Abstract

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care

to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing

on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability

and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the

body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under

which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone

discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative

expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of

someone else’s agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the

political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of

contemporary issues, such as the Men’s Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the

Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state.

Care, Vulnurability, Welfare State, Care Ethics,

Mutual Aid, Critical Theory

Keywords

DOI

The Politics of Vulnerability and Care:

An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese

Estelle Ferrarese, Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort

Krisis 42 (1): 76-92.

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.42.1.38697

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 License International License (CC

Licence

The Politics of Vulnerability and Care:

An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese

Estelle Ferrarese, Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort

Liesbeth Schoonheim & Tivadar Vervoort: In your work (2016a; 2016b), you sketch

various genealogies of the concept of vulnerability. You refer to the American strand

of Butler’s notion of grievable lives, which of course builds on a Levinasian notion of

ethics, but interestingly you also refer to a French strand that starts from the sociological

analysis by Robert Castel. Precarity, in this latter approach, indicates a process (rather

than a social position) that is shared by the precariously employed and unemployed,

that is, by the poor and the middle class. How would you position yourself in this

genealogy? And in addition to that, keeping in mind the topic of this special issue, could

you elaborate on your understanding of how vulnerability relates to care?

Estelle Ferrarese: At some point, maybe about seven-eight years ago, the very idea of

vulnerability was all over, and a lot of people were trying to deal with this concept. So,

I wanted to gure out where it came from and why it was so important at that time to

think in terms of vulnerability. More specically, I tried to identify the dierent lines of

thought that had produced this focus. My aim was both theoretical and political.

In addition to the lines you mentioned, there is a very old, Christian account of

vulnerability, to which I did not want to be bound. The history of vulnerability within

this tradition is actually very rich. But it also explains why there is so much reluctance

when it comes to vulnerability: although this concept has been met with success, it is

also met with some kind of allergy, especially from people from the left. My assumption

was that it was mostly because of this Christian past that the concept of vulnerability

was considered to be totally apolitical. With the gure of a merciful God who becomes

man, inasmuch as he assumes a vulnerable esh sensitive to suering, it casts vulnerability

as an anthropological feature. I wanted to address this issue. My aim was to identify and

to build on lines of thought where vulnerability was always-already political, where the

term does not only refer to a shared ontological precariousness, but to the exposure to

threats that are socially determined. This social determination encompasses our bodies,

that is, even when we talk about bodily vulnerability, there is something which is social.

And this socially determined vulnerability is not limited to a gradual dierence between

bodies, where some of us are much more exposed due to, for instance, disability or

race-based violence. The historical and social texture of vulnerability is not limited to

an ordering of bodies – some are more exposed than others because of a collective and

institutional past and present. This texture characterizes each singular body. We should

not understand our bodies as immutable, and instead our biology is completely histor-

ical and socially determined, technologized, and so on. This, more thoroughly social,

account can be found in Adorno. In other words, I was looking for these approaches

that conceptualized vulnerability in terms that were free from traces of ontology.

And I found some interesting possibilities. None of them completely satised

me. This is why I try to borrow from dierent threads. One of them, of course, was

Butler’s, especially because they were at the time trying to conceive of a politics of

vulnerability that would arise from bodies (Butler 2013 [1997]; 2016 [2009]). But I was

not convinced by what they proposed. Another possibility was care ethics. And as it

happens, I started to engage a lot with representatives of this tradition in France in the

mid-2010s. For some reason, there was a renewal of the idea of care in France, which

took place almost twenty or fteen years after all the developments in the States around

Joan Tronto and others (Tronto 1993; Held 2006).

This was a group of several feminist thinkers around Sandra Laugier, who came,

strangely enough, from an analytical background, primarily Wittgensteinean schol-

arship. They tried to think through, Laugier especially, what care means in terms of

ordinary life (Laugier 2020; Paperman and Laugier 2020 [2006]; Molinier, Laugier, and

Paperman 2009). And they started to invite me a lot to their workshops because I was

using this idea of vulnerability. In my discussions with them, I was assessing what I could

accept from care ethics and what I would need to abandon. So that was the second,

big trend with which I engaged. There are elements of care ethics that I found really

valuable, especially in Tronto. But I had a big diculty with her, and with care ethics

more broadly, namely that the issue of capitalism was completely out of sight. While

capitalism was not really considered, they were, of course, talking and thinking of care

as some kind of work. And hence this work did not seem to be determined by capitalist

imperatives, it seemed there was no inherent relationship between the distribution and

performance of care on the one hand, and the meaning of the market and of production

on the other hand. For me, coming from the Frankfurt School, it was of course not

possible to think about work as something that could be thought independently from

the capitalist form of life.

And then nally, there is Castel, whom you mentioned and who is a sociologist.

As opposed to many of the other theorists that I mentioned before, and who are often

in between philosophy and the social sciences, or were completely in philosophy, he

was a sociologist who was recognized for his empirical work. In the period I am men-

tioning, around 2015, he had already passed away, but some ten to fteen years earlier

he had used this idea of vulnerability in regard to the question of poverty. That was his

prime focus, and he was arguing that vulnerability should not be thought of as a state

but as something that was to be grasped as a certain temporality, as related to time.

Vulnerability evolves and is the result of past events and must be envisioned in relation

to the future. I found that really interesting. The other thing I found intriguing was the

unusual way he was dealing with the idea of risks. When he was talking about groups

that are vulnerable to poverty, he was describing risks. He showed that if you have

previously been exposed to poverty, you have more chances to become poor again or

even become poorer. He would also think of risk in questions, such as, do you still have a

strong network of relationships, acquaintances, and family or not? In other words, he was

trying to list those dierent risks, suggesting that if you’re losing one asset after the other,

then you would become even more vulnerable. What I found most fascinating, however,

was that his purpose was not to assess vulnerabilities by calculating risks, which is part

of the mathematical way of thinking typical for sociology. His aim was not so much to

add one item to another to anticipate a kind of logical development of someone’s life;

what he was actually trying to think with this idea of vulnerability was some sort of

an existential condition: when you are vulnerable it actually encompasses your way of

dealing with the world. It transforms your psyche. It is really a total experience. I learned

from Castel that when we talk about risk, we should avoid thinking of that as something

that aects you from the outside and makes you the prey of dierent sociological logics.

It’s also something that becomes you, and as you become more vulnerable, you embrace

your own vulnerability, even if it’s against your own will, of course.

This is, in short, the constellation within which I developed my account of

vulnerability.

LS&TV: Could you elaborate on your notion of the body as fully socially determined,

which is also central to your current research. If we understand you correctly, the issue

is not just a social constructivist point, such as Judith Butler’s, where the body is situated

beyond discourse and yet not accessible except through discourse. New Materialists

have criticized this position quite extensively, and brought to our attention specic

practices of care as transformation of the body. Some, such as William Connolly, have

suggested that an experimental, playful practice of self-care might alter our aective and

bodily reactions, which are initially sedimentations of power relationships (Connolly

1997). Would such a notion of care of the self as transformative, corporeal practice have

a place in your social-constructivist account?

EF: My point is that the body is not only determined, but it’s really constructed. I want

to avoid a dualism where a body is perceived as pure biology, that it encounters dierent

social items, where this encounter involves some kind of violence, and modies an

until-then natural core. My point is that actually our bodies are always-already historical

and socially framed, shaped, and formed because biology has a history – rst of all, a

species history but secondly also a personal history. Everything is interwoven from the

beginning. For instance, we have bigger bodies then 500 years ago. Most, if not all,

of our bodies are technically or medically modied right now: most of us have had

surgeries, many of us take hormones on a daily basis, etc. To speak about history of the

bodies does not amount to endorsing an evolutionary perspective, it is not a question

of envisaging a slow mechanical capitalization of an optimum, on the contrary, it is of

how practices and techniques modied the bodies, in ways which can be contradictory.

And it does not do any good to try to think of vulnerability as something that would be

related to a kind of weakness of the body with a big “B”, a body that would be without

protection, and where threats that are so-called external would activate or disactivate

exposure dierently according to the class or the gender you belong to.

So that’s my point. But you might be right that there is a way we can exper-

iment with our bodies. The history of individual bodies is also a history of self-care

in the Foucauldian sense. The late Foucault talks about self-care as what you owe to

yourself and which is related to the body, as the ancient Greeks used to think (Foucault

1986; 2012). So of course, you can modify your own body through some forms of care.

LS&TV: Could we go back to your genealogy and more specically the position of

Butler and Castell? Your combination of these two authors brings to mind Isabell Lorey’s

work on precarity. Lorey describes precarization as the neoliberal government of risks,

so drawing on a Foucaultian analysis of neoliberalism, but she also builds on Butler’s

account of precariousness as well as Castel’s sociological analysis of precarity and risk.

But whereas in your work there seems to be a tension between Butler’s work on

precariousness and Castel’s work of precarity, in Lorey’s work these themes are brought

together. More specically, Lorey seems to dier from you in that she claims to follow

Butler in understanding precariousness as “the term for a socio-ontological dimension

of lives and bodies” rather than “an anthropological constant,” or again, “a transhistorical

state of being human, but rather a condition inherent to both human and non-human

being […] it is always relational and therefore shared with other precarious lives” (Lorey

2007, 11-12). So the question that emerges is that, if we understand precariousness

not as an anthropological constant but as a relational account of vulnerability, could

such a relational account prevent the abstraction of vulnerability into a trans-historical

anthropology? How, and if, can a relational understanding of vulnerability prevent vul-

nerability becoming an anthropological constant in your account?

EF: That’s a good question. What I would like to highlight is that I, for sure, support

shifting the idea of vulnerability from a form of ontology to a relational form. However,

I am also a bit wary about focusing too much on this idea of relations because the

idea of relations brings to the fore the face-to-face model and it makes vulnerability a

matter of intersubjectivity: what can happen when someone is in the hands of someone

else. Instead, what I try to think is really the fact that this scene of intersubjectivity is

shaped by a lot of things, but mostly by normative expectations that make us vulnerable

to some set of threats. In other words, it is precisely because there exists some set of

normative expectation regarding what should be done on this scene that you are made

actually vulnerable. Vulnerability necessarily appears at the same time as a horizon of

obligations (fullled or not). Maybe this is a totally constructivist way of thinking, but

I would say that we cannot use that idea of vulnerability to think about the kind of

exposure that one might have experienced in other times. I think that is not the right

way to think about vulnerability. It does not acknowledge the fact that vulnerability is

instituted. Vulnerability materialises at the level of interactions and social interactions

but is instituted by normative expectations which are not mental phenomena but are

situated between subjects, and must even be conceived as institutions. And this is some-

thing that the focus on the relational does not allow us to think.

