Estelle Ferrarese

Les sanglots ne sont pas de simples pleurs. Ils surviennent dans une situation d’impuissance, comme un deuil, une rupture, une humiliation ; et ils la redoublent. Secousses, contractions, spasmes, ils sont une attaque du corps contre la parole, la pensée, la station debout. Autant de facultés censées faire de nous des sujets. Ce faisant, ils nous obligent à regarder en face notre impuissance et la vanité de notre être-sujet. Les corps qui sanglotent sont des corps auxquels a été conféré un statut de sujet constamment sous probation – à commencer par les corps féminins. En se soulevant, le diaphragme crée, pour quelques instants, un autre rapport au temps, aux autres et au monde qui est le ressort d’une présence vive à soi et d’une protestation. C’est donc en féministe qu’Estelle Ferrarese s’efforce de placer les sanglots sur la scène du visible, du pensable, du représentable.

Estelle Ferrarese’s book _The Market of Virtue: A Critique of Ethical Consumerism_ demonstrates that ethical consumerism collaborates with the very order it seeks to escape. Today’s spread of consumer practices advocating ‘fair’ prices or ‘responsible’ purchases is grounded in a supposed critique of capitalism at the level of everyday life. This book runs counter to the prevailing view. Ethical consumerism, it argues, conceals the fact that the market perpetually undoes any of the moral standards that are injected into it. Arguments for ethical consumerism incorrectly suppose that capitalism can be reduced to psychological mechanisms, such as an apparently predatory temperament, mechanisms that can then be curbed by the upholding of virtues. Practices of ethical consumerism invest individual intention with absolute mastery over the world, with a boundless ability to reshape it. And given ethical consumerism’s wont to put a figure on everything – whether damages or virtuous behaviour – it ends up contributing to the very form imposed on the world by the market, namely generalized commensurability.

One question regularly recurs concerning an ethics of care, which is how it can be applied beyond the intersubjective relationship, or otherwise than within the caregiver/care receiver dyad. To the extent that it presumes affects, or an attentiveness to the particular or the individual, is it possible to show concern collectively and bring it to bear on an unknown other? This inquiry is generally approached through the prism of the institutionalization of an ethics of care, of its compatibility with the scale of the state and its logic of universalization. But the question I wish to address here is that of the market. Can care, which I will call concern for others, be deployed on and with the market? This is the proposition advanced by contemporary consumer ethics and the one I would like to critique in this paper. After drawing up a cartography of the objects with which contemporary ethical consumption is concerned, I will show that there is a vainness to ethical consumption as a critique of capitalism insofar as it centers on immoderation. I will then highlight what the market does to care by translating it into the language of prices.

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.

« Même si elles sont datées par bien des aspects, les thèses de l’École de Francfort sur le marché et la consommation permettent de mettre au jour les contours et les manques de la critique du capitalisme que constitue la consommation éthique contemporaine. Nous en discutons dans cet article deux éléments. D’une part, la consommation éthique repose sur le postulat qu’il est possible et nécessaire d’injecter des normes morales dans le marché, posé comme en étant dépourvu. Or, la question de savoir si le marché est arraché aux normes, ou s’en donne simplement l’apparence, est le lieu d’un débat complexe au sein de la Théorie critique. Déplier les arguments avancés aide à comprendre comme nécessaire le désajustement des intentions morales des consommateurs et des effets de leurs pratiques sur le monde. D’autre part, la consommation éthique appelle à une forme de vertu qui serait à même de briser le fétichisme de la marchandise, engageant à ne pas oublier ce qui se tient derrière la relation entre des choses (des travailleurs, des personnes singulières, de la peine, etc.) dont l’illusion réificatrice est instituée par le marché. La discussion, par Adorno et Benjamin tout particulièrement, de ce thème marxien du fétichisme permet de mettre en évidence l’insuffisance du geste éthique pour amender ou réformer le capitalisme. »

Résumé De multiples théories contemporaines font de la politique une affaire de création d’une nouvelle forme de vie ; il est postulé que c’est en vivant (autrement) que l’on transforme le monde. Deux logiques se distinguent : une politique de la discipline, et une politique de l’exubérance ou de l’informe. Cet article s’en détache pour dégager de la pensée d’Adorno les éléments d’une politique du difforme : il confère à la forme (et non à la vie) le rôle de maintenir une indétermination, pensant une forme qui n’oublie pas qu’elle est forme, qu’elle est issue d’un mouvement qui aurait pu être autre.

Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition – Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the tradition to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other

Il semble impossible, dans les théories contemporaines comme dans les discours politiques, de parler de reconnaissance sans parler de lutte. Que signifie alors précisément lutter pour la reconnaissance? Quelles sont les conditions de possibilité de l’affrontement? Qu’est-ce qui permet de l’identifier, puisqu’il existe des résistances qui restent invisibles? Pourquoi apparaît-il comme une condition nécessaire de la reconnaissance? Ce livre dégage autant une théorie du conflit qu’un diagnostic sur ce qui le contraint dans les démocraties capitalistes contemporaines. Il observe une grammaire répandue de la contestation, la reconnaissance, tout en éclairant la manière dont elle est prise entre idéologie et réification. Il offre ainsi une réflexion sur les conditions d’un antagonisme réellement émancipateur.

