Jack Wearing

In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. In this paper I reconstruct Butler’s response to this challenge, arguing that there is an interesting and plausible path from ontology to politics. I draw on Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction to elucidate the central concepts of Butler’s ontology: vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependency. I argue that one of Butler’s central attempts to derive an ethic of nonviolence from ontology is unpersuasive, resting on a conflation of the ontological and ontic senses of ‘interdependency’. Nonetheless, I contend that Butler is right that genuinely acknowledging our vulnerability is likely to make us more responsive to the claims of others, loosening the grip of ideals of invulnerability and sovereign independence. These ideals and the violence they encourage amount to a disavowal of our ontological condition, while commitment to nonviolence is a way of acknowledging

In his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Martin Heidegger advances a critique of humanism while insisting that this critique does not imply that he ‘advocates the inhuman’. There are two reasons why Heidegger might be concerned to rebut this accusation. First, one might worry that any rejection of humanism commits one to rejecting its central values, such as the idea that human beings have an essential worth. Second, Heidegger might be concerned to distance his critique from the inhuman policies of National Socialism, with which he was associated in the early 1930s.In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Heidegger's conception of ‘the inhuman’ to shed light on his critique's normative implications. Through this examination of Heidegger's views, I raise concerns about the political prospects of his anti-humanism, and, more tentatively, of anti-humanistic thought in general. First, I reconstruct Heidegger's critique of humanism, his positive conception of the human essence, and his cryptic account of evil in the Letter. I argue that the view that emerges involves a problematic displacement of human responsibility for evil, which Heidegger interprets as symptomatic of the modern epoch in the ‘history of Being’. Moreover, while his account opposes ‘the inhuman’ in a ‘Being-historical’ sense, I argue that it disavows crucial normative resources for resisting ‘the inhuman’ in the ordinary moral sense.

In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. In this paper I reconstruct Butler’s response to this challenge, arguing that there is an interesting and plausible path from ontology to politics. I draw on Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction to elucidate the central concepts of Butler’s ontology: vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependency. I argue that one of Butler’s central attempts to derive an ethic of nonviolence from ontology is unpersuasive, resting on a conflation of the ontological and ontic senses of ‘interdependency’. Nonetheless, I contend that Butler is right that genuinely acknowledging our vulnerability is likely to make us more responsive to the claims of others, loosening the grip of ideals of invulnerability and sovereign independence. These ideals and the violence they encourage amount to a disavowal of our ontological condition, while commitment to nonviolence is a way of acknowledging