LS&TV: Like your work on care and vulnerability, Butler has taken up elements from

Adorno’s reections on morality in their reections on vulnerability. In their Adorno-

lectures (Butler 2005, 103), they interpret Adorno’s account of humankind as pertaining

to “a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms at the same time as we

question the authority by which we make that assertion.” Still, Butler utilizes notions

such as relationality, precariousness, and grievability that seem to dene essential char-

acteristics of humankind. You have criticized Butler’s work for this tendency, as well

as for lacking an account of how the performativity of precariousness would imply

an emancipatory politics. Elsewhere, (2016, 152), you suggest that the denial of the

political importance of vulnerability in the literature (which you dene, very broadly,

from Foucauldians to other post-foundational thinkers such as Rancière and Badiou),

unfolds along four themes, of which its “possible anthropological character” is one. You

write that “the rearmation of the ontological, anthropological, or constitutive status

of vulnerability raises problems that are categorical as much as political, that is, are of

political pertinence: how could an ineradicable, universal phenomenon pertaining to

human nature become the object of a critique, or be the wellspring of emancipation?

How does the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for

socially produced or congured forms of vulnerability?” (ibid, 153). Could you elab-

orate on your account of vulnerability (and care) with relation to the anthropological

assumptions, and its consequences for a politics of vulnerability? This massive question

could perhaps be split into two: rstly, how does your account of care and vulnerability

relate to these kinds of anthropological assumptions, and what is your critique of these

assumptions?; and secondly, what does this mean for a politics of vulnerability?

My denition of vulnerability is a living at the mercy of someone else’s agency.

I use this denition rst because I think this idea of “mercy” is very important: it stresses

the fact that something actually might happen or might not happen, but either way you

are still vulnerable. It also encompasses the idea of a power, of a huge power, which is

placed upon you, which does not depend on you, while I insist that it doesn’t mean that

you don’t have your own agency.

It just means that on your own you do not have the eciency or the ecacy

to protect yourself from the risk of these threats. All the same, you can have very strong

agency in other parts of your life.

Now, as I said before, this idea of living at the mercy has to be understood as

something which is determined by normative expectations. And this is where maybe I

should mention someone who is also important to my work, and that is Castoriadis, from

whom I borrow some ideas, even though he is not at all a theorist of vulnerability. He

actually helped me to think about the strength and the density of normative expectations

again, which are not only shared beliefs, but something much more important. He has

this strong idea of institutions as something that is both instituted and instituting. This

is exactly what I have in mind when I talk about normative expectations as institutions.

They are instituted in that we receive them and they are in front of us. But at the same

time, they are instituting, as they institute the scene of interaction. And they institute the

subject, they make us subjects that appear on the intersubjective scene. I mean, we are

made of normative expectations and they create us as a subject.

Once you think about vulnerability in these terms, then politics becomes a

matter of making normative expectations explicit, making them reexive, making them

the object of debates, of perhaps also conicts and struggles in a society.

From this observation, you can go both ways. You can say that there are a lot

of exposures that should count as vulnerabilities, that should be taken care of by the

state, for instance. But you could also see that actually there are some vulnerabilities that

should stay under the radar and that should not be addressed because it is okay if they

stay in the private sphere. I think I mentioned that during our discussion in Leuven,1

when I was talking about love. Love is typically a form of vulnerability, where we are

exposed to the other’s lack of love for us. This vulnerability is terrible to the point of

being a threat to life, as some people commit suicide because they were abandoned by

their partners. But at the same time, as a society, we don’t want laws ruling the end of a

feeling or a relationship, and we don’t want the state to take care of this. So, if one thinks

about vulnerability as instituted by normative expectations, a politics of vulnerability is

about making them explicit, reexive, and being the objects of debate. I don’t necessar-

ily mean the polite and rational, Habermasian, debates, but really making them explicit

and then seeing what happens in terms of justications, critiques, claims, etc. It is about

making disagreement possible and visible.

And this may bring us to another point, since once you do that, or rather in

the process of doing that, new political subjects might appear. Subjects who transform

themselves by the very fact that they are putting forward some claims about the reality,

the scope of their exposure and the kind of collective organization it requires. There

is no politics without the birth of new political subjects. Here too, when a person or a

group excavates and challenges an existing normative expectation, we witness a polit-

ical transformation which is at the same time self-transformation. I do believe political

subjects can emerge from a condition of vulnerability, as opposed to what many authors

assume whom I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, such as Rancire or Badiou

(Rancière 2006). For Badiou vulnerability enables the substitution of politics for ethics

and blocks the path to all emancipatory politics (Badiou, 2001). I would say no, quite

the opposite, and stress that being vulnerable is also the possibility to make explicit our

own normative expectation, or the kind of normative expectations in which we are

entangled. Our political agency can be deployed against, on the basis of a vulnerability,

as emancipation can be a task engendered by the trial of vulnerability.

And if I could add a last part to my reection: there is also a threat inherent to

the place of vulnerability in politics; it sometimes seems that the use of the idea of vul-

nerability would per se suce to receive some kind of satisfaction for our claims. I mean

that vulnerability is such a strong focus in politics and philosophy that the argument

“I’m vulnerable” sometimes seems to be enough to prove or to justify some kind of

claim. For instance, there is a new masculinism that has now arrived in France, coming

from North America. I don’t know if you have that in Germany, too, but you probably

do. It is evidenced by the struggles of fathers who did not obtain the custody of their

kids. Which vocabulary do you think they use? That of vulnerability: they described

themselves as vulnerable fathers who are actually at the mercy of unjust states. And it’s

interesting that they actually use the idea of vulnerability to describe an exposure to

very old, patriarchal patterns that would not take into account their love for the kids.

That is why vulnerability not only has a political relevance, but must have

one: politics is a matter of disagreement, including strong disagreement. I think that

what politics allows is precisely an encounter – which can even be dicult – between

dierent discourses, and this encounter actually, and hopefully, might be necessary to

judge and assess all the claims.

That focus on disagreement produces another set of questions, because this

raises the whole issue of who is heard by whom in politics on the political scene. And

it is tragic for some people who cannot provide the proof of what they are exposed to.

It’s very complicated. But I want to stress that we need this movement of explication

and conict when we talk about vulnerability, because of this threat that vulnerability

becomes an argument per se. This is why we need politics.

LS&TV: The manner in which you describe how the language of vulnerability almost

directly invites a language of reparative justice, and how these can be co-opted by the

right, such as the Men’s Rights movement, is very instructive. Could you return, however,

to your discussion of love? Just to clarify, your position sounds almost Arendtian, in that

romantic love entails its own forms of vulnerability, and that it should be kept out of

politics and out of the control of the state (Arendt 2013, 242; 2003, 207–8). This is a

position, of course, that has been subject to feminist critiques of love, where there is

a long history of contesting, interrogating, and ghting the normative expectations of

romantic love. Love, we might argue, is always-already under the purview of the state,

insofar as they take shape in specic institutions – typically, marriage – that are sanc-

tioned by the state. Or, in a more Bourdieuian sense, we could say that love relationships

often take place between people with a similar social capital, which has been converted

in one way or another by the state. We might say that the assertion that love is to be

kept outside of politics and, perhaps more narrowly, outside of the state, runs counter

to the feminist critique of love that has brought about massive changes in civil and

criminal law with regard to the institutions in which ‘love’ takes place, but also to the

observation that love is always-already political.

Thank you for raising this question, which is indeed very important. When I

was talking about love, I was precisely thinking about the fact that discussing it and the

kind of collective organization it legitimates is political. The claim that the state should

not address all vulnerabilities arising from love is a political one. I was not saying it is

not political at all. Quite the contrary. I was saying let’s make this the topic of discussion.

And probably – that was my anticipation – most of us would say no, we don’t want the

prohibition of divorce on the grounds of the pain one can experience in a break-up.

But again, that would be the result of a discussion, which means that actually divorce,

marriage, partnership, etc., is political. We saw that in a dierent way in the last ten

years all over Europe with the same-sex marriages struggles. So, you and I agree about

love. I like very much Adorno’s notes on love, which you can nd in Minima Moralia

(§11, 21, 104, 107, 109, 122) precisely because he understands it not as the tumult of

an interiority, but as having from the start a content and social eects. He suggests

that love is pressing in the direction of something which is outside of the capitalist

form of life because it is completely external to any idea of commensurability, and it

coincides with some form of truly caring for someone etc. But at the same time, it

is something totally bourgeois. It is this hilarious aphorism in Minima Moralia where

he is discussing divorce. The truth of love is exposed in the pathetic divorce by

intellectuals and the way they end up struggling in a very petty way about, you know,

furniture and taxes.

So the political texture of love can be observed from dierent aspects, in addition

to feminist theories that have articulated a critique of love. We could think, for instance,

about the fact that the chances of loving and being loved are unequally distributed.

Patrick Pharo, a French sociologist, showed in the 1980s how it was complicated for

farmers to nd love because women didn’t want to live this very harsh life anymore – I

mean, the life outside on the elds, the absence of vacation, etc. In this sense too, love is

thoroughly social and political in the sense that the fact of failing in love is not only a

matter of contingency and bad luck, but can be the result of social determinations. We

should not reduce love to this pure feeling coming from nowhere that would save us

against greediness and violence and hate.

LS&TV: Your recent work centers around the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical

Theory on the one hand, and questions around the ethics of care and vulnerability

within the feminist tradition on the other. Taken at face value, the two traditions do

not seem to have much in common: recently, it has often been pointed out that the

writings of the rst generation of the Frankfurt School tend to neglect gendered forms

of social domination. Or even worse, as far as gender and sexuality are discussed, the

recourse of authors like Adorno to Freudian clichés can even be said to reproduce

rather than problematize gendered social norms. In The Fragility of Concern for Others

you develop a fascinating counterweight to these divergences by pointing out that both

Adorno’s “minimal” morality and contemporary theories of care ethics nd a common

ground in taking issue with the coldness and suering that is caused by subsumption

of the particular under the general. What implications do these resonances have for

emancipatory politics in general, and the tradition of critical theory more specically?