With the notion of the form-of-life as a counter-figure to the notion of bare life, Agamben seems to invite us to place at the center of a critical theory of capitalism a reflection on bios. To envisage a form of emancipation that unfolds against bare life suggests, at first glance, another relation to the living body. Such a gesture seems to be inspired by the desire to think a natural life that would also be a politically qualified life. The idea with which Agamben closes the Homo Sacer series, namely that of a use of bodies, also gestures in this direction. In this paper I show how the categories of bare life and of the use of bodies fail to live up to their promise, before demonstrating in what sense the idea of a subtraction of law as a political project which subsumes all others ends up weakening the critical potential of the idea of a form-of-life that is to be realised against the force of production of bare lives.

No Current Hegelian theories of recognition assume a concept of the subject as always being available for harming. This emphasis placed on vulnerability, whose validity is not being called into question as such here, leave a certain number of elements on the nature of the harm threatening the person expecting recognition unclarified, especially the fact that it cannot be perpetrated without the victim being aware. At the same time, it fails to address the nature of the relationship of recognition, omitting from consideration the exercise of power and the mechanisms inherent to this relationship. These omissions, as I show, cause a particular dimension of recognition-driven struggles to be neglected, a dimension which I will refer to as the politics of exit

Questo articolo si sforza di ricollocare le teorie del care in seno alla teoria politica contemporanea, in cui si attesta un ritorno al tema della vulnerabilitÀ corporea e morale come problema politico e morale in sé. Qui si distinguono tre accezioni della parola vulnerabilitÀ, accezioni che implicano ogni volta ragionamenti morali e legittimano ordini politici differenti: il modello della disponibilitÀ alla ferita fisica e morale, quello dell'associazione stretta fra l'idea della vulnerabilitÀ e il concetto di dipendenza, e infine la vulnerabilitÀ come non possesso di sé.

I show how a notion of the political as emerging reality which does not derive from any other logic — as a phenomenon devoid of foundations, of predetermined elements — features in Habermas’s theory of society. There is certainly nothing obvious about such a claim, insofar as the political is conceived, across his entire oeuvre, in relation to the public sphere, which is presented as a social space in which the functions and properties he attributes to language in general are made explicit and catalysed. It appears the public sphere coincides with the constitutive rules of universal pragmatics. More generally, the motif of the public sphere is bound up with topics which all curb the political “mode” — i.e., the validity attributed to political statements (1), the weight given, in myriad ways, to morality in the public sphere (2), and the concern to preserve science and complexity no matter what (3). I examine each one in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, through the limits imposed on them, they enable us to grasp the specificity of the public sphere as political instance and, from this basis, identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s theory.

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much it is an idea with assured academic success. In the United States, torturable, "mutilatable," and killable bodies are a wide topic of discussion, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In Europe, current reflection on vulnerability has emerged from a thematic of precarity and exclusion; the term evokes lives that are dispensable, evictable, deportable, and the abandoning of individuals to naked forces of the market. But if the theme has had notable fortune, it also continues to come up against considerable reluctance. The political scope of vulnerability is often denied: it seems inevitably to be relegated to the sphere of "good sentiments." This book aims to address this criticism. It shows that by questioning our hegemonic anthropology, by reinventing the categories of freedom, equality, and being-in-common based on the body, by overthrowing the legitimate grammar of political discourse, and by redefining the political subject – the category of vulnerability, far from being conservative or a-political, works to undo the world such as it is. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Critical Horizons. _.

Je tente de mettre en évidence trois pôles thématiques qui structurent la résurgence actuelle de l’idée de vulnérabilité, pôles qui sont à comprendre comme constitués dans un champ de tensions, et n’existant jamais sous une forme pure. Je distingue le modèle d’une disponibilité à la blessure physique et morale, celui d’une association stricte de l’idée de vulnérabilité au concept de dépendance, et enfin la vulnérabilité comme impropriété de soi. Et dans la mesure où la notion de vulnérabilité suppose davantage que la susceptibilité de certains torts, mais implique qu’ils peuvent être prévenus, un large espace pour l’éthique et/ou à l’action politique, à l’organisation collective, s’ouvre à chaque fois, que je m’efforce d’esquisser

Il a été fréquemment, et à bon droit, relevé la minceur, voire l’absence du motif de l’antagonisme dans une théorie, celle de Habermas, entièrement préoccupée d’entente. Pourtant, s’il est à chercher, c’est dans la figure de la désobéissance civile que le conflit se trouve. De quels traits est alors paré le conflit politique tel qu’il apparaît chez Habermas? Fort classiques, ils sont pour la plupart empruntés à John Rawls. C’est l’architectonique théorique sur laquelle elle se trouve déposée qui donne à la désobéissance civile sa spécificité et sa centralité. Elle se trouve en effet au croisement des thèmes de la légitimité, de la société civile, de la culture politique et de l’être-ensemble, qui constituent les points cardinaux de la politique délibérative de Jürgen Habermas

This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted.