survival and welfare continue to be constantly threatened. In these areas, the World Values Surveys examined by Norris and Inglehart in Sacred and Secular clearly show that religious values and practices are becoming increasingly important to people. According to their theory, then, it is this precarity or experience of vulnerability that makes people in the Global South more religious than people and populations experiencing prosperity and security.20 In the prosperous parts of the world, such as the rich and industrialized north, religious institutions and practices are gradually and progressively weakening, and secularization is still underway. However, in the world as a whole, the opposite trend can be observed: the global importance of religiosity is increasing. This is because religious adherence is strong and growing in the parts of the world where the populations are growing most rapidly (i.e. in the Global South). According to statistics, in 1900, 32% of the world’s population lived in the north. By 1970, this proportion had fallen to 25%, and it had decreased to around 18% by 2000. By 2050, it is, according to the revised 2011 version of Norris and Inglehart’s book, estimated that only one-tenth of the world’s population will live in the prosperous north. This demographic trend is related to religion, the authors claim: population growth is most significant where people are most 15 16 17 18 19 20

Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 4. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 5. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 4. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 4. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 217–218. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 79.

112

chapter 4

religious—in the south.21 There is a correlation between vulnerability, religiosity, and population growth. Poor people give birth to more children than rich people do, and this phenomenon is related to religious values. Across various religions, traditional family values prevail, often implying a traditional division of labor between the sexes and weakening women’s access to education and work. In unsafe living conditions, children are perceived as insurance. In other words, increased demographic growth is both closely related to and a consequence of the sense of security that religious beliefs seem to provide people under precarious circumstances. Hence, according to Norris and Inglehart, there is no contradiction between continued secularization among the rich and an overall global increase in religiosity. The number of religious people is increasing, in turn reflecting the fact that the proportion of the world’s population experiencing precarious living conditions is also increasing. 2 Security Why should there be more religiosity in poor regions where demographic growth is the highest? If it cannot be explained by traditional and blatantly arrogant and ethnocentric references to rationality and modern development claiming that Western society has ‘outgrown’ religion and that ‘the rest’ will do so in due course—what then? As we can see, Norris and Inglehart respond to this by replacing the secularization theses’ traditional emphasis on ‘modernization’ with human security as the decisive factor in explaining secularization and religious resurgence. They claim that the explanatory factor is the human experience of physical and material exposure and risk. Their “revised version of secularization theory (…) emphasizes the extent to which people have a sense of existential security – that is, the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted.”22 If they are correct, the stronger the sense of insecurity or experience of vulnerability, the more people will commit themselves to religion and religious practices. People who cannot take survival for granted will turn to their respective religious sources for orientation, transformation, and support. In contrast, those who grow up in communities enjoying a high degree of

21 22

See Scott M. Thomas, “A globalized god: Religion’s growing influence in international politics,” Foreign affairs. 89 no. 6 (2010). Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 4.

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

113

material welfare and security for the future will continue to lose interest in religion and participate less in religious activities. In summary, “rich countries are becoming more secular, but the world as a whole is becoming more religious.”23 This means that the differences in religious values and practices between the rich and poor worldwide are increasing. Contrary to Huntington’s infamous thesis,24 this indicates that, to a considerable degree, social and religious fault lines overlap. Although this polarization does not automatically increase the level of conflict between the two groups, according to Norris and Inglehart, they do warn that this is a divide that “fanatics and demagogues can seize, to use for their own ends.”25 We should note here that experiences of precarity are not always linked to poverty. Whereas the experience of vulnerability can be constant, as among many poor people and conflict-ridden populations, it can also occur abruptly and urgently, as in a disaster, a pandemic, or a terrorist attack. In times of war and crisis, in precarious and exceptional times, one should expect to see instances of a temporary increase in religious activity, even in rich countries and communities. 3 Deprivation Inglehart and Norris’ book provides convincing empirical evidence of the increasing significance of religion in precarious times. However, political theologian Graham Ward has refuted Norris and Inglehart’s thesis. He sees it as yet another example of a “deprivation thesis” on religion that perceives religion and religiosity as merely an effect of something else, primarily signaling a lack of something. It reduces religion to a substitute, a consolation, and again, referring to Marx, an ‘opium.’ Ward cites Clifford Geertz’s view, expressed in the sixties, “that religion is a symbolic world order giving expression to deep human anxieties as such.”26 The problem with this, according to Ward, is that religion is viewed merely as “epiphenomenal—a response to something rather than a cause of anything.”27 Ward rebukes such a view harshly: 23 24

Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 217. Cf. Huntington, “The clash of civilizations?”; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, where the fault lines are essentially ‘civilizational’, i.e., cultural, not social or economic. 25 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 217. 26 Graham Ward, The politics of discipleship: Becoming postmaterial citizens (London: SCM Press, 2009), 124. 27 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 124.

114

chapter 4

Besides the moral and intellectual hubris of such negative reductions, it is evident that social scientists never espouse religious faith positively, as something of intrinsic value and import. Worship, prayer, liturgical attendance, reading sacred texts, and practices of devotion are never affirmative human acts. They are always substitutes for a lack of some kind. They are never taken seriously as such.28 It is certainly not difficult to find examples in the history of the social sciences’ treatment of religious practices of the tendency Ward attacks. Nevertheless, his criticism appears somewhat overstated. First, most social scientists’ analyses of the return or resurgence of religion do indeed take religiosity seriously. Some even point to the expected positive (in their view) outcomes of religious transformation. A case in point is the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America, positively described as a democratizing force by Berger and, among others, another prominent sociologist of religion, David Martin.29 Admittedly, this could still be seen, following Ward, as valuing religiosity for its presumed effects rather than its “intrinsic value.” However, one could ask what criteria could be used to assess religiosity if it is unrelated to its impact on people’s lives? Whether it is based on what religious adherents express or what can be observed from ‘the outside,’ valuing religiosity would not be very meaningful if it simply held something to be good because it is religious. The questions of why, to whom, and concerning what a specific religious practice or belief is valuable must also be raised. Such questions are inherently values-based; they express values that are implicitly and explicitly present in the epistemological presuppositions and methodological designs of the social sciences, religious studies, and theologies alike. That being said, there is no doubt that the Enlightenment legacy, as well as the almost blind faith in the secularization thesis, characterized the social sciences’ examination of religion and religiosity, not seldom giving the discipline the kind of ‘hubris’ vis-à-vis religion that Ward accused it of. Treating ‘religious people,’ whoever ‘they’ may be, as less ‘rational,’ immature, and ultimately unaware of the truth about themselves or their best interests, is certainly arrogant—not honest knowledge-seeking science. However, this arrogance seems less typical in social or religious studies today. As Nancy Ammermann rightly observed, “Rather than assuming that spiritual beliefs are irrational and religious participation is regressive, researchers are now 28 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 124. 29 See e.g. David Martin, Pentecostalism: The world their parish, Religion and modernity, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

115

asking whether and under what conditions different sorts of beliefs and spiritual practices have what kind of effects.”30 However, is Ward’s harsh critique of this point accurate regarding the particular thesis presented by Inglehart and Norris? Is their view necessarily epiphenomenal and reductionist? Or, framed otherwise, does the “view that religion is an expression of existential insecurities” necessarily preclude, denigrate, or neglect the intrinsic value of religion?31 If Norris and Inglehart’s thesis implied that avoiding risk and seeking safety are all that should be said about religion and that the causal direction only flows from human experience and living conditions to religious practice, Ward’s would be an adequate critique. However, I do not think this is what Inglehart and Norris claim. In contrast, they clarify that “the need for a sense of certainty in a world where existence is full of danger and uncertainty” is “not the only motivating factor” for religious adherence.32 They empirically demonstrate a link between two phenomena: the experience of human security and religious adherence. This is significant for a general understanding of current societal trends and the role of religiosity. In Sacred and Secular, they generally say little about why there is such a link and in what ways different forms of religiosity respond to experiences of precariousness. This is reasonable, since, presumably, providing answers to this kind of question would overstep the limits of their methodological design and available data. Nonetheless, a few passages in the book are ambiguous in this regard. Immediately after asserting that a sense of security is not to be seen as the only motivating factor for religiosity, Inglehart and Norris continue, “Philosophers and theologians have sought to probe into the meaning and purpose of life since the dawn of history; but for the great majority of the population, who lived at the margin of subsistence, the need for reassurance and sense of certainty was the main function of religion.”33 The problem, as I see it, consists of setting the “meaning and purpose of life” (a task superficially attributed to ‘philosophers and theologians’) against the “need for reassurance and sense of certainty.” Why should they be opposing alternatives? Seeing “the meaning and purpose of life” as separate from, or even an alternative to, the quest for existential and bodily safety and well-being is neither necessary nor plausible.

30

Nancy T. Ammerman, Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5. 31 Ward, The politics of discipleship, 124. 32 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 231. 33 Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 231.

116

chapter 4

A secularized bias is detectable in another section of Inglehart and Norris’ text. Dismissing too-superficial critiques of classic secularization theory, they point out that it is “knocking down a straw man” to refute the theory by referring to the fact that “religion remains strong in countries that have not yet experienced the industrialization process.”34 I find the ‘not yet’ noteworthy. Is there, in fact, a secularizing teleology lurking in this formulation? Norris and Inglehart seem to imply that the drift toward secularization is constant and only a matter of time. Strong religiosity in preindustrial countries would then not contradict the secularization hypothesis, but rather confirm it. It seems that the “not yet” could imply that when nations eventually become industrialized, they will also become more secular. These few exceptions notwithstanding, I find Norris and Inglehart’s principal claim on this matter convincing regarding the impact and importance of religion in precarious life situations. This is significant for the present essay in political theology. It shows the political relevance of the human phenomenon of religiosity, particular in situations of suffering and injustice. A political theology of vulnerability should therefore critically examine why and how religiosity becomes more important to people in times of adversity, as indicated by Norris and Inglehart. We need to understand what is at stake in this precarious religiosity and to critically construct viable visions for ethical and political action. What do people ‘make of’ religion in precarious circumstances? Why and how does this matter? Which resources in a particular faith tradition become particularly important to people struggling to overcome injustice and disenfranchisement? 4 Responses The resurgence or consolidation of religiosity in precarious times may take many forms. Not only religions or faith traditions, but also different forms of religiosity may deal with the experience of precarity in distinct, even opposite, ways. Consider two dominant global waves of religious revival: Pentecostalism and fundamentalism. Recent decades have witnessed the spread of charismatic religiosities through the rise of Pentecostalism within and outside established churches. A global increase in the visibility, size, and influence of fundamentalist movements has occurred across world religions. These transformational trends have a decisive impact on the effect of religion on politics, 34

Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 216.

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

117

as has been widely studied.35 However, how these different religiosities handle issues of experienced vulnerability has received less detailed attention. More empirical and comparative studies are needed in this area. If I nonetheless should endeavor to posit a preliminary and highly tentative characterization of these different religiosities and how they respond to vulnerability, it would be along these lines: Fundamentalism, as a cross-cultural, transreligious, and political phenomenon,36 is likely to uphold and strengthen what I have called the conventional view of vulnerability. It sees frailty and affectability as predominantly and univocally a weakness and a problem in human life. In fact, this is the problem that establishes the need for religious belonging in the first place—that human beings by themselves are exposed to risk, harm, and death. It explains why religiosity must be clean, strict, rigid, and unswervingly clear. The absolute totality of the divine truth, as revealed in Scriptures or by traditional authorities in the present religious community, serves as a protective shield against fragmented, confusing, and insecure everyday experiences of precarious life.37 Fundamentalism pits religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy against the vulnerabilities of life. The sacred or divine truth is not affected or affectable and serves as a safe haven against attacks by the perceived falsehood and evil of enemy forces. These evil forces may be perceived as corporeal, political, or spiritual, or as a fusion of them. That is also why obedience is demanded, doubt is intolerable, and deviance is punished. Charismatic or experiential religiosities, as seen in the conservative Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Neo-Pentecostal churches, are not—contrary to 35

36

37

See e.g. Jonathan Fox and Shmuel Sandler, Bringing religion into international relations (New York, Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan 2004); Haynes, Religion in Global Politics; Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, The new visibility of religion: Studies in religion and cultural hermeneutics, Continuum resources in religion and political culture, (London ; New York: Continuum, 2008); Sturla J. Stålsett and Oddbjørn Leirvik, The Power of Faiths in Global Politics (Oslo: Novus, 2004). See e.g. Martin E. Marty et al, The Fundamentalism project: Fundamentalisms comprehended, Vol. 5 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995); Torkel Brekke, Fundamentalism: Prophecy and protest in an age of globalization (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Karen Armstrong, “What Is Fundamentalism?,” in Promise and Peril. The paradox of Religion as Resource and Threat, ed. Anna Lännström (Notre Dame, Indiana: Univeristy of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong religion: The rise of fundamentalisms around the world (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). James William Jones, Terror and transformation: The ambiguity of religion in psychoanalytic perspective (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2002); James William Jones, Blood that cries out from the earth: The psychology of religious terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

118

chapter 4

what is sometimes believed—necessarily fundamentalist. They are indeed open to change and intensely direct their attention toward God’s overwhelming appearance in the near future, rather than the authoritative divine revelation of the past (although the latter is certainly also prevalent).38 More accurately, their focus is on the present moment. This can best be observed in Neo-Pentecostal ‘Prosperity Christianity.’ A religiosity of the present, based on the power of divine inspiration, is expected to immediately impact health, wealth, and success.39 Vulnerability, as a sensation, is by no means strange or unfamiliar to this religious approach; it could even be seen as its typical point of departure. It is by the power of the divine that the perceived vicissitudes of human vulnerability—illness, poverty, sin, and so on—may be overcome. In this religiosity, the human condition is indeed acknowledged as precarious, but only, it is promised, prior to conversion. In Neo-Pentecostal and charismatic forms of religiosity, it appears, faith in God liberates people from vulnerability; it carries the assurance of receiving spiritual power and blessings from God, making it possible to escape or rise above the vulnerabilities of life. While charismatic approaches generally differ from fundamentalism concerning the practices for receiving divine inspiration, the two forms of religiosity do share a Manichean ethical and political approach anchored in the belief in an ultimately cosmic and suprahistorical war between good and evil, which has historical and political consequences for life as vulnerable in the here and now. These characterizations, of course, would have to be nuanced and modified for application to a particular fundamentalist or charismatic movement in a specific context. The characteristics of other forms of religiosity could also be examined with a particular view to revealing how they orient people’s ways of dealing with precariousness. By definition, all such forms of lived religion are complex and challenging to neatly systematize; for instance, both fundamentalist and charismatic forms of religiosity are sometimes effectively aligned with authoritarian political movements. However, in other contexts, they represent divergence and resistance, and thus open up dynamics of democratization, pluralism, and demands for respecting minorities. Whether or not these descriptions succeed in capturing some overall tendencies of religious responses to vulnerability, it can at least be said that the 38 39

See, e.g., Paulo Barrera Rivera, Tradição, transmissão e emoção religiosa. Sociologia do protestantismo contemporâneo na América Latina (São Paulo: Olho d’Água, 2001). See Sturla J. Stålsett, ed, Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age (London: SCM Press, 2006).

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

119

so-called ‘return’ of religion is inconclusive regarding which political effects it will have in different contexts, depending on which forms of religiosity prosper and what theologies they develop. During the last fifty years, fundamentalist and charismatic movements have gained considerable traction, but so have explicitly political and public theologies in the form of liberation theologies, feminist theologies, contextual theologies, ecumenical theologies, interreligious reflection and practice, and more and less organized grassroots movements linked to them.40 They, too, can be seen as religious responses to increasing precarity. In the next chapter, I will draw on selected theological sources nurtured by such religious practices, in order to show some of its potential in affirming the value of vulnerability for political agency and community. Norris and Inglehart’s alternative secularization theory linked insecure life conditions and religious practice. It shows that religion matters to vulnerability, and vice versa. However, a critical question must be raised: Does this connection confirm a conventional view of human vulnerability (i.e. seeing it as primarily a deficiency, a lack, or a problem that could or should be solved)? In other words, does Norris and Inglehart’s thesis undermine, rather than underpin, religious support for seeing vulnerability as a value? Does their argument imply that, for people experiencing precarity, religion functions as the ultimate shield—as protection against vulnerability rather than as an affirmation of the precariousness of life that would call for the protection of life as vulnerable? To discuss such questions, we need to proceed from the empirical approaches assessed in this chapter so far toward a more conceptual and hermeneutical inquiry. Why and how can precariousness and religion be interlinked? What could be reasons for seeing religiosity as a human way of handling vulnerability in life? 5 Ultimacy Why is religiosity particularly related to the experience of vulnerable living? Is there something about what we conceptualize as ‘religion’ that makes it 40

See, for instance, Leonardo Boff, E a Igreja se fez povo (Petrópolis: Editora Voces, 1986); Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll (NY): Orbis books, 1986); Guillermo Cook, The Expectation of the Poor. Latin American Base Communities in Protestant Perspective (New York: Orbis Books, 1985); Guillermo Cook, ed, New Face of the Church in Latin America. Betweeen Tradition and Change (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994).

120

chapter 4

uniquely relevant to tackle situations of risk, marginalization, and trauma? As outlined in the introduction, I prefer an understanding of religion that is practice-oriented, contextual, and, in the specific sense, pragmatic. Such a pragmatic approach seeks to “consider religion with regard to its experiential implications.”41 In short, religion is more about what we do than what we think or believe. Religions “deal with the transcendental conditions for human experience and attempt to formulate and engage those in ways that shape, form, and expand human life, agency, and understanding”42 In his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience,43 William James famously maintained that there is a sense of wrongness behind every religious belief. Religion, he asserted, is a way to overcome the experienced wrongness in life by making a proper connection with “the higher powers.”44 According to this line of thought, religion is a way of dealing with the limits experienced in life. Conventionally, vulnerability could be another word for those limits. However, there is constant negotiation about where these limits are, what they imply, and how to relate to what is beyond them. Limits are never absolute, fixed, or permanent. As boundaries, they do not necessarily undermine the flourishing of life. As I have argued at length, vulnerability is not merely a limitation or a ‘wrongness’ in life. Personal experience of the flexible and unstable boundaries of agency or ability may open up necessary and life-sustaining relationships with and receptions of other people—or something or someone ‘beyond,’ be it the transcendent, the sacred, or God. This openness to what is beyond one’s experienced reach takes on a particular religious character when the reality to which one reaches out is seen as ultimate, as famously stressed by Paul Tillich.45

41 Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy: Christian religion as unfinished business, vol. 5, 15. See also Jan-Olav Henriksen, Religion as orientation and transformation: A maximalist theory, vol. 90, Religion in philosophy and theology, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 90. 42 Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, 25. 43 William James, The varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature, Routledge classics, (Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland, N.Z.: Floating Press, 2008), (first published in 1905). 44 See James, The varieties of religious experience, 28. Pursuing this in his decidedly pragmatic approach, Jan-Olav Henriksen sustains that religion can be seen as an effort in human life to manage or respond to the ambivalent experience of vulnerability: “One can interpret the meaning of religious representations as helping to deal with these tasks through practices of orientation (What is the best thing to do or be?); transformation (Should I transform the object of my desires or my way of dealing with vulnerability?); and reflection (How do I live in and relate in the best way possible to others and to God?)”, Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, 136–7. 45 Paul Tillich, Systematic theology: Combined volume (Welwyn, Herts: Nisbet, 1968).

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

121

The ultimate consists of elements that give meaning to human life and practices beyond individual life.46 Referring back to what has been said above regarding the importance of recognition to human agency and community, I would highlight here how relating to something ‘ultimate,’ can be a critical source of such recognition, sparking the personal and communal energies required for shouldering, and at best getting rid of, the burden of misrecognition and harassment. This is one reason, I think, why living out one’s religiosity in situations of dismay is not primarily about mourning, but more often about rejoicing. Agency is ignited, rehearsed, and directed in common celebration of the recognition retrieved from religious sources, traditions, stories and practices. That religious enactment of a meaningful life in community takes many forms, across regions, religions and confessions. There is singing and clapping hands; there is silent concentration and contemplation; there is sharing of concerns and sorrows as well as dreams and accomplishments. Still, as already pointed out, the ways in which these practices and their interpretation assess and address the experience of vulnerability differ. They may be as much escaping as asserting the reality of precarious life. It could be argued, though, that even when religiosity serves to temporarily ‘forget’ the troubles of everyday living, it may create a space for renewal and restitution that can have a positive effect on self-assertion that, in turn, as underlined by Honneth and Butler in different, albeit, concurring ways, can foster political agency.47 My argument here is also that such political action is not merely or primarily a response to vulnerability. As discussed in chapter 3, it is also an enactment or performance of vulnerability. In the human condition of precariousness, there are inherent resources for resistance and political agency.48 Political agency and political community depend on a reconceptualization of vulnerability as not only passive receptivity, but as active response and engagement. Therefore, returning to our main question at this point, what

46 Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, 41. 47 Axel Honneth, The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995), see also Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière, and Katia Genel, Recognition or disagreement: A critical encounter on the politics of freedom, equality, and identity, New directions in critical theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 48 This may be primarily a matter of terminology, but I differ from Springhart when she calls it a danger for human beings to “become an agent of vulnerability.” Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability: Vulnerability in Vitality,” 29. I see being an agent of vulnerability, or ‘acting vulnerably,’ as a constructive and liberating act of political affirmation.

122

chapter 4

role does religion play in this vulnerable act, or rather, in this event of acting vulnerably? 6 Wrongness Religion can be seen as a way to make desire and vulnerability “an integral part of a good life in community with others.”49 Undoubtedly, both vulnerability and desire are fundamental features of human life, and they are closely interlinked. In my view, they need not be seen as in tension with each other. When they are construed as opposites, the experience of vulnerability could once again easily be seen primarily as a negative dimension of human life. Instead, I have suggested that we understand vulnerability as not merely an inescapable part of human life but also as a value and force for political agency and political community. Such agency issuing from vulnerability will always depend on the motivating force of desire. To see vulnerability as integral to agency, or even as a form of agency in itself, would imply viewing desire and vulnerability as complementary rather than contradictory forces. According to Heike Springhart, as we saw, ontological and situated vulnerability taken together make it possible to recognize vulnerability as a more realistic envisioning of human life. In her own words, “It is the complementarity of ontological and situated vulnerability that makes vulnerability a value of human life.”50 However, if we accept Butler’s distinction between ontological, universal precariousness on the one hand, and differential and situational precarity on the other, it becomes clear that there is tension between these two dimensions of vulnerability. Situational vulnerability or precarity is an expression of a negative circumstance in life.51 The two mentioned dimensions of vulnerability are indeed interlinked in such a way that ontological vulnerability makes these situated instances of precarity possible. These situated experiences of being vulnerable are, in other words, expressions of the underlying human condition. This does not mean that they should be viewed as two sides of the same coin. Instead, we should see these two dimensions as in tension: whereas common, universal vulnerability is valuable, 49 Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy. 50 Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability,” 24. Henriksen apparently agrees with Springhart on this point, See Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, 169. 51 This is what can be described as the tragic dimension of human experience, see e.g., Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, and Rowan Williams, The tragic imagination: The literary agenda (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

123

actual instances of precarity (i.e. situational vulnerability) are harmful; they are examples of how that fundamental vulnerability is exploited and violated rather than being protected. This exploitation is what constitutes, to use William James’ term, a ‘wrongness.’52 Hence, the condition of vulnerability (i.e. as ontological or shared) is not in itself contrary to life’s goodness. It is situated vulnerability, or precarity, that exposes wrongness: the reality of harassment, suffering, and death through real and intolerable acts of violence or destruction. That is why I have argued that these ontological and situated dimensions should be seen as corresponding to a distinction between vulnerability and woundedness. Vulnerability, as a common and ineradicable condition, sustains life and can foster political agency and community. Woundedness, on the contrary, as the expression of unique and multiple experiences of bodily violations and assaults on corporeal and existential integrity and well-being, undermines the flourishing of life in just relations. 7 ‘Handling’ Drawing on the pragmatic approach to lived religion, it makes sense to view religion as a practical, personal, and political way of expressing and ­addressing— handling—the vulnerability of life. In and through religious imaginations and interruptions, vulnerability can be addressed in its dialectical oscillation between the (enabling) ontological condition of precariousness and the (disabling) contexts of and situations of precarity. The relational character of human existence, which makes vulnerability both a fact and a value, corresponds with religious practice understood as ‘re-ligare’, indicating a transcending movement existentially relating to that which is beyond human experiences of limitation and exposure.53 The act of reaching beyond the experienced 52 53

Theologically, this violation of vulnerability could correspond to the concept of sin. See Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 103ff. Note the distinction between the transcendent and transcendental, underlined by Henriksen: “(T)he transcendent is simply that which is beyond our world, that which is not part of our realms of experience. but which we sometimes can get a glimpse of in our actual experiences. The transcendental is, on the other hand, that which is implied in, and necessary for our actual experience, its content and shape.” (…) “The transcendentals I speak of here and in the following are part of the created order, and therefore intimately related to the actual experiences we have of the world.” Henriksen, Representation and ultimacy, 26.

124

chapter 4

flexible boundaries marked as vulnerability can be understood as a religious act. In view of the considerations in this chapter, then, I suggest that this should be seen as a key element of religiosity: ‘religion’ is a term for lived practices of handling (i.e., addressing and engaging) experiences of human ­vulnerability— in its tension between life-sustaining precariousness and life-threatening ­precarity—­reaching relationally ‘beyond’ the limits of these experiences. However, as noted when distinguishing between different types of religiosity or religious practices , the connection between vulnerability as relationality and religion understood as ‘re-ligare’ can be read and realised in quite contradictory ways. In a precarious position, a person is handed over to or utterly dependent on someone else. Whether this is experienced as a tolerable situation depends on trust. Finding oneself handed over to someone or something one does not trust can be a paralyzing experience of precarity.54 Relying on someone who turns out to be willing and able to respond—to show responsibility in that concrete relating—can, on the contrary, be a precious experience of what sustains life and makes it worth living. This basic observation may shed further light on the connection between precariousness and religiosity. Trust, of course, is a critical element of lived religion, and has one of its possible religious manifestations in faith.55 A concrete expression of such precarious handing over of oneself to the other in trust is the practice of prayer. As we have seen, etymologically, the adjective ‘precarious’ is linked to prayer; ‘precor’ the Latin word for ‘precarious’ means “depending on favor, pertaining to entreaty, obtained by asking or praying.”56 Neither the religious dimensions of politics nor the political dimensions of lived religiosity are always explicit. Using James Scott’s terminology, religious visions and practices are part of hidden transcripts: “a critique of

54

“Being handed over against one’s will is not always a beautiful scene.” Butler, The force of nonviolence, 49. 55 Faith as fiducia, trust, is often distinguished from faith as assensus, accepting something to be true; fidelitas, faithfulness; and visio, a way of seeing the world as resulting from God’s grace at work. See discussion in Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability,” 29. For an original analysis of the ‘traces of’ and ‘trouble with’ trust related to (ecclesial) community that opens itself to others, see Ulrich Schmiedel, Elasticized ecclesiology: The concept of community after Ernst Troeltsch, Pathways for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 56 See https://www.etymonline.com/word/precarious. Judith Butler refers to this etymology without developing or exploring its relevance to religion. Or, put otherwise, she does not reflect on religion as a relevant field of experience and practice for developing a different view of the vulnerable condition of life.

Precious: Religion in Precarious Times

125

power spoken behind the back of the dominant.”57 Such religious resources prove indispensable in struggles for survival in situations of domination and oppression. Thus, religiosity can express political resistance—at times, the only viable resistance. Participating in a religious celebration, singing hymns, praying, or performing a rite, can be among the “innumerable small acts that [could] serve to recover or assert dignity”, borrowing the words of Waite and colleagues.58 Religious belonging or belief can also provide the courage and strength to simply keep on struggling and holding on to hope even when the prevailing forces of the dominating sovereign power, the Empire, and the bio/necropolitics in permanent states of exception seem overwhelming and resistance appears futile. When an open confrontation with power appears to be impossible, self-destructive, or even suicidal, Scott pointed out that dominated people often prefer to avoid an open battle. This is not necessarily an expression of resignation but may simply reflect their accumulated wisdom. It seldom means that they refrain from criticizing or resisting, however. The impulse to “speak truth to power”, directly or indirectly, sits deeply within human nature. Humans demand recognition; we yearn for respect. So people in precarity often camouflage criticism as stories, rumors, ironies, and jokes, or—importantly—as prayers, chants, prophecies, processions, celebrations, and sermons. These disguised forms of resistance, we may recall, constitute ‘infrapolitics’: “The silent partner of a loud public resistance.”59 Central to the infrapolitical repertoire of people in precarity are practices expressed as religiosity. Religiosity can be a way of acting vulnerably that may transform into precarious politics. To summarize, in this chapter, I have been probing the possible role of religiosity in the search for a more operational and realistic conceptualization of common action for justice and human dignity. This discussion has situated contemporary expressions of religion in precarious life contexts. Religiosity seems to flourish where life is experienced as vulnerable. Religion can be understood as practices that, in multiple ways, aim to handle life’s precariousness, emerging from, shaping and directing common action.60 Its relevance to politics in its numerous forms and at different levels is indisputable.

57

James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990), xxi. 58 Waite et al, “Precarious Lives: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring,” 485. 59 Scott, Domination, 199. 60 Compare Durkheim and Cladis, The elementary forms.

126

chapter 4

However, as we have seen, different forms of religiosity provide varying and conflicting ways of handling precarious experiences. Hence, I will now pay attention to practices that are understood as Christian and played out in contexts of repression. How can the celebration of Christian faith in God under such circumstances—practically performed and theologically interpreted—reconnect vulnerability, political agency, and political community?

Chapter 5

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability A political theology of vulnerability must engage in “the crucial task of reordering the collective imagination.”1 In this chapter and the next, I will consider the re-imagination of human precariousness from the point of view of Christian faith practiced in contexts of precarity. My aim is to identify interpretative and motivational resources for revaluing vulnerability in ways that promote political agency and community. For this pursuit, different procedures are possible.2 Many significant contributions choose constructive and contextual methods, underpinned by, for instance, critical theories of race and intersectionality, disability studies, and feminist philosophy.3 While drawing on some of these important contributions, 1 “The church is called, as it exists in this space of trauma, to engage in the crucial task of reordering the collective imagination of its people and to be wise and passionate in this task.” Serene Jones, Trauma and grace: Theology in a ruptured world, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 31 (italics in the original). Public theology, according to Kjetil Fretheim, has the double task of providing not only imagination but also interruption. See Kjetil Fretheim, Interruption and imagination: Public theology in times of crisis (Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2016). 2 See for instance, William C. Placher, Narratives of a vulnerable God: Christ, theology, and scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), and the comprehensive works of Pool, God’s Wounds. Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering. Volume One: Divine Vulnerability and Creation, 1; Jeff B. Pool, God’s Wounds. Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering. Volume Two: Evil and Divine Suffering, 3 vols, vol. 2, Princeton Theological Monograph Series, (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2010). In the compilation Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas, Exploring vulnerability, [1. Auflage]. ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) this is also a common interpretative strategy, see, e.g. Andreas Schüle’s chapter “‘All Flesh’: Imperfection and Incompleteness in Old Testament Anthropology”, 83–92. Applying a phenomenological and deconstructive approach clearly inspired by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, John D. Caputo develops a ‘weak’ theology in The weakness of God: A theology of the event, Indiana series in the philosophy of religion, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), see also John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, (Bloomington: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), see also Stefan Stofanik and John D. Caputo, The adventure of weak theology: Reading the work of John D. Caputo through biographies and events (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018). 3 Dorothee Soelle, The Window of Vulnerability. A Political Spirituality, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); Kristine A. Culp, Vulnerability and glory: A theological account, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010); Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_006

128

chapter 5

I will also seek to include the concerns that are central in the studies of lived religion and everyday theology.4 These approaches, as noted, prioritize “the material, embodied aspects of religion as they occur in everyday life”5 and view religion as a potentially liberating source of orientation, transformation, and legitimation.6 With this in mind, I shall take the two main festivals of Christianity, Christmas and Easter, represented by the key symbols of the crib7 and the cross, as a point of departure for a political theological reflection on the critical issues addressed so far.8 Seeking to root these festivals in contexts and experiences of precarity, I have chosen in this chapter to pay close attention to one particular Christmas sermon, delivered in the Cathedral of San Salvador in a country on the brink of civil war, in 1979. I find this sermon particularly rich in both contextual awareness and theological content relevant to my topic. My aim is not to portray this as an ‘ideal’ or ‘correct’ Christian preaching in precarity, but to draw insights from it as one example of how Christian practices and resources can help reimagine the connection between human vulnerability, community and agency. In the next chapter, I move from preaching to prayer, in particular prayer in the form of spirituals addressing the cruelty of crucifixion in the midst of slavery. By choosing these contexts, I also give experiences of precarity a certain epistemological and hermeneutical priority. Such experiences, I hold in line with the liberationist strand of theology, can be seen as loci theologici in a

4 See Nancy T. Ammerman, Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nancy T. Ammerman, Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Meredith B. McGuire, Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).Jeff Astley and Leslie J. Francis, Exploring ordinary theology: Everyday christian believing and the Church, Explorations in practical, pastoral and empirical theology, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 5 Ammerman, “Finding Religion in Everyday Life,” 190. 6 Jan-Olav Henriksen, “Everyday religion as orientation and transformation: a challenge to theology,” Nordic Journal of Society and Religion 29, no. 1 (2016), see also Jan-Olav Henriksen, Religion as orientation and transformation: A maximalist theory, vol. 90, Religion in philosophy and theology, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 90. 7 Note that the ‘crib’ also can be seen as a symbol of violent separation enforced by Western ideology that rejects the co-sleeping practices of most of the world, and most of human ­history—a kind of prison for children. This sharply contrasts with the idealization in many present-day depictions of the nativity scene. 8 Still, although I thus seek to come closer to lived experiences and expressions of contemporary Christianity, my work does not pretend to be ethnographic or empirical in any strict sense. I am still, in a quite traditional way for theology, using texts and testimonies as a basis for a hermeneutical, text-based analysis.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

129

revelatory sense.9 This methodological priority can also invite a more narrative and embodied mode of reflection, which may be appreciated in what follows. I start in a quite common and generally positive experience, though: the celebration of birthdays. 1 Birthdays The Christian faith distinguishes itself from both Judaism and Islam by its assertion of a decisive incarnational event: God becoming human through the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Every Christmas celebration is, of course, a religious birthday party. Birthdays are among the most common everyday rituals, although they are not universally shared. Many births go unnoticed in contemporary postcolonial zones of marginality and abandonment and remain unregistered—like the birth of Mariam’s child.10 Due to precarity, millions are not remembered yearly as a cause of celebration. Some lives are not only made ungrievable, as Judith Butler observed; we could add that many births are de facto framed as ‘unrejoicable’ —not worthy of celebration.11 Nonetheless, most birthdays are indeed celebrated with joy and symbols of praise and honor. This is also the case for Jesus of Nazareth, who according to the Gospel of Luke was born in colonial Bethlehem because his parents obeyed the command of the Roman Emperor to be legally registered. The dominant, commercialized, and romanticized version of the Christian Christmas celebration threatens to gloss over the perilous and political dimensions of the Lukan nativity narrative (Luke 2, 1–20). As any mother knows, giving birth is fraught with risk and pain. In her theological anthropology, Elizabeth Gandolfo makes “women’s diverse experiences of maternity and natality” her epistemological and hermeneutical vantage point “in order to lay out the anthropological 9 10

11

See, e.g. Jon Sobrino, Resurrección de la verdadera Iglesia: los pobres, lugar teológico de la eclesiología, Colección Teología Latinoamericana, (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1986). In 2019, a report issued by UNICEF showed that 166 million children under-five, or 1 in 4, remained unregistered, and 237 million children under-five globally – or slightly more than 1 in 3 – lacked official proof of registration, see United Nations Children’s Fund, Birth Registration for Every Child by 2030: Are we on track?, UNICEF (New York: United Nations Children’s Fund, 2019). See Sturla J. Stålsett, “Asylbarn og menneskeverd: Etiske refleksjoner med utgangspunkt i erfaringer fra Helsesenteret for papirløse migranter,” Etikk i praksis. Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics 6, no. 2 (2012), and Sturla J. Stålsett, “Diaconia: ampliação da democracia? O caso da Missão Urbana da Igreja na Noruega e os imigrantes em situação irregular,” in Religião, mídia e cultura, ed. Júlio Cézar Adam and Iuri Andréas Reblin (São Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal, 2015).

130

chapter 5

constants that result in human vulnerability.”12 She notes, with Julia Kristeva, that such experiences have been an object of abjection: “The maternal has been simultaneously revered and feared in Western thought and culture due to both its awesome creative power and its perilous proximity to the vulnerability that plagues our condition.”13 The pregnant and birthing body reminds us of any body’s ability to “cause us immense amounts of physical suffering,” she holds, exposing us not only to physical “but social and psychological death as well.”14 Despite the ever more impressive medical ability to mitigate pain and illness, disproportionally enjoyed by the privileged, the body remains impossible to control.15 This uncontrollability of embodied life is not only physical16 but also thoroughly relational: “The wisdom of the wailing newborn child reminds us that relationships of interdependence also render us vulnerable to forces beyond our control.”17 We saw that Butler made a similar point in her moving account of every newborn immediately being handed over to another person. At every birth, “someone gives the child over to someone else.” In full awareness of its critical peril, however, Butler quickly deromanticizes the moment of birth to reflect the double character of dispossession: “Being handed over against one’s will is not always a beautiful scene.”18 This deromanticizing is linked to a deprivatization of natality and birth that is highly relevant to contemporary political theory, making the Christmas celebration a potent instance of a ‘lived’ political theology of vulnerability. My inquiry has exposed the political dimension of birth several times. “Fear and I were born twins,” Thomas Hobbes famously quipped, thus highlighting what

12 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 37. 13 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 37, referring to Julia Kristeva’s analysis of maternal abjection in Powers of Horror. An essay on Abjection (1982). 14 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 42. 15 Gandolfo addresses ‘privilege’ as discriminatory power-relations. In her words, it is “one defining feature of contemporary social structures that characterizes the unhealthy, unjust, and ultimately violent mismanagement of vulnerability in our world today.” With reference to Martha Fineman, she defines privilege as “the accumulation of both assets for self-protection from vulnerability and resources for resilience in the hands of certain individuals and social groups” Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 137–138. In a more recent article, Fineman underlines the importance of recognizing “the ways in which power and privilege are conferred through the operation of societal institutions, relationships and the creation of social identities, sometimes inequitably.” Fineman, “Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality.”, 142. 16 Cf., again, Hartmut Rosa, The uncontrollability of the world. 17 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 48–49. 18 Judith Butler, The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind (London, Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2020), 49.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

131

he saw as an immediate relationship between the geopolitical threat of the Spanish Armada preparing to invade England and Hobbes’ mother giving premature birth to her son. More critically and systemically, the “birth of biopolitics,”19 according to Foucault, is closely related to the management of birth and death rates at the population level. Biopower is not primarily concerned with the individual human body; its focus is the human species or human populations, meaning that managing reproduction, births, and deaths is crucial: “Biopolitics of the population consists in all sorts of techniques to intervene in and control populations.”20 Agamben explored this further in reflections on the etymological link between natality and nationality or nation.21 Roberto Esposito held pregnancy to be the most extraordinary example of a natural immune mechanism that simultaneously accepts and protects another within the self.22 Inglehart and Norris, for their part, saw a clear connection between population growth, vulnerability, and religion.23 There is a paradox in this: in perilous living conditions, children are perceived as insurance, even in their utter powerlessness. Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality in her On Revolution could also be brought in here.24 “In a very suggestive formulation,” notes Ewa Ziarek, Arendt argues that freedom in the positive and transformative sense reveals a political capacity to enact with others the “birth” of a new world. The political birth of a new world, or what Arendt famously calls natality, not only implicitly inscribes the feminine inflection of agency into the political, but also connects it with the most creative aspect of action, rather than of procreation.25 So, birthdays are not simply ‘happy,’ private, and romantic. Being born and giving birth are critical political acts. At Christmas, religious symbols, liturgies, scripts, and celebrations address the politics of birthing in implicit and explicit 19

See Foucault et al, The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, and Michel Foucault, “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, Il faut défendre la société, (New York: Picador, 2003); Foucault et al, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. 20 Arnason, “Biopower (Foucault)”, 298. 21 See Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. 22 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 169–171. 23 Esposito, Immunitas: The protection and negation of life, 169. 24 Hannah Arendt, On revolution, Penguin classics, (New York: Penguin, 2006). 25 Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action,” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013), 78.

132

chapter 5

ways. What are the possible implications for seeing the value of vulnerability for political agency and community? 2

San Jorge

To contextualize this account of vulnerable lived religiosity in a rather autobiographical and narrative way, I return to my first direct encounter with premature Latin American death in the small village of San Jorge in El Salvador in 1985, just before Christmas. Civil war ravaged the country. San Jorge was located in a conflict-ridden area, and there were sporadic confrontations between the army and the armed opposition, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). We rose before sunrise to ascend the volcano that gave its name to the village. As one can imagine, it is wise to climb such steep slopes before the heat becomes unbearable. Furthermore, it was safer, said don Napo (my Salvadoran companion and local pastor); “fewer soldiers out.” I guess that he was in his mid-sixties, always proudly wearing a stylish sombrero. He was growing a crop high up on the slopes that he wanted to show me. Perhaps we would meet with ‘los muchachos’ (the FMLN guerrilla group hiding in the area). The heat of the sun intensified as we were returning from the climb, and we needed to quench our thirst. We walked up to one of the shacks located beside the dry riverbed—the most transited local road outside the rainy season. In the spirit of hospitality that was common in the Salvadoran countryside, we were quietly welcomed and shown into the hut. Inside, there was a peculiar silence. When my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I understood why. I saw an infant lying on a table, stiff, with tiny hands and a pale face. The child was dressed in a white robe with a small crown on its head. At first sight, I took it to be a Christmas decoration—the baby Jesus in the manger. Then I realized—this was not a doll. It was a stillborn baby. “Este se fue al cielo,” [“this one went to heaven”] said the lady who had invited us in. She looked tired. Perhaps she had acted as the midwife. Around the infant’s body, several other children stood watching. They would have been the baby’s siblings. They were quiet, their movements uncertain, and none of them was crying. Not knowing quite what to say, I (rather unnecessarily) asked the woman how she was feeling. “Algo regular,” was the short answer. It can be translated as either “quite normal” or “not that good, actually.” Both translations would apply, I thought. Feeling unwell would be pretty normal around here this Christmas. Outside the small hut, a barefoot young

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

133

man was assembling some old pieces of floorboard. I presumed he was the children’s father preparing the coffin. Later, on our way again, we saw another coffin, just like the one he had been preparing. It, too, was barely larger than a shoebox, giving its silent testimony from a cart winding its troubled way slowly down the riverbed toward the cemetery. The child on the table was not the only one who had not made it. He was one among, at that time, approximately 40% of Salvadorans who did not reach the age of five. Had we been there six years earlier, on Christmas Eve in 1979, just before the civil war broke out, we might have been gathering with Don Napo’s family and friends around a tiny transistor radio. It was common across the country to tune into the radio transmission broadcast from the Cathedral in San Salvador. The masses celebrated by the widely popular Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero (1917 to 1980) since 1977 were regularly transmitted throughout this small but densely populated country, somewhat paradoxically bearing the name of the Savior. Born in San Miguel, not far from San Jorge, Monseñor Romero was loved and feared for his preaching.26 He was loved among the poor for his brave messages, which criticized the military government, the wealthy, and the army and called for justice on behalf of the poor communities and the many harassed members of peasant organizations, unions, and congregations. Every Sunday, he read out the names of the newly disappeared, one by one. Emphatically, he demanded information about their possible destinies and held the authorities responsible. Thus, he had quickly become an annoying disturbance, provoking the ruling class (the so-called fourteen families) and their political and economic allies within the army and the business community. There was also a strong sense of deception: Romero had been the oligarchs’ favored candidate for the influential position as head of the Catholic Church in El Salvador.

26

On the life and work of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, see, i.a. Jesús Delgado, Oscar A. Romero. Biografía, 2 ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986); Rodolfo Cardenal, Ignacio MartínBaró, and Jon Sobrino, eds, La voz de los sin voz. La palabra viva de Monseñor Romero, 4th edition ed. (San Salvador: UCA editores, 1996); Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Mons. Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Su diario desde el 31 de marzo de 1978 hasta jueves 20 de marzo de 1980 (San Salvador: Arzobispado, 1989); Jon Sobrino, “Monseñor Romero: Mártir de la liberación,” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 35 (1980). Hans Damerau, Ärkebiskopen är mördad! Predikan som den levande teologins ort. En systematisk-teologisk analys av ärkebiskop Romeros predikningar i El Salvador 1977–80. (Skellefteå: Norma, 2000). Edward T. Brett, “The Beatification of Monsignor Romero: A Historical Perspective,” American Catholic studies 128, no. 2 (2017).

134

chapter 5

The archbishop, in many ways a conservative and pious man, did not hesitate to raise his voice for those he sometimes called ‘the voiceless.’ Christmas Eve in 1979 proved no exception. Little did he know, although he surely sensed the risk, that three months later, in March 1980, his preaching would cost him his life. In this, his last Christmas sermon, Monseñor Romero spoke of his listeners’ priceless worth and inherent dignity amid their stark precarity. He saw in them the very essence of Christmas: “Tonight, in this Cathedral, you are the experience of what Christmas should be. In this world of danger, amid vicissitudes, psychoses, and fears, there is still hope; there is joy.”27 Romero vividly described stark contrasts: abject poverty and divine glory; danger and hope; fear and joy. However, in this celebration of the Christmas event, with its biblical texts, its storyline, its common rituals, and its customs, Romero primarily focused on similarity and identification: “How we Salvadorans look like Jesus in Bethlehem tonight!” he exclaimed, almost enthusiastically. “Ours is a society that can be presented as one of perfect poverty, like Bethlehem in the times of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.”28 The comparison was bold; in their destitution, Salvadorans were close to the divine. ‘Perfection’ was not to be found in the beautifully decorated Christmas cribs. Instead, Jesus is present among “the malnourished children who have gone to bed without a meal.” He is one of “the poor little newspaper sellers who will sleep wrapped in newspapers, or a shoe polisher who may have earned what it takes to bring a gift to his mother.” This Christmas Eve, Romero assured his listeners, Jesus identifies even with “the young newspaper vendor who failed to sell the newspapers and will receive a tremendous reprimand from his stepfather or stepmother.” He is “the young peasant, worker, the one who does not have a job, the one who suffers from illness tonight.” Christmas in El Salvador is by no means idyllic: “How sad is the history of our children! [...] Not everything is joy, there is a lot of suffering, there are many broken homes, there is a lot of pain, there is a lot of poverty.” 27

28

“Uds. están siendo en esta noche, en esta Catedral, la vivencia de lo que debe ser la Navidad. En medio del mundo y no obstante los peligros, las vicisitudes, las psicosis, los miedos, hay esperanza, hay alegría.” The original Spanish text of this sermon, “Natividad del Señor” (ciclo C) (24/12/79), is available at http://www.sicsal.net/romero/homilias/C/791224.htm, accessed 22.09.22. It is also published in Oscar A. Romero, Homilías y discursos 1977–1980. (Milano: KKIEN Publ. Int., 2015), locations 42077–42161. Translations to English in the following analysis are mine. “Como nos parecemos a Jesús en Belén esta noche los salvadoreños cuando tenemos una sociedad que se puede presentar como la pobreza acabada del Belén de María, de José y de Jesús.”

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

135

Nonetheless, in Romero’s interpretation, the message of Christmas is still joyful because “Jesus assumes all of this tonight.” Affliction and hope; fragile humanity and divine presence: these were not a coincidental simultaneity of poverty and privilege, they were intrinsically connected in Romero’s preaching. Thus, in my reading, this Christian celebration of Christmas highlighted an inalienable value in vulnerability. How was the connection made? In the traditional theological language of the church, the link was both incarnational and soteriological. In the framework of a political theology of vulnerability, I will argue, it was displaying a dispossession of divinity and enacting a sacralization of human vulnerability. 3

Divine Dispossession

Dispossession is a paradoxical event. It implies an element of losing oneself or one’s possession of oneself or one’s belongings. Simultaneously, it is the condition for entering into an empowering community with the other. As we saw in chapter 3, Butler and Athanasiou aligned these two contradictory forms of dispossession with the double character of human vulnerability—its negation (as precarity, wounds, and woundedness) and its affirmation (as precariousness and embodied relationality) of a full life. Being vulnerably exposed by losing one’s possession of oneself is undoubtedly a dramatic and risky experience. It “implies imposed injuries, painful interpellations, occlusions, and foreclosures, models of subjugation that call to be addressed and redressed.”29 However, there can be no efficient performative resistance or political project of solidarity without exposure through the shared dependence and responsivity implied by human vulnerability. In this way, dispossession forms, as we recall, the “heteronomic condition for autonomy,” according to Butler and Athanasiou. 30 Celebrating faith in God-becoming-human at Christmas can, I suggest, be understood as a religious framing of precarious life that makes this heteronomic condition for autonomy visible and tangible. By displaying divine dispossession, a space is opened up for personal and political agency in precarity. In his Christmas sermon in 1979, on the brink of war, Romero portrayed the mystery of incarnation not primarily as a general, universal event of the divine becoming human but as a historical and political event: God’ ‘becoming flesh’ as a poor child in the precarious context of a colonial occupation.  29 30

Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The performative in the political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 2. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 2.

136

chapter 5

This was a context that both back ‘then,’ in the Roman province of Judea, and ‘now,’ in a Central American nation torn asunder by violent oligarchy and exploitation, carried many of the marks of a permanent state of exception. They were zones of war, disorder, abandonment, and ungrievability. Preaching to people rendered undesirable or disposable by people in power, Romero spoke of a God who, literally, ‘makes Godself into nothing’ (Spanish: se anonada) to ‘appear a slave,’ as expressed in and through Jesus’ poverty: “Christ, the poorest, wrapped in diapers, is the image of a God who makes Godself into nothing. This is what theology calls kenosis: God empties Godself of all glory to appear a slave and be crucified and buried like a criminal.”31 The dispossession of divinity is theologically portrayed as salvific. The soteriological dimension is strongly emphasized. All of this (noting again that the now of the sermon is both then and now, both Bethlehem and San Salvador) happens for the sake of redemption, salvation, or liberation. According to this preaching, Jesus takes on the suffering of malnourished children, newspaper sellers, peasants, and workers. ‘Taking on’ this suffering is presented as a saving act, echoing the church fathers’ dictum, “what was not assumed, was not saved.”32 Jon Sobrino, one of the archbishop’s theological consultants during these turbulent times, would later stress this salvific core of the Church’s doctrine of incarnation in the context of El Salvador’s victims of multiple forms of violence. From this perspective, when the poor child Jesus is professed as divine and bringing salvation, it is made evident that God’s saving power reaches even the most precarious life conditions. When God is confessed to be incarnated in the child Jesus in the manger, described as “poor as the poorest of the poor,”33 this sustains the claim that God can fully assume the experiences of those whom God wishes to save—experiences of life permanently exposed to violence and precarity.”34

31 32

33 34

“Cristo, el más pobre, envuelto en pañales, es la imagen de un Dios que se anonada. Lo que la teología llama la kenosis: el Dios que se vacía de toda su gloria para aparecer esclavo y dejarse luego crucificar y ser sepultado como un malhechor.” “Christ healed the effects of the fall of humankind in the same way as he healed the sick in his earthly ministry–simply by touching. Moreover, because, as Gregory of Nazianzus put it, “what was not assumed was not healed” (Letters 101.5), Christ had to touch all aspects of human existence from birth to death (Great Catechism 27 [69–72], 32 [77–80]),” https:// iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/. See Gregory and Anna Silvas, Gregory of Nyssa: The letters, v. 83 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007). “…pobre como el más pobre de los pobres.” Jon Sobrino, La fe en Jesucristo. Ensayo desde las víctimas (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1999), 478.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

137

Thus, in this sermon, Romero vividly depicts how Jesus shares the burden of poverty with the poor. Does the savior also take away this burden so that they can be liberated from its affliction?35 Reading Romero’s performative, liturgical, and celebratory account of Christmas as a contextualized and combative narrative of divine dispossession reveals the political connection between incarnation and salvation. In dispossession as the “heteronomic condition for autonomy” Butler and Athanasiou saw vulnerability as a foundation for political agency. Human vulnerability fosters resistance and agency through the very openness and exposure that are inseparable from bodily presence. There is, in the moment of dispossession, a simultaneity of and a transition from being vulnerable to acting vulnerably. As I see it, this paradoxical ‘permanent passage’ connects vulnerability, agency, and community. Romero’s account of incarnation as divine dispossession can thus be seen as, first, a form of divine recognition and participation: by choosing to take part in the precarious daily reality of Salvadorans, God affirms their inalienable dignity despite, and amid, the afflictions they experience. Second, through this act of dispossession, God is professed as empowering resistance in a struggle for recognition and justice: “God does not want social injustice ... God demands justice.”36 The assumption of human vulnerability or the dispossession of divinity by God (incarnation) for the salvation of the precarious person sheds light on, and may serve to potentiate, the oscillation between human passivity and activity in vulnerability—the simultaneity of being vulnerable and acting vulnerably.37 4

Vulnerable God

We must pause to consider this proposition critically. What could it mean to speak of a dispossession of divinity? Can God give Godself up? And, if so, how 35

36 37

I refer here to Ignacio Ellacuría’s epistemology, where he plays with the word ‘cargar’, to carry, in order to accentuate how cognition, passion and ethical action are indissolubly entwined: To gain knowledge of reality implies, he holds, three dimensions: 1) to let the ‘burden’ of real things as real make an impression on the ‘sensing intelligence’, 2) to accept ‘carrying the burden’ of reality and its consequences, and 3) to take responsibility for ‘carrying the burden of reality away’, i.e. to transform it into a ‘better’ reality, Ignacio Ellacuría, “Hacia una fundamentación del método teológico latinoamericano,” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 322–323 (1975), 419. “¡Eso no! Dios no quiere esa injusticia social…Dios reclama justicia…”. “Paradoxically,” Butler comments in a reflection on Hannah Arendt, “it is only possible to struggle to alleviate the suffering of others if I am both motivated and dispossessed by my own suffering.” Butler, Mendieta, and VanAntwerpen, The power of religion in the public sphere, 86.

138

chapter 5

can that be good for the salvation of those who seem to be experiencing God-forsakenness in precarity? For decades, such questions have been hotly debated in political, feminist, and liberationist theologies.38 The first movement provided a clear break from the classical, theistic image of an unchangeable and hence a-pathic God. The idea of God’s immutability and impassibility had to be abandoned. In her acclaimed 1992 book, She Who Is, Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson sums up this movement: “Feminist theology judges that the attribute of [divine] impassibility ... is found wanting when compared with the truth discerned in the lived experience characteristic of women.”39 Such an image of God is, in her opinion, built on the patriarchal ideal of a “nonrelational human male exercising unilateral power.” This ideal devalues “relationality and the inevitable vulnerability that accompanies it” as “imperfections.”40 In contrast, taking a trinitarian perspective with a particular emphasis on God–Spirit/ Sophia, Johnson speaks of the “relational essence of God’s being” with love as its “crystallization.”41 A God who is loving is thus inevitably also a vulnerable God. At this point, Johnson is careful to highlight the “value of relational autonomy.”42 38

See Annie Selak, “Orthodoxy, Orthopraxis, and Orthopathy: Evaluating the Feminist Kenosis Debate,” Modern theology 33, no. 4 (2017). See also, e.g., Sarah Coakley, Powers and submissions: Spirituality, philosophy and gender, Challenges in contemporary theology, (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002); Sarah Coakley, “Kenōsis and subversion,” (London: SPCK Press, 1996), and Asle Eikrem, God as sacrificial love: A systematic exploration of a controversial notion, T&T Clark studies in systematic theology, (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2018). Of course, the question of God’s suffering was acutely addressed in Jürgen Moltmann, Der gekreuzigte Gott, 2nd edition ed. (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1973), and the debate it evoked. See, e.g. Sölle, “Gott und das Leiden.”; Leonardo Boff, Passion of Christ, Passion of the World. The Facts, Their Interpretation, and Their Meaning Yesterday and Today, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987); Jon Sobrino, Cristología desde América Latina (Esbozo a partir del seguimiento del Jesús histórico), Second edition ed. (México: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1976). In Lutheran theology, these discussions naturally emerge from readings of the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), (WA I, 353–74), and Luther’s concept of deus absconditus, the hidden God. In Marius Timmann Mjaaland, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), Mjaaland sees in the Heidelberg theses a new anthropology emerging, “which emphasizes the vulnerability of the human body: The suffering of Christ is experienced in the flesh, and the cross becomes the symbol of humanity suffering in Christ, and of God who is experienced and recognized in suffering, in passion, in passivity, rather than in superiority and perfection,” 92. 39 Elizabeth A. Johnson, SHE WHO IS. The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 252. 40 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 252. 41 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 265. 42 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 265.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

139

Imagining God as relational helps overcome harmful dichotomies and instead contributes to “dynamic relational autonomy” in God and humans.43 Then there was a second movement in the feminist perspective, now seeing the concept of a suffering God and kenosis (‘self-emptying’) as a divine ideal that is potentially damaging to oppressed and violated women. Thus, for instance, Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo prefers to speak of the invulnerability of God. She emphasizes the steadfastness of God’s love for vulnerable humanity, which cannot be destroyed. She sees divine invulnerability from the perspective of women’s lived experiences and struggles, including experiences of maternity, as “the ground and source of human courage in the face of vulnerability, suffering, and violence.”44 Without a solid theological sense of divine invulnerability, understood as the invulnerability of love, Gandolfo simply finds it hard to uphold a conceptual or ontological “ground of God.”45 She anchors this interpretation in Paul’s words in his Letter to the Romans, expressing the conviction that nothing can keep God from loving us (Rom. 8, 39). It is in God’s invulnerable love that “the divine image within human beings is preserved and protected.”46 With this argumentative move, Gandolfo criticizes the image of a vulnerable and suffering God presented by Johnson. In Gandolfo’s opinion, Johnson’s portrayal of a vulnerable God misses “the foundational strength and stability that a theological anthropology grounded in a feminist retrieval of divine invulnerability can offer.”47 Retrieving divine invulnerability does not make God an almighty tyrant lacking compassion nor “an unchanging divine entity that remains unaffected by the unfolding of the cosmos and vicissitudes of the human heart.” Gandolfo continues: Rather, invulnerability is that dimension of divinity that offers vulnerable human beings stability of identity as imago Dei and an unchanging love to draw for courage, resilience, and resistance, even in the face of horrors. From what we know of her story, Mary of Nazareth’s primary experience of grace in the midst of her vulnerable situation was a deep grounding in the unfailing favor of a mighty God who does great things for those who are vulnerable.48 43 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 148. 44 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 189. 45 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 189. 46 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 190. 47 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 189. 48 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 189.

140

chapter 5

The dilemma is well detected: How can a vulnerable God save vulnerable people? How should one, from a situation of precarity, understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s profound and influential words from his death-row prison cell in Nazi Germany: “Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. […] The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help”?49 Would not God’s own suffering lead to resignation and submission, rather than agency and hope? This dilemma was in no way overlooked by Johnson. She even says that “the image of a powerless, suffering God is dangerous to women’s genuine humanity, and must be resisted.”50 However, the quandary is not solved, in my view, by Gandolfo’s proposal to see God’s love as invulnerable. In her nuanced and original exploration of power and vulnerability, Gandolfo still, somewhat surprisingly, insists on seeing vulnerability as a problem in human existence. It is our vulnerability that can make us hurt and harm others, she claims. Hence, vulnerability for her is also the foundation for violence, or in a theological rendering, sin: “We often violate the vulnerability of others in an attempt to deny, scapegoat, project, and protect ourselves from our own vulnerability to suffering.”51 This is perhaps why she ultimately portrays God’s love as invulnerable. While it is undisputed in Christian theology to define God as love (1 Jn. 1.4; 8; 16),52 I find it difficult to see it as meaningful, or even possible, to view love as invulnerable. Being deeply relational and expressing the willingness to open oneself or even hand over oneself to the other, vulnerability belongs to the very essence of love.53 Love is always heteronomic, directed toward another, and thus makes the lover dependent on the beloved. That love at best is consistent, unshakable, trustworthy, and true does not make it invulnerable—very much the contrary. Hence, it seems to me that understanding God as love in the Christian rendering implies confessing God as vulnerable—deus vulnerabilis. At the end of her book Gandolfo, after all, speaks of God’s “inherent” vulnerability. In order to do so, she is forced to distinguish between God’s love and God’s incarnation: “While divine love invulnerably preserves the divine image in human flesh, divine love’s incarnation in humanity (and, indeed, all

49

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, The enlarged edition ed. (London: SCM Press, 1971), letters dated 16 and 18 July 1944, 360f. 50 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 254. 51 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 37. 52 Inge Lønning, “Gott. Neuzeit / Systematisch-theologisch,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Robert Horst et al, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984); Werner G. Jeanrond, A theology of love (London: T & T Clark, 2010). 53 I will come back to the vulnerability of love in the next chapter.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

141

of creation) also makes God inherently vulnerable.”54 I find this distinction strained.55 Surely, incarnation does not ‘change’ God’s love; rather it is God’s love that is expressed in the incarnation. Still, the question remains: How can a vulnerable God help? If vulnerability is understood conventionally, as a problem to be solved, or as mere passivity, then it would be logical for people in precarious life situations not to expect much from the vulnerable God. However, the reconceptualization of vulnerability that I have presented here may open alternative avenues for interpreting God’s salvific work in precarity. In the birth of the ‘God-child’, as well as in other New Testament narratives about Jesus and the stories and symbols inspired by them, I hold, God can be understood as acting vulnerably. It is in and through seemingly powerless, insignificant, and unimpressive acts that salvation is made present, as so many New Testament parables about the Kingdom of God envision.56 5

Sacralizing Vulnerability

This envisioning of what I propose to see as the dispossession of divinity in the mystery of incarnation implies and unleashes what I will call a sacralization of human vulnerability. Sacralization is a process that can be performed and made visible, ‘framed’ in Butler’s sense, through a religious celebration—in this case, the Christmas Mass in the Cathedral of San Salvador, transmitted by radio to the poor villages and neighborhoods. However, the act of sacralization and its practical effects are as political as they are religious. Here, the Durkheimian approach to religion and the sacred can be helpful in revealing a further potential of Romero’s Christmas sermon for empowering political agency in the community. Hans Joas draws on Emile Durkheim’s classical account of religion and sacrality to propose an alternative account of the genealogy of human rights.57 Joas was dissatisfied with an overly optimistic and heroic account of the emergence of rights as the exclusive product of Western Enlightenment. However, he would neither subscribe to a Nietzschean and Foucauldian skeptical approach 54 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 310. 55 See Sturla J. Stålsett, “Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability: Anthropological and Theological Propositions,” Political Theology 16, no. 5 (2015). 56 See Placher, Narratives of a vulnerable God. See also Caputo, The weakness of God: A theology of the event, and Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. 57 Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2013).

142

chapter 5

to their origins as merely another transformation of power. Instead, he interprets human rights as “the expression of a profound cultural shift in which the human person became a sacred object.”58 In line with Joas’ approach, but more critically contextualized in the postcolonial zones of abandonment and disposal and explicitly committed to doing political theology from the perspective of precarity, I propose to see the 1979 Salvadoran Christmas celebration as an instance of communal sacralization of human vulnerability. When Durkheim spoke of the individual as sacred, it meant being surrounded by a “transcendental majesty” invested with a “mysterious property,” inducing respect.59 Joas prefers the sacredness of the person to that of the individual, to avoid “the unscrupulous, egocentric self-sacralization of the individual and thus the narcissistic inability to break away from self-­referentiality.”60 Unlike an individual, a person cannot be seen apart from the society or community. Being a person implies inevitable sociality or relationality. Importantly, in this relatedness to others, a person is also inescapably vulnerable. Sacralizing a person is, thus, implicitly a sacralization of vulnerability. There is in my view critical political potential in making this process of affirming the sacredness of human vulnerability explicit and concrete. For Durkheim the sacred was experienced as the location of a ‘force’ or ‘energy.’ Informed by William James, Durkheim viewed religious faith not as a cognitive event affirming truths, but as “a sure sense of the presence of a greater force, a force on which our own vital force in turn relies.” “Sacredness” refers to “an experience so intense that it constitutes or transforms our entire worldview and self-understanding.”61 Such sacredness can be transmitted from one object or phenomenon to another. It can also be intentionally conferred.62 When Romero, in his sermon, directly connected God with the “poorest among the poor,” we can see it as an act of intentionally conferring sacrality on their precarious predicament—their vulnerability: “Tonight, in this Cathedral, you are the experience of what Christmas should be. In the midst of this world of danger, amid vicissitudes, psychoses, and fears,

58 Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 49. 59 Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 50, quote from Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” 61. 60 Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 51. 61 Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 55, quoting Durkheim. 62 “Now, as in the past, we observe society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones,” Émile Durkheim and Mark S. Cladis, The elementary forms of religious life, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 160.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

143

there is still hope; there is joy.” Reciting Biblical texts, performing church rituals, and referring to the familiar signs and symbols of Christmas, he aims to provide his listeners with a force—a renewal of energy and a sense of purpose connected with the sacred. Sacralization is thus, in this case, soteriological in both a ‘religious’ and a ‘political’ sense. It aims to offer the assurance of being embraced by God and given the force to struggle for justice and the flourishing of life. Seeing something as holy need not be a ‘religious’ act, since it is not only ‘religious people’ who engage in sacralization, as Joas pointed out.63 For Durkheim, the sacralization of the person was a means to constitute social cohesion, and Christianity was thus a “cultural prerequisite for the emergence of modern individualism.”64 My analysis opens up the possibility of seeing Christian faith practiced in contexts of precarity as—if not a cultural prerequisite—something that can facilitate the emergence of a new understanding of vulnerability through its sacralization. However, this is a conflictual process, since there are competing sacralizations. Joas showed that sacralizing the human person in the foundation and continuous upholding of human rights is constantly challenged by alternative processes; for example, the sacralization of the power and superiority of one nation or ‘race’ over others in racism and fascism, and the sacralization of money and wealth in exploitative capitalism. Interestingly, Archbishop Romero was acutely aware of the temptation to engage in alternative ­sacralizations—both economic and ideological. He recognized them as temptations for oppressed and oppressors alike: “Let’s not absolutize wealth, or the struggle, or the party, or the organization. Nothing has absolute value on this earth, everything is relative to the only Absolute.”65 The theological term for such conflictual and destructive alternative practices of sacralization is ‘idolatry.’ This is understood as serving and adoring false

63

“Durkheim does not derive the concept of the sacred from that of religion, but regards it as constitutive of religion. From this perspective, it is not just religious believers who have something that is holy to them. The sacredness found in all individuals and cultures may, conversely, generate religion if the beliefs and practices associated with this sacredness, to which the definition of religion referred, are systematized and organized socially,” Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 56. 64 Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 53. 65 “Démosle a las cosas de la tierra su valor relativo. No absoluticemos la riqueza, ni la lucha ni el partido, ni la organización. Nada tiene valor absoluto en esta tierra, todo es relativo frente al único Absoluto,[…]”.

144

chapter 5

gods—gods of death as opposed to the God of life.66 Idolatry means absolutizing the relative and deifying the ungodly. Although the most obvious case of idolatry in the biblical as well as the Salvadoran context would be that of the cult of Mammon, Romero did not reserve his warning for the rich and powerful. He spoke of “demagoguery” and of absolutizing “the party, the organization,” clearly also pointing his finger at the political left: “If there were not so much demagoguery and there was more holiness in the poor, our country would soon see salvation.”67 This could be read as a form of religious escapism from political realities and the need for political mobilization and struggle. “More holiness in the poor” could be understood as an alternative to political struggle. However, such an interpretation is not compatible with the archbishop’s public profile during this period. Nor would it be congruent with the thrust of his sermon, which certainly did not avoid antagonism and confrontation. The sermon contrasts its principal addressees with clearly defined, privileged adversaries: the rich and the powerful. In the context of precarity and conflict, this was decidedly a message with a political sting. Romero used harsh words against the prosperous, asserting that there was no point in seeking Christ amid opulence because the Savior is not present in the pursuit of power by rich people or the intrigues of the great. No facile consolation for the wealthy minority—the ruling class of El Salvador who promoted his election as an archbishop—was in sight. Romero’s message to them was unmistakably confrontational, denouncing the “tremendous sin of the oppressors.” God was simply not there with them. In this way, preaching in a situation where impoverished peasants, students, workers, and their organizations are constantly harassed, persecuted, and accused of inciting violence, Romero points out what he see as the source of the problem—the violent reign of systemic and unjust poverty: “The greatest violence is in them, who deprive so many human beings of happiness and

66

67

This is a central theme in Latin American liberation theology. See, e.g. Jung Mo Sung, A idolatria do capital e a morte dos pobres (São Paulo: Edicoes Paulinas, 1989); Franz J. Hinkelammert, La fe de Abraham y el Edipo occidental, Segunda edición ampliada ed. (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1991); Hinkelammert, El Grito del Sujeto. Del teatro-mundo del evangelio de Juan al perro-mundo de la globalización; Assmann and Hinkelammert, A Idolatria do mercado. Ensaio sobre Economia e Teologia; Hugo Assmann, ed, Sobre ídolos y sacrificios. René Girard con teólogos de la liberación (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1991); Stålsett, “Sacrificial Economy: Theological Critique of Neoliberalism in Latin America.” “Si no hubiera tanta demagogia y hubiera más santidad en los pobres pronto vería nuestra Patria la salvación.”

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

145

who are killing by hunger so many malnourished people.”68 God, according to Romero, is defiantly engaged in this struggle: “God demands justice.” The message is compellingly clear-cut and confrontational. The God of the oppressed confronts the oppressors and their idols and demands conversion. There is little doubt about Romero’s solidarity and partisanship in the social conflict. Since the murder of Rutilio Grande in 1977, his position had become increasingly clear, controversial, and brave.69 At Christmas in 1979, we now know, he was on his way to his own assassination, which occurred while he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in San Salvador on March 24, 1980. Politics and religious sacraments were literally fused as the blood of the Lord in the chalice blended with the blood of Monseñor Romero, after he was shot several times at close range from the back of the chapel. Contrasting an absolutization of “wealth, struggle, the party or the organization” with “more holiness in the poor” can hardly, against this background, be rightly understood as religious escapism or depoliticizing action for justice. It rather called forth the paradoxical power of divine dispossession and the sacralization of human vulnerability—at high personal and communal risk. It was a religious and political message of nonviolent affirmation of life and dignity in a time of escalating brutality.70 6

Subversive Salvation

Does this mean that the sermon presents suffering as salvific? Is passion seen as a necessary implication of the dispossession of divinity and the sacralization of vulnerability? If so, that would be in line with deep and persistent streams in the Christian tradition, particularly in Latin American Catholic popular piety. Exaltation of the pain and wounds of Jesus crucified, as well as the sorrow and tears of his mother, seem to be omnipresent in Christian rituals, symbols, paintings, and practices. Highly commercialized and popular renderings of the Christian narrative (e.g. in movies such as The Passion of the Christ from 2004) 68 69 70

“…como un tremendo pecado de los opresores, y la violencia más grande está en ellos que privan de felicidad a tanto ser humano y que están matando de hambre a tanto desnutrido.” See, i.a. Delgado, Oscar A. Romero. Biografía; Jon Sobrino, Monseñor Romero (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1989); Romero, Mons. Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Su diario desde el 31 de marzo de 1978 hasta jueves 20 de marzo de 1980. Archbishop Romero was beatified in May 2015 in a ceremony in El Salvador, and officially canonized by Pope Francis 14th of October, 2018. See, e.g. https://www.jesuitsmidwest. org/press-release/pope-francis-canonizes-archbishop-oscar-romero-and-pope-paul-vi/, accessed 30.03.2022.

146

chapter 5

also draw spectacularly and speculatively on a fascination with ugliness, pain, and horrific death. However, this undoubtedly represents a profoundly problematic soteriology, rightly criticized by political, feminist, and other liberationist theologies since the Holocaust and its absolute interruption and invalidation of any schemes for rendering radical suffering meaningful or purposeful. Taking contemporary child abuse and violence against women seriously also discards any Anselmian submissive soteriological model that portrays God as demanding or even exercising violence against the innocent to be reconciled with the world. Must one, then, forego speaking of the suffering “of,” “in,” or even “unto” God in political theology?71 Should no link between suffering and salvation be contemplated? According to Elizabeth Johnson, “there is another factor to consider.” She speaks of “the pathological tendency in the present culture of the First World countries to deny suffering and death in human experience, which leads to banality in thought and superficiality in values.”72 Similarly, feminist theologian Shelly Rambo perceives a danger in “not theologizing suffering at all, in avoiding any moves to narrate human suffering in the way of the Christian story.”73 So how could we, against this background, read the following dense passage in Romero’s sermon? The God of the poor has assumed all this and shows the redemptive value of human pain, the value it has to redeem the world from poverty, suffering, the cross. There is no redemption without the cross. But this does not mean a passivism of our poor, whom we have badly indoctrinated if we say: “It is God’s will that you be poor, marginalized and have no more hope.” Nothing of that! God does not want that social injustice; ... God demands justice but he is saying to the poor like Christ to the oppressed, carrying his cross: you will save the world if you give your pain not a conformism that God does not want, but a concern for salvation; if you die in your poverty yearning for better times, making your life a prayer and supporting everything that tries to free the people from this situation.74 71

See, i.a., Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, (Philadelphia, Penn: Fortress Press, 1975), and Johann Baptist Metz, “Suffering unto God,” Critical Inquiry, no. 20 (1994). 72 Johnson, SHE WHO IS, 254. 73 Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting wounds: Living in the afterlife of trauma (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017), 6. 74 “El Dios de los pobres ha asumido todo eso y le está enseñando al dolor humano el valor redentor, el valor que tiene para redimir al mundo la pobreza, el sufrimiento, la cruz. No hay redención sin cruz. Pero ésto no quiere decir un pasivismo de nuestros pobres, a los que hemos mal adoctrinado cuando les decimos: ‘Es voluntad de Dios que tu seas pobre,

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

147

This passage contemplates a redemptive value in human pain: “the value it has to redeem the world from poverty, suffering, the cross” is seen in the birth of Jesus as well as in his death. Both are held to be valuable; that is, they are salvific. The reasoning borders on the paradoxical: There is salvation in divine dispossession and exposure to suffering, and yet suffering is not according to the will of God and not something with which the people in precarity should conform. They should not in any way passively endure calamities. Instead, the causes of suffering should be actively resisted in a constant craving for transformation and liberation. Here, the wording is strikingly strong. Romero encourages his precarious listeners to “make their life a prayer” by “supporting everything that tries to free the people from this situation.” The original Spanish (“acuerpando todo aquello que trata de liberar al pueblo de esta situación”) makes use of the rather rare expression “acuerpando,” literally meaning “making corporeal” or “embodying”. The wording connotes incarnation, highlighting the body as a site of resistance and liberation, not only of the individual but of the people (“liberar al pueblo”). This is subversive, not submissive, preaching. It claims that despite unjust suffering, precarious people’s collective struggle participates in and thus mediates God’s salvific work in history. Salvation transforms the precarious experience in and through vulnerability. ‘Making one’s life a prayer’ becomes a way of performing precariousness. It can imply placing oneself and one’s body as a shield against oppressive power in order to resist and conquer it. This can be, in the words of Pramod K. Nayar, “an extraordinary form of resistance, pitting one’s body against the violence of the state, placing it at risk in ways that are unimaginable.”75 Politically, such resistance is a perilous kind of agency. It

75

marginado y no tienes más esperanza.’ ¡Eso no! Dios no quiere esa injusticia social; pero, sí, una vez que existe se dá como un tremendo pecado de los opresores, y la violencia más grande está en ellos que privan de felicidad a tanto ser humano y que están matando de hambre a tanto desnutrido. Dios reclama justicia pero le está diciendo al pobre como Cristo al oprimido, cargando con su cruz: salvarás al mundo si le das a tu dolor no un conformismo que Dios no quiere, sino una inquietud de salvación si mueres en tu pobreza suspirando por tiempos mejores haciendo de tu vida una oración y acuerpando todo aquello que trata de liberar al pueblo de esta situación.” “Human Shields, A New Form Of Life Worthy Of Life Only As A Potential Death,” published in The Wire 29.05.17., https://thewire.in/politics/human-shield-body-war, accessed 10.10.22. Nayar refers to the American college student Rachel Corrie as a case in point. Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, in 2003. She was using herself as a shield against the demolition of Palestinian homes. On the other hand, Nayar underscores, the widespread use of involuntary human shield constitutes “a bio-­political turn in warfare”, which is in clear breach of the Geneva Conventions, see Additional Protocol I, Article 51.7.

148

chapter 5

may—in fact, it often does—fail. Theologically, it can still be a testimony of shared vulnerability received as a God-given gift, enacted as and transformed into an instance of subversive salvation. Again, we can see how giving birth with the pain it necessarily involves is made politically potent through a religious framing, in a Christian celebration of Christmas. Romero likens the country to a woman in labor, giving birth to “a new age” and consequently enduring pain and anguish. This is the cause of all the blood and suffering, he explains, referring to the words of Jesus according to the Gospel of John: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world” (John 16, 21). Thus, the archbishop proclaims expectation, hope, and even joy during deep trials: “These sufferings will pass! The joy that will remain in us will be the awareness that in this hour of childbirth, we were Christians, we lived by clinging to faith in Christ, we did not give in to pessimism.”76 This could be read, I suggest, as a religious performance of an affirmative biopolitics. 7 Community-in-Vulnerability As we have seen, there is a strong sense of community in Romero’s sermon. He works hard to make his listeners in the Cathedral and around their radios sense how strongly they are related to each other and the dispossessed God in the manger, Jesus. They are like him; he was like them. Romero highlights mutual identification, in and through that which is seen as weakness: humility, poverty, and marginality. Even Jesus’ parents were poor and powerless, he asserts, just like them. Mary, “a humble peasant girl from Nazareth,”77 represents the afflicted Salvadoran woman as the “daughter of a people dominated by the Roman Empire, who sees her captured and tortured Son dying on the cross.”78 Romero appeals to and visualizes a community of faith “in the heart of the Church”79 that seeks to perceive and profess what is not evident to the eye. In 76

77 78 79

“El país está pariendo una nueva edad y por eso hay dolor y angustia, hay sangre y sufrimiento. ’Pero como en el parto -dice Cristo- la mujer que le llega la hora sufre, pero cuando ha nacido el nuevo hombre ya se olvidó de todos sus dolores.’ Pasarán estos sufrimientos! La alegría que nos quedará será que en esta hora de parto fuimos cristianos, vivimos aferrados a la fe en Cristo, no nos dejó sucumbir el pesimismo.” “…una humilde campesina de Nazaret.” “...hija de un pueblo dominado por el Imperio Romano que ve morir en la cruz injustamente a su Hijo prisionero y torturado.” “...en el corazón de la Iglesia.”

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

149

their precarity, the people gathered in the Cathedral and around their radios in the troubled country are held to be in the company of the Creator, thus forming an explicitly religious community celebrating faith by participating in the liturgy and sharing the sacraments. Yet it is also a political community. Romero’s preaching vividly portrays a web of relations protecting and promoting life, referring to a strong “we” (the Salvadorans) intimately unified in dispossession with the God who demands justice: “How we Salvadorans look like Jesus in Bethlehem tonight!” This community of shared vulnerability can promote and enable a common political agency.80 It is based on mutual dispossession, thus recalling Esposito’s exploration of the conceptual roots of community as a debt, burden, or service (munus) to one another. Such a community is not built on something that is collectively owned, but on something lacking. There is an absence at its center rather than a presence. From this center emerges a drive—an energy like the energy unleashed in recognition struggles.81 This force can be an efficient impetus to solidarity: acting with and for, and serving, each other. As pointed out by Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, communities of shared vulnerability enable ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ practices of solidarity: “Overcoming anxiety and coping with vulnerability in healthy, nonviolent ways requires both interpersonal and structural solidarity, defined here as the lived commitment to sharing the burdens of vulnerability in community (Gal., 6.2).”82 Sharing vulnerability is not facile. It is neither symmetrical nor harmonious. As demonstrated, human vulnerability is complex and differentiated. The precarious experience involves tension between commonality and uniqueness; togetherness and separateness.83 Vulnerability as a shared human condition is always personally, socially, and politically diverse. Hence, the act of sharing is already an achievement, a victory, and a cause of joy. Emphasizing and celebrating human commonality in precariousness in acts of faith and hope, as in the Christmas service in El Salvador, can thus foster empathic sensibility and practical solidarity. Perhaps we could think of this as expressing an ‘enacted negative theology:’ the community-in-vulnerability celebrates the gift of the fullness of life and well-being of all, despite appearances, in the paradoxical 80

For an interesting analysis of the significance of shared vulnerability between providers and recipients of care in institutions, see Inger Marie Lid, “From Institutionalisation to Citizenship: Lessons Learned from Studying Diaconal Practice in a Norwegian Context,” Diaconia 10, no. 1 (2019). 81 See my discussion of i.a. Honneth, The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts, above. 82 Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 300. 83 See also Stålsett, “Naming Vulnerability: A Diaconal Dilemma of Designation.”

150

chapter 5

symbol of the ‘king in the crib.’ That which is acclaimed is “not evident to the eye”; in fact, it contradicts sternly what seems to be the case. In so doing, this celebration of faith may be seen as a hidden transcript that calls forth an incipient political agency.84 8 Infrapolitics Reading the Gospel of Luke’s account of how the divine became ‘flesh’ in a vulnerable human being, we may note its reference to instruments and structures of political biopower. We see this, for instance, when it mentions the first census that took place “when Quirinius was governor of Syria”: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world ... and everyone went to their own town to register” (Lk. 2.1–3). In the (post-)colonial context of El Salvador, Romero addresses similar bio-/necropolitical structures. His preaching explicitly mobilizes the full potential of Christian resistance to imperial necropolitics by referring to Luke’s narration of the Magnificat. Mary is someone “who knew how to endure flight and exile, marginalization, poverty, oppression”, and who “raises her cry of holy rebellion” asking God to “dismiss the arrogant and proud and depose the rulers from the throne.” Mary rejoices because God “will give his grace to the humble, to those who trust in the mercy of the Lord.”85 This is not a devotion of weakness, Romero comments. Explicitly addressing experiences of flight, exile, marginalization, poverty, oppression, imprisonment, and torture of a people dominated by an empire, this was indeed politically charged preaching in El Salvador in 1979, as it would be in other postcolonial contexts today. It mobilized religious resources for political resistance from the margins. Although preaching in a cathedral is certainly a public act, it can, particularly in turbulent postcolonial times, engender the kind of political agency and resistance that James Scott called ‘infrapolitics.’ Infrapolitics is real politics. It is “the elementary ... in the sense 84 85

James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990). El Papa lo recordaba en México cuando dijo que la devoción a María no es una devoción de débiles; que María, que supo soportar la huida y el destierro, la marginación, la pobreza, la opresión, María la hija de un pueblo dominado por el Imperio Romano que ve morir en la cruz injustamente a su Hijo prisionero y torturado, María levanta su grito de santa rebeldía para decir a Dios: que despedirá vacíos a los soberbios y orgullosos y si es necesario derribará del trono a los potentados, y en cambio dará su gracia a los humildes, a los que confían en la misericordia del Señor.

Preaching: Sacralizing Vulnerability

151

of foundational form of politics. It is the building block for the more institutionalized political action that could not exist without it.” 86 In this particular religious practice of preaching and liturgical celebration, then, we can get glimpses of a lived ‘infra-political’ theology of vulnerability insisting on something precious in the precarious—a perilous but joyful moment of birth in which the vulnerable divine (deus vulnerabilis) and the vulnerable human (homo vulnerabilis) are confessed as inseparably united. I see it as a way of acting vulnerably and mobilizing a religious force of resistance and rebellion hidden in what appears to be fragile and insignificant. It thus can become, I suggest, a way of exercising precarious power to disrupt the status quo of oppression and mobilize life-­sustaining forces of political resistance and solidarity. “This is not a devotion of the weak,” Romero declared in his Christmas sermon—but he was certainly applying the “weapons of the weak.”87 To sum up, I have made three related points in this theological reflection based on a close reading of Romero’s 1979 Christmas homily. First, this sermon can be read as an example of Christian performance in precarious conditions that displays a dispossession of divinity implied in the narrative of incarnation and enacted in liturgical practice. Second, it professes and celebrates the sacralization of human vulnerability, recognizing precariousness by conferring dignity and fostering political agency to create a new community. This community is based on the sacredness of human vulnerability implied in the ‘assumption’—God’s taking on the precarious human condition. The community emerges at precisely the point of ‘permanent passage’ where passivity—being v­ ulnerable—becomes agency through acting vulnerably. It is a community constituted by shared vulnerability, which, following Esposito’s interpretation of munus, separates and unites community and immunity. It is a moment of profound openness toward the other that is simultaneously an offer, an obligation, and a risk. Thus, vulnerability emerges as essential for political agency and the political community, and this example of performed Christian faith under precarious conditions confirms and actualizes their mutually constitutive relationship. Consequently, I hold that this celebration of divine dispossession and sacralization of human vulnerability can create a community of solidarity with political relevance and impact, testifying to the belief that there is no political agency, no political community, and no flourishing of life without vulnerability.

86 Scott, Domination, 201. 87 Scott, Weapons of the weak.

Chapter 6

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion If Christmas holds a strong position in the popular liturgical celebrations of precarious people in Latin America and other postcolonial contexts, this is even more the case for Easter. It is the most sacred festival in popular Christian piety. In such contexts, the most venerated moment is arguably not Easter morning, with its resurrection testimonies, but Good Friday, with its narrative of Christ’s painful death enacted in processions, hymns, liturgies, and homilies.1 As already pointed out, this can be seen as paradoxical: what consolation and hope could suffering people find in a God who is also suffering? What reading of the crucifixion can render the cross a meaningful sign of hope for a ‘crucified people’—the precariat, the multitude, and the ‘disposable’—today?2 Moving from the symbol of the crib to that of the cross and to a different historical and geographical context, I shall examine these questions further. What light is shed, or shadow cast, from the cross on the experience of human vulnerability? Agamben’s influential analysis of a homo sacer caught in manifold and almost permanent states of emergency in our times was alarming because of the seeming lack of agency.3 This spurred the question of what could be said theologically about this figure. Do we encounter homo sacer in the m ­ anger or on the cross?4 Mbembe’s critical exposition of postcolonial 1 Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórica-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret, 32. See also Saúl Trinidad, “Cristología - Conquista - Colonización,” in Jesús, ni vencido, ni monarca celestial, ed. José Míguez Bonino (Buenos Aires: Ed. Tierra Nueva, 1977). 2 Ignacio Ellacuría, “El pueblo crucificado. Ensayo de soteriología histórica,” in Cruz y resurrección. Presencia y anuncio de una Iglesia nueva, ed. Hugo et al Assmann (México: CRT Servir, 1978); Jon Sobrino, “Meditación ante el pueblo crucificado,” Sal Terrae, no. 871 (1986); Jon Sobrino, “Los pueblos crucificados, actual siervo sufriente de Yahve,” Concilium, no. 232 (1990); Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórica-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret, see also Sturla J. Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified. A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino, vol. 127, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, (Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2003), 127. 3 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life, Meridian, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Cf. Butler’s critique in The force of nonviolence: An ethico-­ political bind (London, Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2020), 184. 4 See discussions in John Milbank, Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon, Radical orthodoxy series, (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 79–93 and Luke Bretherton, Christianity and contemporary politics: The conditions and possibilities of faithful witness (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 126–174, and in my Sturla J. Stålsett, “Radical Mercy: Revitalizing a Fundamental Reformation Impulse in the Context of Exclusion and Irregular(-ized) © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_007

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

153

necropolitics further concretized and actualized the homine sacri, making it evident that a political theology of vulnerability must adopt the perspective of the enslaved.5 Hence, when studying Christian religiosity from the perspective of precarity, it is almost inevitable to recall and reflect on ‘slave songs,’6 the spirituals. They express, I argue, the inner connection between prayer, precariousness and politics.7 1 Spirituals “I contend that at the heart of every black liberation movement in the United States, there is the accompanying sound of black music that serves as a soundtrack for each wave of the movement.”8 In a recent anthology on the significance of music in the Black Lives Matter movement, Stephanie Shonekan highlights the importance of gospel music in black activist spaces. “In conjunction with the black church, gospel music has always been critical to any movements that black folks have led in the United States,” she affirms, adding that she believes it can serve the younger generation’s activism as well.9 The heart of gospel music is, of course, the spiritual. What are spirituals, and why are they relevant for understanding how lived Christianity may connect vulnerability and resistance? Seeing the spirituals as “a classic example of the creative and dynamic communicative possibilities of music in African cultures that continued to be explored by Africans in the Americas,” Mawusi Renee Simmons notes that they, beyond their immediate religious use, “also covered the history, thoughts, and aspirations of enslaved Africans and contextualized

5 6

7 8 9

Migration,” in Politics and Economics of Liberation, ed. Ulrich Duchrow and Martin Hoffmann (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2015), 290. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Politiques de l’inimitié, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), see chapter 1 above. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, DocSouth Books, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), First published in 1867, these songs were collected and annotated mainly in the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War. Recall the etymological link between ‘precarious’ and ‘prayer’ through the Latin ‘precor,’ as noted above. Stephanie Shonekan and Fernando Orejuela, Black Lives Matter and music: Protest, intervention, reflection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 15. Shonekan and Orejuela, Black Lives Matter and music: Protest, intervention, reflection, 21. On spirituals in the context of Black Lives Matter, see also Vincent Lloyd, “Anger: A Secularized Theological Concept,” in Spirit of Populism, ed. Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022).

154

chapter 6

their lives and affairs under the oppression and religious hypocrisy of the slave system.”10 Full of allusion and imagery with hidden and double meanings, the spirituals “served as coded communications for emotional and physical escape as well as rebellion.”11 It is this profound and strategic ambivalence that, according to the leading pioneer of Black Theology, James Cone, turned the spirituals into “black freedom songs which emphasize[d] black liberation as consistent with divine revelation”12—even when they expressed resignation, spiritual submissiveness, or escapism. Because the enslaved people were denied political, economic, and personal security, they had to camouflage their thoughts and deepest feelings: “Blacks knew that violent self-defense was tantamount to suicide; even affirming blackness in a world defined by white power took great courage.”13 White people heard what the slaves permitted them to hear, and many songs were probably reserved for the ears of fellow slaves.14 Still, as Cone remarked, “one does not have to be too bright to detect something more than ‘spiritual’ freedom in such spirituals as: ‘O freedom! O freedom! O freedom over me! An’ befo’ I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, An’ go home to my Lord an’ be free’.”15 We should note here that American law held the legal status of slaves to be somewhere between person and property. From one perspective, the slaves belonged to the slave owner, but the law was not consistent in this regard. The slave was also considered a person who could be legally punished; personhood was acknowledged only to hold slaves accountable for their ‘crimes.’16 An impossible tension was inherent in the legal view of slaves as simultaneously property and people. The concept of property negated the idea of personhood, thereby erasing any protection of the slave by law. Slaves were thus trapped in a power play similar to the one Agamben portrayed for homo sacer in the context of states of exception; they were included by the law but excluded from its protection. This was the main characteristic of the “distinctive regime of

10

Mawusi Renee Simmons, “Spirituals”, in Molefi Kete Asante and Mambo Ama Mazama, Encyclopedia of Black Studies (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2004), 438–440. 11 Simmons, “Spirituals”, Encyclopedia of Black Studies, 439. 12 James H. Cone, “Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation,” Theology today (Ephrata, Pa.) 29, no. 1 (1972), 54. 13 James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), 34. 14 James H. Cone, The spirituals and the blues: An interpretation (New York: Seabury, 1972), location 612. 15 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 617. 16 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, locations 314–322.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

155

violence”17 imposed by colonizers on the colonized that Mbembe called “the authoritarian modality par excellence”—commandement.18 Like lament in the Hebrew Bible, the spirituals express sorrow, distress, or protest against injustice. Hence, they tend to dwell much more on the cross than on the crib. Cone calls it a “curious fact” that the spirituals are “almost silent” about the birth of Jesus,19 considering the many obvious similarities between the birth of Jesus and the birth of black slaves, both of which took place in the margins of “out-of-the-way places,” excluded from society. However, the enslaved communities’ reasons for focusing on the Passion of Christ are easy to grasp. 2 Community In this widely known crucifixion spiritual, for instance, personal closeness, solidarity in suffering, and community with sufferers are the dominating themes: 1. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 2. Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? 3. Were you there when they pierced him in the side? Were you there when they pierced him in the side? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they pierced him in the side?

17 Mbembé, On the postcolony, 102 18 Mbembé, On the postcolony, note 8, 134. 19 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 680. Noting a scholarly discussion on the reasons for this, Cone believes the most fundamental reason may have been that “the anniversary of the birth of Christ was not, in the South, in any sense a sacred or religious holiday,” location 682. It rather became “a time of whiskey, gunpowder, singing, dancing, and visiting. It might have been “part of the scheme of slavery to make Christmas a day on which slaves through sheer excess of sensuous pleasure would forget their bonds.”

156

chapter 6

4. Were you there when the sun refused to shine? Were you there when the sun refused to shine? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when the sun refused to shine? 5. Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? 6. Were you there when he rose up from the dead? Were you there when he rose up from the dead? Sometimes I feel like shouting ‘Glory, glory, glory!’ Were you there when he rose up from the dead? Solidarity and community in the extreme experience of violated vulnerability and senseless suffering is the song’s core message: “The singers of spirituals ... were concerned about the solidarity of the community of sufferers.”20 Thus, they emphasized the exact identification that was so central to Romero’s Christmas sermon at the outbreak of war: you are like Christ; Christ is like you. The spirituals also see the cross as foretold by the crib: Poor little Jesus boy, made him be born in a manger. World treated him so mean, Treats me mean too ... Dey whipped Him up an’ dey whipped Him down, Dey whipped dat man all ovah town. Look-a how they done much Lawd. I was there when they nailed Him to the cross, Oh! How it makes me sadder, sadder, When I think how they nailed him to the cross. I was there when they took him down ... Oh! How it makes my spirit tremble, When I recalls how they took him down.21 Again, the critical point, with the stress on identification, is community: “If Jesus was not alone in his suffering, black slaves were not alone in their oppression under slavery. Jesus was with them! He was God’s Black Slave, who had come to put an end to human bondage.”22 Cone stressed that many spirituals showed that the heaviest burden for slaves was not suffering in itself but the loss of community: “The actual physical brutalities of slavery were minor

20 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 829. 21 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 44. 22 Cone, The spirituals and the blues. location 735.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

157

in comparison to the loss of the community. That was why most slave songs focused on ‘going home’. Home was an affirmation of the need for community.”23 The spiritual “Were you there?,” highlights that God, through Christ’s crucifixion, shared the experience of slaves. Notably, however, it also strongly utters the reverse challenge: are ‘you’ present when God takes on suffering and death? For Jon Sobrino, the question “Were you there?” defined the “hermeneutical place” for christology and soteriology—”the world of the poor”—or, as he would later rephrase it, “the crucified in history.” It is as if the critical question is directed toward the theologian seeking to interpret the cross: “Were you there?”24 The song can also be read as prompting the decisive step from passive acceptance of or residing with someone in need, to active solidarity and resistance with the tortured. Based on the experience of being vulnerable, it calls on singers and listeners to act vulnerably. This community in the simultaneous activity and passivity of vulnerability is dialectical:25 the enslaved Black people found themselves by Jesus’ side, knowing from their bodily vulnerability what pain and shame he endured on the cross. They were deeply moved by a Christ who was “rejected, beaten, and shot without a chance to say a word in defense of their humanity.” As one spiritual recounted, “He never said a mumbalin’ word.”26 They “were there,” by his side, “when He bowed His head and died.” Still, the focus on action for liberation from a position of disadvantage is strong throughout the spirituals’ implicit theology. Cone noted: “Jesus is pictured as the Oppressed One who could ‘make de dumb to speak,’ ‘de cripple walk,’ and ‘give de blind his sight’ [...] Jesus do most anything.”27 When discussing agency in the context of vulnerability (chapter 3), I noted a need to strike a balance between determinism, in which there is no real (at least not free) agency, and voluntarism, in which it is wrongly supposed that one’s action is wholly independent and free. Here, we face this challenge again. In the popular and profoundly pious interpretation of the cross by enslaved people expressed in the words of many spirituals, vulnerability is neither resignation nor the opposite of agency. Vulnerability can, rather, be seen as, to use Butler’s words, “an incipient and enduring moment of resistance.”28 A dual 23 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 855. 24 Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador, 60. 25 Sobrino calls this a “Sitz im Leben und Tode”: “…un lugar de vida, ciertamente, pero también un lugar de muerte: el pueblo crucificado.” Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador, 60. 26 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 706; 730. 27 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 692. 28 Judith Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Zeynep Gambetti Judith Butler, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 25.

158

chapter 6

account of agency is apparent in these songs. In the portrayal of Jesus and in the self-presentation of enslaved ones, being precarious means being acted upon and acting, resisting, and overcoming the troubles. Spirituals were, and continue to be, performed in the community. They are usually sung in gatherings of people; thus, they have the potential to produce political subjects through something resembling what Butler called “a precarious exercise that seeks to overcome its own precarity.” In the politico-religious act of singing these spirituals in assemblies, the precarious can be “propelled into political life.”29 Vulnerability thus becomes a “springboard for agentic resistance.”30 3

Strange Fruit

The necropolitical regime in today’s postcolonial world exercises many forms of violent assault on vulnerable life. There is an overwhelming attempt to, in the words of Mbembe, get rid of the ‘disposable’ people: “Those whose ... mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own existence.”31 The symbols of these mechanisms of exclusion and extermination are manifold, including fortified border wire, walls separating zones of abandonment from the ‘Europe of the camps,’ and overloaded boats with refugees being pushed back into the Mediterranean Sea to meet almost certain death. For the enslaved black population in the Americas, the starkest symbol of the violence they suffered was undoubtedly the lynching tree. Lynching was mob violence and torture directed primarily, although not exclusively, against blacks. It particularly increased in the late nineteenth century. This extralegal ‘punishment’ carried out by or in the name of the community could involve not only hanging, but also whipping, shooting, or stabbing.32 This violence was justified as a ‘necessity’; the only way the community could eliminate ‘bad people’ outside the reach of the law.

29 30

Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 101. Waite et al, “Precarious Lives: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring,” 479–80. 31 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 97. See also Achille Mbembé, Negative messianism in the age of animism, University of Virginaia Guest Lectures (https://ihgc.as.virginia.edu/achille-­ mbembe-negative-messianism-age-animism: UVA Arts & Sciences Digital Communications, 2017). 32 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, locations 336–347.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

159

As noted above, spirituals were not necessarily explicitly religious. At times, a more explicit reference to the Christian faith was added, as in the prominent spiritual Nobody Knows: “Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had, Nobody knows but Jesus, Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had, (Sing) Glory halleluiah!” The phrase “but Jesus” was probably not included in the original version.33 The blues has been called a form of ‘secular spiritual.’34 Perhaps blues lyrics could be seen as expressions of some sort of apophatic spirituality, expressing a negative political theology of vulnerability and resistance? One example could be the compelling musical rendering of the cruel reality of lynching in post-slavery society in the blues classic Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen) and legendarily performed by Billie Holiday: “Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree.”35 The song denounces white supremacy’s systemic violence using deceptively beautiful poetry. Again, we should see this as a hidden transcript. Through artistic performance, protest breaks into the open space between the dominated and the dominators to speak truth to power without the dominated being crushed.36 James Cone made this critique theologically explicit in one of his last major scholarly works addressing the painful link between the cross and the lynching tree. Separated by nearly 2,000 years, they were both symbols of death. However, while the cross represents a message of hope and salvation, the lynching tree signifies the negation of that hope by white supremacy.37 How can this be understood in the framework of a political theology of vulnerability? 4 Recrucifixions Faced with the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy, the enslaved people identified Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree.38 Cone referred to the martyred Jesuit theologian Ignacio Ellacuría’s (1930 to 1989) concept of a crucified people, preached by Archbishop

33 Cone, The spirituals and the blues, location 1472. 34 Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, 138. 35 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, location 3537. 36 See, again, James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990). 37 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, location 179. 38 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree.

160

chapter 6

Oscar Romero, and developed further in the christology of Jon Sobrino.39 By “the crucified people” Ellacuría meant that collective body, which as the majority of humankind owes its situation of crucifixion to the way society is organized and maintained by a minority that exercises its dominion through a series of factors, which taken together and given their concrete impact within history, must be regarded as sin.40 Ellacuría and Sobrino developed a robust and paradoxical interpretation of the victims of war and oppression in their Central American context, seeing in them God’s suffering and liberating presence. As I see it, the relationship between the crucified Christ and the crucified people in Sobrino’s christology was positioned along three axes. Firstly, there is an epistemological-hermeneutical axis, along which the crucified people is interpreted as representing the crucified Christ and vice versa. Second, there is an ethical-praxical axis, where the crucified Christ and people are seen as judging the powers of exclusion and execution, issuing a call to “take the crucified down from their crosses” and join them in a struggle for life in its fullness. Finally, we can detect a historicalsoteriological axis where the crucified in history are seen as making historically operative the salvation brought about by the crucified Christ.41 James Cone, it seems to me, applied the first of these axes when he testified, “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, 39

Ellacuría, “El pueblo crucificado. Ensayo de soteriología histórica.”; Ignacio Ellacuría, “Por qué muere Jesús y por qué le matan,” Diakonia, no. 8 (1978); Jon Sobrino, “La muerte de Jesús y la liberación en la historia,” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 322/323 (1975); Sobrino, “Meditación ante el pueblo crucificado.”; Sobrino, “Los pueblos crucificados, actual siervo sufriente de Yahve.”; Sobrino, Jesucristo liberador, see also Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified, 127. 40 Ignacio Ellacuría, “El pueblo crucificado,” in Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991), 201: “...aquella colectividad que, siendo la mayoría de la humanidad, debe su situación de crucifixión a un ordenamiento social promovido y sostenido por una minoría que ejerce su dominio en función de un conjunto de factores, los cuales, como tal conjunto y dada su concreta efectividad histórica, deben estimarse como pecado.” 41 Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified, 127, 537–569. Elizabeth Gandolfo is “increasingly uncomfortable with the language of ‘crucified people’ due to its tendency to relegate the poor and marginalized to the status of victims lacking agency,” Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 20. While I understand the concern, in my judgment, the complementarity of these three axes helps counter such misreading of Ellacuría’s and Sobrino’s application of this terminology.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

161

and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”42 However, the relationship was to him not only an interpretation. Cone also conceived of the divine presence in precarity as concrete and operative: “The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.”43 That this presence in concrete moments of trial could be experienced as real and emboldening, even when death prevailed, he saw exemplified by the case of Isaiah Fountain: On January 23, 1920, Fountain saw himself as crucified like Jesus and insisted on wearing a purple robe and crown during his execution.44 Like James Cone, the Catholic womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland draws on Ellacuría’s theology of the crucified people when she reflects on enslaved people’s relationship with Jesus.45 “Theology cannot, must not,” she insists, “remain silent or complicit before the suffering of a crucified world and the suffering of God’s crucified peoples.” It must relate the murderous crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth to the equally murderous crucifixion of the countless poor. Enslaved people have experienced such crucifixions through rape, torture, and lynching. The “painful legacy of lynching” is still kept alive in so many ways, Copeland claims, providing a list of numbers and names of contemporary victims of racist violence. The list grows longer every year. Mass incarceration and numerous police killings of black and other people of color continue, despite mass protests such as Black Lives Matter.46 When enslaved people 42 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 20. 43 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 49. 44 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 49. 45 M. Shawn Copeland, Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (Orbis books, 2018). On the shifting and paradoxical significance of the imagined physical appearance of Jesus in the struggles for race justice in the U.S., see Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Blum and Harvey are critical of (what they see as) the ‘myth’ that black liberation theology originated in the 1960s. This myth was, in their assessment, “in part generated by Cone and his colleagues, (and) placed too much of a burden on his work. It also hid much. The myth obscured the c­ enturies-long struggle of marginalized peoples to present Jesus beyond whiteness; it separated black theology from Native American and Mexican American encounters with Christ; it diminished the important role black women, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and white authors, writers, and artists played in undermining assumptions of Christ’s whiteness; and it failed to show how the longer history of challenges to white Christ images made it possible for other groups to present Jesus in various guises without widespread opposition. Blum and Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, 21–22. 46 Black Lives Matter (BLM) started in 2013 as an online movement (with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter), as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder

162

chapter 6

contemplated Jesus’ suffering in light of their own experiences, they saw him as one of them, a friend “who was one with them in their otherness and affliction.” He was, to them, a savior, companion, healer, and fellow sufferer, Copeland says. This could make them sing with confidence: “He have been wid us, Jesus He still be wid us, Jesus, He will be wid us, Jesus, Be wid us to the end.” There was, in other words, a deep, mutual recognition of vulnerability. Whenever a Christian imagination leads one from the thought of “strange fruit swinging in the Southern breeze”—or its more contemporary symbols of brutal postcolonial violence—to the crucified Christ on Golgotha, their interrelationship can be understood in terms of the second (ethical-praxical) axis between the crucified people and the crucified Christ. The lyrics performed by Holiday and acclaimed by a community of listeners positioned between precarity and privilege uttered a powerful critique and an implicit call to rebellion, solidarity, and freedom. What is exposed by both symbols—the lynching tree and the cross—is violated vulnerability. This very exposure can contain a force for protest and an incipient agency for political change. It may unleash the energy present as potential in any occurrence of misrecognition, as we saw in recognition theory from Hegel to Honneth and connected to vulnerability theory by Butler. Exposed vulnerability expresses a demand for recognition. When neglected or violently refused, this demanding vulnerability or vulnerable demand represents an act of resistance and redemption. It poses itself ‘in the way’ of violent power, thus undermining postcolonial necropolitics from within and countering its negative messianisms by focusing on the original center of the Messianic tradition: the dignity and freedom of the slave.47 The need for recognition that makes people vulnerable also partly constitutes their political agency. Political agency and vulnerability are thus entwined.48 The imaginative move from the “strange fruit” on the lynching tree to the cross (and back again) can enlighten and operationalize this precarious power. This is where we could discover the third (historical-soteriological) axis: like the crucified Christ, the enslaved and crucified people—scandalously, against all odds and expectations—mediates God’s salvific presence in the world through their vulnerable agency.49 of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012. 47 Mbembe, Necropolitics, 106. 48 See Anderson, “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined,” 140. 49 In a lecture given at Georgetown University 23.03. 2022, entitled “The Presence of Christ in Crucified People”, Andrew Prevot identified echoes of Ellacuria’s theology of the crucified people in a prayer in Pope Francis’ 2020 encyclica Fratelli Tutti: “Grant that we Christians may live the Gospel discovering Christ in each human being, recognizing him crucified, in the sufferings of the abandoned, and forgotten of our world.” Interestingly, in both Copeland’s and Pope Francis’ application of this theological image Prevot sees a lack

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

163

5 Wounds “Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they pierced him in the side? Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble.” Popular Christian piety, not least in the context of precarity, has often focused on Jesus’ wounds. The carrying of scars (stigmata) on one’s body, like the Son of God who was crucified on Golgotha, has been considered an ambivalent sign of suffering and pride for the sake of salvation throughout Christian history. In the Letter to the Galatians, Paul’s presents his stigmata as protection against trouble: “From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus” (Gal. 6.17).50 The shared vulnerability of God and humans could hardly be stressed more strongly. Paradoxically, this shared vulnerability in carrying the marks of Jesus is proclaimed as a strength, not a weakness. Furthermore, Paul presents the wounds as permanent: “the wounds remain.”51 According to the Gospel of John 20, 24–27, stigmata were still visible—indeed touchable—on the body of the resurrected Christ: Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20.24–27). This story testifies to unity and continuity in the identity of Jesus: the risen one is the one who was crucified and no other.52 The wounds of the resurrected Christ can thus be understood as a sign that vulnerability is not a passing

50 51 52

of real affirmation of the salvific agency of the crucified people. ‘They’ become someone ‘we’ need to be in solidarity with, and help. Thus ‘they’ are ‘othered’ and de facto implicitly excluded from the ecclesial (and authoritative) ‘we’ who speaks/prays. Greek text: Τοῦ λοιποῦ κόπους μοι μηδεὶς παρεχέτω· ἐγὼ γὰρ τὰ στίγματα τοῦ Ἰησοῦ ἐν τῷ σώματί μου βαστάζω. See Shelly Rambo’s ‘theology of remaining,’ Shelly Rambo, Spirit and trauma: A theology of remaining (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010). See also below. This point is strongly emphasized in Jon Sobrino’s christology, see, e.g. Jon Sobrino, “El resucitado es el crucificado,” Sal Terrae, no. 826 (1982).

164

chapter 6

feature for either God or humans; it belongs to life in its fullness—even to resurrected life. Notably, this interpretation has become central in emergent disability theology, arguing for the “presence of impairment in our resurrection bodies.”53 It may also be significant that in this text, we encounter one of the surprisingly few direct references to Jesus as God in the New Testament, indissolubly related to embodied vulnerability. The wounds of Jesus bear witness to the unity of homo vulnerabilis and Deus vulnerabilis. Similarly, Jesus’ scars as the ‘proof’ of his identity may be seen as paradigmatically narrated in the episode immediately prior to the Thomas story. In John 2, 19–23, the resurrected Jesus encounters the scared disciples behind locked doors in Jerusalem and breathes the Holy Spirit into them, having shown them his ‘hands and side.’54 This can be read as implying that an inclusive community of the Spirit depends on participation in the suffering of Christ. Such a reading garners renewed relevance in recent theological contributions focusing on vulnerability and wounds. Feminist theologian Shelly Rambo interprets these biblical stories of the wounds of the resurrected Jesus in the framework of emerging ‘trauma theology.’55 ‘Trauma’ is Greek for ‘wound,’ but it also relates to the verbs titrōskein (‘to wound’), reframed as ‘to pierce.’56 It means “an injury inflicted upon the body by an act of violence.”57 Rambo perceives the wounds of Jesus as marks of the violent character of the social forces of his day. They were signs of “denigration and humiliation,” not only testifying to the suffering of his own body, but also embodying other histories of suffering and

53

Cuddebeck-Gedeon, “Disability: Raising Challenges to Rationality and Embodiment in Theological Anthropology”, in Stephen Okey and Mary Ann Hinsdale, T&T Clark handbook of theological anthropology, (London, England, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 333–344; 342, referring in particular to the works of Eiesland, The disabled God: Toward a liberatory theology of disability, and Yong, Theology and Down syndrome: Reimagining disability in late modernity. 54 This testimony of an intimate and inseparable christological-pneumatological union shows that the classic debates between the East and the West on the filioque may still be relevant for a contemporary political theology of vulnerability, see e.g. Anthony Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a doctrinal controversy, Oxford studies in historical theology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Ecumenical debates on the Christian community understood as koinonia are also related, see Thomas F. and Günther Gassmann Best, ed, On the way to Fuller Koinonia. Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Faith and Order Paper no. 166 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994). 55 Shelly Rambo, Spirit and trauma: A theology of remaining (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010); Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting wounds: Living in the afterlife of trauma (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017); Serene Jones, Trauma and grace: Theology in a ruptured world, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009). 56 See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trauma, accessed 05.10.22. 57 Jones, Trauma and grace, 12–13.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

165

their marks. According to Rambo, following his return after the crucifixion, Jesus began “to teach a way of engaging wounds.” 58 This is significant in light of recent trauma research. The permanence of wounds and the repetitiveness of traumatic events for those exposed to them critically challenge any linear progression from damage to recovery. There is no certain way to move from loss to victory, and time does not heal all wounds. The past is not decisively left behind; hence, the processual promise of the Easter narrative from crucifixion to resurrection is also challenged. What should we say and do when the fears and sufferings of Good Friday remain a burden and a threat? The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in precarious times, following catastrophes and crises on the natural, political, and personal levels, must be considered in political theology. “In the aftermath of trauma,” Rambo notes, referring to the philosopher Susan Brison’s work, “death and life no longer stand in opposition. Instead, death haunts life.”59 Applied to the Christian story: Golgotha is still present on Easter Morning. Past suffering continues to threaten us, reappearing on the future horizon; thus, it challenges our conventional interpretations of redemption. It also affects our ability to act and engage constructively in affirmative relationships. By fragmenting the self, traumatic experiences undermine the constitution of human communities and political agency. Wounds need to be cured, although the scars they leave will not disappear. Difficult memories need healing. This can happen through testimony, making them visible, and engaging with them rather than erasing them or covering them up. However, Christian theology can play into such cover-ups of wounds that remain. Central Christian stories and images have been interpreted in ways that sustain the conventional interpretation of vulnerability as a weakness to be overcome. Resurrection Day can be seen to quickly gloss over the real and persisting pain of Good Friday. The stories about the appearances of the risen Jesus can be read as overcoming the shame of crucifixion through the glory of triumph over death.60 They have, according to Rambo, been read in ways that “provide a bandage over wounds and thus foreclose practices of attending them.”61 In fact, in many Christian stories of resurrection, “wounds disappear.” In such cases, theologies can sustain, instead of resisting—in fact, they can become themselves—practices of wounding.62

58 Rambo, Resurrecting wounds, 150. 59 Jones, Trauma and grace, 3. 60 Rambo, Resurrecting wounds, 148. Rambo cites David Carr. 61 Rambo, Resurrecting wounds, 149. 62 Rambo, Resurrecting wounds, 146.

166

chapter 6

Acknowledging this deeply problematic legacy in the face of persistent postcolonial precarity, critical re-readings of the biblical testimonies are required.63 The story about the appearance of Jesus in the upper room and the following scene about Jesus and Thomas in John 20, certainly invite such alternative reading. Rambo sees the two stories as interconnected, together underlining how difficult it can be to view and accept wounds. Even though Jesus displays his wounds to the disciples in the upper room, it seems that he needs to approach them again to make them understand. For Thomas, seeing is not believing; he needs to touch to believe. This touching becomes a healing moment of truth, Rambo points out. It represents, I would say, a new opportunity for agency, community, autonomy, and relationality. It can thus point to a reconstitution of political agency and community through exposed vulnerability and by attending to woundedness. A new community is formed based on engagement with wounds. It is a community inspired by God’s Spirit, amidst its struggle with death and loss. Instead of suppressing the wounds and vulnerability of the present precarious life, the stories about the return of Jesus after the crucifixion “reveal something about life in the midst of death.”64 In exposing his wounds and sharing his vulnerability, Jesus showed the disciples a way to protect life in a world that continues to be haunted by death. 63

Since the 1980s liberating and ‘popular’ ways of reading the Bible have been developed in South Africa and Latin America. See, e.g., Gerald West, Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation. Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context, Second, revised edition. First published in 1991 in South Africa by Cluster Publications. ed. (Pietermaritzburg and Maryknoll, New York: Cluster Publications and Orbis Books, 1995); Gerald West, The Academy of the Poor. Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); Sarojini Nadar, “What about the margins? Biblical scholarship fifteen years after Voices from the Margin,” Scriptura 95, no. 1 (2007); Sarojini Nadar, “Changing the World: The Task of Feminist Biblical Scholars,” Journal of feminist studies in religion 25, no. 2 (2009); Pablo Richard, Apocalypse: A people’s commentary on the Book of Revelation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995); Pablo Richard et al, “Challenges to Liberation Theology in the Decade of the Nineties,” in New Face of the Church in Latin America. Between Tradition and Change, ed. Guillermo Cook (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994); José Severino Croatto, Biblical Hermeneutics. Toward a Theory of Reading as the Production of Meaning, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987); José Severino Croatto, Exodus. A Hermeneutics of Freedom, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1981); Carlos Mesters, Defenseless flower: A new reading of the Bible, trans. Francis McDonagh (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989); Leif E. Vaage, ed, Subversive Scriptures. Revolutionary Readings of the Christian Bible in Latin America, Edited and translated by Leif E. Vaage (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1997). See also Hannah Strømmen’s call for “political scripture research”, in her chapter “Sacred scripts of populism: scripture-practices in the European far right,” in Spirit of Populism, ed. Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022), 86. 64 Rambo, Resurrecting wounds, 7. Italics in the original.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

167

Remembering and reenacting these biblical narratives may inspire similar acts of restitution amid the zones of abandonment, borderization, and camps. 6 Healing Sub Contrario With this possibility of healing, ‘redeeming’ or ‘resurrecting’ wounds, read through a lens of trauma, we must now return to the distinction between vulnerability and woundedness in the context of salvation. I have argued that vulnerability is a valuable disposition and that we should differentiate between being vulnerable and being hurt. I hold that this is necessary to prevent any idealization of the experience of suffering. Avoiding any devotion-like obsession with scars and wounds is important, despite, or rather, precisely because of, the spectacular and commercial fascination with what is abhorrent, which—as the history of piety abundantly testifies—has also found an outlet in Christian and other religious practices, processions, hymns, and liturgies. In this respect, Werner G. Jeanrond is right, when he warns against an overemphasis on the suffering of Christ. He suggests that we should rather “discuss the implications of having been invited, enabled and inspired by God to embark on a life of love with God, with each other, with God’s creative and reconciling project, and with our own emerging selves.”65 Such a connection between community and agency is at the core of the present project. According to the anatomy of vulnerability I have presented, being vulnerable should not be considered a negative or undesirable condition; it is not in itself a human problem.66 While it is undoubtedly complex and multidimensional,67 life cannot and should not be protected from vulnerability. Attempts at doing so—be they political or religious—run the risk of undermining life itself. That which needs protection—salvation—is life as vulnerable. Theologically, I contend, this is what can be seen in the permanence of wounds on the resurrected body of Christ.

65 Jeanrond, Reasons to hope, 70. 66 Contra Elizabeth Gandolfo, to whom vulnerability is central to the human problem, Gandolfo, The Power and Vulnerability of Love, 5, see also 10; 36–37. Gandolfo’s critical reminder and analysis of “the root causes of suffering located deep in the human condition itself” are relevant but should not lead to the conclusion that vulnerability itself is this root cause. 67 Heike Springhart argues that “neither a purely negative notion of vulnerability nor an exclusively positive one is able to grasp the complexity of life’s vulnerability,” Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability,” 24.