EF: These two theoretical constellations do have a few things in common. First, they

apprehend the body as the level or the reality at which morality should be thought

and envisioned. There is this strong idea of the body, of a materialist morality that you

have in Adorno, and especially in Negative Dialectics, when he says that what is left, after

Auschwitz, is only the kind of disgust that the body can experience confronting the

possibility of harming someone else. So, in Adorno, you have this corporeal moment

that would be the last resource in order to avoid evil. On the other hand, care ethics

is all about bodies that actually perform work for other bodies. Moral life is made of

the weary bodies of caregivers; the insistent or resistant bodies; the failing, heavy, or

repulsive bodies of care receivers; the sexualized bodies of both receivers and givers, etc.

Morality is to be understood in its materiality, and taking care of others has to do with

something which is very corporeal, even more so than in Adorno.

Secondly, and Adorno might even go further at the theoretical level on this

point, both traditions think about morality as something that is impure, which I nd

very enlightening. Morality and making moral choices is not a matter of a mental

experiment that you should and could have by abstracting yourself from the context in

order to determine what is just and what is unjust. Both Adorno and care ethics made

a great deal of criticizing Kant’s model of the categorical imperative and recasting the

idea of moral judgment, in its content and form, so that it is not measured by references

to general principles.

But more importantly, a judgment or a moral act is not invalidated because it is

born in a concrete situation, hindered, or determined, precisely because there is no such

a thing as an abstract moral judgement. For Adorno all the incarnations of morality, i.e.

all moral philosophies, but also all forms of moral life, are historical, and bear the mark

of a social group. So you can have forms of morality that are determined by a history of

violence. Freedom is not the condition of possibility of the moral gesture. Therefore, the

fact that certain moral gestures are born in and from a general organization – generated

by a reifying totality – of work and aects, is not enough to invalidate them.

And this is the case in the history of care. The point we can make with Adorno,

which is not totally explicit in the ethics of care, is the fact that the way you take care of

vulnerable others is something which was born in a history of domination of women

by men, but also, nowadays, the domination of women, and sometimes men, coming

from the Global South by men and women coming from the Global North. So you

have this completely unequal, unfair distribution of work and of an aect, which is

both the result and the tool of a system of domination. But that does not mean that the

normative content of care is wrong. I like that idea very much. In Negative Dialectics he

says that asking the question of the origin of something is a question of a master, that

“the category of origin is ‘a category of dominion’. It conrms that a man ranks rst

because he was there rst” (1990, 155). As a master, you are in the position to ask proofs

of a purity that suits your interests; the reference to origin reinforces the position of one

with a past that is neither shameful nor humble.

So care ethics and critical theory have some orientations in common, but I

also think that one can be used in order to highlight a lot of things that are completely

dismissed by the other. For instance, Adorno is not a feminist, and the moments when

he is most masculinist are precisely the moments when he tries to be a feminist. We nd

such clichés about women in Minima Moralia; also, he is talking about general coldness

as a characteristic of our capitalist form of life. He does not see that this coldness is also

intertwined with, and articulated by, forms of care that are produced by capitalism. Nor

does he see that the care produced by capitalism is gendered, so the logic of gender

remains completely out of sight in his analysis. This perspective can come from the

background of care ethics.

In the other way, as I mentioned at the beginning, care ethics does not really

think about capitalism. In this tradition, work is work, and is not examined as a labor

shaped by a particular economy. It thus misses the many ways in which the gender

order and the capitalist form of life are intertwined. So I think that you can build some

bridges, some of them might be complicated, but I think it is useful to do so.

LS&TV: They are both in dire need of each other.

EF: Absolutely. That’s a very good way to put it. Yes.

LS&TV: Your reading of Tronto in The Fragility of Concern for Others stresses the

gendered distribution of care as an aect (disposition) and activity, with occasional refer-

ences to other dimensions of oppression – an emphasis which is legitimately considered

the aim of your argument. What I found most striking in Tronto – and what makes her a

profoundly political or social theorist – is that she shows how the “morality” of care that

Gilligan essentialized in gendered terms, can actually be found among other groups that

have been coerced or expected to take up care work, for instance Black men. Drawing

on Black feminism, we could perhaps develop this insight in order to problematize the

link between disposition and activity, which is at the heart of the convergence between

Adorno and care ethics as being concerned with coldness and suering. I am thinking

in particular of the gure of the Black domestic as the “outsider within”, whose care

work and close attention to the white psyche enables them and their communities

with information crucial to Black survival (Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks). Could you

elaborate on the possible implications of this critique for your analysis?

EF: I was very much inuenced by bell hooks, even though I do not use her work at all

in the book on Adorno. And I totally agree that the unequal distribution of care work

relies on an unequal distribution of aects. Capitalism, including in its (post-)colonial

logic and in its gendered dimension, produces the subjectivations it needs. It is not only

that you are supposed to perform the gesture, you are also expected to feel, to experience

the moral feeling allegedly behind this gesture.

Someone with whom I discussed a lot in France is Caroline Ibos, a sociologist

who worked on nannies that bourgeois Parisian women hire to take care of their kids.

Her eld work shows the disappointment of these bourgeois women when they realize

that their nanny was actually only driven by money, for instance because the nanny

left and went back to West-Africa without further notice (in France many nannies

come from there). They feel betrayed, thinking “how is it possible that she left without

considering the wellbeing of my kids?” Despite the fact that the paid work hours have

been completed, there is a feeling that the contract has not been fullled. So I agree

that there is this pressure on aects which might also be the last stage of domination.

At the same time, I would also argue in a dierent direction. One could also

say exactly the opposite, that actually that it is easier for some groups to be good, to be

generous. This is something that Adorno talks about in Minima Moralia. When you are

rich, it is so easy to be benevolent and refrain from some forms of violence, pettiness,

and meanness because your form of life is so smooth that actually you are in the posi-

tion that allows you to be kind: “Wealth insulates from overt injustice” (Adorno 2005,

186). So, you have this kind of aect that is possible with no eort precisely because you

are protected from many kinds of resentment, powerlessness, etc., etc. Maybe we can

make things even more complex by saying that, sometimes, experiencing certain moral

feelings is the result of a privilege. Tronto sees only one part of the picture because she

only talks about the indierence of the privileged. For her, the only result of privilege is

indierence. But privilege can also produce some kind of concern, of decency, because

you can aord it. There is no price to be paid.

LS&TV: One of the new ways in which Tronto is taken up is through posthuman

approaches such as by Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). She explicitly builds on Tronto’s

suggestion that care “is not restricted to human interaction with others. We include the

possibility that caring occurs for objects and for the environment, as well as for others”

(Tronto 1993, 103). Care, in Puig de la Bellacasa’s reading, is no longer restricted to an

activity carried out by humans and towards humans but operates within and between

sympoetic systems. While this account runs the risk of making the concept of care

counterintuitively large, it has the great benet of extending care to some of the most

pressing contemporary problems – those connected to extractive capitalism such as the

depletion of natural resources and mass extinction. Could you elaborate if and how

your notion of vulnerability facilitates such a posthuman turn?

EF: Issues of care were and should be thought in ways that are related to non-humans

such as animals, ecological systems, etc. It is striking that most thinkers who use the idea

of care, concern, etc. always address it in a way of the question of non-human entities

that are entitled to our care; such as Tronto, of course, but it is at the core of a lot of

thinking, and again Adorno is an example of that.

I have been a vegetarian for twenty-ve years, so I am totally sympathetic with

what is going on in the younger generations and with this strong movement in the

direction of taking care of what is nonhuman.

Now I developed my account of vulnerability without explicitly dealing with

non-human exposures. They would t with what I propose in as much as I am talking

about vulnerability as something that cannot be disconnected from a set of normative

expectations, and about politics as having to do with making those normative expec-

tations explicit and rephrasing them. When it comes to the environment or animals

we also have normative expectations. But then I am well aware that the usual issue

arises: that we are confronted with entities with which we are in a relation of radical

asymmetry, meaning that we can discuss our normative expectations, but they cannot.

I am not sure whether you can solve the issue with ethics of care either. There

is an inherent violence in the act of care, because caring for someone is also dening

what she or he needs. If there is no way to counterbalance what you believe through

some kind of explicit claim that would be made by who actually benets from your

care activity, the violent moment of care will always be there. This is inescapable when

it comes to environment or animals.

Although he comes from a very dierent background, I remember that

Habermas tried to think what we would all owe to animals in Moral Consciousness

and Communicative Action. He was not convincing at all because he argued that we

owe some kind of consideration to animals because they are quasi-human beings that

are capable of intersubjectivity and even of a quasi-language. So he tries to give them

some kind of rights or entitlements to care because they are similar to us. But I think

this is the totally wrong way of putting it. There must be a moment where you think

about this entitlement in a way which is completely disconnected to what makes them

possibly similar to us. At least theorists of care are not trying to avoid or disguise the

problem of asymmetry.

Now how can you really engage in an activity of care without these radical

movements of violent authority? I don’t know. I really don’t know. In France Bruno

Latour advocates a parliament of things. But this parliament of things only works if

there are some spokespersons, and politically speaking we know what spokespersons

usually have made of the claims of the ones they are supposed to defend.

LS&TV: We indeed could deploy a similar move as Habermas does, starting from the

observation that there is this specic form of inter-species intersubjectivity in attend-

ing to needs. That step can be made quite easily, to say that there are some forms of

normative expectations between so-called higher developed animals. But what Puig

de la Bellacasa does is more radical. She takes Tronto’s denition fairly literally, under-

standing any activity, including the activities of worms and of fungi, as care. So, she not

only addresses the care of humans towards nature but also the care that is exerted by

nonhuman nature. It is really interesting in its radicality, as it questions the conjunction

of aect and activity and opens up the concept of care. Still, we end up with the same

problem that you highlighted with reference to Latour: it is not so clear anymore what

the concept means and entails politically.

EF: In some reections on capitalism, in particular in Jason Moore’s work, something

similar is done in terms of work instead of care: we are invited to think about and

measure the work which is performed by forests, inasmuch as that they clean the air,

that they make our environment breathable. Or the work which is performed by bees

insofar as they reproduce owers and things like that. So there is the idea that what

should be named “work” is not limited to what humans can perform. But that does

not encompass the question of aect that you just mentioned. I don’t think you can

claim that bees have some kind of aect, at least when they take pollen from one ower

and bring it to another. Even if something like an aect is involved, it is probably not

directed towards human beings.