168

chapter 6

There are, as noted above, exceptional cases in which vulnerability itself becomes perverted into some form of ‘pathological vulnerability’ that may undermine autonomy or intensify feelings of powerlessness—or even lead to violating the vulnerability of others.68 Such exceptional cases, I argue, confirm the primary position taken here, that vulnerability typically affirms life rather than negating it, as it is an anthropological and ethical constituent precondition. Moreover, we can recognize the overreactions of pathological vulnerability in necropolitical securitization mechanisms such as the use of permanent states of exception (Agamben), the superpower syndrome (Lifton) and the ‘immunitary dispositive’ (Esposito). That is why it is crucial to resist and replace conceptualizations of other people’s vulnerability that are unable to recognize in this very condition their inalienable agency—indeed, dignity.69 Being wounded, on the other hand, certainly is a negative experience. It is a violation of vulnerability. Every living being seeks and should be provided protection from harm. Does this position, which affirms the value of vulnerability while rejecting any merit in wounding, preclude any envisioning of healing, liberation, or salvation in or through wounds? I have already noted that wounds, which are, after all, inevitable in lived experience, may take on a life-sustaining hermeneutical or even epistemological function. This is what was referred to as the “lens of trauma.” This insight, which may underpin empathic understanding and, hence, ethical awareness and action, admittedly arises from the experience of not just being vulnerable but of actually having been wounded. Thus, wounds, despite their fundamental negativity can also be seen to have paradoxical value, sub contrario.70 They may point to what Swedish liberation theologian Per Frostin, borrowing from the influential Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, called ‘contrast experiences.’71 Schillebeeckx wrote that such an experience:

68 69

70

71

Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, 9. I propose that human dignity can be seen as an expression of the inner strength in vulnerability, see Sturla J. Stålsett, “Vulnerabilidad, dignidad, y justicia: Valores éticos fundamentales en un mundo globalizado,” in La agenda ética pendiente de América Latina, ed. Bernardo Kliksberg (Buenos Aires: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 2005), and, more recently, “Den opprørske verdigheten,” Kirke og kultur 126, no. 2 (2021). This term, meaning “under (the) opposite” is often used in discourses on God’s hiddenness, and presence/absence in Christ’s suffering on the cross (theologica crucis), with reference to, e.g., Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, where God’s power is made “perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12,9), and Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation (1518), theses 19 to 21 (WA I, 353–74). See discussion on God’s vulnerability in chapter 5 above, and Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified, 493–569. Per Frostin, Liberation theology in Tanzania and South Africa, Doctoral thesis (Lund: Lund University Press, 1988), 94–103.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

169

Especially in the memory of the actual human history of accumulated suffering, possesses a special epistemological value and power, which cannot be deduced from a goal-centered “Herrschaftswissen” (the form of knowledge peculiar to science and technology), nor from the diverse forms of contemplative, aesthetic, ludic or non-directive knowledge. The peculiar epistemological value of the contrast experience of suffering as a result of injustice is critical: (…) It is critical of the world-dominating knowledge of science and technology, because this form as such presumes that human beings are only dominating subjects and ignores the ethical priority to which those who suffer among us have a right.72 Frostin saw the black experience as such a contrast experience, claiming that it is a necessary and fruitful starting point for a theological work of action and reflection that opposes the systemic racism of apartheid.73 This corresponds to what I described as the epistemological–hermeneutical axis between the crucified people and the crucified Christ in Sobrino’s christology, or between the lynching tree and the cross in Cone’s. To what degree does such an approach remain valid today, for instance, in post-apartheid South Africa or in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the worldwide struggle for equal dignity under the banner of Black Lives Matter? The experience referred to in these cases—’contrast experience of suffering as a result of injustice; black experience’—is not monolithic, static, or necessarily easily identifiable. It was obviously controversial to promote black theology under Apartheid, recalls South African theologian Olehile A. Buffel, but it is still very controversial and even risky, albeit for a different reason.74 In a supposedly democratic and non-racial country under the government of the African National Congress (ANC), social and economic inequality is among the world’s highest, and economic liberation remains illusory for millions of poor people. The end of colonialism and apartheid only seemed to entrench these economic injustices. Moreover, the poor are still black, while the rich are predominantly white, Buffel observes.75 How do you address this, politically and theologically, with reference to ‘black experience’ without being accused of ‘reverse racism’? Perhaps this dilemma is the cause of what Buffel sees as a disturbing silence among the clergy and church leadership while social 72

Frostin takes this quote from The Schillebeeckx Reader, edited by Robert Schreiter, (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1986), 54. Frostin, Liberation theology in Tanzania and South Africa, 94. 73 Frostin, Liberation theology in Tanzania and South Africa, 100–13. 74 O. A. Buffel, “Black theology and the black experience in the midst of pain and suffering amidst poverty,” Scriptura 116, no. 1 (2017). 75 Buffel, “Black theology and the black experience,” 2.

170

chapter 6

movements of precarious people are still struggling for their rights and dignity. Buffel underscores how essential it was that ministers, bishops, and theologians of black liberation theology during apartheid had strong organizational links with the masses. His vivid description of how they “held hands with masses and endured the teargas that was unleashed on the demonstrating masses and those who were grieving their deceased at funerals,”76 clearly brings to mind how vulnerability, according to Butler, is expressed as resistance in assembly77 and intimately connected to protests against the framing of ungrievability.78 Notwithstanding the controversies and the desire to leave the racist era behind in the ‘new’ South Africa, Buffel claims that it is still necessary for the clergy, theologians, and churches to boldly affirm a “prophetic activism” based on black experiences of suffering and injustice. This praxis needs to be based on a new sensitivity and a committed listening to and sharing with “fellow oppressed blacks”, he holds, through “organic relationships with the suffering masses and their movements.”79 Situations change and new alliances must be forged, but the call for consolidated action for healing the postcolonial, post-apartheid wounds of injustice remains. Does the significance of wounds reach even beyond these possible epistemological and ethical implications? In his search for affirmative biopolitics in the tension between community and immunity, Roberto Esposito pointed to a wound that he saw as necessary for the preservation of life. Life-sustaining immunization processes imply that life cannot preserve itself, he claimed, “except by placing something inside it that subtly contradicts it”80 Paradoxically, life can only survive by restricting itself and separating it from itself. This is what Esposito enigmatically referred to as “a wound that cannot heal”81 because it is created by life itself. The implication is that for life to be sustained, or to “remain as such,” it must “submit itself to an alien force that (...) inhibits its development. It must incorporate a fragment of the nothingness that it seeks to prevent simply by deferring it.”82

76 Buffel, “Black theology and the black experience,” 10. 77 Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, Vulnerability in resistance. 78 Butler, Frames of war: When is life grievable? 79 Buffel, “Black theology and the black experience,” 1. 80 Esposito, Immunitas: the protection and negation of life, 8. Italian original: “non è conservabile che attraverso l’inserimento al suo interno di qualcosa che sottilmente la contradicce,” in Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Filosofia, (Torino: Giolio Einaudi editore, 2002), 9. 81 Esposito, Immunitas: the protection and negation of life, 8. Italian original: “una ferita que non può sanare.” 82 Esposito, Immunitas: the protection and negation of life, 8.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

171

Interestingly, Esposito’s point is not only medical, ethical, and political, but in a sense also soteriological. It is through this permanent and incurable wound that life is saved, he claims.83 Perhaps Esposito’s suggestive reasoning can enrich the fruitful rereading of the theopolitical significance of wounds (Jesus’ wounds as well as our own) that is developed within feminist trauma theology. Seen in this way, woundedness could also, to certain degrees and in particular ways—sub contrario—contain unique resources for the preservation and even flourishing of life. Such an interpretation would shed different light on the assertion of traditional piety that there is “salvation in the wounds of Jesus,” as well as on the permanence of scars on the resurrection body. 7 Amnesty The propositions above—that acting vulnerably to confront precarity could be seen as an expression of divine work of resurrection in history,84 and that there may be sources of salvation in vulnerability and even in wounds—may be questionable from different angles. We have discussed the many impediments of precarious agency. It could also be read as an overburdening of people in peril and disadvantage, similar to the neoliberal expectation of resilience criticized aptly by Sarah Bracke above. How to overcome the precariat’s, multitude’s or homine sacri’s seeming inability to summon efficient political action? To briefly recapitulate some of the challenges, ‘states of exception’ are the orders of the day, Agamben claims. The annulment of rule of law and rights is being legitimized as means to uphold the rule of law, to defend democracy and liberal rights. In this violent paradox, ‘inclusion’ (rights, democracy, welfare, dignity…) is based on exclusion (lawless zones, ‘camps’, exceptions). Vita nuda, ’bare life’ or ‘naked life’ is the name Agamben gives to the person who is thus excluded in the process of, and even as a precondition for, the upholding dominating versions of political community today. It is this bare life, this human person caught in the permanent state of exception, that Agamben also sees as analogous to the figure of homo sacer—a person rendered lawless by law, or as he also frames it, someone being banned by the law by being abandoned by it. The result of the permanent states of exception is disastrous for those 83 Esposito, Immunitas: the protection and negation of life, 8. Italian text: “Che la sua salvezza è condizionata ad una ferita che non può sanare perché è essa stessa a producirla.” Esposito, Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita, 9. 84 Living as ‘resurrected in history’ is a central theme in Jon Sobrino’s Christology, see in particular Jon Sobrino, Christ the liberator: A view from the victims (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001).

172

chapter 6

caught in it: “…[w]hen the state of exception … becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine”.85 This alarming analysis by Agamben did not, as we noted in concordance with Judith Butler, leave any space for political agency. How can this passivity to the point of fatalism be resisted? From the critical venture point of the postcolony, Achille Mbembe warns against the powerful casino-messianism combining neoliberal capitalism and theologies of prosperity. Such a negative messianism, to Mbembe, by-passes completely, or, better, perverts the decisive point in Judaic and Christian accounts of messianism. The core of the messianic tradition is divine intervention in order to free enslaved persons from the forces of captivity, death and destruction. Negative messianism replaces this with a cynical sacrificialism, expressed as a promise to those in power to be rescued from the burden of the slave, through sacrificial expiation. In effect, instead of being saved, the slave is being sacrificed. The ransom being ‘paid’ here is not Christ’s blood. It is rather the blood of the enslaved persons, the ‘disposable’ people, that is the price paid for the liberty of the reigning necropower. As we saw, this is the necropolitical condition for a perverse freedom of not having to care, not being bound to relate to the enslaved ones, the homine sacri. It is exemption from responsibility, from the debt, munus; it is im-munization through sacrificing the other. Adopting the ‘other’ perspective, the perspective of others, of the enslaved, how can a political theology of vulnerability resist the ‘killing machine’ of the state of exception, and the sacrificial cynicism of negative messianism? The spirituals look to God’s saving act, and receive it as a free and liberating gift of grace. To John Newton (1725 to 1807) such an experience of grace was the decisive turning point. The slave trader became a minister and theologian – and the composer of the perhaps most influential Christian hymn of them all: Amazing grace! – how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see. Can the exceptional word and reality of ‘grace’ insert a crack, a subversive opening, in this bulwark of illusionary immunization and invulnerability of necropower?86 Interestingly, in his genealogical studies of the expressions and 85 Agamben, State of exception, 86. 86 “There is a perplexing relationship between trauma and grace,” Vincent Lloyd notes, “both markers of excess, of experience beyond comprehension and control. Trauma is a privileged site of grace, and grace is a salve to trauma.” Vincent Lloyd, “Afterword: Amazing

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

173

mechanisms of “states of exception,” Agamben comes across an instance where law is suspended by mercy, “ex dispensatio misericordiae.”87 In this particular case, he sees the legal system as ‘opened up’ from pure self-reference. Through this dispensatory mechanism the law can, as Agamben sees it, be adjusted to extrajuridical reality. However, this does not happen in the modern states of emergency. On the contrary, these regimes “include the exception itself within the juridical order by creating a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide,” writes Agamben.88 In the context of a political theology of vulnerability, however, this example of a merciful exception included in the rule of law, ex dispensatio misericordiae, might indicate a space for mobilizing theological re-imagining of political agency in precarity. In her Amnesty of Grace (1993) Mexican liberation theologian and biblical scholar Elsa Tamez rereads theologies of justification by faith in the cross and resurrection of Jesus from the perspective of violent economic exclusion in Latin America of the 1990s. Similar to Mbembe’s devastating critique of prosperity theology’s cynical expiatory schemes, Tamez deems it absolutely crucial to reject the conventionally dominant Anselmian theory of substitutionary suffering. The suffering of Jesus on the cross was not ‘necessary’ for God’s sake, she holds, nor for the sake of ‘sinners.’ It rather should be interpreted as inevitable from a historical perspective, as Jesus confronted sovereign powers of this world, the idols, and the imperial system. Thus God’s solidarity with those who are sinned against, “those whose lives are threatened,” is revealed. In this saving act of solidarity, God’s justice and God’s love comes together, Tamez contends, and is offered to all as a gift—as grace. 8 Mercy Seen from contexts of precarity, the persecution and violent assassination of Jesus is not surprising, Tamez points out.89 It is simply to be expected. In this, she follows Sobrino and Ellacuría in seeing the ‘crucified ones’ as reflecting the life and fate of the crucified Christ. Grace,” Cambridge anthropology 40, no. 1 (2022), 125. However, Lloyd is critical to what he sees as the standard Christian understanding of grace, because it expresses a ‘supersessionist logic’: “The world is amiss, fallen; some redemptive force, with its origins both inside and outside the world, is needed to make it right” Lloyd, The problem with grace: Reconfiguring political theology, 2. 87 Giorgio Agamben, State of exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25–26. 88 Agamben, State of exception, 26. 89 Elsa Tamez, The amnesty of grace: justification by faith from a Latin American perspective, trans. Sharon H. Ringe (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 178.

174

chapter 6

But are they—the crucified Christ and the crucified people—reflections or representations of the homo sacer? British theologian, proponent of ‘radical orthodoxy’, John Milbank thinks so. He points to how Jesus was banned and abandoned by the law in a colonial state of exception staged by the Roman authorities. In the Gospels, Jesus is handed over, abandoned by the law, not just once, but three times: from the Jews to the Romans, from the Romans to the popular lynch mob, and from the mob back to Roman authorities. “Accordingly,” says Milbank, “one could argue that the Cross exposed the structure of arbitrary sovereign power in its ultimate exceptional yet typical instance (Matthew 27–27; Mark 14–15; Luke 22–23; John 18–19)”.90 So far, one could agree. But the problem with Agamben’s use of the homo sacer figure to understand our political predicament, is, again, the very limited room it leaves for political agency. Hence, importantly, Tamez sees the ‘crucified ones’ of our time not just reflecting the passive victimhood of Christ on the cross, but as actively following in Jesus’ footsteps. In the Gospels, Jesus’ life is narrated as a life in conflict, struggle, and persecution for the sake of the liberation of oppressed and marginalized people—‘the poor’. In other words, attributing to the crucified ones—people confronting precarity—a salvific role is to recognize and promote their status as subjects, as principal agents. It affirms and aims at strengthening their political agency. In this way, it avoids captivating them in the passive role of ‘bare life’, or burdening them with any expiatory role which explicitly or implicitly would make their suffering a salvific demand or necessity, as in necropolitical messianism. The simultaneity of being vulnerable and acting vulnerably that I identified in the reconceptualization of the common human precariousness above, turns out to be crucial for making this theological point. And yet, the mere presence and suffering of the precariat is definitely also a call for action by others. In an original actualization of Ignatius of Loyola’s meditation on Christ the crucified, Ellacuría asks, with St. Ignatius, what “we have done” to crucify the crucified people, and what we can do to “take the crucified down” from their crosses. This move towards a praxis of taking the crucified people down, struggling to liberate them from recrucifixions, is what Jon Sobrino later would see as an expression of the structuring principle of any liberating praxis and theology today – the ‘principle of mercy.’ To Sobrino, mercy—misericordia—is a reaction to the suffering of the other, which has no other reason than this suffering, and no other aim than removing it.91 It is 90 Milbank, Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon, 93. 91 Jon Sobrino, El principio-misericordia. Bajar de la cruz a los pueblos crucificados (Santander: Sal Terrae, 1992), 66.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

175

a kind of love which is the primary and ultimate cause of God’s salvific intervention, that is “historicized in the practice and message of Jesus”92 shaping his whole life and destiny. The parable of the merciful Samaritan is in the gospel of Luke (10, 25–37) put forward by Jesus as a paradigmatic example of a true human being acting out the will of God. If the Word, Logos, is the “absolute-divine beginning” (Jn. 1,1), then mercy is “the historical-salvific beginning,” Sobrino suggests.93 The designation “mercy-principle”—analogous to the principle of hope (Ernst Bloch)—suggests that mercy more than being a spontaneous, random event, is something that is at the beginning and the end of a process, being both its cause and purpose, thus structuring the process as a whole. This concrete expression of love, that is reaction to the suffering of the other, is what should direct and shape any Christian and human endeavor, according to Sobrino. Here, in other words, by endorsing and critically concretizing the mercy principle in political action, we might catch sight of that crack, that dispensatio misericordiae, that merciful and liberating ‘exception’ affirming precarious life amidst necropolitical states of exception. It could be an instance of amazing grace, indeed – but also an act of potent resistance profoundly provocative for the sovereign powers of this world. 9 Love “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” “Oh! How it makes me sadder, sadder, When I think how they nailed him to the cross.”94 The spirituals are deeply emotional. They expose sentiments of sadness, of anger, and of abandonment. When directing these feelings to the cross, they also come through as profound affection, solidarity and care. Spirituals can in this sense be heard as love songs, displaying how love and vulnerability are inseparably connected. Thus, these musical and communal prayers lay bare the political relevance of a Christian valorization of vulnerability amidst precarity. Vulnerability can be seen as an indispensable ingredient in relations of love. No human being can stay alive for very long without the experience of being affirmed in goodness by being handed over to and received by another.95 Love is, as we recall, according to Honneth the primary dimension of embodied and 92 Sobrino, El principio-misericordia, 34. 93 Sobrino, El principio-misericordia, 33–34. 94 Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Location 677. 95 Jeanrond, A theology of love.

176

chapter 6

emotional recognition.96 In his A Theology of Love, Werner Jeanrond reminds us that “the vulnerability of the child confronts us with an insight into the necessity of love if life is to continue.”97 Love is indispensable because life is vulnerable. Through the present inquiry, I have found reasons to sustain also the reverse statement: The experience of love confronts us with the necessity of vulnerability if life is to continue. It is the vulnerable openness towards the other that enables us to initiate, receive and sustain loving relations. Love is also possible because life is vulnerable. The invulnerable person—if such a person could be imagined—would not need the love of the other or, at least, would not be aware of that need. Indeed, love clearly also makes one vulnerable. In loving, we are, in a way, forced out of ourselves.98 The attraction or attachment to another always implies degrees of dependence and a risk of loss, rejection, or even deceit. Love desires mutuality, but is always asymmetric. Love as the “desire to relate to the other, to get to know the other, to experience the other’s life, to spend time with the other”99 is always heteronomic, directed toward another. It thus—inevitably—makes the lover dependent on the beloved. In this way, love both requires and increases vulnerability.100 Vulnerability belongs to the ‘essence’ of love as the indispensable condition for sustaining human, indeed humane, relations. The central question here is how this concretely translates into political theology. Drawing theological insights from the spirituals as communal testimonies of faith amid precarity, I have seen them as expressions of vulnerable agency. Although not always explicitly religious nor political, they inspire and shape incipient forms of resistance. Contemplating the classical topos of Christ’s death on the cross, a community in suffering—recall the correspondence between the lynching tree and the cross, the crucified in history and the crucified Lord—is strongly accentuated. In crucifixion, the vulnerable human 96

“Because this relationship of recognition prepares the ground for a type of relation-to-self in which subjects mutually acquire basic confidence in themselves, it is both conceptually and genetically prior to every other form of reciprocal recognition.” Honneth, The struggle for recognition, 107. Cf. Iris Marion Young, “Recognition of Love’s Labor: Considering Axel Honneth’s Feminism,” (2007) for a feminist assessment of limitations in Honneth’s approach to love. 97 Jeanrond, A theology of love, 19. 98 “The lover and the beloved, as they interact with each other, are constantly forced outside of themselves by the miracle of love, by the miracle enacted in the space between them” Lloyd, The problem with grace: Reconfiguring political theology, 39. Vincent Lloyd rereads Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work to argue for love as a theopolitical virtue in a ‘politics of the middle.’ 99 Jeanrond, A theology of love, 2. 100 See also Springhart, “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability: Vulnerability in Vitality,” 32.

Prayer: Spirituals Confronting Crucifixion

177

and the vulnerable divine is seen as unified. In light of recent trauma theology this unity can be interpreted as fostering political agency and community through exposed vulnerability and by attending to wounds. In resurrection faith, life conquers death in and through vulnerability. Vulnerability remains because love remains. Furthermore, recognizing the indissoluble intertwinement of love and vulnerability, I have argued, makes it possible to draw on central Christian resources to imagine and enact an ‘amnesty of grace’ and a ‘principle of mercy’ as possible remedies in the confrontation with predominant states of exception, immunitary dispositives, or necropolitical exclusion. Thus, the inalienable human condition of vulnerability is situated at the core of a new political agency and community. How does the indissoluble unity of vulnerability and love become political? I have shown some instances and instruments for this transition from precariousness to politics, by pointing to everyday practices of lived religiosity in particular Christian celebrations of the birth and death/resurrection of Jesus. Such examples abound, throughout history as well as at present. The efficaciousness of these practices as politics can, of course, be put in doubt. Their actual impact may seem minimal and, at best, provisional. Hence, we must dare to ask: Is there a future for a politics of vulnerable love?101 I believe there is. It is, evidently, a future that can not be guaranteed. Many would even hold that the odds are against it. Concluding his Apocalyptic Political Theology, Thomas Lynch recommends to ‘live pessimistically,’ hoping only for the end and nothing else, since “the end is enough. It is all there is. For now.”102 Lynch’s bold pessimism can be seen as a way of taking with utterly seriousness the present state of the world. It could perhaps also be a way of radically affirming the “against all hope” in the Pauline expression in Romans 4,18: παρ’ ἐλπίδα ἐπ’ ἐλπίδι ἐπίστευσεν”, (“Against all hope, [Abraham] in hope believed…”). I would rather suggest to see the end as vulnerable, and to see vulnerability as the end in the sense of fulfillment—or better, a promise of fulfillment. By boldly affirming the value of vulnerability—not fear—as a precondition for political agency and community in precarious times, we may have faith that the future still has something to offer. This is why I shall end this political theology with a reflection on vulnerability as a promise.

101

See John Milbank, The future of love. Essays in political theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). See, again, Jeanrond, A theology of love, in particular the chapter on “The Politics of Love”, 205–237. 102 Lynch, Apocalyptic political theology, 142.

Chapter 7

Promise: The Vulnerable Basis of Political Agency and Community Is there a force for affirmation, dignity, and justice in the condition of bodily vulnerability? If so, how can this be recognized and operationalized in a more efficacious political agency and a more sustainable political community? What role, if any, could religiosity in general and Christian practices in particular play in that regard? These have been the guiding questions of my inquiry. My answers to these questions can be summarized in four interconnected suggestions. First, at present, in various global crises, from precarization to climate catastrophe, from forced migration and racist neo-colonialism to terror and war, the viability of political agency and political community is at stake. They are both being seriously undermined in interlinked ways that can be critically analyzed within the framework of a dominant ‘politics of life’ (biopolitics) turning out to be a ‘politics of death’ (necropolitics). The conundrums at the core of these crises point to the relevance of—indeed, the urgent need for—an alternative, critical, and affirmative understanding of vulnerability. Second, drawing on interdisciplinary research and Judith Butler’s feminist political ethics in particular, I have sketched such an alternative anatomy of human vulnerability that sees it as a provocation, a source of resistance, and a force for good. Contrary to conventional approaches variously expressed as either biopolitical ‘care’ for the security of populations or liberal individualism focused on self-management,1 vulnerability could be seen as having political value by enabling life in community and nurturing its flourishing. In this way, vulnerability is political, not as an object of “interventions that target specific groups identified as vulnerable and subject them to restrictions or forms of surveillance ... [or] so-called protection”2 but as a subject or an agent—personal and communal—struggling for recognition, dignity, justice, and the 1 Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action,” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013). 2 Catriona Mackenzie, “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University PRess, 2014), 47. © Sturla J. Stålsett, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004543270_008

Promise: The Vulnerable Basis of Political Agency and Community 179

well-being of human as well as nonhuman life.3 Vulnerability can empower political agency and be a condition for building a political community. Hence, it is not to be seen as a problem in human life. It is its violation that has to be confronted, not its existence. It should be protected and not futilely targeted for elimination. Third, religiosity is closely linked to experiences of vulnerability and its violations. Its communal and personal significance increases in adversity. Hence, what we call ‘religion’ can be seen as human ways to handle vulnerable life. Different types of religiosity deal with human vulnerability in diverse, internally conflicting ways. The potentially positive contribution of religious practice to strengthening human relationships and political community therefore depends on the particular ways in which they offer a means of handling vulnerability. Religious performance and beliefs can be sources of recognition; they can provide orientation and inspire transformation. They can, at best, build community and serve as reservoirs of celebration, meaning, and hope in the midst of trouble. This is not to say that ‘religion’ in and by itself necessarily plays this role. If more than eight out of ten people in the global population have a religious affiliation,4 this inevitably entails such a complex variety that any overly confident talk of what religion ultimately is or does should be resisted. Still, I maintain, it also means that critically reflecting on, questioning, and challenging religious imagination and practice—doing political theology—can have a decisive impact on people’s lives and political outcomes. Fourth, the Christian faith in God can be read as proclaiming the dispossession of divinity, and be seen as a sacralization of vulnerability. The value of vulnerability according to the Christian faith can be explored by examining how it is enacted in the two principal Christian festivals: Christmas and Easter. These communal rituals, central to any version of the confessional currents of this faith, express in practice the arguably most provocative and idiosyncratic Christian claim: that the story of God’s presence in the birth, 3 See again ’el sujeto viviente’ in Hinkelammert, e.g., Franz J. Hinkelammert, “El sujeto negado y su retorno,” Pasos, no. 104 (2002), and Sturla J. Stålsett, “El sujeto, los fundamentalismos y la vulnerabilidad,” Pasos, no. 104 (2002). 4 This figure, provided by the PEW Institute in 2012, has become “almost obligatory” in speeches addressing freedom of religion and belief (FORB) Judd Birdsall and Lori Beaman comment in a 2020 report commissioned by the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (CIRIS) on behalf of the Transatlantic Policy Network on Religion and Diplomacy (TPNRD). They rightly warn that such statistics “…can obscure the enormous complexity and variety of religion around the world,” Judd Birdsall and Lori Beaman, Faith in Numbers: Can we Trust Quantitative Data on Religious Affiliation and Religious Freedom?, Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (22 June 2020), https:// religionanddiplomacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Faith-in-Numbers-final.pdf, 7.

180

chapter 7

life, death, and resurrection of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, testifies to the sacredness of embodied human life. The repetitive ritualization of this founding narrative becomes, in my interpretation, a continuous, contextual, and dynamic reimagination and historicization of divine vulnerability. Through this paradoxical appraisal of the power in precariousness emerges a possible resurgence of political community and agency. In the language of Christian faith such community bears the name of the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, God’s kingdom or reign—as both project and promise—and the agency can be envisaged as a following of Jesus in history.5 However, any liberationist, pragmatist, or plainly ‘evangelical’ (in the original sense of the word as providing good news) theology needs at least some sort of verification in practice. Can this really work? Are there examples of a political strength emerging from vulnerability that is framed as such through religious and/or Christian faith resources? Does a political theology of vulnerability hold its promise? In fact, effective and affirmative vulnerable action is not difficult to see; it is an everyday and global phenomenon. People continuously come together and fight for survival, resistance, and a more just and dignified life—human as well as nonhuman. Consider the groups of Mayan women assembling weekly in a small town in Guatemala to share personal stories, using sociodrama to tacitly address issues of domestic violence and to obtain information on local and regional developments that threaten their community. Consider the self-organizing of sex workers and victims of human trafficking in a major capital in Europe, breaking the paralyzing (self-)stigmatization and daring to ‘come out’ to demand rights and legal protection. Consider the countless 5 In an earlier work, Sturla J. Stålsett, The crucified and the Crucified. A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino, vol. 127, Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, (Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2003), I have dealt extensively with the centrality of these two biblical concepts in Latin American liberation theology. See, in particular, Jon Sobrino, “Centralidad del reino de Dios en la teología de la liberación”, in Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991) vol. 1 (San Salvador, 1991); Jon Sobrino, “Cristología sistemática: Jesucristo mediador absoluto del reino de Dios,” in Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991); Ignacio Ellacuría, “Recuperar el reino de Dios: des-mundanización e historización de la Iglesia,” Sal Terrae, no. 780 (1978); Jon Sobrino, Cristología desde América Latina (Esbozo a partir del seguimiento del Jesús histórico), Second edition (México: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1976); Segundo Galilea, El seguimiento de Cristo (Bogotá: Ediciones Paulinas, 1978). See also, e.g., Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire. The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

Promise: The Vulnerable Basis of Political Agency and Community 181

testimonies of brave civilian resistance to brutal war in Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, and Ukraine. Consider humanitarian rescue efforts and protection advocacy in the Mediterranean and on the Mexican–US border. Consider the brave LGBTQ+ mobilization in contexts where people are threatened, harassed, and criminalized for their sexual orientations. Consider the long but, despite many setbacks, efficacious struggles of disability rights movements, women’s rights movements, and labor unions. Consider the mobilization of different degrees and forms of civilian disobedience in defense of the environment. Consider Greta Thunberg. Consider Black Lives Matter. These everyday struggles, which I suggest seeing as examples of vulnerably empowered performative infrapolitics, are sometimes framed, interpreted, strengthened, inspired, ‘sanctified,’ and interrupted by religious imaginations and practices. Consider brave interfaith initiatives for peace in Sudan, Myanmar, and the Middle East. Consider the symbolic resistance of Buddhist monks to military oppression by turning their traditional begging cups upside down. Consider how churches and communities of diverse confessional adherence organize networks of assistance, consolation, and protection in neighborhoods ravaged by drug-related gang violence in Central America and Brazil. Consider the living legacies of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Mahatma Gandhi, or the personal bravery of the likes of Rosalina Tuyuc, Nadia Murad, Denis Mukwege, and millions of martyrs for the sake of human dignity and justice whose names only God knows. I offer these as examples of vulnerability expressing itself in concrete political agency and community, implicitly and explicitly entwined with religiosity. I think that they confirm the relevance of the political theology of vulnerability. However, unquestionably, the counterexamples are also many. In all regions, communities and leaders acting in the name of religiosity violate vulnerability and play into biopolitical narratives of security. At the time of writing, the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church on the bloody and unprovoked war in Ukraine comes to mind as the most extreme case, but it is not unique. Thus, although I have argued for an affirmative account of vulnerability, its potentially positive political impact is by no means assured. This lack of guarantees should come as no surprise; uncontrollability, unpredictability, and contingency are inherent in vulnerability. However, these characteristics simultaneously represent spaces for freedom and action, as Ziarek pointed out in her creative reading of Arendt’s political philosophy in the light of a feminist approach to vulnerability.6 6 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability.”

182

chapter 7

This takes us back to the opening question of this book regarding why and how people seek each other’s company to build a political community. I have suggested that this is neither out of friendship nor fear, but a shared recognition of vulnerability. In other words, the basis for political agency and community emerging in and from vulnerability is not a Hobbesian, Rousseauian, or any other version of the social contract. Instead, the basis can be imagined as a promise. Contrary to the politics of contracts, where notions of equivalent economic exchange and the calculation of quid pro quo logic rule, a politics of promise is based on the incalculable value of the vulnerability of the other. We should distinguish between contractual obligation and “the ethical responsibility characteristic of the incalculable promise.”7 In accepting the responsibility that inevitably emerges from our vulnerable intertwinement, I give you a promise, tacit or explicit, in an act that may not always know its source or dare to speak in its name. I trust you to do the same. I cannot live a single day without this trust. This pact of promises is not a social contract. Our promises obligate us to each other and to every other—human and nonhuman. “Such bonds of obligation”, I agree with Ewa Ziarek, “are not an expression of subjective initiative (just as agency is not reducible to initiative) but rather a political modality of responsibility for others and for the common world in which we live.”8 It is in making a promise that the self can include the other without losing self-consistency or self-affirmation. This is a key contention of Paul Ricoeur’s ethics in Oneself as Another.9 Thus, I hold, a politics of plurality amidst precarity can be pursued, constructing a web of relations as a community-in-difference, mindful of multiplicity, but unified in its purpose of protecting and promoting life. 7 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 79. 8 Ziarek, “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability,” 80. 9 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, I am following William Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” The Journal of religion 100, no. 4 (2020): “Insofar as one desires to be a self through time, the narrative coherence of one’s life is bound to self-constancy through the form and dynamics of promise-making. Here is the domain of ipse identity or selfhood at the intersection with idem identity or sameness. We are responsible for our selfhood through time whose worth and the worth of others is attested in acting and suffering. There is then an otherness in oneself that takes the form of responsibility to others and promise-making”, 490–1. See also my reading of this theme in Ricoeur in Sturla J. Stålsett, “The Other in the Ecclesial Self: The Church and the Populist Challenge,” in The Spirit of Populism. Political Theologies in Polarized Times, ed. Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston, Political and public theologies. Comparisons coalitions - critiques. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022).

Promise: The Vulnerable Basis of Political Agency and Community 183

Politics emerging from vulnerability is vulnerable politics. It depends on people coming together with different inclinations and preferences, life experiences, and worldviews. Democratic politics, which is a politics of disagreement but on a common ground of mutual recognition of the dignity inherent in the other, cannot be biopolitically ‘secured’ without losing its inner freedom, and eventually turning into necropolitics. Democracy is always fragile and must remain so. When attempts at immunization disrespect the debt toward others upon which such a community is built, it destroys what it is supposed to preserve. The only way community and immunity can be held together is through openness toward the other and the debt we share—vulnerability. In the Anthropocene, with its ravaging fires in Paradise, humanity’s illusionary flight from the vulnerability that is an intrinsic part of all living has reached a dead end. Insatiable, extractive, and exploitative capitalism and colonialism have driven planetary life to the edge.10 Only a radical, renewed recognition of vulnerability, as a value to be protected rather than a flaw to be eliminated, can possibly provide a way out of the deadlock. Christian faith practices facing precarity can—indeed should—express and strengthen such recognition. “There is a crack in everything” sang Leonhard Cohen;11 this crack, I hold, is the vulnerable foundation of a politics of livable life in precarious times. The light that gets in—an almost unnoticeable beam of the vulnerable divine, perhaps?—is its promise. 10 11

Clayton Crockett and Catherine Keller, eds, Political theology on edge: Ruptures of justice and belief in the anthropocene (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022). “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” is the famous line in Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem”, appearing on his 1992 album The Future (Columbia). According to Leonard Cohen’s biographer Sylvie Simmons, during the making of this record Cohen was deeply impacted by the Los Angeles uprising related to the Rodney King case. See Sylvie Simmons, I’m your man: The life of Leonard Cohen (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012).

References Acciari, Louisa. “Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity.” Latin American research review 56, no. 1 (2021): 67–81. https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.594. Addy, Tony. Seeking conviviality. Re-forming community diaconia in Europe. Department for mission and development, The Lutheran World Federation (Geneva: The Lutheran World Federation, 2013). https://www.lutheranworld.org/content/ resource-seeking-conviviality. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life. Meridian. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. Slave Songs of the United States. DocSouth Books. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. doi:10.5149/9780807869505_allen. Almond, Gabriel A., R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan. Strong religion: The rise of fundamentalisms around the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent theology: Theological perversions in sex, gender and politics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2000. Ammerman, Nancy T. “2013 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture: Finding Religion in Everyday Life.” Sociology of religion 75, no. 2 (2014): 189–207. Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. Everyday religion: Observing modern religious lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Anderson, Joel. “Autonomy and Vulnerability Entwined.” In Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, 134–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Arendt, Hannah. The human condition. Second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. ———. On revolution. Penguin classics. New York: Penguin, 2006. Armstrong, Karen. “What Is Fundamentalism?” In Promise and Peril. The Paradox of Religion as Resource and Threat, edited by Anna Lännström, 11–21. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Arnason, G. “Biopower (Foucault).” In Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, Vol.1, edited by Ruth Chadwick, 295–99. Cambridge: Elsevier Inc., 2012.

186

References

Asamoah-Gyadu, J. “Migration, Diaspora Mission, and Religious Others in World Christianity: An African Perspective.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39, no. 4 (2015): 189–92. Asante, Molefi Kete, and Mambo Ama Mazama. Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2004. Assmann, Hugo, ed. Sobre ídolos y sacrificios. René Girard con teólogos de la liberación. San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1991. Assmann, Hugo, and Franz J. Hinkelammert. A idolatria do mercado. Ensaio sobre economia e teologia. Teologia e libertação. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1989. Astley, Jeff, and Leslie J. Francis. Exploring ordinary theology: Everyday Christian believing and the Church. Explorations in practical, pastoral and empirical theology. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Barrera Rivera, Paulo. Tradição, transmissão e emoção religiosa. Sociologia do protestantismo contemporâneo na América Latina. São Paulo: Olho d’Água, 2001. Bauman, Zygmunt. Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Themes for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. ———. Globalization. The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Theory, culture & society. London: Sage, 1992. ———. What Is Globalization? Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Was Ist Globalisierung? Suhrkamp Verlag 1997. ———. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Bedford, Daniel. “Introduction: Vulnerability refigured.” In Embracing vulnerability. The challenges and implications for law, edited by Daniel Bedford and Jonathan Herring, 1–27. London & New York: Routledge, 2020. Bedford, Daniel, and Jonathan Herring, eds. Embracing vulnerability: The challenges and implications for law. London & New York: Routledge, 2020. Benjamin, Jessica. Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. London, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018. Berger, Peter L. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. ———. “Max Weber is alive and well, and living in Guatemala: The protestant ethic today.” Review of Faith and International Affairs 8, no. 4 (2010): 3–9. ———. Secularization and de-secularization. 13. 2001. Bergmann, Sigurd. God in Context. A Survey of Contextual Theology. Abingdon: Ashgate, 2003. ———, ed. “Man får inte tvinga någon”: Autonomi och relationalitet i nordisk teologisk tolkning. Nora: Nya Doxa, 2001. Best, Thomas F., and Günther Gassmann, eds. On the way to Fuller Koinonia. Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Faith and Order Paper no. 166. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994.

References

187

Birdsall, Judd, and Lori Beaman. Faith in Numbers: Can we Trust Quantitative Data on Religious Affiliation and Religious Freedom? Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies (22 June 2020). https://religionanddiplomacy.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2020/06/Faith-in-Numbers-final.pdf. Bitun, Ricardo. “O neopentecostalismo e sua inserção no mercado moderno.” Mestrado, Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior, 1996. Blum, Edward J., and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Boff, Leonardo. E a Igreja se fez povo. Petrópolis: Editora Voces, 1986. ———. Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis books, 1986. ———. Passion of Christ, Passion of the World. The Facts, Their Interpretation, and Their Meaning Yesterday and Today. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987. Boldt, Joachim. “The concept of vulnerability in medical ethics and philosophy.” Philos Ethics Humanit Med 14, no. 1 (2019): 6–6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-0190075-6. Bonhoeffer, Diedrich. The Cost of Discipleship. Revised and unabridged edition containing material not previously translated. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1963. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. The enlarged edition. London: SCM Press, 1971. Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing back. Vulnerability and resistance in times of resilience.” In Vulnerability in resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 52–75. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016. Brekke, Torkel. Fundamentalism: prophecy and protest in an age of globalization. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bretherton, Luke Christianity and contemporary politics: The conditions and possibilities of faithful witness. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Brett, Edward T. “The Beatification of Monsignor Romero: A Historical Perspective.” American Catholic studies 128, no. 2 (2017): 51–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/ acs.2017.0031. Brown, Brené. Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. London: Penguin Life, 2015. Brubaker, Rogers. “Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective.” Ethnic and racial studies (2017): 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700. ———. “Why populism?”. Theory and Society 46 (2017): 357–85. https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7. Bruce, Steve. Religion in the modern world: From cathedrals to cults. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

188

References

———. Secularization: In defence of an unfashionable theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Buffel, Olehile A. “Black theology and the black experience in the midst of pain and suffering amidst poverty.” Scriptura 116, no. 1 (2017): 1–14. Butler, Judith. The force of nonviolence: An ethico-political bind. London,Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2020. ———. The force of nonviolence: The ethical in the political. London: Verso, 2020. ———. Frames of war: When is life grievable? Pbk. ed. London ; New York: Verso, 2010. ———. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London ; New York: Verso, 2009. ———. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Thinking gender. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. ———. Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London; New York: Verso, 2006. ———. “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Zeynep Gambetti Judith Butler, and Leticia Sabsay 12–27. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: the performative in the political. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Vulnerability in resistance. ———, eds. Vulnerability in resistance. Durham &London: Duke University Press, 2016. Butler, Judith, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. The power of religion in the public sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Caputo, John D. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. ———. The weakness of God: A theology of the event. Indiana series in the philosophy of religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Cardenal, Rodolfo, Ignacio Martín-Baró, and Jon Sobrino, eds. La voz de los sin voz. La palabra viva de Monseñor Romero. 4th edition, San Salvador: UCA editores, 1996. Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A theological account. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Casanova, José. Public religions in the modern world. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Cavanaugh, William T. The myth of religious violence: Secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

References

189

Cesari, Jocelyne. We God’s people: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the world of nations. Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Chambers, Robert. “Editorial Introduction: Vulnerability, Coping and Policy.” IDS Bulletin 20, no. 2 (1989): 1–7. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.1989. mp20002001.x. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1759-5436.1989. mp20002001.x. Coakley, Sarah. “Kenōsis and subversion.” 82–111. London: SPCK Press, 1996. ———. Powers and submissions: spirituality, philosophy and gender. Challenges in contemporary theology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002. Comtesse, Hannah, Verena Ertl, Sophie M. C. Hengst, Rita Rosner, and Geert E. Smid. “Ecological grief as a response to environmental change: A mental health risk or functional response?” Int J Environ Res Public Health 18, no. 2 (2021): 1–10. https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020734. Cone, James H. “Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation.” Theology today (Ephrata, Pa.) 29, no. 1 (1972): 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/004057367202900107. ———. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011. ———. The spirituals and the blues: An interpretation. New York: Seabury, 1972. Cook, Guillermo. The Expectation of the Poor. Latin American Base Communities in Protestant Perspective. New York: Orbis Books, 1985. ———, ed. New Face of the Church in Latin America. Betweeen Tradition and Change. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994. Commonwealth Secretariat Consultative Group on the Special Needs of Small States. Vulnerability: Small states in the global society. Report of a Commonwealth consultative group. London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1985. Copeland, M. Shawn. Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience. Orbis books, 2018. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. On intersectionality: Essential writings. New York: The New Press, 2020. Croatto, José Severino. Biblical Hermeneutics. Toward a Theory of Reading as the Production of Meaning. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987. ———. Exodus. A Hermeneutics of Freedom. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1981. Crockett, Clayton, and Catherine Keller, eds. Political theology on edge: Ruptures of justice and belief in the anthropocene. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Cruz, Gemma. An Intercultural Theology of Migration: Pilgrims in the Wilderness. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Culp, Kristine A. Vulnerability and glory: A theological account. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

190

References

Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen Landman. Mourning nature: Hope at the heart of ecological loss and grief. Chicago, Illinois: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Cyfer, Ingrid. “What’s the trouble with humanity? A feminist critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of vulnerability.” Digithum revista digital d’humanitats, no. 23 (2019). https://doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i23.3157. Damerau, Hans. Ärkebiskopen är mördad! Predikan som den levande teologins ort. En systematisk-teologisk analys av ärkebiskop Romeros predikningar i El Salvador 80–1977. Skellefteå: Norma, 2000. Daughrity, Dyron B. To whom does Christianity belong? Critical issues in world Christianity. Understanding world Christianity. Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2015. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Sociology/International Studies. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2014. Delgado, Jesús. Oscar A. Romero. Biografía. 2. ed. Madrid: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986. Denton-Borhaug, Kelly. “Remembering the Summer of 2020.” Dialog: A journal of theology 59, no. 4 (2020): 319–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12606. Diduck, Alison. “Family law’s instincts and the relational subject.” In Embracing vulnerability. The challenges and implications for law, edited by Daniel Bedford and Jonathan Herring, 31–51. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2020. Durkheim, Émile, and Mark S. Cladis. The elementary forms of religious life. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Dussel, Enrique. Ethics of liberation: in the age of globalization and exclusion. Latin America otherwise. Edited by A. Vallega, translated by N. Maldonado-Torres, E. Mendieta and Y. Angulo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. ———. Ética de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión. Madrid & Mexico: Editorial Trotta, UAM-I, UNAM, 1998. ———. Las metáforas teológicas de Marx. Estella: Editorial Verbo Divino, 1993. Eiesland, Nancy L. The disabled God: toward a liberatory theology of disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994. Eikrem, Asle. God as sacrificial love: A systematic exploration of a controversial notion. T&T Clark studies in systematic theology. London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2018. Ellacuría, Ignacio. “El pueblo crucificado.” In Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, edited by Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 189–216. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991. ———. “El pueblo crucificado. Ensayo de soteriología histórica.” In Cruz y resurrección. Presencia y anuncio de una Iglesia nueva, edited by Hugo Assmann et al., 49–82. México: CRT - Servir, 1978. ———. “Hacia una fundamentación del método teológico latinoamericano.” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 322–323 (1975): 409–25. ———. “Por qué muere Jesús y por qué le matan.” Diakonia, no. 8 (1978): 65–75. ———. “Recuperar el reino de Dios: des-mundanización e historización de la Iglesia,” Sal Terrae, no. 780 (1978): 335–343.

References

191

Esposito, Roberto. Bíos: Biopolitics and philosophy. Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ———. Communitas: origine e destino della comunità. Piccola biblioteca Einaudi Filosofia. Nuova edizione ampliata. Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 2006. ———. Communitas: The origin and destiny of community. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010. ———. “Community and nihilism.” Cosmos and history 5, no. 1 (2009): 24–36. ———. Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. ———. Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Filosofia. Torino: Giolio Einaudi editore, 2002. Farley, Wendy. Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion. A Contemporary Theodicy. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminister/John Knox Press, 1990. Fineman, Martha Albertson. “Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality.” Oslo Law Review 4, no. 3 (2017): 133–49. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2387-3299-2017-03-02. http://www.idunn.no/oslo_law_review/2017/03/vulnerability_and_inevitable_ inequality. ———. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition “. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008). Fineman, Martha Albertson, and Anna Grear. Vulnerability: Reflections on a new ethical foundation for law and politics. Gender in law, culture, and society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Flood, Gavin. The importance of religion: Meaning and action in our strange world. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Foucault, Michel. “Of other spaces.” Spaces of visual culture (2006): 93–101. ———. “The Subject and Power.” Critical inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–95. https://doi. org/10.1086/448181. Foucault, Michel, Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, François Ewald, and David Macey. “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Il faut défendre la société. New York: Picador, 2003. Foucault, Michel, Frédéric Gros, Graham Burchell, and Collège de France. The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983. Vol. [8], Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Foucault, Michel, Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Sécurité, territoire, population. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Foucault, Michel, Michel Senellart, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and France Collège de. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Naissance de la biopolitique cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

192

References

Fox, Jonathan, and Shmuel Sandler. Bringing religion into international relations. New York, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004. Frank, Thomas. The people, no: A brief history of anti-populism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. Fraser, Nancy, J. Golb, J. Ingram, C. Wilke, and A. Honneth. Redistribution or recognition? A political-philosophical exchange. Umverteilung oder Anerkennung? London: Verso, 2003. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. London: Harmondsworth, 1972. Frerks, Georg, J. Warner, and B. Weijs. “The politics of vulnerability and resilience.” Ambiente & sociedade 14, no. 2 (2011): 105–22. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1414753X2011000200008. Fretheim, Kjetil. Interruption and imagination: Public theology in times of crisis. Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2016. Frostin, Per. Liberation theology in Tanzania and South Africa. Doctoral thesis. Lund: Lund University Press, 1988. Fukuyama, Francis. The end of history and the last man. London: Penguin, 1992. Furre, Berge. “Crossing boundaries: The ‘universal church’ and the spirit of globalization” In Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age, edited by Sturla J. Stålsett, 39–51. London: SCM Press, 2006. Galilea, Segundo. El seguimiento de Cristo (Bogotá: Ediciones Paulinas, 1978). Gandolfo, Elizabeth O’Donnell The Power and Vulnerability of Love. A Theological Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Garver, Eugene. Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gheaus, Anca. “Children’s vulnerability and legitimate authority over children.” (2018). https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12262. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. acls humanities e-book. Vol. 21, Berkeley, Calif: Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2007. doi:10.1525/j.ctt5hjht8. Gilson, Erinn C. The ethics of vulnerability: a feminist analysis of social life and practice. Routledge studies in ethics and moral theory. Vol. 26, New York: Routledge, 2014. Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Graff-Kallevåg, Kristin, Sven Thore Kloster, and Sturla J. Stålsett, eds. Populisme og kristendom. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2021. Graff-Kallevåg, Kristin, and Sturla J. Stålsett. “Holy marathon – ‘running religion’? Religious interpretations of Body Vulnerability in the context of marathons.” In

References

193

Training the Body. Perspectives from Religion, Physical Culture, and Sport, edited by David Torevell, Clive Palmer and Paul Rowan. Routledge Research in Sports, Culture and Society, 25–38. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. Graff-Kallevåg, Kristin, and Sturla J. Stålsett. “Vulnerability in the arena of strength: An analysis of Christian sermons in the context of international sporting events.” Studia theologica (2021): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0039338X.2021.1937313. Grau, Marion. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011. Grau, Marion, and Jason A. Wyman. What is constructive theology? Histories, methodologies, and perspectives. Rethinking theologies. Vol. 3, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020. Grear, Anna, and Martha Albertson Fineman. Vulnerability: Reflections on a new ethical foundation for law and politics. Gender in law, culture, and society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Gregory, and Anna Silvas. Gregory of Nyssa: The letters. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2007. Gros, Frédéric, and David Fernbach. Disobey! A guide to ethical resistance. London; New York: Verso, 2020. Gunnes, Gyrid Kristine. “Our Lady of the heterotopia: An empirical theological investigation of heterotopic aspects of the Church of Our Lady, Trondheim.” Diaconia 8, no. 1 (2017): 51–68. https://doi.org/10.13109/diac.2017.8.1.51. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. La fuerza histórica de los pobres. Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1982. ———. Teología de la liberación. Perspectivas. 10th edition Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1984. Hammer, Espen. “One Big Mac and an AK-47 to go, please!” Samtiden, no. 1 (2002): 37–47. Hansen, Thomas Blom, and Finn Stepputat. Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2000. ———. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Hausner, Sondra L. Durkheim in dialogue: A centenary celebration of the elementary forms of religious life. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Haynes, Jeff. Religion in Global Politics. London and New York: Longman, 1998. Haynes, Jeffrey. An introduction to international relations and religion. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007. Hempelmann, Reinhard. Panorama der neuen Religiösität: Sinnsuche und Heilsversprechen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Vollständig überarb. Neuausg. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001.

194

References

Henriksen, Jan-Olav. Christianity as distinct practices: A complicated relationship. Rethinking theologies: Constructing alternatives in history and doctrine, New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019. ———. “Everyday religion as orientation and transformation: A challenge to theology “. Nordic Journal of Society and Religion 29, no. 1 (2016): 36–51. ———. Religion as orientation and transformation: A maximalist theory. Religion in philosophy and theology. Vol. 90, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017. ———. Representation and ultimacy: Christian religion as unfinished business. Nordic studies in theology. Vol. 5 . Zürich: LIT, 2020. Herrick, Vanessa. Limits of vulnerability: Exploring a kenotic model for pastoral ministry. Grove pastoral series. Cambridge: Grove, 1997. Hetherington, Kevin. The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering. London; New York: Routledge, 1997. Hilden, Per Kristian, and Sturla J. Stålsett. “Other by law: Migration, exclusion and naturalizing discourses of citizenships and rights.” Diaconia: Journal of Christian Social Practice 8, no. 2 (2012): 138–51. Hinkelammert, Franz J. El Grito del Sujeto. Del teatro-mundo del evangelio de Juan al perro-mundo de la globalización. 3rd ed. San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1998. ———, ed. El Huracán de la Globalización. San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones (DEI), 1999. ———. “El sujeto negado y su retorno.” Pasos, no. 104 (2002). ———. La fe de Abraham y el Edipo occidental. Segunda edición ampliada. San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1991. ———. “Liberation Theology in the Economic and Social Context of Latin America.” In Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas edited by David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta, Lois Ann Lorentzen and Dwight N. Hopkins, 25–52. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Hobbes, Thomas. Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. A critical edition by G. A. J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann. London: Continuum, 2005. Hoelzl, Michael, and Graham Ward. The new visibility of religion: Studies in religion and cultural hermeneutics. Continuum resources in religion and political culture. London; New York: Continuum, 2008. Hogue, Michael S. “Ecological emergency and elemental democracy: Vulnerability, resilience and solidarity.” In Exploring vulnerability, edited by Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas, 123–34. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Honneth, Axel. The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1995. Honneth, Axel, and Martin Jay. Reification: A new look at an old idea. The Berkeley Tanner lextures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

References

195

Honneth, Axel, Jacques Rancière, and Katia Genel. Recognition or disagreement: A critical encounter on the politics of freedom, equality, and identity. New directions in critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and Empire. The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. First published by SIMON & SCHUSTER 1996. New Dehli: Viking, 1997. ———. “The clash of civilizations?” Foreign affairs, summer (1993): 22–49. Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman. Beyond religious freedom: The new global politics of religion. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2015. Hägglund, Karin, Göran Kenttä, Richard Thelwell, and Christopher R. D. Wagstaff. “Is there an upside of vulnerability in sport? A mindfulness approach applied in the pursuit of psychological strength.” Journal Of Sport Psychology In Action 10, no. 4 (2019): 220–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/21520704.2018.1549642. International Monetary Fund. Social Capital and Civil Society. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2000. http://elibrary.imf.org/view/IMF001/062909781451849585/06290-9781451849585/06290-9781451849585.xml. Iversen, Lars Laird. “From safe spaces to communities of disagreement.” British journal of religious education 41, no. 3 (2019): 315–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200 .2018.1445617. James, William. The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Routledge classics. Auckland, N.Z.: Floating Press, 2008. Javier de la Torre, Díaz. “Dependence and Vulnerability in the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre.” Revista iberoamericana de bioética, no. 5 (2017): 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.14422/rib.i05.y2017.005. Jeanrond, Werner G. Reasons to hope. London: T&T Clark, 2020. ———. A theology of love. London: T & T Clark, 2010. Jenkins, Philip. The next Christendom: The coming of global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Joas, Hans. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2013. Johnson, Elizabeth A. SHE WHO IS. The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Johnston, Douglas, ed. Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Johnston, Douglas, and Cynthia Sampson, eds. Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Jones, James William. Blood that cries out from the earth: The psychology of religious terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

196

References

———. Terror and transformation: The ambiguity of religion in psychoanalytic perspective. Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2002. Jones, Serene. Trauma and grace: Theology in a ruptured world. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Kalleberg, Arne, and Steven P. Vallas. “Probing Precarious Work: Theory, Research, and Politics.” Precarious Work 31 (2017): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277283320170000031017. Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy. The Oxford handbook of populism. Handbook of populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Keenan, James F. “The World at Risk: Vulnerability, Precarity, and Connectedness.” Theological studies (Baltimore) 81, no. 1 (2020): 132–49. https://doi. org/10.1177/0040563920907633. Keller, Catherine. “A democracy of fellow creatures: Feminist theology and planetary entanglement.” Studia theologica (2015): 3–18. ———. Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. Keller, Catherine, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera. Postcolonial theologies: Divinity and empire. St. Louis, Mo: Chalice Press, 2004. Kepel, Gilles. The Revenge of God. The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World. Translated by Alan Braley. Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1994 (1991). Kim, Sang-Bok David. “Changes and Trends in World Christianity.” Transformation (Exeter) 30, no. 4 (2013): 257–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265378813502612. Kirkens Bymisjon. Undocumented Migration, Human Trafficking and the Roma. Manifestations of Irregular Migration and Exclusion in Norway, Shortcomings in Governance, and Implications for Health, Well-Being and Dignity. The Oslo Church City Mission (Oslo: Stiftelsen Kirkens Bymisjon Oslo, 2013). http://www.bymisjon.no/ PageFiles/39920/SKBO%20Global%20Gov%202013.pdf. Klein, Naomi. This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Koopman, Nico. “Vulnerable Church in a Vulnerable World? Towards an Ecclesiology of Vulnerability.” Journal of reformed theology 2, no. 3 (2008): 240–54. https://doi. org/10.1163/156973108X333731. Kordela, A. Kiarina. “Biopolitics: From supplement to immanence in dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s trilogy: Communitas, Immunitas, Bíos “. Cultural critique 85, no. 85 (2013): 163–88. https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.85.2013.0163. Laclau, Ernesto. On populist reason. London: Verso, 2005. Levinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.

References

197

———. Den Annens humanisme. Translated, commented and annotated by Asbjørn Aarnes. Oslo: Aschehoug, Thorleif Dahls Kulturbibliotek & Det norske akademi for sprog og litteratur, 1993. ———. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972. Lewin, Kurt. “Action research and minority problems “. Journal of Social Issues, no. 2 (1946): 34–46. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x. Lewis, Hannah M., Peter James Dwyer, Stuart Hodkinson, and Louise Waite. “Hyper-precarious lives: Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North.” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 5 (2014): 580–600. https://journals.sagepub. com/doi/10.1177/0309132514548303. Lid, Inger Marie. “Disability as a human condition discussed in a theological perspective.” Diaconia, vol. 3, no. 1 (2012): 158–71. ———. “From Institutionalisation to Citizenship: Lessons Learned from Studying Diaconal Practice in a Norwegian Context.” Diaconia 10, no. 1 (2019): 51–66. https://doi.org/10.13109/diac.2019.10.1.51. Lid, Inger Marie, Trygve Wyller, et al. Makt, motmakt og praksis: Bidrag til kritisk refleksjon innen diakoni og velferd. Oslo: Cappelen Damm akademisk, 2022. Lifton, Robert Jay. Superpower syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nations Books, 2003. Lloyd, Vincent. “Afterword: Amazing Grace.” Cambridge anthropology 40, no. 1 (2022): 121–28. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2022.400109. ———. “Anger: A Secularized Theological Concept.” In Spirit of Populism, edited by Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston, 25–39. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022. ———. Race and Political Theology. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012. Lloyd, Vincent W. The problem with grace: Reconfiguring political theology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. Race and political theology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. Lorenzini, Daniele. “From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much.” Foucault studies 21, no. 21 (2016): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i0.5011. Lucio, Carlos, and Barkin David. “Postcolonial and Anti-Systemic Resistance by Indigenous Movements in Mexico.” Journal of world-systems research 28, no. 2 (2022). https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2022.1113. Luthar, Suniya S. Resilience and Vulnerability: Adaptation in the Context of Childhood Adversities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511615788. Lynch, Thomas. Apocalyptic political theology: Hegel, Taubes and Malabou. Political theologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Løgstrup, K. E. The Ethical demand. Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.

198

References

Løgstrup, Knud E. Den etiske fordring. 12. opplag. København: Gyldendal, 1956( 1989). Lønning, Inge. “Gott. Neuzeit / Systematisch-theologisch.” In Theologische Realenzyklopädie, edited by Robert Horst, et al. Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 668– 708. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984. Macedo, Edir. O Perfeito Sacrifício: o significado espiritual dos dízimos e ofertas. Rio de Janeiro: Universal, 2001. Mackenzie, Catriona. “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability.” In Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, 33–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy. Studies in feminist philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Marchart, Oliver. Die Prekarisierungsgesellschaft: Prekare Proteste. Politik und Okonomie im Zeichen der Prekarisierung. Gesellschaft der Unterschiede. Vol. 8: Transcript, 2013. Mareike, Gebhardt. “To Make Live and Let Die: On Sovereignty and Vulnerability in the EU Migration Regime.” Redescriptions: Yearbook of political thought, conceptual history and feminist theory 23, no. 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.323. Mariano, Ricardo. “Neopentecostalismo: os pentecostais estão mudando.”Mestrado em Sociologia, Universidade de São Paulo, 1995. Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The world their parish. Religion and modernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Marty, Martin E., R. Scott Appleby, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Fundamentalism project: Vol. 5: Fundamentalisms comprehended. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mathewes, Charles. “Vulnerability and political theology.” In Exploring vulnerability, edited by Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas, 165–84. Göttingen/ Bristol: Vandehoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Mauss, Marcel. The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge, 1990. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steve Corcoran. Politiques de l’inimitié. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Mbembé, Achille. Negative messianism in the age of animism, University of Virginaia Guest Lectures. https://ihgc.as.virginia.edu/achille-mbembe-negative-messianism-age-animism: U VA Arts & Sciences Digital Communications, 2017. Mbembé, J. A. On the postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McCoy, Marina Berzins. Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. doi:10.1093/acpr of:oso/9780199672783.001.0001.