In order to act as a spokesperson, we might need to make a kind of mental and

theoretical adjustment to translate what is done by non-human entities into categories

that are human. Talking about care and work when it comes to some kind of non-human

activities might help us in order to think about what we owe non-humans. But that

does not solve the political problem of the very existence of a spokesperson, because in

the end the only ones who speak – who discuss normative expectations – are us.

LS&TV: In conclusion, could we talk a bit more about how you situate care as a collec-

tive, political praxis within the context of the privatization of the welfare state? Emma

Dowling, in The Care Crisis (Dowling 2022), shows very astutely for the British context

how the neoliberal de- and underfunding of public services leads to crises, where care

work is increasingly relegated down the “care chain”, such that underpaid and unpaid

care work is done by those who are marginalized based on residency and citizenship

status, ethnicity, race, and gender. Dowling is quite critical of what she calls “care xes”,

under which she also subsumes mutual aid projects, suggesting that public refunding is

the only desirable solution. Yet there is a longstanding critique of the kind of normal-

ization and coercion exerted by the welfare state, which we nd in feminist analyses as

well as anarchist-Marxist approaches. In fact, if we look at the discussion of mutual aid

by someone like Dean Spade (Spade 2020b; 2020a), mutual aid is a political praxis that

generates knowledge of social relations and transforms them from the bottom up. In fact,

it might illustrate quite well your understanding of politics as having its own movement

and immanent eect, as an “activity of transformation of relations to others and to the

social world, and insofar as the subject of praxis is constantly transformed through the

experience in which she is engaged, an experience that she forges but that also forges

her” (Ferrarese 2018, 39). Could you position yourself vis-a-vis this discussion?

EF: I come from a French background where the welfare state was and still is quite

strong compared to other countries. We tend to think that the State has a burden when

it comes to taking charge and taking care of some kind of vulnerabilities, disasters,

social threats. And I too regard the State as assuming a primary responsibility to prevent

or compensate for the harms individuals might suer. To put it like Castel, beyond the

intersubjective forms of care that render possible the exercise of an autonomy, every

individual depends upon a “‘social property’ made of sucient rights, resources and

protections” (Castel 1991) and which should be oered by the State. Mutual aid can

be, to be sure, very ecient. But their responsibility for the care of vulnerabilities is a

responsibility by default, which raises if and when the State is decient. I agree that

experiments of mutual aid can be the place of some kind of personal transformation,

some way of reorganizing communities and of giving voice to silenced groups. But they

might completely jeopardize the whole idea of the welfare state, for two reasons, one

is purely political, the other one is moral and cultural. First, forms of self-organization

that seek to build their own care system can be counterproductive because they suggest

that people can take care of socially produced injustices and social pathologies by them-

selves. By substituting themselves to it, they make State intervention unnecessary.

Second, there is also a slippery slope vis-à-vis what we owe each other within

a political community. When we self-organize, do we still have collective discussions

about who should take care of what?

Let me take the counter-example of nursing homes that actually are not real

nursing homes, but places where elderly people organize care between each other. I think

this is problematic. In a way it is really nice that people take care of each other, but on the

other hand, it means that taking care of the elderly is an issue for other elderly. So in a

way, they unburden the rest of us of a kind of work and concern that we should also carry.

LS&TV: There seems to be a tension between mutual aid projects that substitute for

the state on the one hand, and quite the opposite, namely practices of mutual aid that

do not replace the welfare state, but are a place where new forms of community and

political consciousness emerge which could formulate demands towards the welfare

state. With recourse to Rahel Jaeggi’s work, Daniel Loick has called such projects the

politics of forms of life (Loick 2017; 2018, Jaeggi 2018). Take, for instance, the care

work done within the gay community when the state did not help those suering from

HIV/AIDS. To what extent can forms of care become a political project demanding the

transformation of existing institutions? Or to what extent are practices of mutual aid on

the contrary depoliticizing these very institutions and no longer demanding anything

anymore? Perhaps geographical dierences matter a lot. When we look at the US, UK,

or even the Netherlands, the neoliberalization of the state is in such a stage that it has

reached its apex and not much welfare state is left. Hence, the danger of mutual aid

depoliticizing existing institutions seems minimal as the state already retreated from the

realm of care to such an extent that mutual aid projects oer more of a hopeful per-

spective for reestablishing something of a welfare state from the bottom up. In France,

where there is still something of a welfare state, the opposite might be true. Still, I had

to think of Édouard Louis’ Qui a tué mon père (2018) which tells the story of Louis’ dad

who cannot work while the state already took away so many of his social benets and

forced him to apply for jobs he is physically incapable of doing. I wonder, whether even

in France, we can still defend the existing welfare state. Should we instead aim for new

projects of social transformation that start out from everyday practices of care? What

should be our political wager?

EF: In France too, there is a neoliberalization of the state, and a lot of things that

were obvious before are not anymore. I too think, and deplore the fact, that not only

Macron, but before him the governments of the past thirty years, including the socialist

governments, have dismantled a lot of systems of protections, have considerably impov-

erished hospitals, schools, universities. Now, compared to other countries, we still have

maternity leave and relatively correct nursing homes (although very recently there was

a scandal about some of them). We still have non-conditional minimum help benets.

They are very low but do still exist. Universities are still almost free.