References

199

McDonagh, Enda. Vulnerable to the Holy: In Faith, Morality and Art. Dublin: Columbia, 2005. McGuire, Meredith B. Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mesters, Carlos. Defenseless flower: A new reading of the Bible. Translated by Francis McDonagh. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989. Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society. Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. London: Burns & Oates, 1980. ———. “Suffering unto God.” Critical Inquiry, no. 20 (1994): 611–22. Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. God is back: How the global revival of faith is changing the world. New York: Penguin, 2009. Milbank, John. Being reconciled: Ontology and pardon. Radical orthodoxy series. London ; New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. The future of love. Essays in political theology. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Alexander Street Press, 2009. Miller, Fiona, Henny Osbahr, Emily Boyd, Frank Thomalla, Sukaina Bharwani, Gina Ziervogel, Brian Walker, et al. “Resilience and Vulnerability: Complementary or Conflicting Concepts?”. Ecology and society 15, no. 3 (2010): 11. https://doi. org/10.5751/ES-03378-150311. Mjaaland, Marius Timmann. The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015. Mo Sung, Jung. A idolatria do capital e a morte dos pobres. São Paulo: Edicoes Pauli��nas, 1989. ———. Neoliberalismo y pobreza. Una economía sin corazón. Translated by Guillermo Meléndez. San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1993. Moïsi, Dominique. The geopolitics of emotion: How cultures of fear, humiliation and hope are reshaping the world. London: Bodley Head, 2009. Moltmann, Jürgen. Der gekreuzigte Gott. 2nd edition. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1973. ———. Theology of Hope. On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology. Translated by Lames W. Leitch. London: SCM Press Ltd., 1967. Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland, California: PM Press, 2016. Mouffe, Chantal. On the political. Thinking in action. London: Routledge, 2005. Mouritsen, Henrik. Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482885. Mudde, Cas. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and opposition (London) 39, no. 4 (2004): 541–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x. Munck, Ronaldo. “The Precariat: A view from the South.” Third world quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 747–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.800751.

200

References

Müller, Jan-Werner. What is populism? Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Nadar, Sarojini. “Changing the World: The Task of Feminist Biblical Scholars.” Journal of feminist studies in religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 137–43. https://doi.org/10.2979/ FSR.2009.25.2.137. ———. “What about the margins? Biblical scholarship fifteen years after Voices from the Margin.” Scriptura 95, no. 1 (2007): 293–97. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Northcott, Michael. A political theology of climate change. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2013. Northcott, Michael S. Place, ecology, and the sacred: The moral geography of sustainable communities. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Political emotions: why love matters for justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Nye, Malory. “Decolonizing the Study of Religion.” Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–45. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.421. ———. “Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness.” Method & theory in the study of religion, 31, no. 3 (2019): 210–37. https://doi. org/10.1163/15700682-12341444. Ofstad, Harald. Vår forakt for svakhet: En analyse av nazismens normer og vurderinger. Pax Vol. 661, Oslo: Pax, 1971. Ojala, Maria, Ashlee Cunsolo, Charles Ogunbode, and Jacqueline Middleton. “Anxiety, worry, and grief in a time of environmental and climate crisis: A narrative review.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 46 (2021): 35. https://doi. org/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-022716. Okey, Stephen, and Mary Ann Hinsdale. T&T Clark handbook of theological anthropology. London, England,New York, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Padilla, Elaine, and Peter C. Phan. Christianities in migration: the global perspective. Theology and migration in world Christianity: contextual perspectives. Vol. vol. 3, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ———. Contemporary issues of migration and theology. Christianities of the world. New York, N.Y: Palgrave, 2013. Phan, Peter C. “Deus Migrator—God the Migrant: Migration of Theology and Theology of Migration.” Theological studies (Baltimore) 77, no. 4 (2016): 845–68. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0040563916666825. Placher, William C. Narratives of a vulnerable God: Christ, theology, and scripture. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994.

References

201

Plato, and Francis Macdonald Cornford. The republic of Plato. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Pool, Jeff B. God’s Wounds. Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering. Volume One: Divine Vulnerability and Creation. Princeton Theological Monograph Series 3 vols. Vol. 1, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2009. ———. God’s Wounds. Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering. Volume Two: Evil and Divine Suffering. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. 3 vols. Vol. 2, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti. Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993. Rambo, Shelly. Resurrecting wounds: Living in the afterlife of trauma. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017. ———. Spirit and trauma: a theology of remaining. Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. Ramp, William. “The Elementary Forms as Political (A)theology.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (2014): 595–618. https://doi.org/10.29173/cjs19122. Rauch, Leo, David Sherman, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness: Text and Commentary. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Richard, Pablo. Apocalypse: a people’s commentary on the book of Revelation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995. Richard, Pablo et al. “Challenges to Liberation Theology in the Decade of the Nineties.” In New Face of the Church in Latin America. Between Tradition and Change, edited by Guillermo Cook, 245–58. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rogers, Wendy. “Vulnerability and Bioethics.” In Vulnerability. New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, 60–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Romero, Óscar Arnulfo. Homilías y discursos 1977–1980. Milano: KKIEN Publ. Int., 2015. ———. Mons. Oscar Arnulfo Romero. Su diario desde el 31 de marzo de 1978 hasta jueves 20 de marzo de 1980. San Salvador: Arzobispado, 1989. Rosa, Hartmut. The uncontrollability of the world. Cambridge, England,Medford, Massachusetts: Polity, 2020. Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le Siècle du populisme. Histoire, théorie, critique. Paris: Le Seuil, 2020. Ruuth, Anders. Igreja Universal Reino de Deus. Gudsrikets Universella Kyrka - en bra�siliansk kyrkobildning. Bibliotheca theologiae practicae, Kyrkovetenskapelige studier. Vol. 54, Stockholm: Almquist & Wicksell International, 1995.

202

References

Ryan, Gerard J. Mutual accompaniment as faith-filled living. Recognition of the vulnerable other. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Sabadell Nieto, Joana, and Marta Segarra. Differences in common: Gender, vulnerability and community. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Sabsay, Leticia. “Permeable Bodies Vulnerability, Affective Powers, Hegemony.” Chap. 13 In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 278–97. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016. Sanneh, Lamin. Disciples of all nations: Pillars of world Christianity. Oxford studies in world Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sanneh, Lamin, and Akintunde E. Akinade. A new day: Essays on world Christianity in honor of Lamin Sanneh. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Sanneh, Lamin, and Michael James McClymond. The Wiley Blackwell companion to world Christianity. Companion to world Christianity. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Schmiedel, Ulrich. Elasticized ecclesiology: The concept of community after Ernst Troeltsch. Pathways for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. “Mourning the Un-mournable? Political Theology Between Refugees and Religion.” Political Theology 18, no. 7 (2017): 612–27. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1462317X.2017.1291399. Schmiedel, Ulrich, and Joshua Ralston. The spirit of populism: Political theologies in polarized times. Political and public theologies. Vol. 1, Leiden,Boston: Brill, 2022. Schmiedel, Ulrich, and Graeme Smith, eds. Religion in the European Refugee Crisis, Religion and Global Migrations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Schmitt, Carl. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985. Schweiker, William. “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics.” The Journal of religion 100, no. 4 (2020): 481–98. https://doi. org/10.1086/710509. Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990. Scott, James C. Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Scott, Peter, and William T. Cavanaugh, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Scully, Jackie Leach. “Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power.” In Vulnerability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds, 204–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

References

203

Selak, Annie. “Orthodoxy, Orthopraxis, and Orthopathy: Evaluating the Feminist Kenosis Debate.” Modern theology 33, no. 4 (2017): 529–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/ moth.12354. Seymour, Richard. “We are all precarious - on the concept of the ‘precariat’ and its misuses.” New Left Project (2012). Sheffi, Yosef. The resilient enterprise: Overcoming vulnerability for competitive advantage. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005. Shonekan, Stephanie, and Fernando Orejuela. Black Lives Matter and music: protest, intervention, reflection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Siecienski, Anthony Edward. The Filioque: history of a doctrinal controversy. Oxford studies in historical theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Simmons, Mawusi Renee. “Spirituals.” In Encyclopedia of Black Studies, edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Mambo Ama Mazama, 438–440. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2004. Simmons, Sylvie. I’m your man: The life of Leonard Cohen. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. Sobrino, Jon. Christ the liberator: A view from the victims. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001. ———. “Centralidad del reino de Dios en la teología de la liberación”, in Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, vol. 1, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 467–510. UCA Editores: San Salvador, 1991. ———. Cristología desde América Latina (Esbozo a partir del seguimiento del Jesús histórico). Second edition ed. México: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1976. ———. “Cristología sistemática: Jesucristo mediador absoluto del reino de Dios,” in Mysterium liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, ed. Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, 575–579. UCA Editores: San Salvador, 1991. . ———. El principio-misericordia. Bajar de la cruz a los pueblos crucificados. Santander: Sal Terrae, 1992. ———. “El resucitado es el crucificado.” Sal Terrae, no. 826 (1982): 181–94. ———. Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórica-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991. ———. Jesus the Liberator. A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1993. ———. Jesus the Liberator. A Historical-Theological Reading of Jesus of Nazareth. Translated by Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh. Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1994. ———. La fe en Jesucristo. Ensayo desde las víctimas. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1999. ———. “La muerte de Jesús y la liberación en la historia.” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 322/323 (1975): 483–511.

204

References

———. “Los pueblos crucificados, actual siervo sufriente de Yahve.” Concilium, no. 232 (1990): 497–508. ———. “Meditación ante el pueblo crucificado.” Sal Terrae, no. 871 (1986): 93–104. ———. Monseñor Romero. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1989. ———. “Monseñor Romero: Mártir de la liberación.” Estudios Centroamericanos, no. 35 (1980): 253–76. ———. Mysterium Liberationis. Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1993. ———. Resurrección de la verdadera Iglesia: los pobres, lugar teológico de la eclesiología. Colección Teología Latinoamericana. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1986. ———. The True Church and the Poor. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 1987. Sobrino, Jon, and Ignacio Ellacuría, eds. Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación Vol. I, II. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1991. Soelle, Dorothee. The Window of Vulnerability. A Political Spirituality. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. Springhart, Heike. “Exploring Life’s Vulnerability: Vulnerability in Vitality.” In Exploring Vulnerability, edited by Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas, 13–33. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Springhart, Heike, and Günter Thomas. Exploring vulnerability. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Standing, Guy. The precariat: The new dangerous class. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ———. A precariat charter: From denizens to citizens. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472510631. ———. The precariat. The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Stanghellini, Giovanni, and René Rosfort. Emotions and personhood: Exploring fragility - making sense of vulnerability. International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Starr, Amory, María Elena Martínez-Torres, and Peter Rosset. “Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra.” Latin American perspectives 38, no. 1 (2011): 102–19. https://doi. org/10.1177/0094582X10384214. Stofanik, Stefan, and John D. Caputo. The adventure of weak theology: Reading the work of John D. Caputo through biographies and events. Albany: SUN Y Press, 2018. Strømmen, Hannah. “Sacred scripts of populism: Scripture-practices in the European far right.” In Spirit of Populism, edited by Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston, 85-100. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022. Strømmen, Hannah, and Ulrich Schmiedel. The Claim to Christianity. Responding to the Far Right. London: SCM Press, 2020.

References

205

Stålsett, Sturla J. “Asylbarn og menneskeverd: Etiske refleksjoner med utgangspunkt i erfaringer fra Helsesenteret for papirløse migranter.” Etikk i praksis .Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics 6, no. 2 (2012): 23–37. http://tapir.pdc.no/index. php?el=Kapittel&p=EIP&seks_id=70725. ———. “Another world is here. Notes on religion and political power.” World Forum on Theology and Liberation, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Jan 21–25, 2005. ———. “Den opprørske verdigheten.” Kirke og kultur 126, no. 2 (2021): 176–83. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-3002-2021-02-07. ———. “Diaconia: ampliação da democracia? O caso da Missão Urbana da Igreja na Noruega e os imigrantes em situação irregular.” In Religião, mídia e cultura, edited by Júlio Cézar Adam and Iuri Andréas Reblin, 309–29. São Leopoldo: Editora Sinodal, 2015. ———. “El sujeto, los fundamentalismos y la vulnerabilidad.” Pasos, no. 104 (nov dic 2002). http://www.dei-cr.org/EDITORIAL/REVISTAS/PASOS/104/pasos104_6. html. ———. “Globalisation and the Hidden Transcript: Religion as Everyday Resistance.” In The Power of Faiths in Global Politics, edited by Sturla J. Stålsett and Oddbjørn Leirvik, 171–74. Oslo: Novus, 2004. ———. “Liberation theology.” In Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions, edited by Henri Gooren. OnlineSpringer, 2016. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry /10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_197-1. ———. “Liberation theology.” In Key Theological Thinkers. From Modern to Postmodern, edited by Ståle J. Kristiansen and Svein Rise, 617–30. London: Ashgate, 2013. ———. “Liberation theology: Religious resistance to globalisation? The Chiapas uprising as a case.” In The Power of Faiths in Global Politics, edited by Sturla J. Stålsett and Oddbjørn Leirvik. Oslo: Novum Press, 2004. ———. “Naming Vulnerability: A Diaconal Dilemma of Designation.” Diaconia 11, no. 2 (2020): 125–40. https://doi.org/10.13109/diac.2020.11.2.125. ———. “Networking Contextual Theologies.” In Discovering Jesus in Our Place. Contextual Christologies in a Globalised World, edited by Sturla J. Stålsett, 163–79. Delhi: ISPCK, 2003. ———. “Non/Human: Overcoming the fatal separation, without diffusing the crucial distinction. A response to Catherine Keller.” Studia Theologica 69, no. 1 (2015): 25–31. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org10.1080/0039338X.2015.1029078. http://www.tandf. co.uk/journals/frameloader.html?http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tfs/0039338x. html. ———. “Offering On-Time Deliverance: The Pathos of Neo-Pentecostalism and the Spirits of Gloobalization.” In Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age, edited by Sturla J. Stålsett, 198–212. London: SCM Press, 2006.

206

References

———. “Opprøret i Mexico: Etterlevning eller forvarsel?” Kirke og kultur, no. 1 (1994): 79–87. ———. “Prayers of the Precariat? The Political Role of Religion in Precarious Times.” Estudos teológicos 58, no. 2 (2018): 313–25. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.22351/ et.v58i2.3439. http://periodicos.est.edu.br/index.php/estudos_teologicos/article/ view/3439/pdf. ———. “Precious and Precarious Life: Exploring Diaconal Economics.” Diaconia 10, no. 1 (2019): 67–84. https://doi.org/10.13109/diac.2019.10.1.67. ———. “Radical Mercy: Revitalizing a Fundamental Reformation Impulse in the Context of Exclusion and Irregular(-ized) Migration.” In Politics and Economics of Liberation, edited by Ulrich Duchrow and Martin Hoffmann, 271–92. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2015. ———. “Sacrificial Economy: Theological Critique of Neoliberalism in Latin America.” In Religion in a Globalised Age: Transfers and Transformations, Integration and Resistance edited by Sturla J. Stålsett, 125–39. Oslo: Novus Press, 2008. ———, ed. Spirits of Globalisation. The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age. London: SCM Press, 2006. ———. “Vulnerabilidad, dignidad y justicia: valores éticos fundamentales en un mundo globalizado.” In La agenda ética pendiente de América Latina, edited by Bernardo Kliksberg, 43–56. Buenos Aires: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, 2005. ———. The crucified and the Crucified. A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino. Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity. Vol. 127, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2003. ———. “The ethics of vulnerability, social inclusion and social capital.” Forum for development studies 34, no. 1 (2007): 45–62 ———. “The Other in the Ecclesial Self: The Church and the Populist Challenge.” In The Spirit of Populism. Political Theologies in Polarized Times, edited by Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston. Political and public theologies. Comparisons coalitions - critiques, 278–93. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2022. ———. “Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability: Anthropological and Theological Propositions.” Political Theology 16, no. 5 (2015): 464–78. https://doi.org/10. 1179/1462317X14Z.000000000115. Stålsett, Sturla J., and Oddbjørn Leirvik. The Power of Faiths in Global Politics. Oslo: Novus, 2004. Stålsett, Sturla J., Raag Rolfsen, Karin Dokken, and Hans Morten Haugen. Vulnerability and Security. Current Challenges in Security Policy from an Ethical and Theological Perspective. Expanded version of the Norwegian “Sårbarhet og sikkerhet” (2000). Oslo: Church of Norway Council on Ecumenical and International Relations, 2002.

References

207

Sölle, Dorothee. „Gott und das Leiden.“ Wissenschaft und Praxis in Kirche und Gesellschaft, no. 7 (1973): 358–72. ———. Suffering Philadelphia, Penn: Fortress Press, 1975. Saarinen, Risto. Recognition and religion: A historical and systematic study. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2016. Tamez, Elsa. The amnesty of grace: Justification by faith from a Latin American perspective. Translated by Sharon H. Ringe. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993. Taves, Ann. “2010 Presidential Address: ‘Religion’ in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79, no. 2 (2011): 287–314. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr004. Taylor, Charles. Modern social imaginaries. Public planet books. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. A secular age. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Tham, Joseph, Alberto García, and Gonzalo Miranda. Religious perspectives on human vulnerability in bioethics. Advancing Global Bioethics. Vol. 2, New York: Springer, 2014. Thomas, Scott M. The global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international relations: Tthe struggle for the soul of the twenty-first century. Culture and religion in international relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. “A globalized god: religion’s growing influence in international politics.” Foreign affairs. 89 no. 6 (2010): 93–101. Tierney, Thomas F. “Toward an Affirmative Biopolitics.” Sociological theory 34, no. 4 (2016): 358–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275116678998. Tillich, Paul. Systematic theology: Combined volume. Welwyn, Herts: Nisbet, 1968. Tonstad, Linn. “On vulnerability.” In Suffering and the Christian life, edited by Karen Kilby and Rachel Davies, 246–63. London; T&T Clark, 2020. Topinka, Robert J. “Foucault, Borges, Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces.” Foucault studies, no. 9 (2010): 54. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i9.3059. Trinidad, Saúl. “Cristología - Conquista - Colonización.” In Jesús, ni vencido, ni monarca celestial, edited by José Míguez Bonino, 89–110. Buenos Aires: Ed. Tierra Nueva, 1977. Turner, Bryan S. Vulnerability and human rights. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. United Nations Children’s Fund. Birth Registration for Every Child by 2030: Are we on track? UNICEF (New York: United Nations Children’s Fund, 2019). Vanheeswijck, Guido M. “The Philosophical Genealogy of Taylor’s Social Imaginaries: A Complex History of Ideas and Predecessors.” J Hist Ideas 78, no. 3 (2017): 473–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2017.0026.

208

References

Vaage, Leif E., ed. Subversive Scriptures. Revolutionary Readings of the Christian Bible in Latin America. Edited and translated by Leif E. Vaage. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1997. Vaaland, Tor Øystein. “De synlige og de usynlige.” Morgenbladet (March 16 2012). http://morgenbladet.no/samfunn/2012/de_synlige_og_de_usynlige. Waite, Louise. “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?”. Geography compass 3, no. 1 (2009): 412–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00184.x. Waite, Louise, Hannah Lewis, Peter Dwyer, and Stuart Hodkinson. “Precarious Lives: Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Resistance within Unfree Labouring.” ACME an International E-journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 2 (2015): 479–91. Ward, Graham. The politics of discipleship: Becoming postmaterial citizens. London: SCM Press, 2009. West, Gerald. The Academy of the Poor. Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. ———. Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation. Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context. Second, revised edition. First published in 1991 in South Africa by Cluster Publications. Pietermaritzburg and Maryknoll, New York: Cluster Publications and Orbis Books, 1995. William, T. Cavanaugh, and Peter Manley Scott. Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. Williams, Rowan. The tragic imagination: The literary agenda. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2016. Wyller, Trygve. Heterotopic citizen: New research on religious work for the disadvantaged. Research in Contemporary Religion. Vol. vol. 4, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Yong, Amos. Theology and Down syndrome: Reimagining disability in late modernity. Waco, Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007. Young, Iris Marion. “Recognition of Love’s Labor: Considering Axel Honneth’s Feminism.” 189–212, 2007. Zanetti, Gianfrancesco, Alessandro Di Rosa, and Irene Vicente Echevarría. Filosofía de la vulnerabilidad: percepción, discriminación, derecho. Madrid: Dykinson, 2019. Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska. “Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action.” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013): 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2013.0036. Zucker, Robert A., Maria M. Wong, Leon I. Puttler, and Hiram E. Fitzgerald. “Resilience and Vulnerability among Sons of Alcoholics: Relationship to Developmental Outcomes between Early Childhood and Adolescence.” In Resilience and Vulnerability. Adaptation in the Context of Childhood Adversities, edited by S.S. Luthar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 76–103.

Index 9/11 33n, 41, 43, 92, 92n, 100 Abraham 144n, 177, 194 absence 73n, 77, 88, 99, 149, 168n abusive 76 affective 105 affirmative 3, 17, 21, 41, 49, 54, 64, 65, 78, 79, 81, 91, 93, 102, 103, 114, 148, 165, 170, 178, 180, 181 affirmative biopolitics 21, 49, 54, 102, 148, 170 Africa XII, 5n, 55, 108n, 166n, 168n, 169, 169n, 170, 192, 208 African National Congress (ANC) 169 Agamben, Giorgio 21, 27n, 44, 45, 45n, 46, 46n, 47, 47n, 48, 48n, 49, 52, 55, 56, 61, 71, 76, 107, 131, 131n, 152, 152n, 154, 168, 171, 172n, 173, 173n, 174, 185 aggressive begging 66 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 36, 36n, 62n, 185 amnesty 173n, 177, 207 anatomy of vulnerability 33, 64, 79, 102, 167 Anderson, Joel 82, 82n, 83, 83n, 162n, 185 anger 32, 65, 87, 175 Anselmian 146, 173 Anthropocene IX, 1, 1n, 15, 34, 72, 183, 199 anthropological 44, 69, 74, 88, 129, 168 antinomic 54 Apartheid 59, 169 Apocalyptic 2n, 12, 12n, 13n, 23n, 43n, 44n, 67n, 177, 177n, 197 apophatic 78, 159 Arendt, Hannah 36, 36n, 79, 99, 131, 131n, 137n, 181, 185 Aristotle 1n, 58n, 86, 192 assumption XI, 137, 151 asylum VIII, VIIIn, 24, 27, 45n, 48, 96 asymmetries of power 66, 98 asymmetry 67 Athanasiou, Athena 8n, 74n, 91, 92n, 93, 93n, 94n, 101, 101n, 105n, 135, 135n, 137, 158n, 188 authenticity 100 authoritarianism 15 autoimmune 53 autonomy 61, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 82n, 83, 93, 99, 135, 137,138, 166, 168 barbarism 41

bare life 21, 44, 45n, 46–49, 58, 70, 71, 152n, 171, 174, 185 Bauman, Zygmunt 29, 29n, 35, 35n, 36n, 186 Benjamin, Walter 41 Benjamin, Jessica 91n, 100n, 186 Berger 10n, 107n, 110, 110n, 114, 186 bioethical research 75 biopolitics 6, 6n, 21, 36, 44, 46, 49, 49n, 52, 53n, 54n, 57, 63, 95, 131, 131n, 178, 191, 196, 207 biopouvoir 6 biopower 6, 6n, 44, 49, 58, 150 bios 45–47, 58 black VIII, 8, 18, 22, 59n, 153–156, 158, 159, 161, 161n, 169, 169n, 170, 170n, 188 Black Lives Matter 153, 153n, 161, 161n, 169, 181, 203 Black Theology 154 Bloch, Ernst 175 blues 154n, 155n, 156n, 157n, 158n, 159, 189 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 12n, 140, 140n, 187 borderization 58, 167 boundaries 59n, 80, 120, 124, 192 Bracke, Sarah 95, 95n, 96, 96n, 171, 187 Brison, Susan 165 Brubaker, Rogers 29n, 31, 31n, 187 Bruce, Steve 110, 110n, 187 Buffel, Olehile A. 169, 169n, 170, 170n, 188 Butler, Judith 4n, 8n, 17n, 22, 43, 43n, 44, 44n, 45n, 48n, 57, 62n, 63, 67, 68, 68n, 69n, 70, 70n, 71, 71n, 72, 72n, 73, 73n, 74, 74n, 75, 75n, 77, 78, 78n, 79n, 80, 80n, 85, 85n, 87, 87n, 88, 88n, 89, 91, 91n, 92, 92n, 93, 93n, 95n, 98, 98n, 99n, 100, 100n, 101n, 102, 103, 104, 104n, 105, 105n, 107, 107n, 121, 122, 124n, 129, 130, 131n, 135, 135n, 136n, 137, 137n, 141, 152n, 157, 157n, 158, 158n, 162, 170, 170n, 172, 178, 187, 188, 190, 209 camps 26, 45n, 46, 57, 58, 93n, 158, 167, 171 capitalism 2n, 143, 172, 183, 199 Capitol Hill 26 care 16, 33, 60, 63, 70, 73, 75, 77, 86, 87, 149n, 172, 175, 178 Carter, J. Kameron 15, 15n, 188 Cavanaugh, William T. XIn, 12, 12n, 188, 202, 208

210 charismatic 116, 118, 119 Chiapas 40n, 205 citizen 46, 62n, 208 civic dissidence 98 civic friendship 86 civil society 38, 38n, 42 class 4, 26, 26n, 27, 28n, 32, 35, 40, 77, 133, 144, 204 climate VII, IXn, XI, 1, 1n, 15n, 17, 34, 42, 71n, 178, 196, 200 colonial 1, 8, 34, 38, 56, 57, 57n, 67, 70, 88, 93n, 129, 135, 150, 174 colonization 21, 56, 57, 62, 93, 96 commandement 56, 57, 62, 155 communism 50 communitarian 10, 50, 53 communitas 21n, 50, 50n, 51–54, 58 community of disagreement 36 competing sacralizations 143 Cone James H. 154, 154n, 155, 155n, 156, 156n, 157, 157n, 158n, 159, 159n, 160, 161, 161n, 169, 175n, 189 conformity 98 conquest 58, 83n consent 98 consolation 113, 144, 152, 181 constructive theology 13n, 22, 193 contextual 13, 18, 74, 75, 101, 119, 120, 127, 180, 200 contingent 62, 76, 79, 95, 99, 101 contract theories 86 conviviality 61, 67 Copeland 161, 161n, 162n, 189 COVID-19 pandemic IX, X, 16, 21, 26, 52 Cox’s Bazar 26, 59 crib 22, 128, 128n, 150, 152, 155, 156 critical theory 18, 21, 60, 78, 121n, 195 cross 22, 49, 79, 117, 128, 138n, 146, 147, 148, 152, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 168n, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176 crucified people 152, 159, 160, 160n, 161, 162, 162n, 174 crucifixion 19, 128, 152, 155, 157, 160, 161, 165, 166, 176 Cruz, Gemma 15, 15n, 152n, 189, 190 Cyfer, Ingrid 69, 69n, 92n, 98n, 100n, 190 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 18n, 40, 40n, 190

index decolonization 55 Democracy 17n, 35n, 37n, 40, 40n, 41, 46, 72, 72n, 95n, 99, 171, 183, 193, 194, 196, 201, 204 demographic growth 112 denizens 27, 27n, 28, 28n, 29, 30, 204 deprivation thesis 113 Descartes, René 80 desire 44, 73n, 87, 90, 122, 170, 176 determinism 100, 157 deus vulnerabilis 140, 151 Diduck, Alison 81, 81n, 190 dignity 7, 61, 65, 71, 75, 77, 93, 96, 102, 104, 125, 134, 137, 145, 151, 162, 168, 168n, 169–171, 178, 181, 183 disaster 113 discipleship 5n, 20, 20n, 113n, 114n, 115n, 208 disease 53, 58, 134 disobedience 98, 181 dispensatio misericordiae 175 disposable 31, 57, 58, 70, 136, 152, 158, 172 dispositional 76 dispossession 92, 93, 98, 130, 135–137, 141, 145, 147, 149, 151, 179 disrespect 66n, 71n, 90, 151 divine 22, 46, 117, 118, 134–140, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154, 161, 171, 172, 175, 177, 180, 183 Dodds 16n, 17n, 34n, 63n, 74, 74n, 75n, 76n, 82n, 168n, 178n, 185, 198, 201, 202 Durkheim, Émile 8-11, 8n, 142, 142n, 143, 143n Durkheimian 10n, 141 Dussel, Enrique 11n, 33, 33n, 67, 68n, 190 duty-bearers 98 Dwyer, Peter James 5n, 96, 197, 208 dysfunctional 76 ecological extermination 15 El Salvador 22, 132, 133, 133n, 134, 136, 144, 145n, 149, 150, 190 Ellacuría, Ignacio 8n, 137n, 152n, 159, 160, 160n, 161, 173, 174, 180n, 190, 203, 204 emancipation 60 embodied 6, 7, 14, 32, 42, 44, 75, 81, 84, 98, 101, 128, 129, 130, 135, 164, 175, 180 embodiment 19, 22, 71, 84, 93 emotion 106, 106n, 199 Empire 21, 37, 37n, 38, 38n, 39, 39n, 40, 41, 41n, 42–44, 46, 61, 99n, 125, 148, 180n, 193, 195

index enactment 56, 98, 121 Enlightenment 114, 141 enslaved 21, 58, 59, 60, 62, 153, 157, 158, 161, 162, 172 epiphenomenal 9, 113, 115 epistemological 69, 76, 114, 128, 129, 160, 168–170 eschatological 59 Esposito, Roberto 21, 49, 50, 50n, 51, 51n, 52, 52n, 53, 53n, 54, 54n, 55, 55n, 56, 58, 61, 76, 78n, 88n, 107, 131, 131n, 149, 151, 168, 170, 170n, 171, 171n, 191, 196 ethical 2, 3, 14, 17n, 44, 48n, 58n, 64n, 67–69, 71, 71n, 74, 79, 85, 85n, 86, 89, 92, 92n, 98n, 99, 104, 116, 118, 137n, 160, 162, 168–171, 182, 188, 191, 193 ethics 16n, 17, 17n, 24, 35n, 64n, 69n, 74, 74n, 77, 79–81, 85n, 86, 92n, 93n, 100, 100n, 102, 168n, 178, 182, 187, 190, 192, 198, 201, 206 Europe VIII, XII, 45, 45n, 59, 65, 71, 158, 180 European Commission 74 European Union 65 evangelical 180 ex dispensatio misericordiae 173 exclusion IX, 16n, 19, 25, 30, 32, 33, 36, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 61, 66, 68, 69, 72, 102, 158, 160, 171, 173, 177, 190, 194 existential 4n, 73, 75, 92n, 105, 112, 115, 123 experience 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 18, 19, 23, 27, 37, 55, 56, 66, 68, 70, 72, 76, 77, 81, 88, 90, 93, 105, 107, 109, 111–113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 120n, 121, 122, 122n, 123n, 124, 124n, 129, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 142, 146, 147, 149, 152, 156, 157, 167–169, 169n, 172, 172n, 175, 188, 195 expiation 60, 172 Exteriority 67 faith X, XII, 5, 7, 10n, 11–13, 15, 20, 22, 23, 29, 49, 60, 89n, 107n, 110, 114, 116, 118, 124, 124n, 126, 127, 129, 135, 142, 143, 148, 149, 151, 159, 173, 173n, 176, 179, 180, 183, 199, 202, 207 false gods 143, 144 family law 81 family values 112 Fanon, Frantz 57 far-right 31 fascism 31, 32, 143