But most importantly, the pandemics have changed a few things in the sense that we

saw a strong return of the State, both in the good and in the bad way. The way the State

did take care of vulnerabilities shifted, and I think we cannot have the same unilateral

“neoliberal” reading of the political evolution that we had two years ago. In France, the

state suddenly had money for so many things; whereas before it was impossible to get

any kind of help and the budget was so constrained, in the last two years, anything was

possible. Macron had this strange motto where he said “no matter what it will cost”. And

a signicant part of the population got its normal salary while not being able to work for

months and months, thanks to State funds. We were not in the situation of many neo-

liberal countries where millions of people just lost their jobs from one day to the next.

There is a lot of discussion about where that money was before, but the point

here is that there is a strong return of the State. That is not to say that now we are back

to a full welfare state (strangely, in the midst of the pandemic, the number of hospital

beds continued to decrease), but that focusing on the withdrawal of the State from some

spheres of society is to leave out new trends that are just as damaging from the point of

view of the care of vulnerable people as from the point of view of gender.

As everyone has noticed, the return of the State could not do much about

the gendered distribution of work - quite the opposite. Everyone was forced to stay at

home, and everyone (or at least a signicant part of the population) was paid, but in the

end, care was performed in a very traditional way by women who were burdened with

helping the kids with school, cooking, etc.

I would say that there is a strange kind of dialectics here. The return of a quite

strong welfare state did not prevent, and in a way triggered, some kind of a neo-tra-

ditional distribution of care activities. And it did so not because of a certain neo-pa-

ternalism which would have conditioned state aid on certain practices but because it

made the household exclusively an economic unit. Women were in a way both forced

and abandoned in their households. As soon as they were no longer in public spaces

in the broad sense, such as companies, associations, etc., they lost the protections they

used to enjoy thanks to the laws, norms, and public policies that framed their activity in

the economic and political spheres, and even in the street. They had strong protection

by the State in economic terms, and at the same time, large aspects of their lives were

just left to agreements that would happen in households. But those agreements were

not agreements, they were just reenactments of very old and oppressive forms of life.

Hence, they were both super-protected and totally underprotected. Here again, you can

see the limits of any kind of state organization of care as a collective activity as long as

normative expectations are not politicized.

LS&TV: This brings us back to the politization of love, maybe not of romantic love

but of parental love, which is another taboo that we still have to look at. We might

have to distinguish between mutual aid projects that are some kind of neoliberal

communitarianism set up by privileged social groups, and those forms of mutual aid

which are galvanizing political consciousness. The typical example is the Black Panther

Party which started a breakfast for children program that the FBI considered the most

dangerous political action in the US. Still, it is often cited as the reason why there is a

breakfast program in the US today. So, the very aim of taking up this need was not the

collective change of ideas of what needs should be met, or what vulnerability is, but

basically an eort to undermine the possibility of political consciousness. Might we say

that the vulnerability of kids at the mercy of the Black Panther Party is preferable to

the vulnerability towards a state-run program with its own risks, such as breaking up

collective consciousness, or the paternalism which Tronto also highlights?

I totally believe that those kinds of non-mixed meetings, practices, and caregiv-

ing organizations have the potential to give rise to new claims, and to allow members

of these groups to rethink and reformulate their own identities, to dene what a threat

is for them, etc. – this is what Nancy Fraser called subaltern counterpublics.

But then comes the second moment of your question, because at some point

you need to assess between vulnerabilities. You mentioned kids, who might indeed

be vulnerable to the way a group performs a certain form of care. How do you assess

vulnerabilities? Well, I think there are no criteria. There is not one and only way to have

a discussion about that. I don’t think that there are ultimate principles that should be

found out in order to say: if we go past this threshold, then it is not taking care of some

vulnerability anymore, but pure violence or paternalism. It is always a matter, again, of

normative expectations and normative expectations cannot be discussed only inside a

group, notably because even the normative expectations of the group are shaped by

something which is broader than the group, because the group was socialized within

a larger political community; but also because claims must go through the trial of

disagreement.

In short, I would say that when it comes to politicization, the moment of closure

of the group upon mutual aid can only be thought of as a temporary step. It cannot be

regarded as an emancipatory horizon. It is the tool, not the end.

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References

1 Estelle Ferrarese gave a talk at the Institute of

Philosophy, KU Leuven on November 18, 2021.

Notes

Estelle Ferrarese is a full-professor of moral and

political philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne

University (France). She is a Senior Member

of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has

been a Visiting Professor at the New School for

Social Research in New York, an Alexander von

Humboldt-Foundation fellow at the Humboldt

Universität in Berlin, and a research fellow at the

Marc Bloch Franco-German Center of Social

Science Research, in Berlin. Her books include:

Vulnerability and Critical Theory (Brill 2018), The

Politics of Vulnerability (ed., Routledge 2017), La

Fragilité du souci des autres. Adorno et le care (Editions

de l’ENS 2018 (engl. transl. The Fragility of Concern

for others. Adorno and the Ethics of Care, Edinburgh

University Press 2020), Ethique et politique de l’espace

public. Habermas et la discussion (Vrin 2015).

Liesbeth Schoonheim is a post-doctoral researcher

at the research unit Theory of Politics at Humboldt

University Berlin. She is an editor of Krisis.

Tivadar Vervoort is an FWO PhD Fellow in social

philosophy at KU Leuven. He is an editor of Krisis

and de Nederlandse Boekengids.

Biographies