211 fear 1, 2, 41, 65, 66, 68, 86, 88, 91, 106n, 134, 177, 182, 199 feminist 8, 11, 16n, 17, 17n, 18, 23, 33, 63, 66, 69n, 72n, 74, 74n, 77, 80, 81, 85n, 92n, 93n, 98, 98n, 100, 100n, 102, 119, 127, 138, 139, 146, 168n, 171, 176n, 178, 181, 190, 192, 196, 198, 200, 201 feminist/womanist 8 Fineman, Martha Albertson 17n, 82, 82n, 130n, 191, 193 Flexibility 95 following of Jesus 180 Foucault, Michel 6, 6n, 46, 57, 57n, 62n, 97n, 99, 102n, 131, 131n, 185, 191, 197, 207 foundationalism 77 Fountain, Isaiah 161 fragility XI, 3, 16n, 62, 64, 74, 203 framed 44, 46, 48, 70, 115, 129, 141, 180, 181 Fraser, Nancy J. 28n, 33, 33n, 89, 192 freedom 5n, 7n, 8, 28n, 59, 61, 77, 79–81, 83, 90, 93, 99, 105, 121n, 131, 154, 162, 172, 179n, 182, 183, 195 Freire, Paulo 83, 83n, 192 Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) 132 Frostin, Per 168, 168n, 169, 169n, 192 functional 10, 72n, 189 fundamentalism 116, 117, 117n, 118, 185, 188, 198 Gandhi, Mahatma 181 Gandolfo, Elizabeth O’Donnell 17n, 66, 66n, 84, 84n, 123n, 127n, 129, 130n, 139, 139n, 140, 140n, 141n, 149, 149n, 160n, 167n, 192 Gaza 59, 147n Geertz, Clifford 113 gender-based violence 65 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 77, 77n, 192 Global South 111 globalization 21, 25, 26, 28, 33, 37, 38, 39, 59n, 117n, 187, 190, 192 God 6n, 8n, 9n, 10n, 12, 12n, 13, 13n, 15n, 16n, 18n, 59, 60n, 107n, 110, 118, 120, 120n, 124n, 126, 127n, 129, 135–137, 138n, 139– 141, 141n, 142–146, 146n, 147, 148, 150–152, 156, 157, 160, 161, 161n, 162–164, 164n, 166, 167, 168n, 172, 173, 175, 179, 180n, 181, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 195, 196, 199–201

212 God–Spirit/Sophia 138 Good Friday 88, 152, 165 gospel X, 49, 153, 175 Gospel of John 76n, 148, 163 governmentality 6 grace 12n, 14n, 49, 124n, 127n, 139, 150, 164n, 165n, 172, 172n, 173, 173n, 175, 176n, 177, 196, 197, 207 Grande, Rutilio 145 grievability 44, 69, 70, 72, 72n, 100 Gros, Frédéric 58n, 98, 98n, 191, 193 ground zero 68 Guantánamo Bay 45 Guatemala VII, 26, 110n, 180, 186 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 13, 58n Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio 21, 37, 37n, 38, 38n, 39, 39n, 40, 40n, 41, 41n, 42, 44, 46, 48n, 55, 61, 66n, 84n, 99n harm 2, 20, 74, 84, 86, 91, 96, 98, 104, 117, 140, 168 healing 84n, 90, 91, 165–168, 170 health IX, 16, 24, 33, 72n, 84n, 118, 189 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2n, 28n, 89, 89n, 90, 90n, 162, 197, 201 Henriksen, Jan-Olav XII, 7n, 14, 14n, 120n, 121n, 122n, 123n, 128n, 194 hermeneutical 18n, 76, 80, 119, 128, 128n, 129, 157, 160, 168, 169 heteronomic 93, 135, 137, 140, 176 hidden transcript 150, 159 historicization 180 Hobbes, Thomas 1n, 11, 11n, 86, 86n, 87, 87n, 88, 88n, 91, 130, 194 Hodkinson, Stuart 5n, 96, 197, 208 Hogue, Michael S. 17n, 94, 95n, 194 Holiday, Billie 159, 162 homine sacri 46n, 47, 60, 153, 171, 172 homo sacer 46, 48, 49, 152, 154, 171, 174 homo vulnerabilis 1, 151, 164 homophobia X Honneth, Axel 28n, 33, 89, 89n, 90, 91, 91n, 121, 121n, 149n, 162, 175, 176n, 192, 194, 195, 208 Human Development Index (HDI) 26n, 111 human flourishing 2, 18, 109 human rights XII, 10n, 16n, 27, 30, 46, 47, 65, 141, 143, 207 human security 2, 112, 115

index human trafficking 180 humanitarian VIII, X, XII, 38, 48n, 181 humanitarian interventions 38 Huntington 108n, 113, 113n, 195 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman 5n, 7 hymns XII, 3, 19, 125, 152, 167 idealization 2, 65, 77, 128n, 167 idolatry 143 Ignatius of Loyola 174 illusion of invulnerability 43, 44, 67 imaginaries XII, 14, 17, 18, 107, 207 imaginary 14n, 20, 79, 79n imagination 14, 14n, 49, 122n, 127, 127n, 162, 192, 208 imago Dei 139 immanent 41 immunitas 21, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58 immunity 49, 52, 53 immunization 25, 52–55, 60, 170, 172, 183 impassibility 138 incarnation 135–137, 140, 141, 147, 151 incarnational 129, 135 individualism 143, 178 infrapolitics 4, 5n, 96n, 125, 150, 181 Inglehart, Ronald 7n, 22, 109, 110, 110n, 111n, 112, 113, 113n, 115, 115n, 116, 116n, 119, 131, 200 injurability 2, 64, 69, 100 injustice 12, 15, 73, 76, 116, 137, 146, 155, 169, 170 integrity 75, 123 interdependency 41, 67 interdependent X, 34, 89, 104 intersectional 30, 62, 77 intersubjective 79, 82, 82n, 105 intervention IX, 38, 153n, 172, 175, 203 invulnerability 44, 66, 139, 172 irregular 16n, 27n, 30n, 152n, 196, 206 Islamophobia X Iversen, Lars Laird 36, 36n, 195 James, William 120, 120n, 123, 142, 195 Jeanrond, Werner G., XII, 8n, 140n, 167, 167n, 175n, 176, 176n, 177n, 195 Jenkins, Philip 108n, 195 Jesus 18n, 19, 19n, 60, 76n, 129, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 145, 147, 148, 155–159, 161, 161n, 163–166, 171, 173–175, 177, 180, 180n, 195, 203, 205

index Joas, Hans 9n, 10n, 141, 141n, 142, 142n, 143, 143n, 195 Johnson, Elizabeth 138, 138n, 139, 139n, 140, 140n, 146, 146n, 195 Jones, Serene 14, 14n, 127n, 164n, 165n, 196 Kabul 43, 44 Kant, Immanuel 80 Keller, Catherine 11, 11n, 13, 13n, 15, 15n, 36n, 71, 72n, 108n, 183n, 189, 196, 205 kenosis 136, 136n, 139 Kepel, Gilles 10n, 107n, 196 kingdom 180 Kingdom of God 141 Kristeva, Julia 130 Laclau, Ernesto 31n, 196 lament 155 Latin America XII, 28n, 108n, 114, 120n, 144n, 152, 173, 189, 190, 194, 201, 206, 208 law 16, 16n, 17n, 24, 30n, 37, 44, 46, 47, 47n, 48, 52, 56, 63n, 64, 66, 81, 81n, 101, 154, 158, 171, 173, 174, 186, 190, 191, 193, 194 Leviathan 1n, 11, 11n, 86, 86n, 87n, 194 Levinas, Emmanuel 67, 67n, 79, 85, 99, 196 Lewis, Hannah M. 5n, 27n, 96, 159, 197, 208 LGBTQ+ 181 liberal 29, 31n, 46, 47, 63, 64, 81, 87, 88, 103, 171, 178 liberation 5n, 8, 13, 18, 23, 33, 36, 39, 40n, 48, 59, 60, 65n, 71, 83, 105, 119, 136, 144n, 147, 153, 154, 157, 161n, 168, 169, 173, 174, 180n, 190 Lifton, Robert Jay 43, 43n, 44n, 67, 67n, 76, 168, 197 liturgical 114, 137, 151, 152 lived religion XII, 5n, 7, 14 Lloyd, Vincent W. 11n, 12n, 13, 13n, 15, 15n, 60n, 154n, 172n, 176n, 197 loci theologici 128 Logos 175 Løgstrup 67, 67n, 86n, 197, 198

213 love 16n, 63n, 84, 86, 89, 106n, 138, 138n, 139, 140, 140n, 167, 173, 175, 175n, 176n, 177, 177n, 187, 190, 195, 199, 200 Lynch, Thomas 2n, 12, 12n, 13n, 23, 23n, 177, 197 lynching 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 169, 176 Løgstrup, Knud E. 67, 67n, 86n, 197, 198 Machiavelli, Niccolò 41 Mackenzie, Catriona 16n, 17n, 33, 34n, 63n, 74, 74n, 75n, 76, 76n, 81, 81n, 82n, 167n, 178n, 185, 198, 202 Mammon 144 manger 49, 132, 136, 148, 152, 156 Manichean 118 manifestations 98, 101, 124 Martin, David 114, 114n Marx, Karl 11, 109, 113, 190 Mary 134, 139, 148, 150, 164n, 200 material 7, 12n, 19, 29, 32, 33n, 41, 52, 111–113, 128, 187n materialistic 41, 110 maternity 129, 139 Mbembe, Achille 21, 45n, 55–58, 56–59n, 60, 88, 107, 152, 153n, 155, 158, 158n, 172, 173, 198 media 38, 70 Mediterranean 158, 181 Meeropol, Abel 159 mercy 49n, 82, 150, 173, 174, 177, 205n messianic 59, 60, 172 messianism 58, 59n, 60n, 158n, 172, 174, 198 methodology 19 Metz 12, 146, 199 micropower 6 migrant detention centers 45 migration 15, 15n, 17n, 27n, 30n, 47n, 108n, 133n, 186, 189, 194 Milbank, John 46n, 152n, 174, 177n, 199 military 37, 38, 133, 181 miracle 48, 176n misericordia 174, 150n, 203 misrecognition 82n, 90, 121, 162 modernization 22, 52, 110, 112 Moria 26, 59 Mouffe, Chantal 31n, 62, 199 mourning 43n, 44, 68n, 69–71, 78n, 85n, 93n, 104n, 121, 188

214 Mukwege, Denis 65, 181 Multitude 21, 37, 37n, 39–42, 61, 193 Munck, Ronaldo 32, 32n, 199 Murad, Nadia 65, 181 natality 129–131 National Population Registry 25 Nayar, Pramod K. 147 Nazi 140 necropolitics 21, 25, 57, 59, 102, 108, 125, 150, 152, 162, 178, 183 negative messianism 58–62, 162 neoliberal 28, 92, 95, 96, 103, 105, 171, 172 Neo-Pentecostalism 59n, 109, 205 Newton, John 172 Nietzsche, Friedrich 80 Nobody Knows 159 nonviolence 48n, 71n, 79n, 80n, 87n, 88n, 91–93n, 124n, 130n, 152n, 188 Norris, Pippa 7n, 22, 109–113, 115, 115–116n, 119, 131, 200 Norway 17n, 27n, 33n, 66, 196, 206 obedience 117 obligation 50, 51, 52, 54, 71n, 85, 98, 151, 182 occupation 58, 93, 136 occurrent 76 ontology 41, 79, 79n oppression 22, 33, 36, 38, 74, 76, 97n, 125, 150, 151, 154, 156, 160, 181 orientation 7, 14, 14n, 18n, 19, 112, 120n, 128n, 128, 179, 194 orthodoxy 46n, 117, 138n, 152n, 174 orthopraxy 117 pandemic 16, 72, 133 parables 141 passivity 65, 76, 78, 79, 83, 91, 100, 104, 105, 137, 141, 151, 157, 172 paternalistic 78, 81, 101 pathogenic vulnerability 75, 82 pathologies 90 Paul 5n, 19n, 80, 80n, 84n, 89, 120, 120n, 139, 161, 163, 168n, 182, 182n, 185, 187, 193, 196, 201–203, 207 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 83, 192 Pentecostal 109, 117 performative 8, 72, 92n, 100, 107, 135, 137, 181, 188

index perishability 66 Phan, Peter C. 15, 200 pharmakon 57 Plato 86, 88n, 201 plebs 31 pluralistic 37, 39, 56 polarization 113 political 1–37, 39–49, 52, 54–58, 60–65, 67–72, 73n, 75, 76, 78n, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86–109, 92n, 113, 116–119, 121–133, 129n, 135, 137, 138, 141–151, 152n, 158, 159, 162, 164n, 165–167, 171–183, 183n political agency 1, 7, 9n, 13, 19, 21-24, et passim 62, 121, 162 political community 7, 10, 19, 25, 28–30, 35, 37, 41–44, 49, 58, 61, 68, 87, 91, 109, 121, 126, 149, 151, 171, 178–180, 182 political engagement 6, 36, 105 political theology 1–3, 2n, 5, 6, 9n, 10–14, 10–13n, 15, 15n, 17n, 19–23, 25, 31, 45, 48, 48n, 49, 49n, 54, 58, 60, 60n, 61, 62n, 64, 69, 72, 72n, 78n, 102, 105, 116, 127, 130, 135, 138n, 141n, 142, 146, 151, 153, 159, 164n, 172, 173, 176, 176n, 177, 179–181, 183n, 189, 196 political theology of vulnerability 1, 10, 19–23, 25, 48, 58, 60, 62, 102, 116, 127, 130, 135, 141n, 151, 153, 159, 164n, 172, 173, 180, 181, 206 politics of paradise 34 popular piety 145 populism 15, 31, 153, 187, 192, 196, 200, 202 populist 28, 29n, 31, 31n, 32, 35, 187, 196 postcolonial 18, 25, 36, 36n, 55–57, 60, 77, 129, 142, 150, 152, 158, 162, 166, 170 postcolony 21, 56, 56n, 57n, 62, 88, 108, 155n, 158, 172 poverty 39, 72, 95, 98, 113, 118, 134–137, 144, 146–148, 150, 169n, 188 power 4–6, 6n, 8, 11, 15–17n, 31, 37–42, 44–49, 45n, 52, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 65–67, 70, 74, 78, 80, 83, 84n, 85, 87, 92, 94–96, 97n, 98, 99, 101, 107n, 109, 117n, 118, 123n, 125, 127n, 130, 130n, 136, 137n, 138, 140, 140n, 141n, 142–147, 149n, 151, 152, 154, 159, 160n, 162, 167n, 168n, 169, 172, 174, 180, 185, 188, 191, 192, 200, 202, 205, 206

index pragmatist 13, 180 prayer 19, 114, 124, 128, 146, 147, 153, 162n preaching 3, 19, 128, 133, 134, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151 precariat 21, 25–37, 39, 45, 47, 48, 61, 70, 73, 95, 107, 107n, 108, 152, 171, 174, 191, 203, 204, 206 precarious 3, 3–5n, 4, 15, 18–22, 25–27, 26n, 28n, 29–31, 32n, 33–35, 43n, 44, 47–49, 55, 62–64–68, 69n, 70, 71, 71n, 73, 74n, 75, 75n, 78, 79n, 81, 85n, 89, 92, 92n, 93n, 95–98, 101, 101n, 103–105, 107, 107n, 109, 112, 113–119, 121–126, 124n, 125n, 127, 135–137, 141, 142, 147, 149, 151–153, 153n, 158, 158n, 162, 165, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 180, 183, 196, 197, 203, 206, 208 precariousness 3, 4, 4n, 18, 20, 22, 31, 44, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 73, 75, 78, 92, 92n, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 115, 118, 119, 121–125, 127, 135, 147, 149, 151, 153, 174, 177, 180 precarity 3, 4, 4n, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21–25, 33–36, 40n, 42, 44, 47, 48, 58, 61, 62, 64, 71, 73–75, 79n, 83, 85n, 92, 92n, 97–99, 101, 104, 105, 107–109, 111, 113, 116, 119, 122–125, 127–129, 134–136, 138, 140–144, 147, 149, 153, 158, 161–163, 166, 171, 173–176, 182, 183, 196, 208 precarization 25, 27, 28n, 31, 33–35, 37, 39, 42, 105, 107, 110, 178 pregnancy 53, 131 privileges 57 project 18, 21, 23, 32n, 39, 42, 44, 66, 103, 117n, 135, 140, 167, 180, 188, 203 promise 23, 59, 61, 117n, 165, 172, 177, 180, 182, 182n, 183 Prosperity Christianity 118 prosperity theologies 59 protection 2, 25, 26n, 33, 46–48, 51–54, 53–55n, 61, 63, 75, 81, 95, 101, 102, 119, 130n, 131n, 154, 163, 167, 168, 170n, 171n, 178, 180, 181, 191 provocation 64–68 psychology 16, 64, 84n, 94, 117n public theology 14, 192 Putnam, Robert D. 35n, 201 race 4, 23, 30, 57, 60n, 77, 127, 143, 161n racial 4, 15, 29n, 57, 60n, 169, 187 racism 1

215 racist 10n, 32, 78, 161, 170, 178 Rambo, Shelly 76n, 146, 163–166, 163–166n rebellion 98, 150, 151, 154, 162 receptivity 72, 76, 78, 84, 85, 92, 105, 106, 121 recognition 28, 30–33, 33n, 44, 61, 71, 76n, 82, 83n, 89–91, 92n, 100n, 102, 104, 105, 121, 121n, 125, 137, 149, 149n, 162, 176, 176n, 178, 179, 182, 183, 192, 195, 202 recognizable 69 redemption 59, 136, 146, 162, 165 redistribution 28, 29, 61 reimagination 180 rejoicing 121 relational 1, 7, 8n, 10, 30, 34n, 63n, 66n, 72, 73, 79–83, 89, 91, 92, 104, 107, 108, 123, 130, 138–140, 178n, 190, 198 relationality 30, 57, 73, 79–86, 89–91, 93, 124, 135, 138, 142, 166 religion 3, 5, 5n, 7–11, 10n, 13, 13–15n, 14, 18, 18n, 22, 28n, 33, 40n, 53, 62n, 78n, 84n, 89n, 107–128, 128n, 131, 137n, 138n, 141, 143n, 166n, 179, 179n, 182n, 185–188, 191–196, 198–200, 202, 205, 206–208 religiosities 18, 116, 117 religious escapism 144 religious practice 3, 11, 12, 114, 115, 119, 123, 151, 179 religious ritual 9 representation 7, 26n, 28, 31, 61, 70, 120–123n resilience 4, 17n, 94–97, 107, 130n, 139, 171, 187, 192, 194, 197, 199, 208 resistance 4, 5n, 8, 17n, 21, 28n, 34, 40, 40n, 48, 56n, 58n, 61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 73n, 76–78, 77n, 78n, 80n, 91, 93–101n, 96–102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 118, 121, 125, 125n, 135, 137, 139, 147, 150, 150n, 151, 153, 157–159, 157–159n, 162, 170, 170n, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181, 187, 197 respect 7, 27, 35, 52, 87, 89, 105, 125, 142, 167 responsibility 24, 27, 42, 51, 57, 60, 67, 67n, 68, 71, 74, 84–86, 91, 94, 95, 99, 100, 124, 137n, 172, 182, 182n resurrection 19, 152, 164, 165, 171, 173, 177, 180 Resurrection Day 165 return of religion 10, 119 Ricoeur, Paul 80, 80n, 89, 182n, 201, 202

216 risk 3, 4n, 20n, 30, 54, 63, 68, 68n, 72n, 73n, 78, 95, 104, 112, 115, 117, 120, 129, 134, 147, 151, 167, 176, 189 Rogers, Wendy 1, 16n, 17n, 29, 31, 34n, 63n, 74, 74–76n, 82n, 86n, 87n, 168n, 178n, 185, 187, 194, 198, 201, 202 Romero, Oscar A. 19, 133–137, 141–151, 145n, 156, 160, 187, 188, 190, 201, 204 Russia 181 Russian Orthodox Church 181 Sabsay, Leticia 17n, 73n, 95n, 98n, 99, 99n, 157n, 170n, 187, 188, 202 sacralization 110, 135, 141–143, 145, 151, 179 sacred 5, 9, 9n, 15n, 61, 114, 117, 120, 141, 142, 142n 143n, 152, 155n, 200 Sacred and Secular 7n, 110, 111, 110–113n, 115, 115n, 116n, 200 sacredness 141–143n, 142, 151, 180 sacrificial 60, 62, 138n, 172, 206 salvation 22, 54, 108n, 136–138, 141, 144–148, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168, 171, 193 San Jorge 132, 133 San Salvador 8n, 19, 128, 129n, 133, 133n, 136, 136n, 141, 145, 145n, 160n, 180n, 188, 190, 203 Sanneh, Lamin 108n, 202 Schillebeeckx, Edward 168 Schmiedel, Ulrich 15, 15n, 20n, 31n, 36n, 77, 78n, 105n, 124n, 153n, 166n, 182n, 197, 202, 204, 206 Schmitt, Carl 9n, 11, 11n, 48, 202 Scott, James C. 4, 5n, 10n, 12, 56, 62n, 96n, 97n, 98n, 112n, 124, 125n, 150, 150n, 159n, 185, 198, 202, 207, 208 secularization 7n, 11, 22, 52, 109–112, 114, 116, 119, 186, 188 secularization thesis 7n, 110, 114 security 22, 25–27, 26n, 29, 33, 52, 79, 87, 95, 102n, 104, 105, 111–113, 115, 131n, 154, 181 self 6, 6n, 28, 36n, 42, 43, 47, 53, 54, 61, 63, 65, 66, 75, 80–82, 86–90, 92, 96, 99, 101–105, 110, 121, 125, 130n, 131, 139, 142, 154, 158, 165, 173, 176n, 178, 180, 182n, 182, 191 self-contempt 65 self-help 63, 103 self-mastery 65 sensitivity 84, 170 sentiments 175

index September 11, 2001 38, 41, 68, 70 sexual harassment 93 Seymour, Richard 32, 203 Shonekan, Stephanie 153 Simmons 153, 183n, 203 sin 28n, 118, 123n, 133n, 140, 144, 146n, 160, 188, 199 slave 58–60, 58n, 136, 153, 153n, 154, 156, 157, 159n, 172 slavery 19, 22, 59, 83, 90n, 128, 155n, 156, 159 Sobrino, Jon 8n, 19, 65n, 129n, 133n, 136, 136n, 138, 145, 152n, 157, 157n, 160, 160n, 163n, 171n, 173, 174, 175, 180n, 188, 190, 203, 204 social cohesion 143 Socrates 86, 88 soteriology 59, 146, 157 sovereignty 6n, 9n, 11, 16n, 37, 39, 57n, 61, 78, 104 Spinoza, Baruch de 41 Spirit 15, 132, 138, 153n, 156, 163n, 164, 164n, 166, 182n, 192, 197 spirituals 19, 22, 128, 152–159, 159n, 172, 175, 176, 189, 203 Standing, Guy 26–29, 26–29n, 31–35, 55, 107, 204 state of exception 45–49, 45–48n, 56, 136, 171, 172, 173n, 174, 185 stigmata 163 stigmatization 61, 65, 180 Strange Fruit 158 strangers 36, 99 structural power 6 struggle 10n, 11n, 19, 28, 29, 32, 36n, 38n, 66n, 72n, 83, 89–91, 89n, 93, 104, 105, 121n, 137, 137n, 143–145, 147, 149n, 160, 161n, 166, 169, 174, 176n, 194, 196 sub contrario 167, 168, 171 Subcomandante Marcos 40 subjectification 96 subordination 98 subversive 145, 172 suffering 7, 12, 65, 66, 67n, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84n, 102n, 116, 123, 127n, 130, 134, 136, 137n, 138n, 139, 140, 145–147, 146n, 148, 152, 155–157, 161–167, 168n, 169, 169n, 170, 173–176, 182n, 188, 199, 201, 207 superpower 43, 44, 67, 168 superpower syndrome 44, 67, 168

217

index susceptibility 66, 72, 74, 78, 100, 104 Tamez, Elsa 173, 174, 207 Taylor, Charles 14, 28n, 33, 79n, 89, 91n, 110, 110n, 186, 207 terror 41, 43, 53, 58, 95, 178 thanatopolitics 49 The Passion of the Christ 145 the U.S. 45, 68, 161n The Varieties of Religious Experience 120 Thunberg, Greta 181 Tillich, Paul 120, 207 Tonstad, Linn 102–104, 207 transcendence 18 transcendent 41, 120, 123 transformation 10n, 13n, 14, 14n, 25, 32, 37, 48, 56, 79, 96, 108, 112, 114, 117n, 120n, 128, 128n, 142, 147, 179, 194 transgression 98 trauma 14, 23, 76n, 92, 120, 127, 146n, 163n, 164, 164n, 165, 167, 168, 171, 177 trinitarian 138 trust 35, 42, 61, 124, 150, 182 Tutu, Desmond 181 Tuyuc, Rosalina 181 Ukraine 16, 181 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 25 unauthorized 30, 101 uncontrollability 29n, 99n, 130, 181, 201 undocumented migrants 24, 27, 48n unpredictability 79, 99, 181 vaccination 53 value 2, 4, 19, 31, 44, 51, 56, 59, 64, 64n, 69, 72n, 74, 94, 102–104, 114, 115, 119, 122, 123, 132, 135, 138, 143, 146, 147, 168, 169, 177–179, 182, 183

victimization 65, 101 violence 19, 33, 38, 41, 43n, 56, 65, 66, 68n, 73–75, 85n, 88, 104n, 123, 136, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 180, 181, 188 violent 1, 4, 15, 30, 32, 41, 56, 65, 66, 70, 74, 87, 98, 128n, 130n, 136, 144, 154, 158, 162, 164, 171, 173 vita nuda 44, 45 voluntarism 100, 157 vulnerability studies 64 vulnerable politics 183 vulnerably 3, 61, 77, 79, 94, 97, 107, 121n, 122, 125, 135, 137, 141, 151, 157, 171, 174, 181 Waite, Louise 4n, 5n, 40n, 79, 96, 197 War 24, 38, 38n, 39n, 92n, 108n, 153n Ward, Graham 5n, 20, 113, 113–115n, 114, 117n, 194, 208 Weber, Max 11, 110, 110n, 186 Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 155 work security 26, 26n world Christianity 15n, 108, 108n, 186, 190 World Social Forum 40, 205 World Values Surveys 111 wound 2, 54, 76n, 164, 170 woundedness 4, 55, 76, 123, 135, 166, 171 wrongness 120, 122, 123 Zapatistas 40, 204 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska 63, 63n, 71n, 79, 79n, 85, 85n, 99, 99n, 103, 105n, 131, 131n, 178, 182 zoe 45–48, 58 zonas francas 45 zones of war 56, 136

PPT 3

Diaconal Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. He has published monographs, edited compilations, and written numerous research articles in English, Norwegian and Spanish on Liberation, Political and Contextual Theology, Globalization and Religion, Politics of Faith and Belief, and Ethics and Diaconal work, including The crucified and the Crucified: A Study in the Liberation Christology of Jon Sobrino (Peter Lang, 2003), and the edited volumes Spirits of Globalisation: The Growth of Pentecostalism and Experiential Spiritualities in a Global Age (SCM Press, 2006), and Religion in a Globalised Age: Transfers and Transformations, Integration and Resistance (Novus Press, 2008).

ISBN 9789004543263

STURLA J. STÅLSETT

Taking vulnerability as starting point for constructive agency and community radically transforms political theology. The author’s powerful global experience and intellectual depth make this book essential reading for anybody concerned with theological attention to lived religion, emancipation, justice, love, and peace in the pressing conflicts of our world. – Werner G. Jeanrond, Em. Professor of Theology, University of Oslo

POLITICAL AND PUBLIC THEOLOGIES

STURLA J. STÅLSETT , Ph.D. (1998), is Professor of Religion, Society and

A POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF VULNERABILITY

Vulnerability is at the core of the political drama of our time. Countering conventional approaches, this book presents human vulnerability as a source of political community and a potential for political agency in precarity. Analyzing Christian celebrations of Christmas and Easter in contexts of struggle, it shows how religious resources inspire precarious politics. Combining critical political theory, liberation theology, and lived religion, Sturla J. Stålsett sees in such celebrations a ‘political sacralization’ of vulnerability and a ‘dispossession of divinity’.

A Political Theology of Vulnerability

STURLA J. STÅLSETT 9

789004 543263

ISSN 2666-9218 BRILL.COM/PPT